>Hey, how many people can cite John
>Stuart Mill, a sociological book about the juvenile deliquency scare
>in the fifties, a six-hundred-page biography on Pope John Paul II and
>"I, Claudius" among the last ten books they've read? On the other
>hand, what does that really mean?
That you've not been reading Patrick O'Brian novels lately, and that your brain is therefore atrophying.
>Does this make my intellect any sharper than the next person's?
All sorts of people are 'sharp' (including many a positivist neoliberal economist). 'Broad' is sorta what we're after, I think - in the sense that had the likes of Weber, Adorno, Mannheim and Habermas make reference to substantial reason - insight into how things inter-relate, a modest but determined effort to approximate the totality of the moment, a conscious questioning of ends rather than a blindly technocratic devotion to means, and a commitment to reasoning through communication with the measure of all truth: one's fellow subjects.
Reading, talking, listening, and occasionally paying attention to whats actually going on beyond the window, nay, perambulating beyond same, are all prerequites. Just about anyone can do 'em, and anyone who does 'em all is what I'd call an intellectual. It's what Heilbroner's 'worldly philosophers' (of which Stuart Mill was one, and Graves's Claudius another - dunno about the other bloke) were and all too many of today's razor-sharp econometricians, politicians, bureaucrats and professors are not allowed to be.
Anyway, if all that is too demanding, just wonder unobtrusively about the quarterdeck and listen to Maturin and Aubrey working out their world while they help make this one ...
Cheers, Rob.