DissapearingIntellectualsandDecliningPublics

DissapearingIntellectualsandDecliningPublics

byWilliamFalcetano

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Source: PRAXISInternational(PRAXISInternational),issue:4/1988,pages:498503,onwww.ceeol.com.

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DISAPPEARING INTELLECTUALS AND DECLINING PUBLICS*

William Falcetano The author begins by informing his readers that this book is about a vacancy in culture, the absence of younger voices, perhaps the absence of a generation. Younger readers who fall into the authors generation gap of intellectuals (under 40) will find this book particularly poignant. It gives voice to a vague but widespread sense among this generation that the postwar intellectual culture it has inherited has more to do with bureaucratic institutions and academic careerism than with ideas and social criticism. One might sense this vacancy from other books like William Barretts The Truants: Adventures Among the Intellectuals which describe and celebrate an earlier time when men and women of letters forged their existence as freelance literary and social critics and lived in affordable modesty together with other artists and writers within the bohemian districts of the metropolis. Jacobys book does more than memorialize, celebrate, or describe: it makes (contains?) an argument about the nature of a vital intellectual culture and the current threat to that vitality. The books heroes, Edmund Wilson, Lewis Mumford, Jane Jacobs, Dwight MacDonald, and C. Wright Mills are characterized as public intellectuals and are contrasted to the anonymous professors who fill the halls and hold the chairs of the academic bureaucracy today. The contrast is not, however, meant to separate intellectuals into two mutually exclusive groups: public and academic. The author makes the important qualification that ... the decisive category here is not intellectuals, those who cherish thinking and ideas, but public intellectuals, those who contribute to open discussions.1 The crucial issue here is not academic affiliation but literary style, taken in the broadest sense to mean not only ones prose idiom but ones manner, the form of behaviour that determines whom one addresses and how one does it, i.e., what constitutes an audience and how one interacts with it. Two of the books heroes, C. Wright Mills and John Dewey, had distinguished academic careers but they adopted a distinctly public literary style, they avoided technical jargon and pitched their arguments to a general and educated audience, they opened up their fields of study to other disciplines of learning and expanded their discourse to a wide range of readers far beyond the immediate confines of the academic profession. Public intellectual is a category fraught with difficulties, the author confesses, because ... the definition must include a commitment not simply to a professional or private domain but to a public world and a public language, the vernacular.2 It is the abandonment of a widely accessible, non-technical public vernacular for a technical, insular, and scholastic academic idiom, and the consequences of this change in literary
* Review of Russell Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe (NY, Basic Books, 1987).
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style on the intellectual culture at large that preoccupies this critical book. Choice selections from the humanities and social sciences are offered as examples, providing a dramatic contrast to the readable and lucid prose of an earlier generation schooled in the little magazines, such as The Dial and Partisan Review. If the authors claim were only about changing styles it might be dismissed as facile, but Jacoby insists that the change in form has brought about a significant change in content, that the style in which ideas are presented and discussed affects the content and substance of those ideas. Hardly a controversial assertion, but it has come up against stiff resistance from an academic community that would like to perceive itself as superior to the dialectic of form and content. The academic idiom, the author insists, is not suited to expressing those public concerns that occupy the pages of Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, and John Dewey. That this generation has failed to produce a vernacular literature of social criticism widely accessible to the educated public is a cause of serious concern; particularly if, with John Dewey, we identify democracy as a form of culture as well as a network of institutional arrangements. Behind this line of reasoning lies the assumption that particular forms of thought are rooted in and deeply influenced by particular forms of life. Thus, the author locates the reason for the shrinkage and disappearance of a public style of discourse in the confluence of two powerful social and demographic movements that resulted in the academization of postwar American intellectual culture: rapid suburbanization (along with the concomitant decline of urban bohemia) and the equally rapid expansion of higher expansion. These movements served to erode the social basis of public intellectual culture which the author almost exclusively identifies with the life of urban bohemia. The option to pursue a non-academic career, to live in affordable modesty, to subsist on literary remuneration, was effectively curtailed as more and more younger intellectuals (accurately) perceived the universities as the only safe haven for a life of letters. For the post 1940s generation of intellectuals to live from selling book reviews and articles ceased to be difficult; it became impossible.3 According to the author this represented a paradox for those interested in social criticism, for they now had to make an accommodation with the very establishment which they had during the sixties come to regard with a certain degree of suspicion and contempt. The hybrid child of this union, the New Left academic, Jacoby regards as an oxymoronic nullity. Today leftist, Marxist, or feminist sociologists can, and do, fill the convention halls. They seem everywhere. The change is startling and partly deceptive. The increased numbers do not translate into public intellectuals; out of the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of left-wing sociologists, it is difficult to name one with the presence of C. Wright Mills. 4 How does Jacoby explain this paradox? It has to do with the . . . nature of cultural activity in an age of institutions.5 The shift from bohemia and the small magazines of the thirties, forties, and fifties, to suburbia, the campus, and the academic journal represent a major transformation of the habitat, manners, and idiom of intellectuals. Academics write for professionalized journals that, unlike the little magazines, create insular societies. . . As intellectuals became academics, they had no need to write in a public prose; they did not, and finally they could not.6 Despite its benefits for individuals assimilation into the academy has taken
