The pragmatic and polymathic Posner.

Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline, by Richard A. Posner, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001. 408 pp.

FEW WILL DENY that Judge Richard A. Posner is a person of immense influence: as a judge in the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals; as an author of over thirty books and hundreds of articles on a variety of subjects; as a public intellectual much in demand as a public speaker; as a legal scholar more frequently cited in scholarly publications than even the legendary Oliver Wendell Holmes. Quite obviously when Judge Posner speaks, or writes, people will pay attention. They do so not only to see what they can learn from him but also to see where and how they can find him vulnerable. He is that kind of public intellectual--combative and inviting challenges to his pronouncements.

With this particular book, he need not fear that he has grown more mellow. Using public intellectuals as his generic opponent, he takes on leftists, rightists, centrists, and public intellectuals not easily categorized by any label. Thus, public intellectuals like Noam Chomsky, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Robert Bork, Stephen Jay Gould, Martha Nussbaum, Edward Luttwak, Christopher Lasch, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Camille Paglia, Alan Dershowitz are included here. Neither radical leftists nor fervent conservatives escape his wrath.

What exactly is a "public intellectual"? Posner spends over twenty pages discussing the varied shadings of the origins and the meanings of both "public" and "intellectual." The heart of his reflections on the meaning of the term, and perhaps the heart of the book itself, is found in the following passage:

  To summarize, a public intellectual expresses himself in a way that is
  accessible to the public, and the focus of his expression is on
  matters of general public concern of (or inflected by) a political
  orideological cast. Public intellectuals may or may not be affiliated
  with universities. They may be full-time or part-time academics; they
  may be journalists or publishers; they may be writers or artists; they
  may be politicians or officials; they may work for think tanks; they
  may hold down "ordinary" jobs. Most often they either comment on
  current controversies or offer general reflections on the direction or
  health of society. (1)

At first glance, the subtitle of the book, A Study of Decline, may be misleading. Originally, I thought that the subtitle meant that public intellectuals had lost their influence. This conclusion was prompted by such statements as "We'll see in Chapter 4 that there is little evidence that public intellectuals are highly influential," but as I continued reading the book, I realized that the subtitle also meant that the real, important purpose of the book was to show that the public intellectual (non-academic and academic, but especially the latter) (2) has declined in quality in the decades since World War II. Posner complains throughout the book about the public intellectual's arrogance, intolerance, self-righteousness, unrealistic utopianism, and ignorance of facts. Fortunately, he has a self-deprecatory sense of humor. He admits that "I am aware that the arrows I shoot may curve in flight and hit the archer."

The book has two parts. Part One ("General Theoretical and Empirical Analysis") differentiates public intellectuals from "knowledge workers." He discusses the various kinds of public intellectuals--commentators on current events; social and cultural critics and policy makers; the conditions which have caused the decline in the quality of the public intellectual, the failure of public intellectuals' diagnoses and prognoses of important economic, political, and social issues. The showpiece of Part One is Chapter 5 ("More Public, Less Intellectual"), in which he lists ten statistical tables showing "the market value" of both academic and non-academic public intellectuals by citing the number of times they are mentioned in the public media, "Web hits," and citations in scholarly publications from 1995 to 2000. The tables also differentiate between living and dead public individuals, between the various fields of scholarship, and so on ad nauseam.

Part Two "substantiates claims in Part One, goes beyond definition to an explanation of the varied genres of public-intellectual expression, and deals in depth with some of the most interesting ... public intellectuals active in the United States today.... Part One has provided the tools for explaining the fundamental deficiencies in public intellectual work that Part Two explores."

There is much in Judge Posner's book which seems quite right to me. Clearly, his complaints about the public intellectuals (both academic and non-academic) are quite justified. Tenure at their university tends to give some of them not only security but also a kind of arrogant invulnerability which encourages recklessness and irresponsibility and facilitates their jaunts into public appearances rather than intensifying their scholarly pursuits. Posner rightly claims that those public intellectuals who make wild prophecies should be held accountable for their failures as prophets. Occasionally, some of them unthinkingly petition for or against a cause or an individual (as in the lawyers' collective protest against the nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court); one wonders whether their public appearances as public intellectuals are motivated by ideology, by altruistic intentions--or by a desire to better their gross annual income and their "celebrity" status.

