Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline.

• Author: Presser, Stephen B.
• Position: Book Review

PUBLIC INTELLECTUALS: A STUDY OF DECLINE. By Richard A. Posner. (1) Harvard University Press. 2001 Pp. 408. $29.95.

Most Americans have never heard of Richard Posner, but law professors know that he is one of the country's more interesting and bizarre natural phenomena. He is now a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, one rung below the United States Supreme Court, and Posner would be a Supreme Court Justice except for the fact that he is constitutionally incapable of suffering fools gladly, has never hidden his opinions of them, and would not likely be well-received at his Senate confirmation hearings. Even so, there is something about Posner that appeals even to the liberal media. For example, in a recent admiring profile, The New Yorker reported that Posner publishes a new book "every half hour," and in the New York Times review of this book it was declared that Posner issues a tome "more or less after every meal." Actually, there are only thirty-one of them, which is still unprecedented for federal judges, most of whom can't find time to read many books, let alone write them.

In truth, there is much to admire about Posner. He is one of the only two authentic geniuses former Supreme Court Justice William Brennan ever met, he was the one man that all parties turned to to mediate the Microsoft Antitrust case (he was able to get the federal government and Microsoft on the same page, although he couldn't succeed in bringing the state attornies general into line, so the settlement foundered), and he helped create the most influential modern movement in legal scholarship (law and economics). According to some accounts, Posner packed away a small fortune as a result of his founding, when he was a mere law professor at the University of Chicago Law School (where he is still a senior lecturer), a law and economics consulting firm, Lexicon. Much, if not most legal scholarship in the last two decades of the twentieth century has been, in effect, a dialogue with Posner, as legal scholars, particularly those on the left, have tried, without much success, to poke holes in his theories.

Posner himself, in recent years, has become something of an equal opportunity excoriator, and in his latest work, here under review, he has harsh things to say about virtually everyone on the right or the left. This book, in gestation for several years, was prompted by Posner's belief that the profession of public intellectual in our...