Public Intellectuals 2.0

Daniel W. DreznerThe Fletcher School

Tufts UniversityMay 2008

Disquisitions about public intellectuals tend to conclude that they ain’t what they

used to be.1 In many ways, however, curiosity about the American intelligentsia has

never been greater. The past decade has seen the creation of doctoral degree programs

and fellowships for public intellectuals.2 Public intellectuals are now the subject of

serious and semi-serious analysis.3 There has been a surge of work exploring

quantitative, qualitative and autobiographical aspects of public intellectual work.4

Foreign Policy, in conjunction with Prospect magazine, periodically publishes its list of

the “top 100” public intellectuals in the world.5 Even the New York Times Style section

suggests that, despite all appearances to the contrary, musings about public affairs is

currently the chic thing to do.6

1 This starts, of course, with Russell Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe (New York: Basic Books, 1987). 2 Florida Atlantic University’s Ph.D. in comparative studies offers a Public Intellectuals Program. According to the program’s website (http://www.fau.edu/comparativestudies/), “The goal of the Public Intellectuals Program is to combine theoretical with concrete analysis, preparing students who are theoretically confident and knowledgeable about the world they hope to understand and change.”3 For the serious, see Richard Posner, Public Intellectuals: A Study Of Decline (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002). For the semi-serious, see David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), chapter four. 4 For quantitative examples, see Posner, Public Intellectuals; and Ignacio Palacios-Huerta and Oscar Volij, “The Measurement of Intellectual Influence,” Econometrica 72 (May 2004): 963-977. For qualitative assessments, see Mark Lilla, The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics (New York: New York Review Books, 2001). For autobiography, see Benjamin Barber, The Truth of Power: Intellectual Affairs in the Clinton White House (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001). 5 http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=4262 (accessed May 2008).6 Ashley Parker, “Washington Doesn’t Sleep Here,” New York Times, March 9, 2008.

The Internet is another possible aid to the renaissance of public intellectuals. The

explosion of online publications, podcasts, diavlogs, and especially weblogs has enabled

public intellectuals to express their ideas beyond the narrow confines of elite op-ed pages

and network television. From an economic perspective, the Internet, like any

technological innovation, increases the production possibility frontier of those who use it.

It simultaneously expands the size of the market while increasing individual

productivity.7 This applies to businesses, entrepreneurs, and even public intellectuals.

Media studies professor Siva Vaidhyanathan recently concluded, “There has never been a

better time to be a public intellectual, and the Web is the big reason why.”8

Will the World Wide Web midwife a new Golden Age of public intellectual life?

There are reasons to be skeptical. Members of the intelligentsia initially embraced

broadcast innovations of the past – radio and television – as potential breakthroughs in

the ability to contribute to reasoned discourse. As the contours of these media have

developed, the failure of these utopian visions to come to pass has soured many on the

marriage between technology and thought. Already, some have argued that the Internet

will simply exacerbate the decline in discourse observed in other venues.9

This essay takes the contrary position: the growth of online publication venues

has stimulated rather than retarded the quality and diversity of public intellectuals.10 The

criticisms levied against these new forms of publishing seem to mirror the flaws that

plague the more general critique of current public intellectuals: hindsight bias and

7 For an argument that parallels this one about globalization and culture, see Tyler Cowen, Creative Destruction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). 8 Siva Vaidhyanathan, “The Lessons of Juan Cole,” Chronicle of Higher Education, July 28, 2006. 9 Cass Sunstein, Republic.com 2.0 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), pp. 169-180. 10 For a prior argument in this vein, see Susan Kates, “Emerging Technologies and the Public Intellectual,” Literature Interpretation Theory 16 (October 2005): 381-388.

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conceptual fuzziness. Rather, the growth of blogs and other forms of online writing have

partially reversed a trend that many have lamented – what Russell Jacoby labeled the

“professionalization and academization” of public intellectuals. In particular, the growth

of the blogosphere breaks down – or at least lowers – the barriers erected by a

professionalized academy.

