Public Intellectuals in the Global Arena

Description

What is a public intellectual? Where are they to be found? What accounts for the lament today that public intellectuals are either few in number or, worse, irrelevant? While there is a small literature on the role of public intellectuals, it is organized around various thinkers rather than focusing on different countries or the unique opportunities and challenges inherent in varied disciplines or professions. In Public Intellectuals in the Global Arena, Michael C. Desch has gathered a group of contributors to offer a timely and far-reaching reassessment of the role of public intellectuals in a variety of Western and non-Western settings. The contributors delineate the centrality of historical consciousness, philosophical self-understanding, and ethical imperatives for any intelligentsia who presume to speak the truth to power. The first section provides in-depth studies of the role of public intellectuals in a variety of countries or regions, including the United States, Latin America, China, and the Islamic world. The essays in the second section take up the question of why public intellectuals vary so widely across different disciplines. These chapters chronicle changes in the disciplines of philosophy and economics, changes that "have combined to dethrone the former and elevate the latter as the preeminent homes of public intellectuals in the academy." Also included are chapters that consider the evolving roles of the natural scientist, the former diplomat, and the blogger as public intellectuals. The final section provides concluding perspectives about the duties of public intellectuals in the twenty-first century.

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Philosophie politique
• Political
• POLITICAL SCIENCE
• PHILOSOPHY
• Philosophie et théologie
• Politics
• Leadership

