http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/22/opinion/22PERL.html New York Times/Op-Ed January 22, 2002
Thinkers in Need of Publishers By RICK PERLSTEIN
Every semester brings a new symposium, every season a new book, every Sunday a new furrowed-brow disquisition. The topic is "public intellectuals" — writers and thinkers who address a general audience on matters of broad public concern — and the theme is decline. Russell Jacoby, who coined the phrase, delivered the consensus judgment in the title of his 1987 book, "The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe": There are none to speak of. And as Mr. Jacoby noted in the splashy 2000 edition, "Happenings since its publication do not cause me to revise its main points."
The old lament is now back under the elegiac title "Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline," a book by the federal judge Richard A. Posner, a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago's law school. Why, the question runs, are there no more public intellectuals?
Ever the gentlemen, both of these authors claim to indict impersonal forces: for Russell Jacoby, the disappearance of cheap bohemian neighborhoods; for Richard Posner, a technical failure in the intellectual- services marketplace.
But in the final analysis both end up tacitly playing the same blame game. Once giants roamed the earth: George Orwell and Dwight Macdonald, C. Wright Mills and Lewis Mumford, Hannah Arendt and Lionel Trilling, smart people writing for ordinary people, openly and unashamedly, on issues people care about.
And now? Nothing save the gusts of postmodern academics and the ill- informed bleats of publicity-hound law professors. The previous generations of non-university intellectuals, the Jacoby-Posner story line goes, were made of sterner moral stuff.
"A literate, indeed hungry public still exists," Mr. Jacoby writes in the 2000 edition of "The Last Intellectuals." "What is lacking is the will and ability to address it."
I would like to interrupt this bit of rote programming. Where are all the public intellectuals? A well- stroked three-wood aimed out my Brooklyn window could easily hit half a dozen.
In one direction: an author of two literary, daring and original travelogues about life on the cusp between wilderness and civilization, who is also a gifted miniaturist of the city à la Joseph Mitchell.
In another direction: an erudite and fearless muckraker whose freelance exposés of international rogues and investigation of the corporate takeover of American universities are but two achievements of a young career spent writing on just about everything under the sun.
In still another direction: the editor of a searing (self-published) magazine of media criticism, at work on a critical study on the history of advertising. And a freelancer who has just come out with a rattling new study on the depredations of the American prison system. And there are more than a few impressive young literary critics and cultural reporters in my neighborhood, too, one of whom also happens to be a smashingly effective film critic.
These are just a few people I know. My Brooklyn neighborhood happens to be unusually well stocked with but-for-the-name public intellectuals.
But they are plentiful in other cities: young men and women without university affiliations, who rendezvous in barroom salons, are under 40, practice exacting self-discipline and don't sell out. All can hold their own with professors in one or more areas of expertise.
If you read widely you have read them, even the ones who have yet to find much public success: in the dwindling numbers of newspaper book reviews, in the corners of the Sunday paper labeled "Insight" or "Outlook"; in one of the few quarterly magazines that still pay something or one of the few magazines that publish writing on serious issues.
But are they equal to any from those golden generations — the Orwells, Mumfords, Paul Goodmans? Are they great, or potentially great? To attempt an answer would be foolish. For what is on display in most debates about public intellectuals is nostalgia, and nostalgia is systematically cruel to the present. We only remember those who pass the test of time: the stars.
Then, in our minds we remake the past in these lions' images. Here in the unruly present, however, we are thrown back on nothing more than our critical discernment to make judgments.
It's also hard to judge because it isn't fashionable to look for young intellectual talent any more. People once believed there were notable independent intellectuals because they were instructed to seek out and prize them. "The most brilliant young critic of our day," trumpeted the cover of Norman Podhoretz's first book, an anthology of essays that was published when he was 33. There is no such trumpeting today, partly because there are no such anthologies being published today. I can think of several brilliant young critics who deserve them.
The story I'm telling is really one of extraordinary resilience and willpower. Just try, as many young writers do, to support yourself writing book reviews. You can still string together enough income for a rice- and-beans year from what you can turn out in cultural essays for newspapers and semi-prominent magazines: maybe 30 pieces, probably averaging about $400 each. You can even end up, after a few or more faithful years, with a middle-class sinecure at some publication, perhaps with the perquisite of a year's leave to write a book someday, maybe even to become some future generation's intellectual giant from the good old days.
But the farm teams are folding. In the 90's, future household names were writing regularly for magazines like Lingua Franca and Feedmag.com. Both ceased publication last year, as did several book-review sections. Other regular outlets have cut back precipitously — paying less, shutting out new voices. Academia, once a potential solace, is out: at the professional conferences these days new Ph.D.'s walk around with a kicked-in-the-teeth look. The non-Ph.D.'s, of course, are not even in the game.
And still they write. That's the thing. The fact is that there are no "last intellectuals." The will and ability to write smartly and well for a general audience seems to be indomitable.
The intellectuals are there; the public need not feel starved; we need no more jeremiads. What today's public intellectuals need are publishers, and maybe a few publicists, too. -- Rick Perlstein is author of "Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus."