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Does Celebrity Make Intellectuals Stupid?A look through Richard Posner's data.

By Timothy NoahPosted Thursday, Jan. 3, 2002, at 7:09 PM ET

Illustration by Mark Alan Stamaty Chatterbox rang in the new year reading Richard Posner's Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline. The book has attracted some notice for its informal census of public intellectuals in America, which Posner numbers at 546 (he subsequently expanded that to 607). Alan Wolfe, in a New Republic review of the book that was full of misplaced fury, faults Posner's methodology, and comes up with various names that ought to have been on Posner's list, including Paul Berman, Andrew Delbanco, Jerome Groopman, Katha Pollitt, Sam Tanenhaus, etc., etc. (Wolfe himself is on Posner's list, as is, of course, Posner, a leading guru of the conservative "law and economics" movement who moonlights as a federal appellate judge.) But it isn't Posner's purpose to come up with a definitive list of intellectuals who comment regularly on public affairs. Rather, Posner wants to identify some trends among public intellectuals, and for that all he really needs is a decently large sample, which is what he's got. Obviously, the findings are far from scientific, despite Posner's laborious efforts at regression analysis. But they are suggestive, in a playful sort of way, and Chatterbox thinks they deserve attention. (In theory, Posner is supposed to have posted his data here, but just now the site appears to be under construction.)

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[Update, Jan. 5: The tables are there now. Click here for Posner's data on 546 public intellectuals, and click here for Posner's data on the expanded group of 607 public intellectuals.]

The thesis of Posner's book is that the reliability of public intellectuals has been harmed by two trends: the increasing specialization of academic life, on one hand, and the ever-growing media's insatiable demand for wise experts ("domes," as we called them when I worked at Newsweek) on the other. More and more academics are becoming public intellectuals, but fewer and fewer of them have acquired the breadth of knowledge that we associate with the gentleman scholars who interpreted American society for the common reader or broadcast audience in years past. (The ranks of academically unaffiliated intellectuals, Posner notes, have thinned out.) Of course, intellectuals have long been inept at retailing commonsensical advice to the polity; witness their voguish support for communism and fascism during the first half of the 20^th century. And intellectuals' direct influence on the public has been negligible for at least the past hundred years. Still, Posner notes, public intellectuals do have substantial indirect influence through the press. And anyway, it's always fun to look at intellectuals through a sociological lens.

The first question you'll want answered is, "Which public intellectuals get the most media mentions?" Since the academics who get the most publicity are by definition the ones who are most famous—hence least likely to be overlooked by Posner—whatever flaws exist in Posner's public-intellectual census play a minimal role here. Posner's top 10 media domes are, in declining order:

Henry Kissinger (12,570 media mentions between 1995 and 2000)
Daniel Patrick Moynihan (12,344)
George Will (10,425)
Lawrence Summers (9,369)
William J. Bennett (9,070)
Robert Reich (8,795)
Sidney Blumenthal (8,044)
Arthur Miller—the law professor, not the playwright (7,955)
Salman Rushdie (7,688)
William Safire (6,408)

Of these 10, Reich, Miller, and Summers are the only ones who currently work full-time in a university setting, and Summers really shouldn't count because he became president of Harvard after the period in question. Thus Lesson 1: Even though the unaffiliated public intellectual is a vanishing breed, if you want to join the media-dome elite, you still will do better staying out of the academy. (Ex-professor, on the other hand, is a much better gambit; Chatterbox counts six here, plus Will was a faculty brat.) More surprising, Lesson 2 is that the Unaffiliation Principle extends to the most famous Washington think tanks, which exist entirely to get their scholars on television. Brookings, Heritage, and the American Enterprise Institute are all unrepresented here.

Posner is too polite to compile a list of the public intellectuals who get the fewest media mentions, so Chatterbox had to do it for him. Here's the single-digit club, in ascending order:

Morton White (two media mentions between 1995 and 2000)
George Lichtheim (three)
Edgar Friedenberg (four)
James Boyd White (six)
Herbert Packer (seven)
Isaac Rosenfeld (eight)
Dennis Wrong (nine)

Posner's methodology is here a somewhat larger cause for concern, since the counting of public intellectuals whose fame is marginal is a pretty subjective business. Most readers probably haven't heard of more than a couple of these people, several of whom are now deceased. (Death, Posner points out in his book, has a devastating effect on the quantity of your media mentions—most obviously, you can't get booked onto Nightline—though the ever-popular George Orwell ranks 11^th in the top 100 media domes.) Somewhat better known are the 10 public intellectuals most-cited in scholarly journals:

Michel Foucault (13,238 scholarly citations between 1995 and 2000)
Pierre Bourdieu (7,472)
Jürgen Habermas (7,052)
Jacques Derrida (6,902)
Noam Chomsky (5,628)
Max Weber (5,463)
Gary Becker (5,028)
Anthony Giddens (4,910)
Stephen Jay Gould (4,891)
Richard Posner (4,321)

Of these, only Gould, Chomsky, and Posner are true media celebrities. Overall, Posner found that 18 of the top 100 media domes also ranked among the top 100 public intellectuals most-cited in scholarly journals. This disproves the cynical notion that a public intellectual's media fame invariably destroys his influence in the academy.

