Public Intellectual NumberOne

...Their political ideology was irrelevant...

...For Richard Posner, the author of a recent book that ranked public intellectuals by their number of citations in the mass media, most public intellectuals were actually professors who wrote for an audience that was not, or not exclusively, academic...

...For one thing, very few writers who could plausibly be called intellectual have their headquarters outside the university anymore, apart from those who retired and left town...

...He also wrote about the Oversoul, the God within everyone, the single substance the universe is made of...

...Even the Pentagon recruits its soldiers with the slogan "An Army of One...

...the only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong what is against it...

...or Cambridge, Massachusetts are about as divorced from the real life of their country as the residents of a typical American suburb are from the rarefied concerns that draw so much of the national talent pool into our now dangerously swollen academic sector...

...Whether he meant it to sound as subjective as it does today is open to debate...

...The inhabitants of Berkeley, California...

...Does a superior journalist like David Brooks or Christopher Hitchens count...

...Buell finds the heart of Emerson's significance in "Self Reliance," the early essay where the first two epigrams quoted above appear...

...To a considerable extent, the public intellectual has of late been willed into being in an effort to undo the work of Emerson and his followers—of a man who in his external life seemed very much like a presentday star professor...

...Second Thoughts Public Intellectual Number One By Christopher Clausen Ever since Russell Jacoby popularized the term "public intellectual" in 1987, people who concern themselves with such questions have been wondering which of their contemporaries fit the definition, how useful public intellectuals are either to the public or to other intellectuals, and when such a phenomenon began to be seen in the world...

...Tell me what you know...

...That intellectuals have tended since the 1950s to house themselves in universities may have made American universities the envy of other countries, but it has had less fortunate consequences as well...

...In 1876, however, he declared, "Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it...

...In Emerson (Belknap, 397 pp., $29.95), Buell tries to make a case for the continuing relevance of a classic American writer to whom many Americans acquired an unconquerable allergy in high school...

...Yet just as André Gide, when asked who the greatest French poet was, is supposed to have said "Alas, Victor Hugo," so Americans must concede, happily or not, that Emerson is by far their most influential prose writer...

...Hence the usefulness of "public intellectual," implying a figure who can bridge the yawning gap between the ivory tower and the vast wasteland...

...Madison, Wisconsin...

...For another, probably no one can make helpful motions toward healing this breach except from within the academy...

...In its heyday during the 1930s and '40s, Partisan Review, the one journal invariably cited by historians of public intellectualism, was an independent publication whose writers and readers rarely had any direct connection with educational institutions...

...Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members...

...Thomas Carlyle admired him...

...Most people who are not specialists probably associate Emerson with a series of aphorisms that often seem tautological, sometimes mystifying, and eventually annoying: "Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist...

...After a few pages of this sort of thing, the mind begins to reel...

...Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this...

...The sky is the daily bread of the eyes...

...It's precisely the sort of phrase he might have devised...

...in a very short time it became a widely used catch phrase...

...Giving him such a contemporary label is a way of suggesting that relevance, as well as subtly implying that today's intellectuals are too private for their own good and society's...

...And how public is public...

...A man is a god in ruins...

...Forget about any religious, moral or political doctrine, any taste or feeling, that does not accord with your own sense of yourself...

...He was not a philosopher in any useful meaning of the word...

...Mass culture—television, radio, the press, publishing, Hollywood, even such lesser cultural institutions as the church—suffers from an evident deficiency of intellectual talent...

...I hate quotations," he announced in 1849...

...Intellectual magazines are written and read almost exclusively by academics, or by the quasiacademics housed at such "think tanks" as the Heritage Foundation and the Brookings Institution...

...Partisan Review itself eventually gravitated to Boston University, where it expired this spring, having long ago lost its independence and (along with all the other small-circulation magazines of its kind) its modest impact on American life...

...After World War II, things began to change drastically...

...There is simply no way of guessing which side in this fundamental culture war Emerson the Harvard graduate, the onetime Unitarian minister, the public intellectual would take if he were suddenly reincarnated...

...In fact some of them didn't write about politics at all, though what they wrote generally had some political implications...

...Coal is a portable climate...

...What was he really in his own time, and what could he plausibly represent today...