A Tale of Two Narratives

It is the best of times and the worst of times for public intellectuals. As

previously observed, the interest in public intellectuals has never been greater. At the

same time, the subtitle of Posner’s book was A Study of Decline. He is hardly the only

writer to make this observation – a subsequent edited volume about the topic had as its

subtitle An Endangered Species?11 One recent review observed, “A consistent refrain…

is that today’s public intellectuals pale in comparison to their early 20th century

counterparts or at least are in need of revitalization to become as great as their

predecessors.”12 Various subgroups bemoan the loss of “their” public intellectuals to

advance their cause or position.13 Ever since Russell Jacoby’s The Last Intellectuals, the

11 Amitai Etzioni and Alyssa Bowditch, Public Intellectuals: An Endangered Species? (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006). 12 Daniel Brouwer and Catherine Squires, “Public Intellectuals, Public Life, and the University,” Argument and Advocacy 39 (Winter 2003), p. 203. For a more recent examplar, see Jacob Heilbrunn, “Rank-Breakers: The Anatomy of an Industry,” World Affairs 1 (June 2008). 13 Eric Lott, The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual (New York: Basic Books, 2006); Howard Jacob Karger and Marie Theresa Hernández, “The Decline of the Public Intellectual in Social Work,” Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare 31 (September 2004): 51-68; Charlotte Allen, “Feminist Fatale,” Los Angeles Times, February 13, 2005.

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dominant trope in musings about public intellectuals is that their quality has gone rapidly

downhill.14

The political influence of intellectuals would appear to have waned – particularly

during the George W. Bush years. Many commentators agree that an organized effort by

liberal intellectuals to influence the Florida recount during the 2000 election misfired

badly.15 The abject failure of public intellectuals to influence the marketplace of ideas in

the run-up to the Second Gulf War is considered an exemplar case of their insignificance.

The replacement of unaffiliated intellectuals with academics leads to farces like the

petition by international relations theorists designed to influence the 2004 election cycle.

This effort at “Weberian activism” was notable only in terms of its utter futility.16 As

academics have focused more on writing for other academics, many have lost the ability

and/or the interest to write for a more general audience.17

The passing of myriad public intellectuals in recent years has exacerbated the

decline trope in public discourse. Susan Sontag, Milton Friedman, David Halberstam,

John Kenneth Galbraith, Norman Mailer, and William F. Buckley, Jr. have all died in

recent years, leading those still alive to argue that no one will be able to replace them.

New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus writes that, “Mr. Buckley and Mr.

Mailer represented something different. More than public intellectuals, they were citizen

14 Of course, some writers never had a terribly high opinion of public intellectuals in the first place. See Tom Wolfe, “In the Land of Rococo Marxists,” Harper’s, June 2003, p. 73-82; Paul Johnson, Intellectuals (New York: Harper & Row, 1989). 15 Tim Noah, “How Intellectuals Blew the Election ‘Crisis’,” Slate, November 14, 2000. Accessed at http://www.slate.com/id/1006497/; Peter Berkowitz, “Nutty Professors,” The New Republic, November 27, 2000. 16 On the failure of the marketplace of ideas, see Chaim Kaufmann, “Threat inflation and the failure of the marketplace of ideas. International Security 29 (Summer 2004): 5-48; on the 2004 effort, see Patrick Thaddeus Jackson and Stuart Kaufman, “Security Scholars for a Sensible Foreign Policy: A study in Weberian activism,” Perspectives on Politics 5 (March 2007): 95-103.17 John Kenneth Galbraith, “Writing, Typing and Economics,” The Atlantic Monthly, March 1978, 102-105; Douglas Borer, “Rejected by the New York Times? Why Academics Struggle to Get Published in National Newspapers.” International Studies Perspectives 7 (August): vii-x.

