Public Intellectuals in the Electronic Age
Public Intellectuals 2.0
Daniel W. Drezner
The Fletcher School
Tufts University
May 2008
Disquisitions about public intellectuals tend to conclude that they ain’t what they used to be.[1] In many ways, however, curiosity about the American intelligentsia has never been greater. The past decade has seen the creation of doctoral degree programs and fellowships for public intellectuals.[2] Public intellectuals are now the subject of serious and semi-serious analysis.[3] There has been a surge of work exploring quantitative, qualitative and autobiographical aspects of public intellectual work.[4] Foreign Policy, in conjunction with Prospect magazine, periodically publishes its list of the “top 100” public intellectuals in the world.[5] Even the New York Times Style section suggests that, despite all appearances to the contrary, musings about public affairs is currently the chic thing to do.[6]
The Internet is another possible aid to the renaissance of public intellectuals. The explosion of online publications, podcasts, diavlogs, and especially weblogs has enabled public intellectuals to express their ideas beyond the narrow confines of elite op-ed pages and network television. From an economic perspective, the Internet, like any technological innovation, increases the production possibility frontier of those who use it. It simultaneously expands the size of the market while increasing individual productivity.[7] This applies to businesses, entrepreneurs, and even public intellectuals. Media studies professor Siva Vaidhyanathan recently concluded, “There has never been a better time to be a public intellectual, and the Web is the big reason why.”[8]
Will the World Wide Web midwife a new Golden Age of public intellectual life? There are reasons to be skeptical. Members of the intelligentsia initially embraced broadcast innovations of the past – radio and television – as potential breakthroughs in the ability to contribute to reasoned discourse. As the contours of these media have developed, the failure of these utopian visions to come to pass has soured many on the marriage between technology and thought. Already, some have argued that the Internet will simply exacerbate the decline in discourse observed in other venues.[9]
This essay takes the contrary position: the growth of online publication venues has stimulated rather than retarded the quality and diversity of public intellectuals.[10] The criticisms levied against these new forms of publishing seem to mirror the flaws that plague the more general critique of current public intellectuals: hindsight bias and conceptual fuzziness. Rather, the growth of blogs and other forms of online writing have partially reversed a trend that many have lamented – what Russell Jacoby labeled the “professionalization and academization” of public intellectuals. In particular, the growth of the blogosphere breaks down – or at least lowers – the barriers erected by a professionalized academy.
A Tale of Two Narratives
It is the best of times and the worst of times for public intellectuals. As previously observed, the interest in public intellectuals has never been greater. At the same time, the subtitle of Posner’s book was A Study of Decline. He is hardly the only writer to make this observation – a subsequent edited volume about the topic had as its subtitle An Endangered Species?[11] One recent review observed, “A consistent refrain… is that today’s public intellectuals pale in comparison to their early 20th century counterparts or at least are in need of revitalization to become as great as their predecessors.”[12] Various subgroups bemoan the loss of “their” public intellectuals to advance their cause or position.[13] Ever since Russell Jacoby’s The Last Intellectuals, the dominant trope in musings about public intellectuals is that their quality has gone rapidly downhill.[14]
The political influence of intellectuals would appear to have waned – particularly during the George W. Bush years. Many commentators agree that an organized effort by liberal intellectuals to influence the Florida recount during the 2000 election misfired badly.[15] The abject failure of public intellectuals to influence the marketplace of ideas in the run-up to the Second Gulf War is considered an exemplar case of their insignificance. The replacement of unaffiliated intellectuals with academics leads to farces like the petition by international relations theorists designed to influence the 2004 election cycle. This effort at “Weberian activism” was notable only in terms of its utter futility.[16] As academics have focused more on writing for other academics, many have lost the ability and/or the interest to write for a more general audience.[17]
The passing of myriad public intellectuals in recent years has exacerbated the decline trope in public discourse. Susan Sontag, Milton Friedman, David Halberstam, John Kenneth Galbraith, Norman Mailer, and William F. Buckley, Jr. have all died in recent years, leading those still alive to argue that no one will be able to replace them. New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus writes that, “Mr. Buckley and Mr. Mailer represented something different. More than public intellectuals, they were citizen intellectuals, active participants in the great dramas of their time, and eager at times to pursue their ideas in democracy’s more bruising arenas.” The American Prospect’s Ezra Klein laments that, “They would write serious books of political analysis and sell millions of copies -- they were the writers you had to read to call yourself an actual political junkie. Now, the space they inhabited in the discourse is held by the [Ann] Coulters and [Bill] O'Reilly's of the world.” In his eulogy for Milton Friedman, David Brooks observes: “[F]rom the 1940s to the mid-1990s, American political life was shaped by a series of landmark books: Witness, The Vital Center, Capitalism and Freedom, The Death and Life of American Cities, The Closing of the American Mind. Then in the 1990s, those big books stopped coming.”[18]
The obituaries for the prominent public intellectual are not terribly persuasive. Most of them suffer from the cognitive bias that comes with comparing the annals of history to the present day.[19] Over time, lesser intellectual lights tend to fade from view – only the canon remains. When one looks back at only the great thinkers, it is natural to presume that all of the writers from a bygone era are great. Even when looking at the intellectual giants of the past, current public commentary is more likely to gloss over past intellectual errors and instead focus on their greatest moments.[20] Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man might look wrong in retrospect, but it is not more wrong than Daniel Bell’s The End of Ideology. Intellectuals like Sontag or Friedman occupy their exalted status in the present only because they survived the crucible of history. It is riskier to assess the legacies of current public intellectuals – because their ability to misstep or err remains.
