My critique of The Last Intellectuals boils down to three related complaints. First, Jacoby’s method is Christopher Laschism at its weakest. That is, he drew broad and unwarranted conclusions from a relatively small number of life stories, books, and articles.
Second, he defined public intellectuals much too narrowly. American thinkers publicly disagreed about ideas long before C. Wright Mills apparently coined the term — indeed, long before there was a United States — as the rival Puritans Anne Hutchinson and John Cotton would attest if they were here. So would the Indian converts who tried to mesh Christian doctrines with their indigenous beliefs; Enlightenment republicans; enemies and friends of slavery; cohorts of awakened Protestants; Catholics, and Jews trying to figure out their place in the de facto Protestant republic; and, finally, two generations of original thinkers, the most impressive of whom were William James and Thorstein Veblen.
Starting the story 250 years too late, Jacoby defined public intellectuals as the ostensibly independent critics and journalists who played a disproportionately large role in intellectual life from the 1890s to the 1950s. Only a few academics made the cut, notably Veblen, Mills, John Kenneth Galbraith, and an impressive trio of Jacoby’s associates from the University of Rochester: Lasch, Eugene Genovese, and Herbert Gutman. Indeed, the chief problem for Jacoby in 1987 was that the intellectual life of baby boomers and near baby boomers was increasingly centered in predominantly conservative colleges and universities.
My third complaint is that Jacoby viewed these issues from the perspective of a nostalgic ’60s leftist. The Last Intellectuals ignored many important developments in American intellectual life even if we join Jacoby in limiting our discussion to the period since the 1890s. He needed to get out more — or at least to turn on the television set he disdained.
Like other inhabitants of the post-’60s-left intellectual bubble, Jacoby failed to notice that the United States in 1987 remained the world’s most religious big rich country. For 50 years, conservative Protestant thinkers had been trying with mixed success to remain faithful while adapting to modernity. Molly Worthen’s Apostles of Reason offers a good introduction to these intellectuals and their conservative Protestant public. In our generation, the historians George Marsden, Mark Noll, and D.G. Hart tried to persuade this public to transcend what Noll called the “scandal of the evangelical mind.”
Many playwrights, directors, and screenwriters should also count as public intellectuals. My shortlist includes D.W. Griffith, Frank Capra, Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Stanley Kubrick, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Spike Lee, Larry Kramer, and Tony Kushner. We should pay attention to some comedians: Finley Peter Dunne, Will Rogers, Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, Dick Gregory, and the Saturday Night Live crew whose satire helped to defeat President Gerald Ford in 1976. My current favorite comics, Chris Rock and Sarah Silverman, are more transgressive than Dean Holloway would allow any of us professors to be in a Yale classroom.
‘Prospects are brighter for public intellectuals than for public scholars.’
Network television is important and sometimes even good. During the “long ’50s,” for example, The Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling noted that Martians could say things that Democrats and Republicans couldn’t.
My reaction to The Last Intellectuals has been affected by my residence in Washington. Economists, lawyers, and international-relations theorists can be intellectuals, too, and Foreign Affairs is as much a “little magazine” as Dissent (though its readers are much more numerous and influential). Without attention to disputes about economic theory, important parts of Daniel T. Rodgers’s notable book, The Age of Fracture, could not have been written. On the liberal side of those disputes, the baby boomers Robert Shiller and Paul Krugman write lucidly for a general audience.
As Bruce Kuklick demonstrated in Blind Oracles, international-relations and military theorists have influenced American decisions about war and peace since the early Cold War. The ranks of war wonks march on with Michael O’Hanlon, David Ignatius, Robert Kagan, and Fareed Zakaria.
Perhaps most important, as radical historians in their intellectual bubble belatedly began to discover two decades ago, the United States contains many conservatives, neoconservatives, and libertarians with ideas of their own.
Jacoby identifies as an intellectual, and I call myself a historian or scholar. Intellectuals tend, as Daniel Bell observed in The End of Ideology, to begin with their own experience and then work outward to the universe. I am convinced that this approach encourages the groupthink and superficial moralism rampant in the historical profession. Therefore I make a concession to Jacoby: When I critically reviewed his book in 1988, I naïvely thought that the intellectual liveliness which, in different ways, had characterized the academy in the ’50s and ’60s would last indefinitely. He was right, and I was wrong.
Nonetheless, as a public scholar, so to speak, I have tried to address as wide an audience as possible. I reached my peak during the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. I was able to tell some radio and television audiences that President Clinton’s frivolous impeachment trial was not a replay of Andrew Johnson’s, when comparable Congressional partisanship nonetheless meshed with intelligent debate about the Constitution and Johnson’s appalling failure to protect newly freed slaves during Reconstruction. Today, with rare exceptions, public scholars are excluded, especially from the nonprint media, in favor of paired partisan officials, political strategists, and war wonks rebranded as national-security consultants.
When opportunities arise, the role of public scholars and public intellectuals is not ethically complicated. We should try to tell the truth as best we can, to as wide an audience as we can reach, while acknowledging the tension between truth and audience size. Perhaps prospects are brighter for public intellectuals than for public scholars. My 25-year-old former student Bhaskar Sunkara publishes Jacobin, a lively magazine of neo-Marxist thought. I’m no actuary, but it looks as if we won’t be running out of public intellectuals for at least 50 or 60 years.
Leo P. Ribuffo is a professor of history at George Washington University.
