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["Devine, James" <jdevine@xxxxxxx>]

Cornering the Market in Chutzpah

PUBLIC INTELLECTUALS: A Study of Decline, By Richard A. Posner, Harvard
University Press: 408 pp., $29.95

[reviewed] By RUSSELL JACOBY

January 27 2002

Did you know that if I were writing this review for big bucks, it would be
better--at least according to Richard Posner? Posner adores the free market;
his only regret is that salaried teachers like myself escape its beneficial
imperatives. Posner is a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals; he is a
well-regarded professor at the University of Chicago Law School and an
author who writes with astounding energy on an astounding number of topics.
He has published books--just to stick to the A's--on aging, AIDS and
antitrust law. Recently he has tackled former President Bill Clinton's
impeachment and the 2000 Florida election debacle. Associated with a
movement that applies economics to law, Posner belongs in the front ranks of
legal thinkers in the United States today--and perhaps the qualifier "legal"
suggests a specialization he has increasingly abandoned. Indeed, in his
latest book he assumes the role of wide-ranging social critic. Posner was
"surprised" by the "low quality" of public commentary on the Clinton
impeachment by philosophers, historians and law professors. The discussion
was no better on the Microsoft antitrust case, in which he served as
mediator. This spurred him to consider the nature of "public intellectuals,"
which, he claims, "has never been studied systematically before." With his
usual industry and boldness, Posner seeks to remedy this deficiency and
explain the sorry state of public intellectuals.

What is a public intellectual? (Disclosure alert: Posner credits me, in my
"The Last Intellectuals," with coining the term, and I marginally figure in
his book.) Standard accounts trace the term "intellectual" to 1890s France,
when writers such as Emile Zola protested the framing of Alfred Dreyfus;
they were "the intellectuals." In the course of the 20th century, especially
in the United States, intellectuals migrated into expanding universities and
became specialists and teachers; they were still intellectuals, but they
addressed themselves to colleagues and students. Only a few of them, the
"public intellectuals," continue to court a wider educated audience on
political and cultural matters.

To Posner, the Dreyfus case was almost the last time intellectuals got
things right. He knows why. Once upon a time intellectuals plied their trade
in a market that adjudicated by ignoring defective goods and rewarding
quality. Intellectuals were essentially independent producers with something
to sell--their words. Inasmuch as public intellectuals are now largely
tenured professors, they escape the dictates of the market; they can write
(and talk) trash in public and still pick up their checks from the bursar.

Posner seeks to substantiate this proposition by case studies illustrating
the defective quality of contributions of public intellectuals and by a
series of tables, graphs and equations demonstrating an inverse relation
between public attention and real scholarship. Pos- ner (or his assistants)
have counted up the number of media "hits" and scholarly citations for more
than 500 intellectuals to show that intellectuals pay for public attention
by diminished professional legitimacy. In the service of this argument, he
has collected a dizzying amount of miscellaneous data. Wannabe public
intellectuals can pick up career tips. To gain media attention, "other
things being equal" it is better to be alive than dead. Take note, students:
Being dead can reduce your media attention by a whopping 30%.

To follow Posner as he picks fights with everyone from Stephen Jay Gould to
Gertrude Himmelfarb and Richard Rorty is worth the price of admission; he is
a formidable critic of academic pretense and sloth. Yet too much of this
book is pure bravado. Posner wants to prove that not only can he draw upon
technical articles on "restaurant pricing" and supply bristling formulas on
the benefits of market regulation and the costs of divorce, he can also
discuss Shakespeare, Dickens or T.S. Eliot with the best of them--and best
them. Irving Kristol opined that the later poetry of Eliot, such as "Four
Quartets," is "much superior" to his earlier work. This judgment, Posner
sniffs, "raises a question whether Kristol is a serious reader of modern
poetry."

Nor is Posner above playing both sides. He makes much of the erroneous
predictions and hyperventilated idiom of public intellectuals, complaining,
for instance, that the rhetoric about the Clinton impeachment by Princeton
University historian Sean Wilentz was typically hysterical and uninformed.
(Posner legalistically thinks the impeachment crisis was about the
obstruction of justice by Clinton.) Yet Posner himself (in Harper's
magazine) defended the Supreme Court's decision in the Florida election on
the grounds it resolved a "dangerous" crisis. "Instability" threatened the
republic. This sounds like the rhetoric Posner detests in others.