The cures that Posner enumerates in his concluding chapter are essentially sound. Among these cures are the following:

1. "Since the problem with the public-intellectual market is lack of accountability (nobody watching, nobody keeping score), one solution might be for universities to require their faculty members to post annually, on the university's Web page, all the nonacademic writing, in whatever form or medium published, and public speaking that they have done during the preceding year, other than books, articles, and other readily accessible work, which would only have to be cited."

2. A potential reviewer of a book should not be one who is criticized in the book to be reviewed--or if he or she is criticized, then that reviewer should make that disclosure in the review.

3. The academic public intellectual should disclose his or her income from any work in the public area. That would include book reviews, articles, lectures, and consulting fees.

4. "The dominant public intellectuals of the present day are the academic [sic] public intellectuals, and they have received much less scholarly attention. One might hope that as a matter of self-respect the university community could be persuaded to create and support a journal that would monitor the public intellectual activities of academics and be widely distributed both within and outside the community."

5. There should be a Journal of Retractions, in which public intellectuals would evaluate previous predictions and analyses and indicate which ones turned out to be true and which ones were false.

Posner is pessimistic about the adoption of any of these suggested cures. "Public intellectuals will resist them; the irresponsibility of public intellectual work is one of the rewards of being a public intellectual," but, at least, Posner claims. "they may have a heuristic value."

To anyone even tangentially familiar with public intellectuals (both academic and non-academic), Posner's diagnosis and prognosis seem "right on the money"--to use a phrase which, I believe, he would endorse with enthusiasm. Likewise, Posner has a clear style which he believes a public intellectual should have in order to be successful. He first outlines what he plans to do, does it in plain prose, and summarizes what he has tried to do. Here, for example, is how he begins his Chapter 3: "This chapter begins empirical inquiry into the value, or quality, of public intellectuals. The next discusses the interrelated questions of influence and predictive accuracy. The chapter after that brings statistical analysis to bear on the issue of value, though it is not limited to that issue but is also concerned with simply providing a more exact description of the public-intellectual market."

Being both a judge and a university lecturer of law, he might be expected to suffer from jargon and pedantry. Happily, Posner suffers from neither of these afflictions. He can write an unlawyer-like sentence such as "Here is a stab at explanation"; he can pepper his subject with gems like this one: "Much fun is made by conservatives, and rightly too, of 'limousine liberals,' left-leaning intellectuals whose motto is 'think Left, live Right.'"

Even when Posner seems to be less than judicious in his observations, some-how the nastiness he has applied to an individual seems well-deserved. When, for example, he writes that "He [Edward Luttwak] writes well and with authority (that is, with an air of great confidence....)," I was tempted to cry out, "Touche!"--considering Luttwak's massive failure as a prophet of doom.

Posner has a passion for taxonomy, footnotes, and statistics. He classifies "public intellectual genres" into eleven categories. He has over seven-hundred footnotes. In Chapter 5, Posner has ten tables of statistics listing public intellectuals and the number of times they appear in the media, on the Web, and in scholarly journals--and so it goes.

The Index is generally done well, but some names appearing in the text are absent from the Index (e.g., William Blake and Sir Karl Popper). And why did Posner omit from discussion such trenchant public intellectuals as Walter Lippmann, Leslie Fiedler, Jose Ortegay Gasset, Julien Benda, Raymond Weaver, and others of public importance? And surely, Russell Kirk deserves more than less than a page of comment and a citation in a footnote. I realize, of course, that when one has a long list of names to consider, omission of some may be a necessity. I feel, however, that in some instances, Posner was not judicious in his choices of inclusions and omissions.

For example, was it wise of Posner to include Chapter 7 ("Political Satire")? Here, he perceptively compares Aldous Huxley's Brave New World with George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, but, at best, such a comparison has but tangential relevance to his main concern: the decline of public intellectuals. More likely, having published an article as a separate article previously, he wanted to include it in this book to get more mileage out of it. The major defect in the book, however. I find to be Posner's basis for his judgments. Although he claims that he became a conservative after the age of thirty, few conservatives will be happy with many of his conclusions, especially his dismissal of morality as a determining influence in life. Pragmatism fuels his judgments. He admits that "... the work of public intellectuals is only one of the nonlegal influences on judges, others being temperament, life experiences, moral principles, party politics, religious belief or nonbelief, and academic ideas" (italics added). Since, however, he is a moral relativist and not seemingly much guided by religious beliefs, party loyalties, or academic ideas, the overriding influence in Posner's case is the criterion of pragmatism: "To do pragmatic analysis of large social, political, and economic issues in a complex society requires combining social scientific knowledge and technique with an empirical understanding of the real-world context of proposed reforms."

