COMMENTS: AT FIRST GLANCE The Role of the Intellectual
Hausknecht, Murray
The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation of Milwaukee, which recently became one of the wealthiest philanthropies in the country, has selected an executive director to develop a public-policy...
...These are, of course, not unknown dangers of commitment...
...The new director, Michael J. Joyce, has been director of the John M. Olin Foundation of New York, whose research grants have helped writers and economists widely regarded as influencing Reagan administration policies...
...in the eyes of others the critical stance puts him (or her) in opposition...
...At this time it is easy to confuse the two groups because the financial support both can muster is different from the financial resources now available to those on the left...
...But the caution imposed by the tradition tends to be swamped by the conservative intellectual's commitments, because they predispose him to see those who are ready to support him as representing benign social forces...
...Analysis starts with a question, and the intellectual in pursuing his vocation is obliged to make the world problematic, his (or her) own as well as others...
...Generosity goes beyond money...
...The intellectual's calling is not without its psychological strains...
...As a defender of existing traditions and institutions, the intellectual easily reaches a broad and significant audience...
...Whether an intellectual chooses an adversary position is irrelevant...
...Among the former I exclude "intellectuals"—the quotation marks are important here—who use their talents only to gain material rewards...
...He represents "a union of nearness and remoteness" because "he examines conditions with less prejudice...
...Just as the objectivity of the stranger contributes to his "remoteness," so too the critical stance of the intellectual acts as a centrifugal force on his social position...
...he assesses them against standards that are more general and objective...
...Many intellectuals, however, are "committed...
...So the social position of the intellectual is an ambivalent one...
...The point becomes clearer if we recall that the intellectual is analogous to Georg Simmel's stranger...
...These same beliefs and attitudes are the foundations of a person's selfimage...
...Some would push the idea even further: an intellectual must be in opposition to the dominant traditions of the society...
...without discourse the mind becomes merely a repetitious, self-confirming mechanism...
...The role always requires an awareness of one's own social interests...
...Discourse means the exchange of opinion, the clash of imaginations...
...The intellectual becomes an "enemy" because unexamined commitments are foundations of social structures of privilege and power—the intellectual is a subversive force within the society...
...But CP journals were open only to those who stayed within the prescribed limits of the party line...
...Its peace is to be preserved, and the raison d'être is to be a guardian of its gates...
...For his critical stance means that the gates may be opening to a Trojan Horse...
...Irving] Kristol, who holds a chair in social thought at New York University endowed by the Olin Foundation, welcomed the Bradley Foundation's decision about Mr...
...All modern societies, democratic and authoritarian, have their share of hacks and cultural apparatchiks...
...That conception of the role, however, overstates and obscures the relationship between the intellectual and the rest of the society...
...The stronger the embrace of the conventional world, the more difficult it becomes to question it...
...The intellectual journal is one channel through which other voices can be heard so that discourse can thrive...
...It is perfectly possible, however, to find intellectuals in democratic societies such as ours who are committed to the institutions of capitalism...
...The conservative intellectual is not only welcomed but generously embraced...
...He becomes a person of some influence, a "powerful voice" sometimes heard even in the councils of the mighty...
...There is a difference between those who become committed to the dominant traditions and groups and those who adopt "deviant" ideas...
...The critical stance is an alienating force on social relationships...
...they consciously choose to support a given set of ideas and lend their talents to furthering specific interests that align them with some groups and not others...
...The critical stance, therefore, disturbs not only the social peace but the psychic equilibrium of the intellectual...
...I do not mean that there was no intellectual work before the modern era...
...They still remain committed persons, but their role within that order is now rather more ambiguous...
...Now it is a distinctive calling that revolves about a critical stance toward ideas...
...Though there are no cultural commissars policing today's journals of conservative thought, the often-noted predictability of opinion in Commentary, for example, indicates a similar absence of discourse and drift toward sterility of thought...
...In such encapsulated worlds an essential ingredient of the vocation—intellectual discourse—disappears...
...No intellectual wholly resists these temptations...