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intellectuals, active participants in the great dramas of their time, and eager at times to

pursue their ideas in democracy’s more bruising arenas.” The American Prospect’s Ezra

Klein laments that, “They would write serious books of political analysis and sell

millions of copies -- they were the writers you had to read to call yourself an actual

political junkie. Now, the space they inhabited in the discourse is held by the [Ann]

Coulters and [Bill] O'Reilly's of the world.” In his eulogy for Milton Friedman, David

Brooks observes: “[F]rom the 1940s to the mid-1990s, American political life was

shaped by a series of landmark books: Witness, The Vital Center, Capitalism and

Freedom, The Death and Life of American Cities, The Closing of the American Mind.

Then in the 1990s, those big books stopped coming.”18

The obituaries for the prominent public intellectual are not terribly persuasive.

Most of them suffer from the cognitive bias that comes with comparing the annals of

history to the present day.19 Over time, lesser intellectual lights tend to fade from view –

only the canon remains. When one looks back at only the great thinkers, it is natural to

presume that all of the writers from a bygone era are great. Even when looking at the

intellectual giants of the past, current public commentary is more likely to gloss over past

intellectual errors and instead focus on their greatest moments.20 Francis Fukuyama’s

The End of History and the Last Man might look wrong in retrospect, but it is not more

wrong than Daniel Bell’s The End of Ideology. Intellectuals like Sontag or Friedman

18 David Brooks, “The Smile of Reason,” New York Times, November 19, 2006; Ezra Klein,”RIP, William F. Buckley,” February 27, 2008 (accessed at http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/ezraklein_archive?month=02&year=2008&base_name=rip_william_f_buckley); Sam Tanenhaus, “Requiem for Two Heavyweights,” New York Times, April 13, 2008. 19 It should be stressed that Jacoby, unlike the multitude who have followed in his footsteps, mostly avoids this trope. 20 For example, the obituaries for William F. Buckley Jr. largely glossed over his favorable comments about racial segregation during the early days of The National Review. Praise for John Kenneth Galbraith’s intellectual legacy tend to obscure the ways in which his sociological and economic predictions proved to be off base.

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occupy their exalted status in the present only because they survived the crucible of

history. It is riskier to assess the legacies of current public intellectuals – because their

ability to misstep or err remains.

A similar error is committed when it is proclaimed that public figures like Bill

O’Reilly or Oprah Winfrey are the successors to the Greatest Generation of public

intellectuals.21 In part this is due to the conceptual confusion that surrounds the term

“public intellectual.” Most people who write about the topic apply a Potter Stewart-like

definition of the term: they know public intellectuals when they see them. The term

tends to get conflated with a category Jacoby would label “publicists.” Many publicists

are television pundits – a class to which one could charitably place O’Reilly and Coulter.

They do not advocate or discuss abstract policy or political ideas. Indeed, given that a

large number of pundits tend to thrive on adopting anti-intellectual personas, one could

argue that they represent the very antithesis of the definition of “intellectual.”22

Skeptics would point out that that television personalities like Coulter and

O’Reilly command greater attention than today’s leading public intellectuals. This point,

however, vastly overestimates the audience that The Partisan Review or Commentary

commanded in their intellectual heydays. Just because current writers cannot remember

Walter Winchell, Hedda Hopper or Louella Parsons does not mean that they did not exist.

Indeed, part of the animating spirit of the public intellectuals of the fifties was to define

21 Patrick Brantlinger labels Oprah and Larry King as public intellectuals in, “Professors and Public Intellectuals in the Information Age,” Shofar 21 (Spring 2003), p. 123. Part of the confusion rests with the fact that entertainment celebrities have increasingly adopted political causes as part of their public profile. On this point, see Daniel W. Drezner, “Foreign Policy Goes Glam,” The National Interest 92 (November/December 2007): 22-29, and James Traub, “The Celebrity Solution,” New York Times Magazine, March 9, 2008. 22 Chrisopher Hitchens, “The Plight of the Public Intellectual,” Foreign Policy 166 (May/June 2008), p. 62. One could further argue that much of what is said by publicists constitutes the topic of Harry Frankfurt’s On Bullshit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).

