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Russell Jacoby
The
Last Intellectuals
(Noonday, 1987)
I’ve been aware of Jacoby’s book for years and have read excerpts here and
there, but I’m reading it for the first time now. If you want to know what
I think about the intellectual world of today, read this book.
Before 1960 the U.S. had a
flourishing culture of political intellectuals, culture-critics, and
social critics – some credentialed and some not, some within the
university and some not. Illustrious examples were John Dewey, Thorstein
Veblen, Lewis Mumford, Edmund Wilson, and C. Wright Mills, but there were
really too many to count.
Since 1960 things have changed.
Free-lance intellectuals are fewer, university intellectuals are more
cautious, university research tends intensely toward specialization,
methodologization, and neutrality, and the university leftists that
remain tend to speak to a small internal audience.
This is all stuff I’ve been
saying. Read the book if you want to know more.
As a free-lance intellectual, when
I talk to university intellectuals I usually sense caution, timidity, and
conventionality. (Not the conventionality of the Church Lady, of course,
but the conventionality of their discipline.)
“Can anyone hear us?” and “Can you say that?” are in the air, and behind them is the ever-present
“Who do I have to blow”? The heirarchies which control hiring and
promotion are well-known (read the
Leiter Report), and until an academic gets tenure at a first-rank
research university, he or she must always be looking over his or her
shoulder.
Jacoby’s book came out in 1987.
Since then tremendous amounts of money have been pumped into the
right-wing think-tanks, so that many of the “public intellectuals” that we
do have are right-wing made men. A factor that Jacoby does not stress,
though I would do so, is the intense privatism and anti-intellectualism of
most of the left subcultures, countercultures, and alternative cultures.
Even when these groups are militant and intellectualized, they all tend
toward personal politics, personal self-dramatization, sentimental issues
like animal rights, and intuitive, spiritual ways of processing reality.
Relevant to Jacoby's thesis, one
of my big beefs with the Democratic Party is that it seems to be entirely
dominated by academics, credentialed bureaucrats, and organization men
trying to rise in the heierarchy. This accounts not only for the
Democrats’ famous lack of imagination and enterprise, but also for their
inability to make a populist appeal to the electorate. Republican populism
is totally fraudulent, but there’s no competition, so they always get away
with it.
My own intellectual heroes are the
people Jacoby was talking about, but I think that that age is gone for
good. American openness and inventiveness have brought great things into
the world, but the America I see coming into existence is a cheesy
concoction of bullying and fraud.
Perhaps the things I cherish in
the American experience will be kept alive somewhere else in the world.
P.S.
You may ask: if the university is as
lame as I say it is, why are Horowitz and Coulter attacking it so harshly?
The answer is, for the same reason that they are claiming that the media
is liberal, when it isn't. It's a mopping-up operation, and intimidation
is the goal. They're partway there, but they want it all.
| After Reading the Book:
The problems within the university that
Jacoby talks about go back at least 80 years, and some of the
most eminent American scholars had to fight the battle:
notably Charles Beard, John Dewey, and Thorstein Veblen (p.
129). There's a cycle, with McCarthyism intimidating the
university in the 50's, a left resurgence in the 70's, and
since then a dwindling effect to which has recently been added
a new McCarthyism.
The diminishing role of independent
non-university intellectuals is new since about 1960, as are the
limitations on what can be said (deriving from narrow definitions of
professionalism) which have led in turn to the encysting of
academic politics in enclaves sealed off from the larger
community.
From Jacoby:
"The prolonged, often humiliating effort
to write a thesis to be judged by one's doctoral adviser and a
committee of experts gave rise to a network of dense relations
-- and deference -- that clung to their lives and future
careers". (p. 18)
H.L. Mencken: " [The professor] .... is
almost invariably inclined to seek his own security in a
mellifluous inanity -- that is, far from being a courageous
spokesman of ideas and an apostle of their free
dissemination.... he comes close to being the most prudent and
skittish of men". (p. 143).
"It is much more the prestige of one's
terminal degree and one's graduate sponsor than one's
scholarly productivity which will lead to a a good academic
appointment". (p. 144)
"The philosophical self-scrutiny,
however, may well be the weakest, because American philosophy
has promoted a technical expertise that repels critical
thinking...........Philosophy seems the most routinized of the
humanities, the least accessible to change." (p. 151) |
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