Public Intellectuals: A study of decline by Richard Posner, Harvard University Press, £20.50, ISBN 067400633X
A PRACTISING judge and legal academic, Richard Posner is also a prominent and prolific author who can be relied on to address the most marketable issues of the moment. Last year, in Breaking the Deadlock, he was in print justifying the Supreme Court’s decision to break the electoral deadlock in Florida and give the presidency to George Bush. Shortly before, in An Affair of State, he was supporting the impeachment of Clinton and castigating all legal scholars who opposed it.
Now Posner offers a critique of American public intellectuals who, although courted by and seeking the attention of publishing houses and other media, nowadays provide largely ill-informed and irrelevant commentary from overspecialised academic domains, or so he says. As Posner himself is an archetype of the tribe he interrogates, he obviously risks being hoist by his own petard. So it is all the more impressive that this book so cheerfully exemplifies the disease it purports to diagnose.
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Early warning symptoms surface on the cover, which proclaims the book to be “the first systematic analysis of the contemporary American intellectual”. Another view might be that it is but the latest in the prevalent “cultures of decline” genre, which for more than two decades has been mourning the intellectual impoverishment emanating from contemporary academia. Echoing Russell Jacoby’s The Last Intellectuals, Richard Hofstader’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, Robert Bork’s Slouching Towards Gomorrah, and many of similar ilk, the book’s claims to analytical novelty are peculiar. Posner knows this, referring cursorily to the vigorous rebuttal of his own well-worn arguments in Bruce Robbins’s Secular Vocations: Intellectuals, Professionalism, Culture, written a decade ago.
The book’s claim to comprehensiveness is also bizarre. There is extreme quirkiness in the issues Posner declares to be of public interest. We find no reference to the fierce debates taking place at the interface between science and culture. He is silent on public controversy surrounding the new genetics in determining our future, disputes over the nature of consciousness, or passionate engagement with issues of trauma memory. Posner does mention the palaeontologist Stephen Gould, whose popular writing is as influential as it is controversial in cultural life, but only to censure his “Marxist” failure to “take religion seriously”. Gould’s celebration of the complexity of Darwin’s legacy against the competing interpretations of evolutionary psychology is ignored.
It is not hard to detect the bias in Posner’s intellectual scrutiny: addressing fetal rights, but ignoring all other healthcare issues; raising anti-Semitism, but silent on rival ethnic and racial chauvinisms; returning readers repeatedly to Clinton’s personal transgressions, but neglecting broader issues of policy. His own authorial aspirations as ideal public intellectual, one who speaks “difficult truths that cut across lines of political affiliation and enthusiasm”, is hardly in evidence. Amusingly, this book made its mark on American upmarket broadsheets for one reason only: its trivialising list of the top 100 public intellectuals selected by their mention on assorted media websites. Henry Kissinger is number 1; almost the entire academic elite he selects for attack is conspicuously absent. So what, one wonders, is the nature of his problem with public punditry?
Sectarian squabbles are already far too prevalent in an academia facing intense internal and external competition for resources, but here Posner believes that urging more crossfire will create the necessary “quality control” for a “well-functioning market” of public intellectuals.