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themselves as distinct from middlebrow and lowbrow culture – cultures that were vastly

more popular with the American people.23

The remaining claim is that there are no more Big Thinkers and Big Books.

Jacoby repeatedly challenges critics of The Last Intellectuals to name the names of

current public intellectuals in order to compare with the past. But this is not a very

difficult task. Among periodicals, The New Yorker has Malcolm Gladwell, James

Surowiecki and Louis Menand on their payroll; Andrew Sullivan, James Fallows, and

Virginia Postrel write for The Atlantic; Harper’s contributing editors include Barbara

Ehrenreich, Thomas Frank, and Tom Wolfe; Vanity Fair has James Wolcott and

Christopher Hitchens; Newsweek employs Fareed Zakaria, Daniel Gross and George F.

Will. Despite the thinning of their ranks, unaffiliated public intellectuals like Paul

Berman, Michael Beschloss, Debra Dickerson, Robert D. Kaplan, John Lukacs, Joshua

Micah Marshall, Rick Perlstein and Robert Wright still remain. The explosion of think

tanks in the past thirty years has contributed to a rise in partisanship – but it has also

provided sinecures for the intellectual likes of Robert Kagan, Joel Kotkin, Michael Lind,

Brink Lindsey, Jedediah Purdy, and David Rieff.24 Within the academy, there is no

shortage of public intellectuals: Eric Alterman, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Michael

Bérubé, Joshua Cohen, Jared Diamond, Jean Behke Elshtain, Amitai Etzioni, Niall

Ferguson, Richard Florida, Francis Fukuyama, John Lewis Gaddis, Henry Louis Gates,

Jacob Hacker, Samuel Huntington, Tony Judt, Paul Kennedy, Paul Krugman, Steven

23 Rachel Donadio, “1958: The War of the Intellectuals,” New York Times Book Review, May 11, 2008, p. 39. 24 On think tanks, see Andrew Rich, Think Tanks, Public Policy, and the Politics of Expertise (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Thomas Medvetz, “Hybrid Intellectuals: Toward a theory of think tanks and public policy experts in the United States.” Working paper, University of California at Berkeley, December 2007. For a critique, see Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke, The Silence of the Rational Center (New York: Basic Books, 2007), chapter four.

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Leavitt, Lawrence Lessig, John Mearsheimer, Martha Nussbaum, Steven Pinker, Richard

Posner, Samantha Power, Robert Putnam, Dani Rodrik, Jeffrey Sachs, Amartya Sen,

Anne-Marie Slaughter, Joseph Stiglitz, Laurence Summers, Cass Sunstein, Michael

Walzer, Sean Wilentz, E.O. Wilson, and Alan Wolfe. Their recent books – A Problem

From Hell, America at the Crossroads, Bowling Alone, Clash of Civilizations, Code,

Colossus, Consilience, The Conscience of a Liberal, The Conservative Soul,

Cosmopolitanism, Development as Freedom, Freakonomics, The Future and Its Enemies,

The Future of Freedom, Globalization and Its Discontents, God Is Not Great, The Great

Risk Shift, Guns, Germs and Steel, Liberty of Conscience, The Metaphysical Club,

Nickled and Dimed, Nixonland, Nonzero, One Nation After All, The Parliament of Man,

Republic.com, Terror and Liberalism, The Tipping Point, What’s Liberal About the

Liberal Arts?, The Wisdom of Crowds – are designed to be accessible to the informed lay

public. It will be easy for the reader to quibble with one of the names or one of the books

listed above. However, most cultural commentators would agree that most of the names

and books belong on that list.

Viewed from abroad, the claim of decline appears odd. There are more

Americans on Foreign Policy’s list of influential intellectuals than any other nationality.

Writing in the Financial Times, James Harkin concludes:25

Good ideas have always been contagious, but thanks to the internet and the increasingly globalised media, they are now making their way around the world almost as soon as they are invented. As this new market for ideas begins to settle, something else has become clear too - America is way out in front….

