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ABSTRACT
Intellectuals represent a class largely ignored in mainstream American political science, which limits the discipline’s ability to articulate the full range of challenges posed by our current populist moment. This essay returns to intellectuals as particularly relevant objects of study, both by reviving past work on intellectuals and also putting forth new lines of political research.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963), p. 7.
2 Merle Curti, “Intellectuals and Other People,” American Historical Review 60:2 (1955), p. 279.
3 Patrick Baert, The Existentialist Moment: The Rise of Sartre as a Public Intellectual (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2015), p. 186.
4 Jeremy Jennings and Tony Kemp-Welch, “The Century of the Intellectual: From the Dreyfus Affair to Salman Rushdie,” in Jeremy Jennings and Tony Kemp-Welch (eds), Intellectuals in Politics: From the Dreyfus Affair to Salman Rushdie (London, UK: Routledge, 1997), pp. 1–24.
5 “Antonio Gramsci,” in Roger S. Gottlieb (ed.), An Anthology of Western Marxism: From Lukacs and Gramsci to Socialist-Feminism (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 115.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid; C. Wright Mills, The New Men of Power: America’s Labor Leaders (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1948), pp. 281–7.
8 On this point, I think Thomas Sowell is right to avoid wasting ink on explanations for why John is on one side of the line while James is on the other side. To get off the ground with any productive analysis of intellectuals, it may prove essential that we acknowledge those occupying “the penumbra surrounding intellectuals” as being as politically and observationally important as those who fall squarely within the conception of intellectual. Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2011), p. 7.
9 G. Eric Hansen, “Intellect and Power: Some Notes on the Intellectual as a Political Type,” Journal of Politics 31:2 (1969), p. 315.
10 Gerhard Richter and Theodor W. Adorno, “Who’s Afraid of the Ivory Tower? A Conversation with Theodor W. Adorno,” Monatshefte 94:1 (2002), p. 19.
11 Jean Paul Sartre, “A Plea for Intellectuals,” in Between Existentialism and Marxism (New York, NY: William Morrow & Company, 1976), p. 232.
12 Ibid., 244.
13 Ibid., 252.
14 Ibid., 254.
15 On Albert Camus’s disdain for Sartre’s conception of the engaged intellectual, see Ronald Aronson, Camus and Sartre: The Story of a Friendship and the Quarrel that Ended It (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
16 Jonathan Judaken, Jean-Paul Sartre and the Jewish Question: Anti-Semitism and the Politics of the French Intellectual (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), pp. 161–2.
17 Ibid., 151, 214.
18 Sartre, “A Plea for Intellectuals,” p. 252; Bill Martin, The Radical Project: Sartrean Investigations (Lanham, MD; Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), pp. 60–2.
19 In “Two Lectures,” Foucault chastises this sort of intellectual, calling his condition: “something one might describe as a febrile indolence – a typical affliction of those enamored of libraries, documents, reference works, dusty tomes, texts that are never read, books that are no sooner printed than they are consigned to the shelves of libraries where they thereafter lie dormant to be taken up only some centuries later. It would accord all too well with the busy inertia of those who profess an idle knowledge, a species of luxuriant sagacity, the rich hoard of the parvenus whose only outward signs are displayed in footnotes at the bottom of the page. It would accord with all those who feel themselves to be associates of one of the more ancient or more typical secret societies of the West, those oddly indestructible societies unknown it would seem to Antiquity, which came into being with Christianity, most likely at the time of the first monasteries, at the periphery of the invasions, the fires and the forests: I mean to speak of the great warm and tender Freemasonry of useless erudition.” Michel Foucault, “Two Lectures,” in Colin Gordon (ed.), Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, and Kate Soper (trans), Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977 (New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 1980), p. 79.
20 Ibid., 126.
21 Ibid., 128, 130.
22 Ibid., 130, 133.
23 Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, “Intellectuals and Power,” in Donald F. Bouchard (ed.), Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 205–6.
24 Ibid., 211–2. For a recent work that takes up Foucault’s mantle and describes how certain radical intellectuals saw their own intellectual work as leading them to act, see Kevin Mattson, Intellectuals in Action: The Origins of the New Left and Radical Liberalism, 1945–1970 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002).
25 Foucault and Deleuze, “Intellectuals and Power,” p. 216.
26 Ibid.
27 C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1956); C. Wright Mills, “The Structure of Power in American Society,” British Journal of Sociology 9:1 (1958), pp. 29–41; C. Wright Mills, “On Who I Might Be and How I Got That Way,” in Kathryn Mills and Pamela Mills (eds), C. Wright Mills: Letters and Autobiographical Writings (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000), p. 252.