A similar error is committed when it is proclaimed that public figures like Bill O’Reilly or Oprah Winfrey are the successors to the Greatest Generation of public intellectuals.[21] In part this is due to the conceptual confusion that surrounds the term “public intellectual.” Most people who write about the topic apply a Potter Stewart-like definition of the term: they know public intellectuals when they see them. The term tends to get conflated with a category Jacoby would label “publicists.” Many publicists are television pundits – a class to which one could charitably place O’Reilly and Coulter. They do not advocate or discuss abstract policy or political ideas. Indeed, given that a large number of pundits tend to thrive on adopting anti-intellectual personas, one could argue that they represent the very antithesis of the definition of “intellectual.”[22]
Skeptics would point out that that television personalities like Coulter and O’Reilly command greater attention than today’s leading public intellectuals. This point, however, vastly overestimates the audience that The Partisan Review or Commentary commanded in their intellectual heydays. Just because current writers cannot remember Walter Winchell, Hedda Hopper or Louella Parsons does not mean that they did not exist. Indeed, part of the animating spirit of the public intellectuals of the fifties was to define themselves as distinct from middlebrow and lowbrow culture – cultures that were vastly more popular with the American people.[23]
The remaining claim is that there are no more Big Thinkers and Big Books. Jacoby repeatedly challenges critics of The Last Intellectuals to name the names of current public intellectuals in order to compare with the past. But this is not a very difficult task. Among periodicals, The New Yorker has Malcolm Gladwell, James Surowiecki and Louis Menand on their payroll; Andrew Sullivan, James Fallows, and Virginia Postrel write for The Atlantic; Harper’s contributing editors include Barbara Ehrenreich, Thomas Frank, and Tom Wolfe; Vanity Fair has James Wolcott and Christopher Hitchens; Newsweek employs Fareed Zakaria, Daniel Gross and George F. Will. Despite the thinning of their ranks, unaffiliated public intellectuals like Paul Berman, Michael Beschloss, Debra Dickerson, Robert D. Kaplan, John Lukacs, Joshua Micah Marshall, Rick Perlstein and Robert Wright still remain. The explosion of think tanks in the past thirty years has contributed to a rise in partisanship – but it has also provided sinecures for the intellectual likes of Robert Kagan, Joel Kotkin, Michael Lind, Brink Lindsey, Jedediah Purdy, and David Rieff.[24] Within the academy, there is no shortage of public intellectuals: Eric Alterman, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Michael Bérubé, Joshua Cohen, Jared Diamond, Jean Behke Elshtain, Amitai Etzioni, Niall Ferguson, Richard Florida, Francis Fukuyama, John Lewis Gaddis, Henry Louis Gates, Jacob Hacker, Samuel Huntington, Tony Judt, Paul Kennedy, Paul Krugman, Steven Leavitt, Lawrence Lessig, John Mearsheimer, Martha Nussbaum, Steven Pinker, Richard Posner, Samantha Power, Robert Putnam, Dani Rodrik, Jeffrey Sachs, Amartya Sen, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Joseph Stiglitz, Laurence Summers, Cass Sunstein, Michael Walzer, Sean Wilentz, E.O. Wilson, and Alan Wolfe. Their recent books – A Problem From Hell, America at the Crossroads, Bowling Alone, Clash of Civilizations, Code, Colossus, Consilience, The Conscience of a Liberal, The Conservative Soul, Cosmopolitanism, Development as Freedom, Freakonomics, The Future and Its Enemies, The Future of Freedom, Globalization and Its Discontents, God Is Not Great, The Great Risk Shift, Guns, Germs and Steel, Liberty of Conscience, The Metaphysical Club, Nickled and Dimed, Nixonland, Nonzero, One Nation After All, The Parliament of Man, , Terror and Liberalism, The Tipping Point, What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts?, The Wisdom of Crowds – are designed to be accessible to the informed lay public. It will be easy for the reader to quibble with one of the names or one of the books listed above. However, most cultural commentators would agree that most of the names and books belong on that list.
