Editor's Introduction Public Intellectuals: Jane Jacobs and Henry George

• Date: 01 May 2015
• Published date: 01 May 2015
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ajes.12106

The AMERICAN JOURNAL of

ECONOMICS and SOCIOLOGY

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synthesis in the social sciences, under grants from the FRANCIS

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Volume 74 May 2015 Number 3

Editor’s Introduction

Public Intellectuals:

Jane Jacobs and Henry George

Among the unusual characteristics that unite the two figures who are

the focus of this issue is the fact that both spent brief periods in jail.

Henry George was arrested in Ireland in May 1882 for his active report-

ing on the work of the Irish Land League (Barker [1955] 1983: 369–371).

Jane Jacobs was jailed in April 1968 for disrupting a sham public hear-

ing on the Lower Manhattan Expressway (New York City) that would

have destroyed several neighborhoods (Sparberg 2006: 132; Flint 2009:

174–175). In both cases, their arrests added to their celebrity.

Both were visible figures, both in print and in public affairs. Henry

George wrote influential books that attacked private monopolies and

concentrated land ownership. He was influential on reformers around

the world (Sun Yat Sen in China, George Bernard Shaw and Winston

Churchill in England, Jose Marti in Cuba, Leo Tolstoy in Russia, to name

a few). He was surpassed in fame only by Mark Twain and Thomas

Edison (deMille 1979: 2). Jane Jacobs was already a legend by the time

of her death in 2006, perhaps in equal parts for leading the fight that

stopped Robert Moses in his efforts to make Manhattan more auto

friendly, revolutionizing city planning by focusing on the lived

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 74, No. 3 (May, 2015).

DOI: 10.1111/ajes.12106

V

C2015 The American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Inc.

experience of urban spaces, and finally by proposing a model of urban

development based on differentiation and import replacement more

than agglomeration, economies of scale, or capital accumulation.

1

Public Intellectual as Activist: A Distinctive Role

The most important feature shared by George and Jacobs was, how-

ever, their position as activist scholars or public intellectuals, terms I

shall use interchangeably. At the simplest level, this means that they

wrote intelligibly for a large audience, not for specialists, about matters

of public importance. But if that characteristic defined a public intellec-

tual, hundreds of journalists would also qualify. Since this is an impor-

tant role that is seldom occupied or acknowledged, I want to take a

moment here to define it in opposition to two other roles: the scholar

and the activist.

Because we commonly organize experience into clearly-defined cat-

egories, it is easy to miss the fact that many of the most important rela-

tionships cross the boundaries we have established. An example of that

is the division between “scholars” or “intellectuals” on the one hand,

and “activists” or “advocates” on the other. We expect the former to be

neutral, objective, and careful, and we think of the latter as journalistic,

but without a deep understanding of the complexities of issues. We

also consider scholars to be original thinkers, developing their own sys-

tems of thought or experimental methods, while activists are generally

derivative, adopting models developed elsewhere and often simplifying

them for mass consumption.

To a great extent, those distinctions between scholarship and advo-

cacy are accurate. Scholars tend to develop theories or models replete

with exceptions and caveats, tested inconclusively with various statistical

techniques. Whatever their findings, they regard them as provisional,

never final. By contrast, a characteristic of most advocacy or activism is

that it focuses on anecdotes and observable relationships. Even statistical

evidence is treated anecdotally. Activists either tend to ignore intellectual

models or make use of ones that are developed by scholars rather than

creating their own. They pick and choose among provisional scientific

conclusions to create a coherent story that can convince the public to

act. To most scholars, activists appear to be motivated by ideology rather

The American Journal of Economics and Sociology458