Since there's much more to consider in Posner's data, Chatterbox will follow up soon with a sequel.

E-mail Timothy Noah at .

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Timothy Noah is a senior writer at Slate.

Illustration by Mark Alan Stamaty.

COMMENTS

Notes From The Fray Editor:

You will be shocked and surprised to hear that there was a noticeable lack of respect for intellectuals in the Fray. Fair and Balanced has a fine tirade here, saying Mao had the right idea, and that "the best description of intellectuals is that they are people educated beyond their limited intelligence." Fingerpik is calling for a list of Public Idiots. We liked a line from David J. Kenney, "Celebrity reminds the sentient public just how strange 'intellectuals' can get," and one from Paul B.: "Celebrity fosters hubris and hubris can cloud and dim the brightest mind." Several readers wanted to know if there were any women on the list.

We always enjoy a good insult: Brendan Skwire says "Calling George Will an intellectual is like calling ketchup a vegetable." Greg gave us his thoughts on celebrities, then ended his post "[that's what] I think anyway, could be wrong, lemme turn on the TV and see what it says." In a brave attempt to link the article to a news item, Dog lover said "Buddy was smart and famous--now dead." (See also here for the off-topic but splendid theory from BiloxiBuc that Buddy knew too much.)

Comments:

As our society becomes increasingly better read and educated, we have come to see intellectualism and intelligence as the same--even required them to be so. This is particularly true among academics and their admirers/former students in the media. Indeed, we have entered an era where the once vaunted "Renaissance Man/Woman" is now despised by their fellow literati as somehow pandering to the least common denominator. However, no intellectual can become a public figure without reaching out to embrace a larger audience, expressing their specialized knowledge in a form that is more easily understandable, and placing its value in context to the human condition. They have become no less intelligent--they simply lose the respect of their colleagues, who often serve as the pundits and critics reviewing their work. Any intellectual, like Mr. Posner, criticizing the "downfall" of their public counterparts must realize, somewhat like Shakespeare's Brutus, that their faults lay not in their media stars but rather in themselves.

--The Bell

(To find or answer this post, click here.)

One thing I find interesting, and missing from this debate (and as far as I could make out, Posner's book, which I skimmed yesterday), is a discussion of and recognition of the many broad "intellectual" books that have shaped public opinion in just the last year. For example, John McCullough's John Adams has generated a widespread rethinking of our Founders, and how they influenced our nation. Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel is incredibly broad in scope, and has changed the way we think about the development of society. And there are a number of other, similar, books in scope and impact.

--Erasmus

(To find or answer this post, click here.)

To include Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida (who are so far to the left that they're almost on the right) on the same list as George Will and William Safire (angry white males who turn to fascism and right wing rant to soothe their self-righteous rage) and to refer to them as "intellectuals" is ridiculous in the extreme. Read the work of any of those four (yes, I have read "work"--ranting actually--by all of them), and really try to understand what they're saying, and you'll realize that (1) they have nothing to say (2) they are couching their lack of something to say in fancy-sounding language and (3) that their flowery language is only covering the fact that they are merely babbling inanities and really don't know what they're talking about themselves.

--Bill G

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I haven't yet read Posner's book or Wolfe's analysis but from the article a major flaw is obvious in the theory. Public intellectuals as commonly defined are not those who hold or have held public office. While Moynihan and Kissinger are certainly intellectual, their constant media mentions stem in great part from their former or current government positions. The true public intellectual was defined in another book a few years ago by a much less pompous author (someone help me with the title and author)as someone who writes and speaks for a general audience without any institutional affiliation, including the federal government. The classic public intellectuals included Irving Howe, Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, Martin Peretz etc. The modern public intellectual sphere seems to be dominated by African-American scholars such as Cornel West, William J. Wilson, Michael Eric Dyson (though all have university posts) and conservatives such as George Will and Thomas Sowell.

--PUTiger

(To find or answer this post, click here.)

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