Viewed from abroad, the claim of decline appears odd. There are more Americans on Foreign Policy’s list of influential intellectuals than any other nationality. Writing in the Financial Times, James Harkin concludes:[25]
Good ideas have always been contagious, but thanks to the internet and the increasingly globalised media, they are now making their way around the world almost as soon as they are invented. As this new market for ideas begins to settle, something else has become clear too - America is way out in front….
America's dominance in the new global landscape of ideas is not only a matter of resources. Americans have also become expert packagers of ideas. American writers and thinkers seem to have acquired the knack of explaining complex ideas in accessible ways for popular audiences. The success of idea books such as The Tipping Point and Freakonomics and a rather depressing glut of books about happiness has signified to cultural commissars a thirst for good ideas clearly expressed.
Some critics argue that the problem of decline lies not with the public intellectuals, but with the fragmentation of the public itself.[26] Again, recent trends suggest that this concern is overstated. In the past ten years, books about history, grand strategy, and economics have become astonishingly popular in the United States. The president of Harvard’s latest book – on death and the American Civil War – has rocketed to the nonfiction best-seller list.[27] This comes a few years after her predecessor triggered a public firestorm over the relationship between gender and intelligence. The past two years have seen two academics trigger a frenzy intellectual debate over the existence and prevalence of an “Israel lobby.” Both the Boston Globe and Los Angeles Times have expanded their Ideas section, and the New York Times Magazine now publishes an annual edition devoted to new currents of thought. Think tanks like the New America Foundation have developed fellow programs consciously designed to promote the dissemination of new ideas through public discourse rather than more specialized discourse.
There are some differences between the current generation of public intellectuals and the generation extolled by so many. In the current era, a lot more public intellectuals possess social science rather than humanities backgrounds. It is likely, therefore, that a greater share (though hardly all) of the current generation are “professional secondhand dealers in ideas,” as Hayek phrased it.[28] As the specialization of knowledge has progressed, it becomes more difficult for the same person to flourish in their specialized field and make that knowledge accessible to the public. This does create a market niche, however, for “second order intellectuals” to emerge, bridging the gap between first order intellectuals and the informed public.
Second, in contrast to the expectation of intellectuals to be affiliated with the left, the most prominent public intellectuals of the past generation have come from the conservative side of the political spectrum. In response to the dominance of postwar liberalism, conservatives developed an array of journals and thinkers to provide cogent oppositionist thinking, ranging from the Federalist Society to the American Enterprise Institute to The Weekly Standard.[29] While left intellectuals were largely powerless during the Bush administration, neoconservatives were warmly welcomed into positions of power and influence.[30]
Public Intellectuals and the blogosphere
In recent years, a new complain has arisen about the state of public intellectual discourse – the blogs killed it. Alan Wolfe argues that, “the way we argue now has been shaped by cable news and Weblogs; it's all ‘gotcha’ commentary and attributions of bad faith. No emotion can be too angry and no exaggeration too incredible.” David Frum complains that, “the blogosphere takes on the scale and reality of an alternative world whose controversies and feuds are… absorbing.” David Brooks laments, “now instead of books, we have blogs.”[31] Russell Jacoby is unimpressed with the ways that blogs could aid public intellectuals:[32]
Blogs may be more like private journals with megaphones than reasoned contributions to public life. Michael Bérubé, who teaches American literature and cultural studies at Pennsylvania State University and is an accomplished blogger, admits as much. “One day I'll have an analysis of the hockey playoffs,” he wrote about his own blog, “the next day a story about the night my band opened for the Ramones, the next day an account of a trip with my younger son, Jamie.”
