The last intellectuals revisited

Monday 18 February 2008 4:20AM (view full episode)

Twenty years ago American academic Russell Jacoby wrote The last intellectuals: American culture in the age of academe. In that work he argued that his own generation had failed to produce public intellectuals of the stature of older thinkers and writers such as Gore Vidal, John Kenneth Galbraith, Edmund Wilson and Mary McCarthy. Has his controversial thesis stood the test of time?


Michael Duffy: Let's start the show by having a look at the universities and the state of intellectual life in the west. Twenty years ago American academic Russell Jacoby wrote a book called The Last Intellectuals: An American Culture in the Age of Academe and it caused quite a stir at the time. He said his own generation had failed to produce public intellectuals of the stature of older thinkers and writers such as Gore Vidal, Edmund Wilson and Mary McCarthy.

Paul Comrie-Thomson: It's interesting, isn't it Michael, to hear those names-Vidal, Galbraith, McCarthy-those names dominated serious public debate and indeed paperback bestseller lists for decades.

Michael Duffy: But where are they now? Last week I talked to Jacoby, who is now a history professor at the University of California in Los Angeles, to ask him how he thought his claims had stood the test of time. I started by welcoming him to Counterpoint.

Russell Jacoby: It's a pleasure to be here.

Michael Duffy: The title of your book implied that intellectuals are not academics, or they're often different from them. What did you mean by the word 'intellectual'?

Russell Jacoby: There's probably no short answer to that. It's people who do not simply value matters of the mind, which would include a large group, but it's people who participate in scholarly and public life, once upon a time mainly by the written word but not only, and through that way they reach people and affect public life.

Michael Duffy: And you were particularly interested in the way they reached people, weren't you. It's not just the thinking but it's the communicating.

Russell Jacoby: Absolutely, and that's why I sort of brought to the fore the term 'public intellectuals', referring to the fact that this was a crucial aspect of intellectual life, being able to have command of the vernacular and be able to reach people as opposed to...or just writing in Latin for other learned savants, be able to command the popular language. That I see as a crucial part of the intellectual project.

Michael Duffy: And you were saying there was a decline in this. Who were some of the last intellectuals you were thinking of?

Russell Jacoby: I was using an American reference point and doing a generational study and looking at people born in 1900, people like Edmund Wilson or Lewis Mumford, and then moving on to people like Kenneth Galbraith or Irving Howe or Jane Jacobs, intellectuals who wrote important books in a language which was accessible. I see that tradition as weakening, and that is the problem.

Michael Duffy: They had dominated the public intellectual landscape for a long time, even in 1987, hadn't they.

Russell Jacoby: That was exactly the starting point of my book. Looking at 1987, '88, and looking was the same generation of intellectuals who had sort of commanded the posts from the end of WWII into the 80s, and in some cases beyond. Again, it was Daniel Bell, Irving Howe, Gore Vidal, and that the new generation were not as visible and didn't seem to be reaching people in the same way as earlier people.

Michael Duffy: Why do you think that was?

Russell Jacoby: Part of the story is paradoxically professionalisation or academisation because many of the earlier intellectuals were either completely outside the university, people like Edmund Wilson or Lewis Mumford, or they entered the university late in their lives, people like Irving Howe and Daniel Bell. But the next generation (and that is in some sense my generation) essentially were students and went to graduate school and then went into becoming professors and never had a life outside the university. As a result, paradoxically because it's in some ways a 60s generation, they were theoretically perhaps more radical then the previous generation but didn't reach people in the same way, didn't have the same kind of prose, didn't write the essays and books which people could read.

Michael Duffy: I wonder why that was? You would think, without knowing a lot of the detail, that being paid to think and write and having the time to do both would actually help you become a public intellectual.

Russell Jacoby: Well, absolutely, and this shows you something about the power of the institutions or the power of the profession. I mention in my book, and I think it's still true, that virtually any field you're in, when you're evaluating people for hiring or for promotion, one of the most damning things you can say about someone is that their work is journalistic, and that becomes a shorthand for saying it's not deep, but it also means it's readable. And if it's readable it's considered superficial, and if it's unreadable it's considered profound. No one spells this out but it's the assumption. I think that yes, paradoxically we have many more left and left-leaning intellectuals than certainly 25, 30, 50 years ago in the university but they don't make the same kind of presence because they have willy-nilly succumbed to some of these academic imperatives of writing scholarly books for small audiences as opposed to writing books for the educated public.

Michael Duffy: Why do you think it is that the sort of people who once would have become public intellectuals haven't realised what you've been talking about and stayed out of the academy? Or to put it another way (and it's a bit hypothetical, I know), had Edmund Wilson been a young man in 1987, do you think he would have stayed out, or is there something attractive about the academy that would have sucked him in?

Russell Jacoby: There was something attractive, and again, I say in my book, Daniel Bell was a classic case, he was a journalist writing for Fortune, and at a certain point he turned to Luce who ran the whole show and said he was leaving for the university. He was asked why, and he said he had four good reasons; June, July, August and September. In other words, he had four months off as a professor. The point is, in short, that the freelance life became increasingly difficult and the universities were expanding at the same time and offered salaries and secure positions. So I think it would be hard to say of course what Edmund Wilson would do, but it's clear that people were tempted to join these institutions, and they joined them at their peril, the golden chains or something. But it has become increasingly difficult to become a freelancer, which people like Edmund Wilson were their whole lives.

