The last intellectuals.

The Last Intellectuals

by Russell Jacoby (Basic 290 pp., $18.95)

RUSSELL JACOBY is an engaging complainer: it's not absolutely clear what he's complaining about, but line by line he's lucid, energetic, and witty. The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe tries to come to grips with "a vacancy in culture, the absence of younger voices, perhaps the absence of a generation.'

"An intellectual generation has not suddenly vanished,' he goes on; "it simply never appeared. And it is already too late--the generation is too old--to show up.' As recently as 1970 a widely publicized study came up with a list of leading intellectuals. Of the top 11, only one, Susan Sontag, was youngish (the others: Bell, Chomsky, Galbraith, Howe, Macdonald, McCarthy, Mailer, Silvers, Trilling, Wilson). The study's longer list of seventy was also short on names from the next generation, and the full roster still hasn't been displaced by new names of comparable stature.

What's happened? Jacoby thinks "the issue is the vitality of a public culture.' The intellectuals have been "professionalized'--have moved to academe or think tanks, and speak only to their peers rather than to a wide readership. "Younger intellectuals no longer need or want a larger public; they are almost exclusively professors.'

I myself hadn't noticed a shortage of intellectuals, but I think I see his point. Today's intellectuals are by and large much less interesting than those of yesteryear. But it's not as though there were giants in the earth in 1950: that generation was in turn less interesting than the previous crop. How do Edmund Wilson, Dwight Macdonald, and John Kenneth Galbraith stack up against Mencken, Russell, Santayana, and Wells?

Free-thinking has been in decline for a long time, partly because it has been so successful. The word "intellectuals' itself has the whiff of a certain type, belonging to a certain moment: the progressive-minded, anti-Christian iconoclast, eager to replace Christian civilization with something newer and better ("I have been over into the future, and it works'). I doubt that Santayana, by the way, would want to be known as an "intellectual' for just that reason: even in his apostasy, he had a deep affection for Catholicism.

The progressives have won, and their daring ideas have become the only safe ones. Country-club prejudices have been displaced by faculty-club prejudices, which have trickled down to Dan Rather and Norman Lear. Bertrand Russell was once disinvited by New York University because he advocated free love; now we have the National Gay Task Force. Even by 1970, movies were being made on the sound assumption that whole theatersful of people, coast to coast, could be emotionally manipulated by appealing to the Properly Progressive Attitudes (remember Easy Rider?).

The market is glutted with Marxism, so the Marxists, naturally, have moved into the universities, where the taxed surplus of capitalism can subsidize them and shield them from brutal market competition. No mystery there. The transitional liberal moment, when progressive ideas were new, dramatic, exciting, fraught with unpredictable implication--that's all over now. We have free love, ubiquitous porn, abortion on demand, a transfer economy, a Communist regime at the southern tip of the continent: in short, progress everywhere. The new ideas have served their purpose. Just what further new ideas would Jacoby have his missing generation proffer us? I really can't imagine, and I doubt there is anything to imagine. All Jacoby seems to have in mind is more of same, but that wouldn't be very exciting. It's been getting steadily less exciting for decades.

Jacoby also seems only half aware of another group of thinkers who gave the last generation some of its interest: the conservatives. He briefly mentions Burnham, Buckley, and Kirk, but not von Mises, Hazlitt, Kendall, Weaver, and others of solid achievement and wide influence. It's nice that he gives Kirk in particular a little--but only a little--of the respect he deserves; the point is that for Jacoby, nobody outside the progressive "mainstream' really counts as an intellectual. A pity, because he is fair-minded and takes pokes at the provincialism and self-absorption of New York intellectuals (though only because they don't seem to appreciate that there have been good radicals elsewhere).

Reflecting some of that provincialism himself, he treats neoconservatives as little more than intellectuals who have completely sold out to rich foundations. They no longer count as intellectuals either. If they did, Jacoby might have to concede that there are still quite a few intellectuals around who do speak to a large public. Of some neoconservatives who complain that leftist intellectuals have injected politics into culture, he says: "For them politics can only mean left-wing politics. Their own politics is not politics.'

Half a point there. But the men he refers to are only using "politics' as he uses "intellectuals,' that is, with the tacit qualification "progressive.' The truth of the situation, I think, is that the Left has won undreamed-of cultural power in America. If it has anything more to say to the public, maybe it just doesn't dare to say it in plain English. Laying low in academe may be a sound strategy for the time being.