25 James Harkin, “Europe must fight back in the battle for good ideas,” Financial Times, February 29, 2008.

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America's dominance in the new global landscape of ideas is not only a matter of resources. Americans have also become expert packagers of ideas. American writers and thinkers seem to have acquired the knack of explaining complex ideas in accessible ways for popular audiences. The success of idea books such as The Tipping Point and Freakonomics and a rather depressing glut of books about happiness has signified to cultural commissars a thirst for good ideas clearly expressed.

Some critics argue that the problem of decline lies not with the public

intellectuals, but with the fragmentation of the public itself.26 Again, recent trends

suggest that this concern is overstated. In the past ten years, books about history, grand

strategy, and economics have become astonishingly popular in the United States. The

president of Harvard’s latest book – on death and the American Civil War – has rocketed

to the nonfiction best-seller list.27 This comes a few years after her predecessor triggered

a public firestorm over the relationship between gender and intelligence. The past two

years have seen two academics trigger a frenzy intellectual debate over the existence and

prevalence of an “Israel lobby.” Both the Boston Globe and Los Angeles Times have

expanded their Ideas section, and the New York Times Magazine now publishes an annual

edition devoted to new currents of thought. Think tanks like the New America

Foundation have developed fellow programs consciously designed to promote the

dissemination of new ideas through public discourse rather than more specialized

discourse.

There are some differences between the current generation of public intellectuals

and the generation extolled by so many. In the current era, a lot more public intellectuals

possess social science rather than humanities backgrounds. It is likely, therefore, that a

greater share (though hardly all) of the current generation are “professional secondhand

26 Andrew Gamble, “Public Intellectuals and the Public Domain,” New Formations 53 (Summer 2004): 41-53; Brantlinger, “Professors and Public Intellectuals in the Information Age.” 27 Peter Schworm, “Faust's Civil War history meets popular acclaim,” Boston Globe, February 18, 2008.

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dealers in ideas,” as Hayek phrased it.28 As the specialization of knowledge has

progressed, it becomes more difficult for the same person to flourish in their specialized

field and make that knowledge accessible to the public. This does create a market niche,

however, for “second order intellectuals” to emerge, bridging the gap between first order

intellectuals and the informed public.

Second, in contrast to the expectation of intellectuals to be affiliated with the left,

the most prominent public intellectuals of the past generation have come from the

conservative side of the political spectrum. In response to the dominance of postwar

liberalism, conservatives developed an array of journals and thinkers to provide cogent

oppositionist thinking, ranging from the Federalist Society to the American Enterprise

Institute to The Weekly Standard.29 While left intellectuals were largely powerless during

the Bush administration, neoconservatives were warmly welcomed into positions of

power and influence.30

Public Intellectuals and the blogosphere

In recent years, a new complain has arisen about the state of public intellectual

discourse – the blogs killed it. Alan Wolfe argues that, “the way we argue now has been

28 Friedrich A. von Hayek, “The Intellectuals and Socialism,” University of Chicago Law Review, 16 (Spring 1949): 417-433.29 Eric Alterman, Sound and Fury (New York: Harper & Collins, 1992); Steven Teles, The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).30 What has not changed is the dismal performance of intellectuals in proximity to political power. See David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (New York: Balantine, 1972), Lilla, The Reckless Mind; Barber, The Truth of Power; Philip Tetlock, Expert Political Judgment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Bruce Kuklick, Blind Oracles: Intellectuals and War from Kennan to Kissinger (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).

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shaped by cable news and Weblogs; it's all ‘gotcha’ commentary and attributions of bad

faith. No emotion can be too angry and no exaggeration too incredible.” David Frum

complains that, “the blogosphere takes on the scale and reality of an alternative world

whose controversies and feuds are… absorbing.” David Brooks laments, “now instead of

books, we have blogs.”31 Russell Jacoby is unimpressed with the ways that blogs could

aid public intellectuals:32

Blogs may be more like private journals with megaphones than reasoned contributions to public life. Michael Bérubé, who teaches American literature and cultural studies at Pennsylvania State University and is an accomplished blogger, admits as much. “One day I'll have an analysis of the hockey playoffs,” he wrote about his own blog, “the next day a story about the night my band opened for the Ramones, the next day an account of a trip with my younger son, Jamie.”

