There is a growing realization today that the character of intellectual life in the West, especially in its relation to society, is undergoing a fundamental shift. A variety of factors—the rise of postmodernism, rapid changes in the world of computers and the media, the growth of the information economy—contribute to this perception. It would be very difficult at this point, however, to formulate a clear conception of where this change is leading us. But this vague, nagging impression also brings powerfully to the fore the converse question: From what are we changing? Exactly what is and has been the character and social role of intellectual life in the modern West? At or near the core of this issue is the uniquely modern phenomenon of the “intellectual” or “public intellectual” (we use the terms interchangeably). On the principle that the outlines of a phenomenon become clearest when it has begun to change or disappear, the time may be particularly ripe to undertake an examination of the modern intellectual.
According to Aristotle, man is the rational animal—but also the political animal. It is, therefore, a permanent question for human beings: What is or should be the relation between the two, between the life of the mind and social life, between ideas and events, between thought and action, reason and history? Is it possible or even desirable for theoretical speculation to guide political practice or shape history? And through what means? How should the two realms of theory and practice be connected? One possible response to these questions—the one uniquely characteristic of our times—is the “public intellectual”: a class of hybrid beings standing with one foot in the contemplative world and the other in the political.
Historically, however, this is a most unusual response. Most cultures do not produce intellectuals. They are a rather late arising Western phenomenon—and one that now seems to be changing and perhaps disappearing (or so it has been reported for the past fifty years). Certainly, societies that produce intellectuals spend a lot of time questioning the meaning and value of what they have produced. Consider only two of the more extreme views heard today.
The first holds that intellectuals are basically perverse and “detached” in an unhealthy way. Theory is for the most part merely an escape from practice (“those who can, do”); so these intellectualizers are out of touch with life and almost always deformed in one way or another—egg-headed, pointy-headed. Specifically, intellectuals are essentially moved by resentment because the mainstream culture does not understand or respect them. Thus they endeavor to pay society back for its neglect by taking a countercultural stance: antipatriotic, antireligious, antibourgeois, anticapitalist, and anti-American. When they teach, they inevitably corrupt the young, as Socrates was said to have done in Athens and as the professorate surely does in the modern university. They’ve taken a public stand on all the great issues of the day—and almost always wound up on the wrong side: they were wrong about communism, wrong about socialism, wrong about the 1960s.
The opposite view holds that intellectuals are actually secular prophets who would lead us to the promised land if only we had the maturity and good sense to listen to them. They do indeed stand outside and against their cultures, but this very alienation gives them the salutary detachment and the purity that enable them to function as the conscience of society and as the vanguard of enlightenment and social progress.
The thirteen chapters in this book—all by close observers and, in some cases, practitioners of the phenomenon at issue—primarily address, in different ways and from different points of view, four essential and interrelated questions. What are the defining characteristics of the public intellectual? When and why did they first arise? Are they a good thing—both for society and for intellectual life? Are they now disappearing, as is often claimed, or only mutating into some other form?
The first five chapters concern the past and primarily describe the historical origin and development of the public intellectual. Arthur Melzer begins with a brief attempt to define the public intellectual and state what is historically unique about it. Thomas Pangle then takes us back to the Greek enlightenment, where the phenomenon essentially did not yet exist. Through an interpretation of the closest Greek analog to the intellectual—the Socratic “citizen philosopher” or the Platonic conception of “political philosophy”—he tries to show why it did not exist and how philosophy had to be fundamentally transformed in its relation to theology, as it began to be in the Renaissance, for something like the public intellectual to emerge. Paul Rahe picks up the story in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, where the public intellectual and the attendant hope for a “Party of Reason” first come into their own. But the dangers of this new phenomenon—doctrinairism, the neglect of political prudence, revolutionary subversion—now become fully apparent, as Rahe shows through a discussion of the warnings issued by Burke, Hume, and Tocqueville. It was Rousseau, however, who engaged in the most complex exploration of the promise and especially the inner tensions and dangers of the modern intellectual, as Chris Kelly shows in his account of Rousseau’s famous quarrels with Voltaire, Diderot, and the other philosophes. Finally, Gordon Wood shows how something like this whole history was recapitulated on the American scene: the Founding Fathers were not yet intellectuals but neoclassical, philosophical aristocrats. Yet they created a modern democracy in which people like themselves could not long endure—to be replaced, among other things, by public intellectuals.
The remaining chapters focus primarily on the present. Staying within the American context, John Diggins traces the history of intellectuals—their character, social role, and self understanding—from the Founding Fathers to the present. Josef Joffe analyzes the present state and possible future of the American intellectual—whom he sees as representative of the whole species—in light of various social changes like the retreat of intellectual life into the universities, the increase in specialization, the growth of the “new class,” and the spread of relativism.
Returning to the European scene, Pierre Hassner picks up the story where Rahe and Kelly left off, bringing us into the twentieth century. In particular, he continues the focus on the dangers and vices of intellectuals through an analysis of the “totalitarian temptation,” the mystery of their slow-to-die flirtations with fascism and especially with communism. Tony Judt further explores these dangers but also focuses on one public intellectual who combated them in his case study of Raymond Aron. Finally, Adam Michnik, moving the scene to Eastern Europe, reminds us of the heroic role played by dissident intellectuals in the struggle against communism, while also warning of the danger that such heroes and moralists can pose in times of peace and reconstruction.
Implicit in all these discussions of the vices of intellectuals is a sense of what the public intellectual still could and ought to be. Explicit reflections on this question finally come to the surface toward the end of Michnik’s essay. This is also the main subject of Ira Katznelson’s discussion of Karl Mannheim, Robert K. Merton, and C. Wright Mills. Similarly, Martha Nussbaum presents a case study of how contemporary philosophy has a vital role to play in the alleviation of human suffering. One issue that emerges in these three pieces, although it has been a leitmotiv running throughout the volume, is the question of how the intellectual’s public role can continue in a world dominated by relativism or the postmodernist rejection of universal truth.
Having discussed the promise of the modern intellectual as well as the tragic side, especially the totalitarian temptation, we conclude with the comic side. That is the theme of Saul Bellow’s chapter (and of his novels). He begins with the question of why so many modern artists and intellectuals have been comic writers, but eventually brings the question around to why they are themselves such comic figures.