What is a public intellectual? Saint Augustine wrote: "What is time? As long as no one asks me, I know quite well. But if someone asks me, I cannot say." Just to say something, I'll call a public intellectual someone who aspires to write for a large, non-specialist audience on subjects of general concern. I think that's enough to go on with, though you should feel free to challenge or correct it.
More to the point, perhaps, who are some exemplary public intellectuals? I'll keep to the United States; we all know about Sartre, Camus, Orwell, and other famous Europeans. In America there's Randolph Bourne, Walter Lippmann, Lewis Mumford, H. L. Mencken, and Edmund Wilson; the fabled New York intellectuals: Lionel Trilling, Philip Rahv, Dwight Macdonald, Irving Howe, Clement Greenberg, and Mary McCarthy; the Cold War liberals: Arthur Schlesinger Jr, Richard Hofstadter, and Daniel Bell; the New Left: C. Wright Mills, I. F Stone, Noam Chomsky, Paul Goodman, Michael Harrington; the conservatives: William F. Buckley, James Burnham, and George Will; and intellectuals of no particular school: Hannah Arendt, Susan Sontag, and Gore Vidal. And contemporaries? I suppose Pankaj Mishra, Adam Shatz, Arundhati Roy, David Bromwich, Samuel Moyn, Christopher Caldwell.
It's a long list, and even a few words about each of them would fill out my time and more. Instead I'd like to offer a few observations about the changing ecology of public intellectuals, about some alterations in the conditions in which we practice our vocation.
As Russell Jacoby wrote in The Last Intellectuals - still the best book on the subject - the living conditions of 20th-century American intellectuals were disrupted by "the restructuring of the cities, the passing of bohemia, and the expansion of the university." Cheap, comfortable urban space, where the temporarily marginal can congregate, no longer exists. Undemanding part-time work - library attendant, bookstore clerk, security guard, clerical worker - the kind of job I did at this university for 35 years and that made my own writing possible - has been downsized or outsourced out of existence. Print or online, little magazines and local newspapers can rarely afford to pay their contributors more than nominally. The spectacular postwar growth of higher education sucked virtually an entire generation of intellectuals into college teaching; a shrinking job market only reinforced their academic socialization, which emphasized specialization and deference, neither of which is characteristic of public intellectuals.
What lies behind this secular change in the situation of intellectuals is the long - now fifty years long - ascendancy of neoliberalism. What is neoliberalism? It is the extension of market dominance to all spheres of social life, fostered and enforced by the state. In economic policy, this means deregulation, privatization, and financialization. In culture, it means untrammeled marketing and the commoditization of everyday life, including the intimate sphere. In law, it means consumer sovereignty and a restrictive conception of the public interest. In education, it means the replacement of public by private (i.e., business) support for schools, universities, and research, with a corresponding shift of influence over hiring, curriculum and research. In civil society, it means private control over the media and private funding of political parties, with the resulting control of both by business and the ultra-rich. The upshot of this political-economic regime is prosperity for Wall Street, Big Tech, and a few other favored industries. For intellectuals - at least those who have not sold themselves to business or the state, which is actually a pretty good definition of public intellectuals - it means austerity, a squeezing of the creative economy, which is a gift economy, the antithesis of a market economy. For everyone, it means a narrowing of horizons.
Students, especially, are affected: the panic currently raging among the young about their career prospects could not be a more effective de-radicalizing agent - could not be more unfavorable for producing public intellectuals - if it had been designed for that purpose by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. According to a recent Crimson article, in 1965 - my freshman year at Harvard, as it happens - 85 percent of entering freshmen said that developing a philosophy of life was one of their most important goals, and 35 percent said that being well-off financially was one of their most important goals. In 2020, 85 percent said being well-off financially was one of their most important goals, and only 40 percent said that developing a philosophy of life was. The result of these changed priorities, according to some other Crimson articles, is that extracurriculars increasingly take precedence over coursework, and even course attendance. The ideal of a college education, as it has been traditionally understood, consists in engaging with small groups of peers under the supervision of a skilled and devoted teacher and discussing ideas and works of art that force each student to consider the purpose of his or her life and the validity of his or her fundamental assumptions. My generation of Harvard students, by and large, was fortunate enough to have that experience. My impression, though I cannot judge with any certainty, is that your generation is less fortunate in this respect. If so, blame neoliberalism.