Of course personal sharing is not all he and others do in their postings, but what is the net result? The Internet provides instant communication and quick access to vast resources, but has it altered the quality or content of intellectual discussions? Too many voices may cancel each other out. Bérubé himself has given up regular blogging to write books instead. Ortega y Gasset's fear almost a century ago of the "revolt of the masses" needs an update. We face a revolt of the writers. Today everyone is a blogger, but where are the readers?…. On the Internet, articles, blog posts, and comments on blog posts pour forth, but who can keep up with them? And while everything is preserved (or "archived"), has anyone ever looked at last year's blogs? Rapidly produced, they are just as rapidly forgotten.
These are not terribly persuasive critiques – indeed, they manifest some of the same flaws of the larger decline meme discussed in the previous section. The concern about vitriolic blogs confuses form with content. All media forms generate distasteful, disposable or demented material. Bad content, however, does not impeach the form through which the content is produced. This would be like arguing that Hustler discredits Harper’s as an appropriate venue for publication, or that America’s Next Top Model ruins Charlie Rose as a place for informed debate. Similarly, Jacoby’s concern about the mix of erudition and trivia within blogs also seems off-base. If celebrity profiles do not compromise Christopher Hitchens’ essays in Vanity Fair, there is no reason to believe that snarky blog posts undercut more serious posts.
The claim that “too many voices cancel each other out” in the blogosphere is a curious one. A cursory analysis of the distribution of traffic and links in the blogosphere reveals two facts very quickly. First, the distribution is highly skewed. There are a few highly ranked blogs with many readers, followed by a steep fall-off, and a “long tail” of medium-to-low ranked bloggers with far fewer readers. Second, intellectuals do surprisingly well within this skewed distribution – academics and magazine writers make up a fair number of the elite group of bloggers.[33] The website – which consists of online video debates between myriad bloggers, writers and scholars – attracts approximately 600,000 views per month.[34] Because the mainstream media responds to cues from the blogosphere, a well-timed post or exchange can have a pronounced effect on public discourse.[35]
There is also little evidence that blogs have substituted for books – in terms of consumption or production. Prominent bloggers – Andrew Sullivan, Matthew Yglesias, Virginia Postrel, Glenn Reynolds, Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, Ross Douthat, George Packer – have managed to author well-received books. Academic intellectuals who started blogging in recent years – Richard Posner, Steven Leavitt, Dani Rodrik, Cass Sunstein, James Fallows – have not slowed down in the slightest. Authors have also been eager and willing to blog in order to jumpstart a conversation about their books. Several blogs – including The Valve, Crooked Timber, Cato Unbound, and TPM Café – regularly host book discussions in which authors, critics and readers to interact with each other. If anything, a successful weblog expands publication opportunities. Book publishers, magazine editors, and op-ed assistants all read weblogs. If a writer can combine erudition with a deft writing style on a blog, it signals editorial gatekeepers that these qualities can also be displayed in other publishing venues. Blogging is not a substitute to other publications: done correctly, it is a powerful complement.
From the perspective of someone who has blogged for six years, this is not surprising. A blog acts as an online notebook for nascent ideas and research notes, allowing the writer to link, critique and respond to news stories, research monographs, and other online publications.[36] Jacoby is correct to observe that most of these posts will not pan out into anything substantive or lasting. This is the case with most ideas, however.[37] Nevertheless, the format permits one to play with ideas in a way that is ill-suited for other publishing venuues. A blog functions like an intellectual fishing net, catching and preserving the embryonic ideas that merit further time and effort. I have published essays in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Foreign Affairs, Perspectives on Politics, and Slate that had their origins in blog posts.[38]
I do not believe that my example is unique. Over time the academization of intellectual output created barriers to the flourishing of public intellectuals. The proliferation of blogs reverses that trend in several ways. Weblogs have facilitated the rise of a new class of non-academic intellectuals. Writing a successful blog has provided an easy launching pad for aspiring writers to obtain jobs from general interest magazines. These periodicals are in turn interested in hiring additional writers as in an effort to online content and web traffic. The premier general interest magazines and journals in the country – including The Atlantic, The New Republic, Slate, Salon, New Criterion, The American Prospect, Reason, Time, Newsweek, The Washington Monthly, Mother Jones, The New Yorker, Commentary and The National Review – either sponsor individual bloggers or have developed their own house blogs.