Since one of the major complaints that Posner makes against academic public intellectuals is that they are not familiar with the "real world" and with how it is changing constantly, how can he explain the following startlingly naive statement: that he makes when comparing the pluses and minuses of granting women more education: "Its [i.e., additional education] positive impact would have to be balanced against the cost. In a society in which few occupations are open to women except the bearing and rearing of children, female education is apt to be less productive than male education"? Where has Judge Posner been the last few decades? Does he not know that women are now occupying not only the traditional fields of education and nursing, but are now increasingly becoming doctors, dentists, lawyers, professional athletes, politicians--and, yes, even judges (including Supreme Court judges)? What has happened here to Posner's pragmatic sense of the "real world"? And for a public intellectual who, theoretically at least, should not be given to making hyperbolic predictions, he seems to have thrown logical restraints to the winds when issuing the following warning: "Unless the United States wants to go the way of Iran and Saudi Arabia, we shall not be able to return to the era of premarital chastity, low divorce, stay-at-home moms, pornography-free media, and the closeting of homosexuals and adulterers."

More importantly, pragmatism seems to me a poor choice as the major governing principle. Furthermore, cost-effective analysis, logic, and reason are short-term investments when compared to more enduring, transcendent values such as one's conscience.

Piqued by the absence of the criterion of a stable morality in his arsenal of criteria in judging, I looked to see whether this absence was found also in his other works. I came across an article by Charles Lindeman ("Can Moral Philosophy Teach Us Anything?") in which this professor of philosophy examines a book published by Posner in 1999--(The Problematics of Moral and Legal Theory). I found enough there to convince me that Posner is indeed a "hard-core" pragmatist. Consider, for example, the following quotation from Posner's book:

  A moralist cannot persuade you by the methods of reason to one
  morality or another, but he can offer [sic] you a morality that you
  can accept or reject for reasons of pride, comfort, convenience, or
  advantage, though not because it is right or wrong.... At its best,
  moral philosophy, like literature, enriches; it neither proves nor
  edifies. (3)

Since Posner majored in English as an undergraduate at Yale, one would hope to expect that he would be influenced by more than pragmatism, logic, reason, and cost-benefit analysis as guiding principles. What ever else his literary studies brought to him, they did not imbue him with a sense of the transforming moral power of literature. He writes, for example (as he did in Professor Lindeman's article previously quoted): "James's novels, like great literature generally, stimulate in their small readership empathy in its sense of capacity and inclination to enter imaginatively into other ways of life, good or bad, but leave it to the reader to decide whom to sympathize with...." Clearly, Posner is a moral relativist! (4)

With this kind of orientation, it is no wonder that Posner decided to pursue law rather than English literature in graduate school. It proved to be a wise, cost-benefit decision!

1. Although Thomas Molnar is never mentioned in Posner's book, Posner's title of his book and his definition of "public intellectual" are quite similar to the title of and definition of the term in Professor Molnar's book. The Decline of the Intellectual (Cleveland, 1961). 2. Interestingly enough, one would think that a pragmatic polymath like Posner would major in something practical at college, something like accounting, economics, science, yet his major at Yale was English. He judges literature not on its potential moral value but on more practical grounds. Note, for example, the following: "Nothing in the nature of literature or any of its genres, including the realistic novel, tends to produce models of modern moral behavior. The classic works of literature were produced in a variety of moral climates by people who for the most part were not moralists or political theorists, or, if they were, had values alien to ours." 3. Charles Lindeman, "Can Moral Philosophy Teach Us Anything?" Academic Questions (Winter 2000-2001), 54. 4. Posner claims that Nietzsche is perhaps the philosopher who has had the greatest influence on his life. See Larissa MacFarquhar, "The Bench Warmer," The New Yorker, December 10, 2001, 84. Strange choice indeed for a pragmatist and moral relativist like Posner!

MILTON BIRNBAUM is a retired Dean of Arts and Sciences and Professor of English at American International College. In addition, he is a widely-published critic.