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DEATH_SCENES
December 29, 2009
There seem to be periodic flare-ups of
interest in Russel Jacoby's "The Last
Intellectuals"... LAST_INTELLECTUALS
A collection of paraphrases and quotes:
Russel Jacoby:
The public intellectual
was replaced by mediocre, Scott McLemee says
insular, academics. that the "tenuring of
radicals gave them a
power base to subvert
society"
Jacoby:
The academy isolated
and neutralized the
radicals (presuming
they *are* radicals).
Scott McLemee (2007, Bookforum):
Argues that the 50s was an
odd time when it became
possible to be a professional
public intellectual, but that
the seeds of the problem
Jacoby noted were already
being complained about by
the likes of Irving Howe.
Irving Howe, "The Age of Conformity" (1954)
_Partisian Review_ (quotes by McLemee):
"The preposterous academic
requirement that professors write
books they don't want to write and
no one wants to read, makes for a
vast flood of books that have little
to do with literature, criticism, or
even scholarship."
TEXTS_IN_DECLINE
"Bohemia gradually disappears as a
setting for our intellectual life,
and what remains of it seems
willed or fake. Looking upon the
prosperous ruins of Greenwich Village,
one sometimes feels that a full-time
bohemian career has become as arduous, if
not as expensive, as acquiring a Ph.D."
"The institutional world needs
intellectuals because they
are intellectuals, but it does not
want them as intellectuals."
Siva Vaidhyanathan (2008):
ACADEMIC_LIGHTS
Academics *do* often function
as public intellectuals, on
the op-ed pages, and in the
books advertised in "The New
York Review of Books".
Richard Posner:
POSNER_DECLINES
Academic intellectuals
are insulated from market
forces, and hence are Are the editors
likely to do poor work as who publish them
public intellectuals. also insulated?
Don't trust experts If academic tenure is
beyond their expertise. such a problem, how about
judicial independence?
One of Posner's Jacoby (2002):
examples of poor Would the supreme
work is one of Posner's argument argues court do a better
my examples of against accepting it job if they had to
the good: "The from Posner. worry about votes
Mis-measure of of no confidence?
Man" by Stephen Posner himself admits
Gould. the problem:
Which unqualified "the arrows I shoot may
commentator are curve in flight and hit
you going to the archer"
believe, him or me?
IS_POT_BLACKNESS_HEREDITARY
Menand (as quoted by "eb", 2005 in
blog commentary that's disappeared):
"But suppose that history in its
cunning reversed the processes
by which, as Jacoby describes
it, younger intellectuals on the
left have been silenced, or
entangled by the academic
octopus. What would those Jacoby does not concede
intellectuals contribute to the that he is only interested
public debate? Jacoby does not in the ideas of the left,
consider the question one would so he can not frame the
have thought came before all question this way.
other questions: whether the
ideas of the left have faded Has the public
from the intellectual scene not intellectual
because of some failure in the baton been passed
environment, but because of some to the right?
failure in the ideas."
Bruce Robbins ("Intellectuals in Decline?" SocialText):
He lists several works contemporary
with Jacoby's that also discussed
a death of intellectualism.
[ref]
"I deduce two things from all this
declining and falling. First,
that since it is produced by
intellectuals, intellectuals are
manifestly taking a certain
pleasure in announcing their own
imminent or recent demise ... "
"... this funeral rhetoric is not
a matter of specific historical The phrase
reality at all, but of a common "specific
myth that is performing some historical Why "specific"?
service to intellectuals in reality" has For that matter,
general. Myth is not I think too a ghost of why "historical"?
strong a word for the familiarity Marxist Why not just
of the decline story. It is a rhetoric "a matter of
story of the Fall ..." about it, reality"?
I think...
Oh wait,
Futher: IN_SUM SocialText.
Sorry.
Bobbins proposes listing
independant intellecutals,
whether or not they are (This variation
academic. seems to appeal
to academics.)
He lists:
Barbara Ehrenreich John Dewey
Edward Said John Kenneth Galbraith
Angela Davis Irving Howe
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