For academics aspiring to be public intellectuals, weblogs allow networks to develop that cross the disciplinary and hierarchical strictures of the academy – and expand beyond the academy. Rebecca Goetz observes, “Because I blog I now have contacts, online and offline, with a variety of scholars inside and outside my field. They don't particularly care that my dissertation is not yet done; the typical hierarchies of the ivory tower break down in the blogosphere so that even graduate students can be public intellectuals of a kind.” Brad DeLong characterizes scholar-blogging as creating an “invisible college” that includes, “people whose views and opinions I can react to, and who will react to my reasoned and well-thought-out opinions, and to my unreasoned and off-the-cuff ones as well.”[39] Provided one can write jargon-free prose, a blog can attract readers from all walks of life – including, most importantly, people beyond the ivory tower. Indeed, citizens will tend to view academic bloggers that they encounter online as more accessible than would be the case in a face-to-face interaction. Similarly, survey evidence also suggests that academics view blogs as a form of public service and political activism.[40] This increases the likelihood of fruitful interaction and exchange of views about culture, criticism and politics with individuals that academics might not have otherwise met.
Henry Farrell ties the growth of the blogosphere to the publishing revolutions that sponsored previous waves of public intellectuals:[41]
[T]he blogosphere resembles not only the Republic of Letters (where a printer's devil could become an internationally renowned intellectual), but the "little magazines" in their golden age, when established scholars, up-and-comers, and amateurs rubbed shoulders on a more or less equal footing. This openness can be discomfiting to those who are attached to established rankings and rituals -- but it also means that blogospheric conversations, when they're good, have a vigor and a liveliness that most academic discussion lacks….
Blogging democratizes the function of public intellectual. It's no longer necessary for an academic to lobby the editors of The Washington Post's op-ed page or The New York Review of Books in order to make his or her voice heard. Instead, he or she can start a blog and (with interesting arguments and a bit of luck and self-promotion) begin to have an impact on the public conversation.
Naturally, there are limits to blogs as a tool to aid public intellectuals. It is not clear how many academics will choose to embrace the technology. The academic politics of blogging can also be problematic. The blogosphere represents a new pathway to public acclaim. Any usurpation of scholarly authority is bound to upset those who benefit the most from the status quo.[42] For example, a July 2005 pseudonymous essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education by a senior humanities professor warned new entrants on the academic job market that “Bloggers Need Not Apply,” [43] Three months later, this professor responded to the volumes of online criticism with another Chronicle essay, observing, “As my original column made clear (and many amid the outcry reiterated) when it comes to blogging, ‘I just don't get it.’ That's right, I don’t. Many in the tenured generation don’t, and they’ll be sitting on hiring committees for years to come.”[44] Junior academics inclined use a blog as a public intellectual have fretted about how it would impact their chances for tenure. Michigan historian Juan Cole was allegedly rejected for an interdisciplinary chair at Yale because of hostility to some of the content on his blog.[45] High-profile academics risk attracting attention the moment they start blogging, stripping them of the opportunity to make rookie mistakes.
Another emerging problem is that professionalization is not limited to the academy. Increasingly, popular bloggers are also paid bloggers – they either generate their own income through advertising or have been hired by prominent media outlets. Megan McArdle – who blogs for The Atlantic – recently observed that, “the biggest bloggers are either professionals, or they have an even more lucrative job…. most of the obvious people of whom I would have said to any media organization ‘You should hire this blogger’ seem to have been hired. I expect the rest to follow soon, since there are fewer arbitrage opportunities.”[46] Professionalization within the blogosphere will not lead to the same pathologies that we see in the academy. At a minimum, however, the emergence of an “old boy network” among prominent bloggers might retard public debate. As bloggers are co-opted by politicians, policy entrepreneurs and each other, it becomes more difficult to retain the distance necessary to engage in effective criticism. Simply put, it is much harder to criticize the ones we know.
Despite these limitations, the proliferation of online forms of discourse and publishing can help to nudge public intellectuals towards the “corporate intellectual” model that Jeffrey Di Leo recently articulated.[47] He warned that, “The nature of public intellectualism in America is in crisis partly because a wedge has been driven between the interests of academe and the interests of public-private sectors. One is either a mere academic or one is a mere public figure.” While dangers remain, the growth of the blogosphere offers the opportunity for talented academics to fulfill both roles.
-----------------------
[1] This starts, of course, with Russell Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe (New York: Basic Books, 1987).
[2] Florida Atlantic University’s Ph.D. in comparative studies offers a Public Intellectuals Program. According to the program’s website (), “The goal of the Public Intellectuals Program is to combine theoretical with concrete analysis, preparing students who are theoretically confident and knowledgeable about the world they hope to understand and change.”
[3] For the serious, see Richard Posner, Public Intellectuals: A Study Of Decline (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002). For the semi-serious, see David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), chapter four.
[4] For quantitative examples, see Posner, Public Intellectuals; and Ignacio Palacios-Huerta and Oscar Volij, “The Measurement of Intellectual Influence,” Econometrica 72 (May 2004): 963-977. For qualitative assessments, see Mark Lilla, The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics (New York: New York Review Books, 2001). For autobiography, see Benjamin Barber, The Truth of Power: Intellectual Affairs in the Clinton White House (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001).
[5] (accessed May 2008).
[6] Ashley Parker, “Washington Doesn’t Sleep Here,” New York Times, March 9, 2008.
[7] For an argument that parallels this one about globalization and culture, see Tyler Cowen, Creative Destruction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).
[8] Siva Vaidhyanathan, “The Lessons of Juan Cole,” Chronicle of Higher Education, July 28, 2006.
[9] Cass Sunstein, 2.0 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), pp. 169-180.
[10] For a prior argument in this vein, see Susan Kates, “Emerging Technologies and the Public Intellectual,” Literature Interpretation Theory 16 (October 2005): 381-388.
[11] Amitai Etzioni and Alyssa Bowditch, Public Intellectuals: An Endangered Species? (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006).
[12] Daniel Brouwer and Catherine Squires, “Public Intellectuals, Public Life, and the University,” Argument and Advocacy 39 (Winter 2003), p. 203. For a more recent examplar, see Jacob Heilbrunn, “Rank-Breakers: The Anatomy of an Industry,” World Affairs 1 (June 2008).
[13] Eric Lott, The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual (New York: Basic Books, 2006); Howard Jacob Karger and Marie Theresa Hernández, “The Decline of the Public Intellectual in Social Work,” Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare 31 (September 2004): 51-68; Charlotte Allen, “Feminist Fatale,” Los Angeles Times, February 13, 2005.
[14] Of course, some writers never had a terribly high opinion of public intellectuals in the first place. See Tom Wolfe, “In the Land of Rococo Marxists,” Harper’s, June 2003, p. 73-82; Paul Johnson, Intellectuals (New York: Harper & Row, 1989).
[15] Tim Noah, “How Intellectuals Blew the Election ‘Crisis’,” Slate, November 14, 2000. Accessed at ; Peter Berkowitz, “Nutty Professors,” The New Republic, November 27, 2000.
[16] On the failure of the marketplace of ideas, see Chaim Kaufmann, “Threat inflation and the failure of the marketplace of ideas. International Security 29 (Summer 2004): 5-48; on the 2004 effort, see Patrick Thaddeus Jackson and Stuart Kaufman, “Security Scholars for a Sensible Foreign Policy: A study in Weberian activism,” Perspectives on Politics 5 (March 2007): 95-103.
[17] John Kenneth Galbraith, “Writing, Typing and Economics,” The Atlantic Monthly, March 1978, 102-105; Douglas Borer, “Rejected by the New York Times? Why Academics Struggle to Get Published in National Newspapers.” International Studies Perspectives 7 (August): vii-x.
[18] David Brooks, “The Smile of Reason,” New York Times, November 19, 2006; Ezra Klein,”RIP, William F. Buckley,” February 27, 2008 (accessed at ); Sam Tanenhaus, “Requiem for Two Heavyweights,” New York Times, April 13, 2008.
[19] It should be stressed that Jacoby, unlike the multitude who have followed in his footsteps, mostly avoids this trope.
[20] For example, the obituaries for William F. Buckley Jr. largely glossed over his favorable comments about racial segregation during the early days of The National Review. Praise for John Kenneth Galbraith’s intellectual legacy tend to obscure the ways in which his sociological and economic predictions proved to be off base.
[21] Patrick Brantlinger labels Oprah and Larry King as public intellectuals in, “Professors and Public Intellectuals in the Information Age,” Shofar 21 (Spring 2003), p. 123. Part of the confusion rests with the fact that entertainment celebrities have increasingly adopted political causes as part of their public profile. On this point, see Daniel W. Drezner, “Foreign Policy Goes Glam,” The National Interest 92 (November/December 2007): 22-29, and James Traub, “The Celebrity Solution,” New York Times Magazine, March 9, 2008.