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 15 novembre 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780268100278
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Public Intellectuals in the Global Arena
Public Intellectuals in the Global Arena
Professors or Pundits?
Edited by
MICHAEL C. DESCH
University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
www.undpress.nd.edu
Copyright 2016 by the University of Notre Dame
All Rights Reserved
Published in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Desch, Michael C. (Michael Charles), 1960- editor.
Title: Public intellectuals in the global arena : professors or pundits? / edited by Michael C. Desch.
Description: Notre Dame : University of Notre Dame Press, 2016. | Includes index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016032991 (print) | LCCN 2016045449 (ebook) | ISBN 9780268100247 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 0268100241 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780268100261 (pdf) | ISBN 9780268100278 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Intellectuals. | Scholars. | Intellectual life. | Scholarship and learning.
Classification: LCC HM728 .P834 2016 (print) | LCC HM728 (ebook) | DDC 305.5/52-dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016032991
ISBN 9780268100278
This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper) .
This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail] .
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Public Intellectuals: An Introduction
MICHAEL C. DESCH
PUBLIC INTELLECTUALS IN A COMPARATIVE CONTEXT
one
Historical Consciousness, Realism, and Public Intellectuals in American Society
JEREMI SURI
two
American Public Intellectuals and the Early Cold War, or, Mad about Henry Wallace
ANDREW J. BACEVICH
three
The Public Intellectual in China
WILLY LAM
four
Intellectuals and Intelligentsia in Latin America
ENRIQUE KRAUZE
five
The Intellectual, Culture, and the State: The Experiences and Failures of Enlightenment in the Arab World
AHMAD S. MOUSSALLI
PUBLIC INTELLECTUALS ACROSS DISCIPLINES
six
The Philosopher as Public Intellectual
PATRICK BAERT
seven
The Economist as ? The Public Square and Economists
J. BRADFORD DELONG
eight
Of Mirrors and Media: The Blogger as Public Intellectual
PAUL HORWITZ
nine
Science in the Crosshairs: The Public Role of Science and Scientists
KENNETH R. MILLER
ten
Diplomats as Intellectuals: An Unlikely Combination
GILLES ANDR ANI
REFLECTIONS
eleven
Reckless Minds: Caveat Lector
MARK LILLA
twelve
Caveat Lilla: On Public Intellectualism in the Twenty-First Century
MICHAEL ZUCKERT
thirteen
The Public Intellectual as Teacher and Students as Public: Declining and Falling Apart
PATRICK J. DENEEN
fourteen
The Ethical Imperative for Some Scholars to Be Public Intellectuals and for the Rest to Let Them Do So
MICHAEL C. DESCH
Concluding Thoughts: Toward a Typology of Public Intellectuals
VITTORIO H SLE
List of Contributors
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This volume had its origins in a conference I organized in the spring of 2013 after I spent the fall semester of that year as a fellow of the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study (NDIAS). For his generous support of the conference, and also for his providing me with one of the best semesters I have had at Notre Dame, I am deeply indebted to my colleague Vittorio H sle, the founding director of the Institute. Of course, the Institute, one of the jewels in the Notre Dame s intellectual crown, would never have existed without the inspiration of former dean of the College of Arts and Letters, Mark Roche, and the generous support of the vice president for research, Robert Bernhard. Vittorio s able successor, Brad Gregory, has generously continued to underwrite our efforts to turn the disparate conference papers into a coherent book.
Directors of institutes come and go, but the permanent staff remains, and invariably does the hardest and most critical work in a project of this nature. This one would never have come to completion without the support and help of NDIAS s executive director, Donald Stelluto, and his colleagues Grant Osborne and Carolyn Sherman. Jonathan Vandenburgh, a longtime NDIAS undergraduate fellow and a soon-to-be philosophy graduate student, helped immeasurably in the final production of the manuscript. My sincere thanks to all of them.
We were fortunate to be able to enlist a large number of Notre Dame colleagues in helping to turn conference papers into chapters through their detailed and astute commentary. In particular, I am grateful to Phillip Munoz, Michael Zuckert, Lionel Jensen, Paolo Carozza, Ann Astell, Rashied Omar, Richard Garnett, Jessica Hellman, Timothy Fuerst, George Lopez, Katherine Brading, Daniel Philpott, Rev. Wilson Miscamble, C.S.C., and Don Howard. The Institute succeeded admirably in its mission of bringing together Notre Dame s brightest intellectual lights with some leading public intellectuals from across the country and around the world.
Finally, I have been privileged to know some modern Max Webers who reassured me that it is still possible to pursue both science and politics as a vocation. Among the many terrific scholars who also found ways to speak to the broader public that I have been privileged to know, I would specifically mention Allan Bloom and Samuel Huntington. In gratitude for all they did for me in my career, I dedicate this book to their memories.
PUBLIC INTELLECTUALS
An Introduction
MICHAEL C. DESCH
STATEMENT OF PROBLEM
What roles do public intellectuals-persons who exert a large influence in the contemporary society of their country through their thought, writing, or speaking-play in various countries around the world and by virtue of their different disciplinary and professional backgrounds?
There is, to be sure, a small literature on the role of public intellectuals in general, but it is organized around various thinkers rather than focused on different countries in a comparative framework or on the unique opportunities and challenges inherent in different disciplines or professions. 1 Indeed, in his comprehensive treatment of the U.S. public intellectual scene, Richard Posner notes that a cardinal omission [in the literature] is the situation of the public intellectual today in countries other than the United States. In his view, such a study would be a fascinating project. 2
The literature on their role in some specific countries is larger, but by no means comprehensive. Their role in the United States, both historically and in contemporary affairs, is pretty well covered. 3 The problem is that this literature comes to very different and radically inconsistent conclusions as to whether public intellectuals actually influence the public. 4 Coverage of other countries is spotty: France, not surprisingly, is well covered; 5 the rest of Europe and other parts of the world are not. 6 Moreover, these other studies also tend to be time-bound and focus on particular periods and eras. 7 Finally, there have been a handful of efforts to gauge the effectiveness of public intellectuals, but the focus has been more abstract and general than what we have in mind. 8 There are a handful of books that attempt a more comprehensive approach, but to our knowledge none do precisely what we do in this volume. 9 Given all of this, we agree with Posner that the phenomena of the public intellectual deserves more attention from sociologists, economists, philosophers, and other students of intellectual and expressive activity than it has received. 10
THIS VOLUME
Given this lacuna, and the reasonable assumptions that (1) public intellectuals play different roles in different countries, disciplines, and professions and that (2) these variations need to be systematically understood, we initiated this project to produce a volume that considers the role of the public intellectual around the world and across the disciplines today. Our overarching objectives are twofold: (1) to achieve a better general understanding of the phenomenon of public intellectualism and (2) to shed light on the U.S. experience, in particular, through a comparative context and an examination of its place within the different scholarly disciplines and professions.
Specifically, we divide our volume into three sections. In the first, Public Intellectuals in a Comparative Context, we offer a series of indepth studies of the role of public intellectuals in the United States and a variety of important countries or regions of the world, including China, Latin America, and the Arab world. Next, in Public Intellectuals across Disciplines, we offer a series of studies that might provide insight into why the public intellectual varies so widely across the disciplines. Here we have chapters on changes in the disciplines of philosophy and economics, which have combined to dethrone the former and elevate the latter as the preeminent home of public intellectuals in the academy. We also have chapters considering the evolving roles of the natural scientist, the former diplomat, and the blogger as public intellectuals. Finally, our third section, Reflections, contains some overarching thoughts on the public intellectual from a one-time skeptic, a skeptic of the skeptic, an advocate of thinking about the changing place of public intellectuals in the academy from a moral perspective, and then a synthetic conclusion.
This sort of inquiry is particularly appropriate for a Catholic university such as Notre Dame that values service more broadly to God and Country. Though hardly a proponent of strictly utilitarian education, cardinal and Oxford don John Henry Newman nonetheless persuasively argued that a cultivated intellect, because it is a good in itself, brings with it a power and a grace to every work and occupation which it undertakes, and enables us to be more useful, and to a greater number. There is a duty we owe to