Michael Duffy: Why is it difficult? Are there fewer outlets? Is there less money sloshing around for that sort of writing?

Russell Jacoby: I think all of the above. Again, I haven't done the exact economic analysis but I think I mention somewhere that if you look at the rates that small magazines or not so small magazines pay for book reviews, something which Edmund Wilson did in the 1920s...for a book review for the New Republic in the 1920s you could rent an apartment for three months, and now you could get a couple of dinners. Those kinds of rates haven't increased at the same time as inflation and the cost of living. So I think the brutal facts of being a freelancer, particularly of a kind of intellectual journalism, has become increasingly difficult. So people join institutions which can give you a salary and medical care as opposed to trying to fight the system, and that is understandable because in some sense I've done that myself, but I'm aware of the costs and I think the costs are high.

Michael Duffy: Do you think as a result of this that the quality of public intellectual debate has lowered, where it still exists? Taking the New York Review of Books, for example, would you see it as the contents has been diminished since it started?

Russell Jacoby: No, I don't think the New York Review of Books has been diminished. It's one of the things I discuss in The Last Intellectuals, already 20 years ago, and one of the things I was concerned about is that the New York Review of Books, unlike some other journals from the past, really didn't nurture a new generation of writers and intellectuals. It depended upon a pretty small group, often English I might say, Oxford and Cambridge people. It had a fairly snobbish crew that it confined itself to, and even though I don't believe...I wouldn't argue that it has declined but it hasn't in any way been identified with the new generation of intellectuals. I think that is a crucial issue; where are the successors to the C Wright Mills, where's the next Noam Chomsky, or where is the next Gore Vidal or Kenneth Galbraith? Maybe it's unfair to put it that way, but I don't see them emerging and I don't see them identified with any journal. I mean, maybe they're blogging away at this point.

Michael Duffy: You wrote recently that the problem with blogging (and I totally agree with you) is that there are just so many voices there they tend to cancel each other out, don't they.

Russell Jacoby: Exactly, it's democracy gone insane. Sure, anyone can blog but it's lost. The small magazines or the newspaper did have an editing function so that you could be at least a little bit assured that someone had vetted something. So yes, what does it mean that anyone can sit at their computer and express their opinion day in and day out? Who can keep up? It's a victory for a kind of democracy of opinion but I'm not sure it is an advance in intellectual discussion.

Michael Duffy: What about the public for public intellectuals, the people that they used to speak and write for? Does that public still exist to the extent it did?

Russell Jacoby: I think that's always one of the big questions and that's one of the criticisms of my book, that I'm pining for a world that does no longer exist. In some sense I think there's some truth to that. We've seen a fractionalisation of the audience in many respects. Everyone has become specialised, not only in the university but in sports or in electronics. There are specialised magazines for every small group and the general magazines are increasingly fewer. So in that respect I think there is some truth to it, and yet (and again my references here are not at the moment) but you can look at books in recent years by Cornel West dealing with black issues which had enormous success, and he was a professor who was writing for a public. And it seems to me there are still books which are written which demonstrate that that audience is still there. But what isn't there as much is the writers who address it. But I don't deny that there's been a fractionalisation. What I do deny is that this is such an advance and that we now have a new kind of Foucaultian guerrilla intellectuals in academic disciplines, which is one of the arguments. I don't see that as particularly productive. I don't see the upshot of those kinds of micro-intellectuals.

Michael Duffy: And your book appeared 20 years ago and from what you've been saying you would still support the thesis, and it seems to me that time has borne you out rather than the other way round.

Russell Jacoby: I would say so. On the other hand maybe it's still too soon. But I see some counter-movements. I mention in the new preface that there are the new science writers who have emerged, there are certainly some new women voices, but not fundamentally do I revise my opinion. The question of the internet and blogs which is a new way...again, I don't see that as fundamentally shifting the intellectual scene.

Michael Duffy: Does it matter that we no longer have many public intellectuals, or indeed no public intellectuals?

Russell Jacoby: I think it matters. If we have a single society, no matter how diverse, which supposedly has some sort of identity and is supposed to act in the future and has a history, we depend on intellectuals to tell us the stories, to tell us the issues, to present us with the problems of the age. And if they're no longer there then, yes, I think society suffers. It needs intellectuals and this is an absence which I think can become expensive after a while.

Michael Duffy: Do you see any change in the intellectual weight of the novel over the period you've been talking about? I'm suggesting the novel also has become less intellectual, less important or serious, possibly for some of the reasons you've talked about, for example, that the sort of people who used to write novels are now attracted to schools of creative writing or teaching as English professors.

Russell Jacoby: The argument has been made, and I haven't made it but certainly people have made it in terms of poetry, and there's several articles which in fact draw on my book and say we've seen this in poetry, that you now can get a masters in poetry and you can teach poetry and poetry has become increasingly academic and elusive for the general public. It tends to be ingrown. So I see it in poetry. I'm less confident in what I would say about the trajectory of the novel in the last 20 years.

Michael Duffy: Professor Jacoby, thanks very much for your time today, and thanks for writing that book.

Russell Jacoby: It's been a pleasure, thank you.

Michael Duffy: Russell Jacoby is a professor of history at UCLA and we've been talking about his book The Last Intellectuals which was published in 1987. His latest book is called Picture Imperfect: Utopian Thought for an Anti-Utopian Age.


Russell Jacoby
Professor of History


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Russell Jacoby
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