...Self Reliance" urges us (for we have to read a writer like Emerson as if he were addressing us) to find truth and meaning within ourselves rather than in teachings of the past or institutions...

...The so-called New York Intellectuals—Daniel Bell, Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, Irving Howe, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, et al.— gradually made their way onto faculties, where their successors have spent their professional lives as a matter of course...

...The virtue of the abstract individual and the corresponding tyranny of "society" is an axiom few people think of challenging...

...By the standards of 2003 he might be contemptuously dismissed as an inspirational speaker, so public as to be hardly an intellectual...

...Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact...

...What does the phrase mean, anyway...

...By that measure, the public intellectual almost has to be from a campus...

...That may be one reason his writings now seem so tedious to students—after all, we know without being told that our own instincts are the most important criteria of truth and value...

...Or does one have to write a bestseller, like the late Allan Bloom...

...But according to Lawrence Buell, a Harvard professor of American literature, Ralph Waldo Emerson, who celebrated his 200th birthday in May, was "the first public intellectual in the history of the United States...

...Conversely, the academy itself suffers from a lack of contact with life outside...

...He might well be discouraged to find, two centuries after his birth, a mass individualism flourishing in popular culture that glorifies whim without quite noticing how lacking in individuality most whims are...

...The mind boggles at all those little maxims turned into koans, but D.T Suzuki, the greatest 20th-century figure in Japanese Zen Buddhism, considered Emerson among the most important spiritual leaders of modem times...

...But many who took it up used it in a broader sense than Jacoby...

...If you looked deeply enough within, presumably you would find that divine substance—whatever exactly it was— and your actions would be the opposite of arbitrary...

...Do the many academics who write for the New York Review of Books, the Nation, the Weekly Standard, or The New Leader count as public intellectuals...

...For Jacoby, a public intellectual was a nonprofessor who lived in a big city—preferably New York—and wrote profoundly but accessibly about politics from a Leftist perspective...

...From "Self Reliance" and the basic idea it labels comes all the rest of Emerson's complicated, sometimes contradictory thinking...

...In his lifetime Emerson was hailed as a profound thinker well beyond his own country...

...Paradoxically, this very self-reliance more than anything else has led to the split between the subculture of books and universities and systematic thought, and the popular culture that so glorifies impulse, emotion, the untutored self...

...Not surprisingly, Emerson coined the two classic excuses for confusion of oneself and others: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds," and "To be great is to be misunderstood...

...The poetry he wrote was rarely much good, as even his admirers concede...

...Although he rarely uses the word, he preaches a more radical individualism than any other important writer of his day...

...All that admiration from intelligent foreigners, though, is difficult to dismiss...

...That so many of Posner's public intellectuals were professors highlighted a fact about our society that most of us take for granted: A disproportionate amount of American intellectual life is now conducted in universities...

...Evidently the term filled a need...

...This kind of extreme individualism, together with the hostility to "society" it entails, has become so deeply ingrained in American (and now European) popular attitudes that we forget it originated in fairly recent times...

...If the problem the public intellectual is intended to solve—the decisive split between town and gown—dates only from the huge growth of universities since World War II, then it may not be very useful to trace that figure's lineage far back in time...

...His disciples Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau are more popular today than the master, but that outcome would have surprised them...

...Matthew Arnold adulated him...

...Perhaps he was even a public intellectual in some usefully ambiguous sense...

...Its impact has been so powerful that we simply take much of what was new to Emerson for granted, like the air...

...He had little to say about politics until late in his career, when he became a post-Civil War Radical Republican...

...Maybe Posner's citations from Lexis-Nexis, much ridiculed when his book was published, go to the heart of the question after all...

...Where would one find a more obvious precursor of the contemporary university town—in its affluence, its isolation from the lives of the majority of people, its conspicuous feeling of superiority—than Concord, Massachusetts during its most famous resident's prime...

...How intellectual is intellectual...

...Maybe it helped that he emphasized his Americanness so little (far less, say, than Whitman) and wrote profusely about European thinkers...

...Even so, the rather pretentious title still prompts many questions...

...By the first decade of the 20th century," Buell states, "Emerson's work had been translated into all major Western European languages, Swedish, Russian, and Japanese...

...He went on turning it out in bulk for 40 years of lectures and essays...