Of course personal sharing is not all he and others do in their postings, but what is the net result? The Internet provides instant communication and quick access to vast resources, but has it altered the quality or content of intellectual discussions? Too many voices may cancel each other out. Bérubé himself has given up regular blogging to write books instead. Ortega y Gasset's fear almost a century ago of the "revolt of the masses" needs an update. We face a revolt of the writers. Today everyone is a blogger, but where are the readers?…. On the Internet, articles, blog posts, and comments on blog posts pour forth, but who can keep up with them? And while everything is preserved (or "archived"), has anyone ever looked at last year's blogs? Rapidly produced, they are just as rapidly forgotten.

These are not terribly persuasive critiques – indeed, they manifest some of the

same flaws of the larger decline meme discussed in the previous section. The concern

about vitriolic blogs confuses form with content. All media forms generate distasteful,

disposable or demented material. Bad content, however, does not impeach the form

31 Alan Wolfe, “The New Pamphleteers,” New York Times Book Review, 11 July 2004; David Brooks, “The Smile of Reason”; David Frum, “Foggy Bloggom,” The National Interest 93 (January/February 2008), p. 51. 32 Russell Jacoby, “Big Brains, Small Impact,” Chronicle of Higher Education, January 11, 2008.

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through which the content is produced. This would be like arguing that Hustler discredits

Harper’s as an appropriate venue for publication, or that America’s Next Top Model ruins

Charlie Rose as a place for informed debate. Similarly, Jacoby’s concern about the mix

of erudition and trivia within blogs also seems off-base. If celebrity profiles do not

compromise Christopher Hitchens’ essays in Vanity Fair, there is no reason to believe

that snarky blog posts undercut more serious posts.

The claim that “too many voices cancel each other out” in the blogosphere is a

curious one. A cursory analysis of the distribution of traffic and links in the blogosphere

reveals two facts very quickly. First, the distribution is highly skewed. There are a few

highly ranked blogs with many readers, followed by a steep fall-off, and a “long tail” of

medium-to-low ranked bloggers with far fewer readers. Second, intellectuals do

surprisingly well within this skewed distribution – academics and magazine writers make

up a fair number of the elite group of bloggers.33 The website bloggingheads.tv – which

consists of online video debates between myriad bloggers, writers and scholars – attracts

approximately 600,000 views per month.34 Because the mainstream media responds to

cues from the blogosphere, a well-timed post or exchange can have a pronounced effect

on public discourse.35

There is also little evidence that blogs have substituted for books – in terms of

consumption or production. Prominent bloggers – Andrew Sullivan, Matthew Yglesias,

Virginia Postrel, Glenn Reynolds, Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, Ross Douthat, George

Packer – have managed to author well-received books. Academic intellectuals who

33 Daniel W. Drezner and Henry Farrell, “The Power and Politics of Weblogs.” Public Choice 134 (January 2008): 15-30. 34 E-mail correspondence with Bloggingheads.tv founder Robert Wright, May 2008. 35 Kevin Wallsten, “Agenda Setting and the Blogosphere,” Review of Policy Research 24 (November 2007): 567-687.

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started blogging in recent years – Richard Posner, Steven Leavitt, Dani Rodrik, Cass

Sunstein, James Fallows – have not slowed down in the slightest. Authors have also been

eager and willing to blog in order to jumpstart a conversation about their books. Several

blogs – including The Valve, Crooked Timber, Cato Unbound, and TPM Café – regularly

host book discussions in which authors, critics and readers to interact with each other.

If anything, a successful weblog expands publication opportunities. Book publishers,

magazine editors, and op-ed assistants all read weblogs. If a writer can combine

erudition with a deft writing style on a blog, it signals editorial gatekeepers that these

qualities can also be displayed in other publishing venues. Blogging is not a substitute to

other publications: done correctly, it is a powerful complement.