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its toll on the larger intellectual culture: as professional life thrives, public culture grows poorer and older. Professionalization, the author insists, leads to privatization or depoliticization, a withdrawal of intellectual energy from a larger domain to a narrower discipline.8 And for several who did seek a larger domain, who tried to become public, professionalization proceeded under the threat of unemployment the final danger in a liberal society. 9 While we may take issue with Jacobys militant urbanism we cannot but come to grips with its underlying assumption: that forms of thought are rooted in and dependent on forms of life; and its corollary: that to alter and affect those forms of social, cultural and material life is to alter and affect the forms of thought which they support. It is precisely at this point that Jacobys critics miss the forest from the trees in their largely defensive efforts to respond to his argument point for point. This illustrates the very myopia that the book criticizes; the inability to comprehend the larger picture as a result of academic overspecialization. The issue here is not whether a plausible list of putative public intellectuals can be marshalled to empirically disconfirm the authors claims, nor whether any of Jacobys specific points can be modified (which will be difficult to do, given the authors numerous and careful qualifications of his most important and controversial assertions). Rather the real question concerns the ability of American intellectual culture to resist the onslaught of powerful social forces that would essentially privatize its public discourse. This book is about the fate of a republic and its capacity to govern itself by enlightened and educated public opinion. It asks us to consider the necessary cultural conditions for the exercise of democratic freedom; as John Dewey put it in Freedom and Culture: The problem is to know what kind of culture is so free in itself that it conceives and begets political freedom as its accompaniment and consequence.10 The health of a nations intellectual culture, and especially its ability to resist the powerful social forces of the economic market and state and corporate bureaucracies is at the very heart of the question of democratic (and academic) freedom, i.e., the ability of the public (or the academy) to govern itself by its own educated opinion. The academization of public discourse, and particularly of social criticism, effectively cuts off this discourse and this criticism from the larger public which needs to understand it in order to act (presumably the purpose of such discourse), and it does this under the epistemological pretext that technical problems need to be solved in a technical idiom by certified experts. Do we need any more powerful illustration of this fallacious reasoning and its destructive consequences than the American policy in Southeast Asia during the 1960s? It is in this sense that Jacoby has given us an interesting and concrete illustration of two themes expressed by Jrgen Habermas in the rarified idiom of German social theory: the colonization of the lifeworld by the systemic media of money and power, and the replacement of moral-practical by technical-practical reasoning. While only a part of the patch-work quilt concept of the lifeworld, intellectual culture is certainly an important, if not the most important part. It is the sphere where society talks to itself, where the many different publics meet, clash, and define or resolve their differences, where mutual understandings are developed or distorted. For this sphere to be anything less than public and free, i.e., widely and easily accessible, represents a grave threat to a republican form of government. Put in
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Habermasian terms, Jacoby argues that American intellectual culture has, since the second world war, succumbed to the colonizing imperatives of the systemic media of bureaucratic power and the economic market. One hardly needs to be schooled in the nuances of Marxist theories of late capitalism to appreciate the authors point that rising rents and poor remuneration have made it virtually impossible to support oneself as a freelance writer in the old style of extra-academic social critic such as Lewis Mumford, Daniel Bell, or Irving Howe. The same is true of the Weberian theory of bureaucratic domination; one need not know it in order to appreciate the authors claims about the bureaucratic character of university policy and its effects on the style and substance of scholarship. Whether phrased in the academic idiom of German social theory or in Jacobys public vernacular, the point remains that the vitality and independence of public intellectual culture is threatened by the twofold pincer movement of academic bureaucratization and economic strangulation; system and lifeworld confront and interact. To portray this interaction in the classical idiom of corruption and virtue might appear hopelessly anachronistic to some, but I will risk the analogy because it opens up a different way of thinking about the issue than the prevailing categories, whether Marxist, Liberal, or Conservative. Yet the analogy is more than heuristic; it involves a critical issue at the heart of democratic political theory. As John Dewey understood it, the problem of political democracy (freedom) was less about legal arrangements and governmental institutions than about the form of culture, the educational experience of participation that gives these institutions meaning and life for concrete individuals. Democracy, Dewey insists, cannot be expressed in political institutions alone. . . for democracy is expressed in the attitudes of human beings and is measured by consequences produced in their lives.12 That form of life, call it vivere civile, vita activa, civic activism, or whatever you wish, is conceived as an active, public, popular and participatory culture that is the socialcultural wellspring from which political democracy derives it strength and integrity. As an historical occurrence it is certainly rare (when compared to the millenia of imperial cultures), and it is equally rare as a moral and social reality, for it is weaved from a thin fabric of educated public sentiment or virtue. The question of the corruption of this public virtue and the culture it supports by the more self-interested motives of wealth and power is at the heart of classical republican political philosophy (the tradition in which Dewey firmly stands, contrary to Rortys mistaken reading of him as forerunner of Rawlsian liberalism). From this perspective the interaction of system and lifeworld can be understood as a modern variant of the classical dialectic of corruption and virtue. In each case a delicate tissue of subjective dispositions and social relations interacts (for better or worse) with systemic media (wealth and power) which (as game-theoretic systems of action) follow their own laws or imperatives. The public culture is described as healthy and vibrant when it effectively resists the encroachments of wealth and power (which introduce invidious social distinctions), and alternatively as corrupted when it succumbs to the alien (because private and self-interested) imperatives of civil, as opposed to political, society. In short, if civil society (i.e., the nexus of economic and legal-bureaucratic systems of action) can effectively compromise political society (by a strategy of colonizaton) the social and cultural foundations of republican government are threatened.
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The erosion of a public style of discourse, the disappearance of public intellectuals and of a public culture of non-technical communication is the very point of Jacobys argument; to miss it is to miss the forest from the trees. Yet this is not hard to do in a book that meanders through the history of Greenwich Village, scrutinizes the psychology of New York intellectuals, discusses suburbanization, academic politics and a host of other issues that are of interest in their own right. There is however a method to this meandering mosaic, a theme which ties its different parts together and makes them a unity. In order to explicate this underlying structural argument I have relied on ideas from John Dewey, Jrgen Habermas and civic humanism which focus on the all important question of the ability of political and intellectual culture to resist social forces that threaten its democratic and public character. Recasting Jacobys argument in the classical idiom of republican virtue (or revealing its historical deep-structure) has the additional heuristic merit of suggesting an historical comparison of our own cultural crisis with that of the early Italian Renaissance when Humanists began to assert a new style and a different set of concerns against the long established tradition of academic Scholasticism. The Scholastics had established a Foucaultist disciplinary hegemony over the entire range of established, certified, and legitimate learning. Their social basis of power rested on the universities and ultimately upon the Church. As a form of thought Scholasticism was deeply rooted in medieval ways of life that had begun to change by the fourteenth century (or had never taken strong root in Italy). This change is clearly reflected in the fresh assertion of secular power by the Italian city-states (particularly Florence and Venice) against the religious authority of the Church and the imperial authority of the Empire. A new source of social power, a new form of life had emerged to support a new style of thinking and writing that could effectively challenge the long established hegemony of Scholasticism. Here too, use of the vernacular, and other issues of literary style had definite political implications. By imitating such classical models as Cicero, Livy, and Polybius, Humanists like Bruni and Machiavelli revived a secular, public idiom that liberated social and political thought from the moral and religious strictures that had prevailed from Augustine to Aquinas and beyond, thus revolutionizing theoretical reflection for the next two centuries preparing the way for Hobbes, Spinoza and Grotius. It is notable that the early civic humanists had a social basis of support that lay outside the reach of the academy (which was effectively a minion of ecclesiastical power) and its ability to certify and legitimize. As Chancellors of the Florentine Republic, Coluccio Salutati, Leonardo Bruni, and Niccolo Machiavelli were supported in their literary activities by the Chancellery and the Republic itself. Under its aegis Humanists could compose political histories, defend and eulogize the Republic, and even theorize and reflect upon the nature of political and social life in a style that was distinctly secular, classical, public and vernacular. None of this would have been possible had not a public and political way of life emerged to support a public and political style of thinking and writing which effectively challenged and ultimately triumphed over an older form of thought rooted in a waning way of life. To the public intellectuals of a younger America the connection between
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humanist intellectual culture and republican political culture was more than an historical contingency: it was a social and moral imperative. In advancing his humanist view of democracy, John Dewey insisted that we have to see that democracy means the belief that humanistic culture should prevail; we should be frank and open in our recognition that the proposition is a moral one like any idea that concerns what should be. 13 Jacobys argument falls into this tradition of American Humanism because it provides a social and moral indictment of our collective inability to sustain a vital public, non-technical, humanistic intellectual culture against the economic and bureaucratic forces that would scholasticize our public discourse as they reify, regiment, and discipline our way of life.
NOTES 1. R. Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals, (NY, 1987), 221. 2. Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals, 235. 3. Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals, 19. 4. Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals, 118. 5. Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals, 124. 6. Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals, 7. 7. Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals. 8. Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals, 147. 9. Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals, 135. 10. John Dewey, Freedom and Culture (NY, 1939), 6. 11. See Halbersams The Best and the Brightest (NY, 1972) and S. Karrows Vietnam: A History (NY, 1983). 12. Dewey, Freedom and Culture, 125. 13. Dewey, Freedom and Culture, 124.

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