Public Intellectuals: a Study in Decline.

• Author: Malanowski, Jamie
• Position: Infinite jest

PUBLIC INTELLECTUALS: A Study in Decline By Richard A. Posner Harvard University Press, $29.95

ONE OF THE KEYS TO UNDERstanding Public Intellectuals: A Study in Decline pops up in a recent New Yorker profile of its author, Richard A. Posner. In the article, Posner--a judge on the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, lord high arbitrator in the Microsoft antitrust case, a founder of the law-and-economics movement in the 1970s, author of 31 books on subjects ranging from AIDS to the Clinton impeachment trial to the Bush-Gore electoral deadlock, and of more than 300 articles on subjects stretching from pornography to Iceland--is quoted as saying, "I have exactly the same personality as my cat. I am cold, furtive, callous, snobbish, selfish, and playful, but with a streak of cruelty." Knowing the man to be both brilliant and mean--playful with a streak of cruelty--it seems to me quite possible that Public Intellectuals is merely a massive 398-page, chart-filled practical joke perpetrated upon a vain intelligentsia and a credulous media, all for the perverse, cat-stroking amusement of Richard Posner.

In the book, Posner argues that the state of "public intellectuals"--the big-brained types who have some academic background or relationship and who discourse on matters of public interest (by which he means political interest, and not, say, the Tom Cruise-Nicole Kidman breakup, regardless of how vast the public's interest in that subject may be)--has declined in the years since giants like George Orwell and Albert Camus walked the earth. He thinks that the ability of the current crop of high domes to comment knowledgeably, insightfully, and cogently on a range of matters is markedly inferior, and that academic specialization is the culprit, finding that too few people are accomplished over a sufficient number of disciplines to supply intelligent commentary. "When public intellectuals comment on current affairs," he writes, "their comments tend to be opinionated, judgmental, sometimes condescending, and often waspish. They are controversialists, with a tendency to take extreme positions. Academic public intellectuals often write in a tone of conscious, sometimes exasperated intellectual superiority. Public intellectuals are often careless with facts and rash in predictions."

Sorry, but to me this is too much like saying that major-league pitching has never been the same since Sandy Koufax felt up his last rosin bag. On the one hand, the...