28 C. Wright Mills, “The Powerless People: The Social Role of the Intellectual,” Bulletin of the American Association of University Professors 31:2 (1945), pp. 231–243; Mills, The New Men of Power; Mills, The Power Elite; C. Wright Mills, “Letter to the New Left,” New Left Review I:5 (1960): pp. 18–23; C. Wright Mills, Listen, Yankee: The Revolution in Cuba (New York, NY: Ballantine Books,1960); Stanley Aronowitz, Taking It Big: C. Wright Mills and the Making of Political Intellectuals (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2012), p. 58.
29 Mills, “The Powerless People,” pp. 233–6.
30 Mills, “Letter to the New Left,” p. 22; Mills, The New Men of Power, pp. 266–292.
31 Mills, “The Powerless People,” p. 239.
32 Mills, The New Men of Power, pp. 281, 284.
33 Ibid., 286.
34 Aronowitz, Taking It Big, pp. 115–6.
35 Ibid., 54.
36 Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, pp. 35, 427–430.
37 Peter J. Boettke and Christopher J. Coyne, “Methodological Individualism, Spontaneous Order and the Research Program of the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis,” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 57:2 (2005), pp. 145 −158; Paul Aligica, “Institutional Analysis and Economic Policy: Notes on the Applied Agenda of the Bloomington School,” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 57:2 (2005), pp. 159 −165; Vincent Ostrom and Barbara Allen, The Intellectual Crisis in American Public Administration, Third Edition (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2008).
38 Foucault, Power/Knowledge, p. 127.
39 Steven M. Teles, The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement: The Battle for Control of the Law (Princeton, NJ; Princeton University Press, 2008), pp. 4, 17–8; Aronowitz, Taking It Big, p. 55.
40 Rogers M. Smith, “Ideas and the Spiral of Politics: The Place of American Political Thought in American Political Development,” American Political Thought 3:1 (2014), pp. 127, 130–1.
41 Ibid., 131.
42 Here, I appropriate and only slightly resignify Deleuze’s term for a bridged theory/praxis relationship.
43 Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, pp. 34, 45.
44 Ibid., 38.
45 Ibid.
46 Ibid., 24–31.
47 Ibid., 45.
48 Ibid., 43.
49 Ibid., 427.
50 Ibid., 429. This sentiment echoes Merle Curti’s presidential address to the American Historical Association, in which the historian worried about intellectuals’ uneven political involvement and the “tendency of many intellectuals to become mere technicians.” Curti, “Intellectuals and Other People,” p. 276.
51 Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, pp. 430, 432.
52 Mills, The New Men of Power, p. 286. Similarly, in a highly autobiographical section of The Intellectual Crisis in American Public Administration, Vincent Ostrom and Barbara Allen elaborate a “mode of inquiry” which intellectuals can engage in (à la Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis) that necessary links to active, outward-oriented, enacted political pursuits. Ostrom and Allen, The Intellectual Crisis in American Public Administration, pp. 172–3, 175.
53 Max Boot, “How the ‘Stupid Party’ Created Donald Trump,” The New York Times (July 31, 2016), available online at: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/01/opinion/how-the-stupid-party-created-donald-trump.html; Laura Chapin, “In Defense of Elitism,” U.S. News & World Report (January 23, 2017), available online at: https://www.usnews.com/opinion/thomas-jefferson-street/articles/2017-01-23/we-needintellectual-elites-to-protect-our-democracy-against-donald-trump; Chris Cillizza, “Donald Trump Isn’t An Intellectual. And He’s Very Proud of That,” The Washington Post (January 19, 2017), available online at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/thefix/wp/2017/01/19/the-aggressive-anti-intellectualism-of-donaldtrump/?utm_term=.0fb17f3a2092; Suzanne Nossel, “Donald Trump’s Assault on the Enlightenment,” Foreign Policy (January 26, 2017), available online at: http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/01/26/donald-trumps-assault-on-theenlightenment-nea-neh-funding-cuts/.
54 Seymour Martin Lipset, “American Intellectuals: Their Politics and Status,” Daedalus 88:3 (1959), pp. 460–486; Curti, “Intellectuals and Other People.”
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Notes on contributors
Paul Baumgardner
Paul Baumgardner is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Politics and the Humanities Council at Princeton University. He also is a doctoral fellow through the American Bar Foundation/AccessLex Doctoral Fellowship Program in Legal & Higher Education. His research in American politics and law has been published in Law & Social Inquiry, Law and History Review, Presidential Studies Quarterly, and Laws.