From the perspective of someone who has blogged for six years, this is not

surprising. A blog acts as an online notebook for nascent ideas and research notes,

allowing the writer to link, critique and respond to news stories, research monographs,

and other online publications.36 Jacoby is correct to observe that most of these posts will

not pan out into anything substantive or lasting. This is the case with most ideas,

however.37 Nevertheless, the format permits one to play with ideas in a way that is ill-

suited for other publishing venuues. A blog functions like an intellectual fishing net,

catching and preserving the embryonic ideas that merit further time and effort. I have

published essays in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Foreign Affairs, Perspectives on

Politics, and Slate that had their origins in blog posts.38

36 Daniel Drezner, “So You Want to Blog….” in APSA Guide To Publications (Washington: American Political Science Association, 2008). 37 As Jonathan Rauch points out, “We can all have three new ideas every day before breakfast: the trouble is, they will almost always be bad ideas. The hard part is figuring out who has a good idea.” Rauch, Kindly Inquisitors (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 64. 38 Indeed, embryonic versions of the ideas and critiques in this essay appeared in my blog over the past six months.

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I do not believe that my example is unique. Over time the academization of

intellectual output created barriers to the flourishing of public intellectuals. The

proliferation of blogs reverses that trend in several ways. Weblogs have facilitated the

rise of a new class of non-academic intellectuals. Writing a successful blog has provided

an easy launching pad for aspiring writers to obtain jobs from general interest magazines.

These periodicals are in turn interested in hiring additional writers as in an effort to

online content and web traffic. The premier general interest magazines and journals in

the country – including The Atlantic, The New Republic, Slate, Salon, New Criterion,

The American Prospect, Reason, Time, Newsweek, The Washington Monthly, Mother

Jones, The New Yorker, Commentary and The National Review – either sponsor

individual bloggers or have developed their own house blogs.

For academics aspiring to be public intellectuals, weblogs allow networks to

develop that cross the disciplinary and hierarchical strictures of the academy – and

expand beyond the academy. Rebecca Goetz observes, “Because I blog I now have

contacts, online and offline, with a variety of scholars inside and outside my field. They

don't particularly care that my dissertation is not yet done; the typical hierarchies of the

ivory tower break down in the blogosphere so that even graduate students can be public

intellectuals of a kind.” Brad DeLong characterizes scholar-blogging as creating an

“invisible college” that includes, “people whose views and opinions I can react to, and

who will react to my reasoned and well-thought-out opinions, and to my unreasoned and

off-the-cuff ones as well.”39 Provided one can write jargon-free prose, a blog can attract

readers from all walks of life – including, most importantly, people beyond the ivory

39 Rebecca Goetz, “Do Not Fear the Blog,” Chronicle of Higher Education, November 14, 2005; J. Bradford DeLong, “The Invisible College,” Chronicle of Higher Education, July 28, 2006.

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tower. Indeed, citizens will tend to view academic bloggers that they encounter online as

more accessible than would be the case in a face-to-face interaction. Similarly, survey

evidence also suggests that academics view blogs as a form of public service and political

activism.40 This increases the likelihood of fruitful interaction and exchange of views

about culture, criticism and politics with individuals that academics might not have

otherwise met.

Henry Farrell ties the growth of the blogosphere to the publishing revolutions that

sponsored previous waves of public intellectuals:41

[T]he blogosphere resembles not only the Republic of Letters (where a printer's devil could become an internationally renowned intellectual), but the "little magazines" in their golden age, when established scholars, up-and-comers, and amateurs rubbed shoulders on a more or less equal footing. This openness can be discomfiting to those who are attached to established rankings and rituals -- but it also means that blogospheric conversations, when they're good, have a vigor and a liveliness that most academic discussion lacks….

