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KADUSHIN

                                             August 4, 2010

   Charles Kadushin

   A man who did some actual research
   on our beloved "intellectual
   elite", back in 1970,
   with NSF funding and everything.

   He started with a list of smart
   people, and went around bugging
   them, getting a lot of them to do           This work was originally
   anonymous interviews (around 60 or          published in the early 70s.
   so turned him down). He asked them
   to name names, and got a list of            A second edition of a book
   their intellectual cohorts, and then        about it was put out in 2005:
   then traced those connections, and
   repeated the process.                          "The American
                                                  intellectual elite"
   This doesn't sound like the
   heaviest work in the world,                          DUTY_IS_SERVED
   but it wasn't bad going for
   1970.
                                             So, this is another
      It's not as silly                      document of 50s/60s
      as Richard Posner's                    intellectuals.  It
      tracing citations,                     covers the same
      but it share's                         territory as Jacoby,
      some flaws: both                       but stops earlier.
      of them needed to
      pick a list of names                               LAST_INTELLECTUALS
      to seed the process.      SHADE_CAST

          In Kadushin's case,
          though, the list            He had the usual bias, though:
          was allowed to grow
          as he worked it over.       "On the arbitrary and probably
                                      wrongheaded assumption that an
                                      intellectual is a generalist
                                      who writes literary or social
                                      criticism, Kadushin eliminated
                                      the hard scientists,
                                      theoretical physicists and
                                      mathematicians."  -- R.Z. Sheppard

                                                        HEIGH_YO
     Charles Kasushin also
     also published some
     papers about "social
     network theory" back           SOCIAL_NET
     then... that might have
     a few present day
     applications, eh?


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