Can social media make up this loss? No doubt it can help. But it is an inherently centrifugal experience, dispersing one's attention in the very act of increasing one's interlocutors and abolishing the indispensable role of the teacher, the skilled and devoted guide. A liberal education concentrates and integrates; social media extends but fragments. If one has gone through the rigorous formative process of a liberal education, social media can be stimulating and enlarging. If not, it is apt to be a snare.
I dedicated The Sealed Envelope to the memory of three of the foremost public intellectuals of the last few decades, and I'd like to say a little about each of them, partly to pay tribute and partly to say what I think we're talking about, or should be talking about, when we talk about public intellectuals.
Barbara Ehrenreich came as close to my ideal of a public intellectual as anyone else in my lifetime, writing about anthropology, culture, sexual politics, political economy, and everything else under the sun with wit and brio. The most popular and influential of her many books was Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America. Sociologists and anthropologists have sometimes gone underground in order to capture aspects of life normally hidden to middle-class readers; but it's safe to say that none have turned in an account written with such verve and generosity. In 2000, after Bill Clinton's historic welfare reform had greatly expanded the ranks of the poor, Ehrenreich decided that, as a citizen, a writer, and a radical, she ought to find out, and report, what life in America is like on the minimum wage. So she spent several months in various parts of the country as a waitress, a housecleaner, and a clerk at Walmart, living (very uncomfortably) solely on her earnings. The book is full of barbed humor, aimed mostly at herself, but her conclusion is perfectly serious:
When someone works for less pay than she can live on ... then she has made a great sacrifice for you, she has made you a gift of some part of her abilities, her health, and her life. The working poor are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor is to be a nameless benefactor to everyone else.
The historian Christopher Lasch fused intellectual history, psychoanalytic theory, sociological analysis, and political polemic into an exceptionally intricate and wide-ranging critique. Lasch's work is an extended quarrel with modernity, which he portrayed as an overlapping, mutually reinforcing phalanx of political centralization, mass production, expanded consumption, automation, geographical mobility, the bureaucratization of education, medicine, and family life, moral cosmopolitanism, and legal universalism. Against that barrage of supposedly benign abstractions, Lasch insisted on the fact of human scale. The human creature has a specific evolutionary endowment and gestational history. As a result, the human infant has a powerful and threatening fantasy life, which it can only outgrow gradually, through a range of close-up interactions, involving both love and discipline, with the same caregivers over many years. The bureaucratic rationalization of work and intimate life plays havoc with this scheme of development, producing a weak self, stripped of traditional skills, tools, and autonomy, entirely dependent on large forces beyond its comprehension, much less control, and crippled by ambivalence toward remote, impersonal authority. What sustained the strong pre-modern self, Lasch believed, was the virtue of hope; what sustains the weak modern self is the ideology of progress.
Richard Rorty, by contrast, was an arch-modernist. He devoted the first half of his career to reformulating, wryly but rigorously, the philosophical pragmatism of William James and John Dewey. Later on, surveying the rubble of our moral and intellectual culture and wanting to give the disenchanted something to hold on to amid the gale winds of nihilism, he wrote an exquisite book, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. After explaining why morality cannot be grounded in either religion or reason, he goes on to explain how it might be grounded - provisionally:
... not by inquiry but by imagination, the imaginative ability to see strangers as fellow sufferers. Solidarity is not discovered by [philosophical] reflection but created. It is created by increasing our sensitivity to the particular details of the pain and humiliation of other, unfamiliar sorts of people.
Imagination, sympathy, solidarity - by whatever name: this is the true engine of political progress, not any grand theory.
Two of Rorty's books featured the word "hope" in their title: Philosophy and Social Hope (1999) and the posthumous What Can We Hope For? (2022). He knew how difficult an achievement democracy is, and how fragile once achieved; indeed, he famously warned that if the left did not reach out to the angry and disaffected white working class, an authoritarian strongman would. Even a philosopher can sometimes be clear-eyed. But his optimism went deep, all the way back to Walt Whitman's great essay Democratic Vistas. It was Whitman's generous vision of American possibilities that Rorty tried to keep alive in what he recognized was an age sadly lacking in solidarity and fraternity.
What sustains hope, for me, in these dark times is a metaphor of Rilke's. In Letters to a Young Poet, he writes that love is a form of knowledge, and that a single act of creation is the fruit of "a thousand forgotten nights of love." He hopes lovers will be solemn and responsible as well as joyful, but reassures his youthful correspondent that, even when they are selfish or careless, their passion is not wholly dissipated but is passed down to the future, despite themselves, as though in a sealed envelope. That is also something public intellectuals can do.
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