Blogging democratizes the function of public intellectual. It's no longer necessary for an academic to lobby the editors of The Washington Post's op-ed page or The New York Review of Books in order to make his or her voice heard. Instead, he or she can start a blog and (with interesting arguments and a bit of luck and self-promotion) begin to have an impact on the public conversation.

Naturally, there are limits to blogs as a tool to aid public intellectuals. It is not

clear how many academics will choose to embrace the technology. The academic politics

of blogging can also be problematic. The blogosphere represents a new pathway to

public acclaim. Any usurpation of scholarly authority is bound to upset those who

40 Laura McKenna, “‘Getting the Word Out’: Policy Bloggers Use Their Soap Box To Make Change.” Review of Policy Research 24 (May 2007): 209-229. 41 Henry Farrell, “The Blogosphere as a Carnival of Ideas,” Chronicle of Higher Education, October 7, 2005.

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benefit the most from the status quo.42 For example, a July 2005 pseudonymous essay in

the Chronicle of Higher Education by a senior humanities professor warned new entrants

on the academic job market that “Bloggers Need Not Apply,” 43 Three months later, this

professor responded to the volumes of online criticism with another Chronicle essay,

observing, “As my original column made clear (and many amid the outcry reiterated)

when it comes to blogging, ‘I just don't get it.’ That's right, I don’t. Many in the tenured

generation don’t, and they’ll be sitting on hiring committees for years to come.”44 Junior

academics inclined use a blog as a public intellectual have fretted about how it would

impact their chances for tenure. Michigan historian Juan Cole was allegedly rejected for

an interdisciplinary chair at Yale because of hostility to some of the content on his blog.45

High-profile academics risk attracting attention the moment they start blogging, stripping

them of the opportunity to make rookie mistakes.

Another emerging problem is that professionalization is not limited to the

academy. Increasingly, popular bloggers are also paid bloggers – they either generate

their own income through advertising or have been hired by prominent media outlets.

Megan McArdle – who blogs for The Atlantic – recently observed that, “the biggest

bloggers are either professionals, or they have an even more lucrative job…. most of the

obvious people of whom I would have said to any media organization ‘You should hire

this blogger’ seem to have been hired. I expect the rest to follow soon, since there are

fewer arbitrage opportunities.”46 Professionalization within the blogosphere will not lead

42 Robert Boynton, “Attack of the Career Killing Blogs,” Slate, November 16, 2005. Accessed at http://www.slate.com/id/2130466/, May 2008. Daniel W. Drezner, “The Trouble With Blogs.” Chronicle of Higher Education, July 28, 2006.43 Ivan Tribble, “Bloggers Need Not Apply,” Chronicle of Higher Education, July 8, 2005. 44 Tribble, “The Shoot Messengers, Don’t They?” Chronicle of Higher Education, September 2, 2005. 45 Liel Liebowitz, “Middle East Wars Flare Up at Yale,” The Jewish Week, June 2, 2006. 46 Megan McArdle, “Blogging Goes Professional,” April 25, 2008. Accessed at http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/04/blogging_goes_professional.php, May 2008.

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to the same pathologies that we see in the academy. At a minimum, however, the

emergence of an “old boy network” among prominent bloggers might retard public

debate. As bloggers are co-opted by politicians, policy entrepreneurs and each other, it

becomes more difficult to retain the distance necessary to engage in effective criticism.

Simply put, it is much harder to criticize the ones we know.

Despite these limitations, the proliferation of online forms of discourse and

publishing can help to nudge public intellectuals towards the “corporate intellectual”

model that Jeffrey Di Leo recently articulated.47 He warned that, “The nature of public

intellectualism in America is in crisis partly because a wedge has been driven between

the interests of academe and the interests of public-private sectors. One is either a mere

academic or one is a mere public figure.” While dangers remain, the growth of the

blogosphere offers the opportunity for talented academics to fulfill both roles.

47 Jeffrey Di Leo, “Public Intellectuals, Inc.” Inside Higher Ed, February 4, 2008. Accessed at http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2008/02/04/dileo, May 2008.

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