...This is not to say that the intellectual is detached from the social structure or above social conflicts...
...But for the conservative intellectual, his commitments pull him toward the center of the established order, as do the welcoming arms of dominant groups...
...the perspective that provides ideological weapons against a group's enemies can be turned against the group itself...
...q 160...
...Thus he is more apt to reciprocate with a warm embrace of his own, without even the matching reserve and suspicion lying beneath the surface of his welcome...
...All of this creates a constant temptation to blunt the edge of the critical stance in order to preserve relationships and contain the ravages of anxiety...
...When questioning the world the intellectual automatically becomes, in Coser's words, "a disturber of the peace"—questioning the fundamental premises underlying beliefs, values, and behavior as well as specific ideologies and programs...
...it demands a response to other voices...
...Joyce, adding, "I think it's great after the liberal Ford, Carnegie and Rockefeller foundations, people of a conservative point of view will have a large foundation to help them in studies, research, enterprises or whatever...
...But "critical stance" also implies for many, at both ends of the political spectrum, that the intellectual is "one who thinks otherwise" (Lewis Coser) or one who adopts "an adversary position" (Robert Nisbet...
...rather, in other times intellectual work was not undertaken so self-consciously or as a task justifying one's existence...
...The respect and deference he receives reinforce his position in the existing structure, so that his relationships with individuals and groups become more firmly fixed...
...Like everyone else, he is buffeted by social currents that shape his thoughts and actions...
...During the '30s and '40s there were intellectuals who came into the orbit of the Communist party, found audiences and financial support through its publications, and soon lived their entire lives surrounded by other CP members...
...The role is also tempered by the specific commitments an intellectual chooses to make...
...In everyday life the imperatives of the intellectual vocation are inevitably modulated by those rooted in the needs of a human being...
...those who deviated could not be heard...
...Thus, censors and cultural commissars...
...The difference between the intellectual and others lies in the imperatives of his vocation: where others are under no obligation to make their own ideas problematic, the intellectual must question his own beliefs as well as theirs...
...In this sectarian setting it was impossible to pursue their calling...
...The committed intellectual is eagerly sought after, but honored less for the nobility or elegance of his thought than for its ideological utility...
...And thus many conservative intellectuals now become ensconced in the established order...
...The stranger is an element of the group itself . . . an element whose membership within the group involves being outside and confronting it...
...There is a tradition of wariness, a (Continued on p. 160) 132 prickly ambivalence toward would-be benefactors that marks the attitude of intellectuals...
...To be analytical, to go beyond merely stating and advocating ideas, demands a problematic approach to the world...
...People become noticeably cool to those who begin to reflect a different set of political beliefs and social attitudes...
...It is intellectual discourse that helps give and maintain an edge to the critical stance...
...Critical stance" means—and there is little or no disagreement in the discourse about intellectuals —an analytical or intensive examination of the structure and bearing of ideas and other products of the human imagination...
...an intellectual who responded unreservedly to the obligations of the role would be a social and psychological monstrosity...
...he is 131 embraced because his vocation allows him to articulate and defend group interests, but at the same time he is treated with reserve and suspicion because he is predisposed to question the world enfolding him in its ranks...
...The committed conservative intellectual has relatively little difficulty, for example, in finding support for starting so inherently risky an undertaking as a new journal of opinion...
...There is, typically, an element of wariness in the welcome extended to the intellectual...
...THE POSITION of the conservative intellectual can become similar, paradoxically enough, to that of some committed intellectuals of the left...
...The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation of Milwaukee, which recently became one of the wealthiest philanthropies in the country, has selected an executive director to develop a public-policy program in support of conservative causes...
...New York Times, September 26, 1985 The intellectual is a modern phenomenon...
...The adversary position is a result of the critical stance itself and not necessarily a consequence of the intellectual's choice...
...the intellectual's social ties are founded upon the very taken-forgranted values and beliefs that he is making problematic...
...that is, they define a person as a person to himself...
Vol. 33 • April 1986 • No. 2