Sticking with Posner is sometimes exhilarating, but don't look out the
window. His book is a house of cards constructed in midair. Though Posner
laments a declining quality of public intellectual work, he provides no base
line for his judgment. Apart from frequent references to George Orwell, he
does not even make a stab at indicating when it was higher. Of course, as a
partisan of "measurement and objective evaluation," Posner must be stumped
by the impossible task of statistically proving that intellectuals once saw
further and thought better. When? He cannot say.

Posner is a smart man bewitched by two ideas, specialization and the free
market. Together, he believes, they can clean up intellectual pollution. For
Posner intellectual specialization is next to godliness. It would be nice if
he ducked into an academic department to check out what its excellent
specialists are up to. On occasion he gets a glimpse and recoils. He takes
up Wayne Booth and Martha Nussbaum as two public intellectuals delivering
imperfect wares. Yet by their lucidity and range, he notes, they are "not in
the mainstream of contemporary literary studies" which is generally composed
of opaque and unappetizing fields like subaltern studies and deconstruction
that "largely disable the practitioners ... from communicating outside their
immediate circle." Posner, who prides himself on his rigor, fails to draw
the conclusion. He does not recognize here his own ideal, insular
specialists who have lost touch with English.

The second idea is the rationality of the free market for resolving
intellectual debate. Posner thinks the market is not too strong but too
weak, exacting no financial penalties from tenured public intellectuals who
depart from their accredited fields to deliver substandard goods. In the
name of the free market, he outdoes Marx, who believed that intellectuals
were lackeys of the bourgeoisie; Posner wishes it were so. Not the economic
noose but its slackness bothers Posner. But does he really believe that the
market can winnow out imperfect ideas and writings? "The Protocols of the
Elders of Zion," a famous anti-Semitic text, is considered one of the
bestsellers of all time. Thoreau once remarked that he had a thousand
volumes in his library, mostly unsold copies of his own books. Are these
examples of market rationality?

Does Posner believe that the free market can resolve a public controversy
about, say, impeachment, war or intelligence testing? Apparently he does. Or
does he? Consider his discussion of Gould's "The Mismeasure of Man," a book
that contests the racial and genetic basis of intelligence. Posner won't buy
it, but many have. Gould is a best-selling Harvard professor published by a
commercial press. The market has spoken. Posner should be pleased, but he
isn't. He returns to his first idea. In writing about intelligence, Gould
has stepped outside his expertise. Posner admits this is not obvious. "Since
Gould is a biologist, he may seem to have been writing within his field. The
appearance is deceptive. He is a paleontologist and not an expert on the
problem of intelligence." Moreover, Gould's belief that distilling
intelligence into a number like IQ exemplifies a "reification" is
nonsensical. Posner knows why; Gould is straying again. "'Reification' is a
philosophical rather than a scientific concept ... so we should not expect
Gould to be able to handle it deftly."

Posner might be vulnerable to an antitrust action: cornering the market in
chutzpah. Gould cannot understand IQ or philosophy (outside his field).
Nussbaum cannot understand women in Africa (outside her field). Several
hundred law professors protested the Clinton impeachment, but they were out
to lunch, since "few were experts on impeachment." In an open letter, 50
Nobel science laureates objected to the proposed national antimissile
defense. Guess what? Appearances again mislead. Half the signatories were
either biologists or chemists, and many others were "in branches of physics
unrelated to the science involved in trying to shoot down missiles."

Who decides when Gould transgresses? When professors of solid-state physics
mistakenly address physics of motion? When professors of torts erroneously
take up constitutional law? Herein the last card: Judge Posner judges.
Posner decides who has the proper credentials. Want to discuss T.S. Eliot's
poetry in public? Judge Posner will inspect your license in his chambers.

But what exactly are Posner's credentials that allow him to airily decide
which physics professors are allowed to speak on military defense and which
philosophy professors on Africa? He has opinions on everything but seems to
lack, well, professional training on all things. He wants everyone to stay
within his or her own field, while he lords over the estate. If the babble
of public intellectuals irritates him, perhaps he should practice what he
preaches and clam up. If he insists on adding to the din, his beloved market
should shock him with sales figures. Don't buy this book. If you must
examine this maddening and provocative work, peruse it in a store or borrow
it from a library. Posner may get the message: His cure for intellectual
irresponsibility is worse than the disease.

*

Russell Jacoby is the author of "The End of Utopia," "The Last
Intellectuals" and other books. He teaches history at UCLA.

--
Jim Devie