[22] Chrisopher Hitchens, “The Plight of the Public Intellectual,” Foreign Policy 166 (May/June 2008), p. 62. One could further argue that much of what is said by publicists constitutes the topic of Harry Frankfurt’s On Bullshit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).
[23] Rachel Donadio, “1958: The War of the Intellectuals,” New York Times Book Review, May 11, 2008, p. 39.
[24] On think tanks, see Andrew Rich, Think Tanks, Public Policy, and the Politics of Expertise (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Thomas Medvetz, “Hybrid Intellectuals: Toward a theory of think tanks and public policy experts in the United States.” Working paper, University of California at Berkeley, December 2007. For a critique, see Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke, The Silence of the Rational Center (New York: Basic Books, 2007), chapter four.
[25] James Harkin, “Europe must fight back in the battle for good ideas,” Financial Times, February 29, 2008.
[26] Andrew Gamble, “Public Intellectuals and the Public Domain,” New Formations 53 (Summer 2004): 41-53; Brantlinger, “Professors and Public Intellectuals in the Information Age.”
[27] Peter Schworm, “Faust's Civil War history meets popular acclaim,” Boston Globe, February 18, 2008.
[28] Friedrich A. von Hayek, “The Intellectuals and Socialism,” University of Chicago Law Review, 16 (Spring 1949): 417-433.
[29] Eric Alterman, Sound and Fury (New York: Harper & Collins, 1992); Steven Teles, The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).
[30] What has not changed is the dismal performance of intellectuals in proximity to political power. See David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (New York: Balantine, 1972), Lilla, The Reckless Mind; Barber, The Truth of Power; Philip Tetlock, Expert Political Judgment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Bruce Kuklick, Blind Oracles: Intellectuals and War from Kennan to Kissinger (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).
[31] Alan Wolfe, “The New Pamphleteers,” New York Times Book Review, 11 July 2004; David Brooks, “The Smile of Reason”; David Frum, “Foggy Bloggom,” The National Interest 93 (January/February 2008), p. 51.
[32] Russell Jacoby, “Big Brains, Small Impact,” Chronicle of Higher Education, January 11, 2008.
[33] Daniel W. Drezner and Henry Farrell, “The Power and Politics of Weblogs.” Public Choice 134 (January 2008): 15-30.
[34] E-mail correspondence with founder Robert Wright, May 2008.
[35] Kevin Wallsten, “Agenda Setting and the Blogosphere,” Review of Policy Research 24 (November 2007): 567-687.
[36] Daniel Drezner, “So You Want to Blog….” in APSA Guide To Publications (Washington: American Political Science Association, 2008).
[37] As Jonathan Rauch points out, “We can all have three new ideas every day before breakfast: the trouble is, they will almost always be bad ideas. The hard part is figuring out who has a good idea.” Rauch, Kindly Inquisitors (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 64.
[38] Indeed, embryonic versions of the ideas and critiques in this essay appeared in my blog over the past six months.
[39] Rebecca Goetz, “Do Not Fear the Blog,” Chronicle of Higher Education, November 14, 2005; J. Bradford DeLong, “The Invisible College,” Chronicle of Higher Education, July 28, 2006.
[40] Laura McKenna, “‘Getting the Word Out’: Policy Bloggers Use Their Soap Box To Make Change.” Review of Policy Research 24 (May 2007): 209-229.
[41] Henry Farrell, “The Blogosphere as a Carnival of Ideas,” Chronicle of Higher Education, October 7, 2005.
[42] Robert Boynton, “Attack of the Career Killing Blogs,” Slate, November 16, 2005. Accessed at , May 2008. Daniel W. Drezner, “The Trouble With Blogs.” Chronicle of Higher Education, July 28, 2006.
[43] Ivan Tribble, “Bloggers Need Not Apply,” Chronicle of Higher Education, July 8, 2005.
[44] Tribble, “The Shoot Messengers, Don’t They?” Chronicle of Higher Education, September 2, 2005.
[45] Liel Liebowitz, “Middle East Wars Flare Up at Yale,” The Jewish Week, June 2, 2006.
[46] Megan McArdle, “Blogging Goes Professional,” April 25, 2008. Accessed at , May 2008.
[47] Jeffrey Di Leo, “Public Intellectuals, Inc.” Inside Higher Ed, February 4, 2008. Accessed at , May 2008.
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