BOOKS

...Intellectuals can no longer subsist without institutional support...

...The Reagan Administration has systematically not done so...

...More lasting perhaps, but little known, is the perversion of the office of Solicitor General, the third-ranking legal officer in the executive branch of Government...

...134 pp...

...The police don't hunt drug traffickers or fight crime...

...It has retreated to the university campus, seeking the security of tenured professorial careers...

...If there is a thing called law, with a reassuring sense of continuity despite its contradictions, a measure of stability that contributes to social order, and an integrity provided by, among other things, the careful practice of legal reasoning, then one of the great misdeeds of the Reagan Administration was to diminish the institution that, to lawyers at the highest reaches of the profession, once stood for the nation's commitment to the rule of law...

...They communicate in a pretentious code that no one else can read...

...In this wrenching book, he describes the dismal facts of life in Chile today...

...The 1962 Port Huron Statement, remember, identified the campus "as a potential base and agency in a movement for social change...

...The intellectuals wrote a public prose accessible not only to the readers of little magazines like The Masses, Partisan Review, and Dissent, but also to a broader literary public, readers of The New Yorker and the Sunday New York Times...

...But the picture is not totally bleak...

...Academic intellectuals, beginning with William Appleman Williams, have also provided the movement with the facts and theory of an anti-imperialist critique and an alternative foreign policy...

...Reagan did not begin the corruption of the Solicitor General-Richard Nixon, among others, was a predecessor—but surely Reagan greatly accelerated the sleazy process...

...The battles of the 1960s took a fearsome moral toll...

...Lee and Fried have prostituted the office, particularly by challenging past Supreme Court decisions on such issues as abortion, school prayer, affirmative action, and school busing, and by generally not being forthright...

...Reagan's social agenda is being pushed, not the law as it has been received and understood...

...And, as Jacoby is proof, there will always be feisty, public-spirited academics writing vigorous prose who are determined to speak out...

...The leaders of the attack on law have been the Reagan Solicitors General-first Rex Lee and now Charles Fried...

...Well, maybe...

...He merely assumes its past existence...

...The intellectual situation, from my vantage, is both better and worse than what Jacoby describes...

...It is not exhaustive, but it is the best study yet published of the little-known but important office of the Solicitor General...

...All the academics who have become valuable social critics (from Mills to such contemporaries as Chomsky, Barry Commoner, and Howard Zinn) had or have the security of a tenured position...

...Born in the Ukraine, Timerman had grown up in Argentina in the late 1920s...

...History will not lightly view the perversion of the ideals of the American legal system...

...The military dictatorship imposed by General Augusto Pinochet in 1973 has brought obscene brutality and police surveillance...

...BOOKS BRIEFLY Police State CHILE: Death in the South by Jacobo Timerman Alfred A. Knopf...

...As an independent journalist he had endured kidnapping, torture, imprisonment, and exile, which he related in his book Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number...

...Hence the title, The Tenth Justice...

...Written constitutions such as ours do not guarantee its existence, as this Arthur S. Miller is professor emeritus of law at George Washington University...

...The storied rule of law is one of the basic myths of the American constitutional order...

...Jacoby's attack on the "self-devouring theory" of Marxist philosophers who write critiques of each other's impenetrable theories is also welcome and accurate...

...Our heritage of dissident, free-thinking independent intellectuals— the Edmund Wilsons, Lewis Mumfords, Dwight Macdonalds of an earlier time-lapses after the Noam Chomskys, Susan Sontags, Michael Harringtons, and Irving Howes...

...Marty Jezer (Marty Jezer is the author of "The Dark Ages: Life in the United States, 1945-1960," published by South End Press...

...The student intelligentsia that set out to reform the campus as a first step in changing society got sidetracked by the civil-rights movement and the Vietnam war...

...In The Tenth Justice, Lincoln Caplan documents how it has been thoroughly politicized and otherwise debased in the years since 1981...

...University administrators have learned to withhold tenure as a means of controlling dissident teachers...

...They are the last intellectuals...

...He believes that a degree of progress can be made by responsible groups on the Right who are deeply concerned about the desecration of human rights...

...Jacoby makes a distinction between today's academics and the intellectuals of the past...

...In 1986, Jacobo Timerman revisited Chile after an absence of fifteen years...

...Bohemia is dead, a victim of suburbanization and the urban crisis...

...But it also must be said that the retreat to the campus was self-willed...

...He also argues convincingly that a supportive environment for an independent and dissident intelligentsia no longer exists...

...Academics are also under pressure to write for professional journals that, Jacoby says, "create insular societies...

...It is a scary world of repression, suspicion, and fear...

...The debasement of the office will not be easily remedied...

...The Justices have long memories, and it will be many years before the damage done by Reagan and his minions can be rectified...

...they look for subversion...

...When it returned to academe to take up teaching jobs, its rebellion was spent, as was its youth...

...The Iran-contra fiasco likely is the worst, because it corrupted, at least temporarily, the constitutional system...

...Law, particularly constitutional law, in fact is constitutional politics...

...scholarship that "concentrates on texts, signs, and signifiers as the stuff of interpretation," encouraging endless "spirals" of career-enhancing commentary that ignores "social and material context," the stuff of human existence...

...Veterans of the 1960s remain keen in their response to injustice...

...Yes, Jacoby is right, much of what left-wing academics write has little to do with the real-world problems of left-wing concern...

...15.95...

...For those who would understand the flow of litigation to the Supreme Court, this book is highly recommended...

...The fault is not wholly our own, Jacoby insists...

...Himself an academic, a historian, and a veteran of the New Left, Jacoby describes the institutional pressures that compel acquiescence to academic convention...

...The world is slithering toward nuclear disaster, global pollution, and starvation," Jacoby writes, "but one Marxist critic writing on another brightly trades in Marxist academic futures...

...No longer able to manipulate Congress, Reagan has turned to the courts and judge-made law...

...Catholic and other churches give schoolchildren basic nutrients, and they learn to save some food to take home to their parents...

...Under the Constitution, the President is charged with the duty that the laws "be faithfully executed...

...One result, rarely acknowledged, is a loss of nerve...

...If society cannot support an independent intelligentsia (if dissident intellectuals can no longer afford to live in the garrets in which they might otherwise be willing to "starve"), from where are dissident ideas and visions going to come...

...by Arthur S. Miller There are many derelictions, large and small, that can rightly be charged to Ronald Reagan's shabby Administration...

...Today's academics, by contrast, are constrained by academic convention: narrow specialization, obscurantist scholarship, impenetrable jargon, and a pseudo-objectivity in which a passion for justice can play no part...

...magazine learned in 1979 when it sought to publish Howard Morland's article on "The H-Bomb Secret...

...Thousands of radical sociologists, as Jacoby notes, but no C. Wright Mills...

...Yet it is hard to deny the uncertain future that Jacoby describes...

...The officials orchestrating this development are Attorney General Edwin Meese III and his colleague, William Bradford Reynolds...

...And then again, maybe not...

...No one can fully understand the workings of the Federal Government without reading it...

...Caplan's conclusion merits full quotation: "To understand how the Reagan Administration views the law, it is only necessary to know what it did to the office of the Solicitor General...

...Jacoby's arguments are provocative...

...Refuge on Campus THE LAST INTELLECTUALS by Russell Jacoby Basic Books...

...Without a renewed struggle for academic freedom, we may, as Jacoby warns, be in an era of the last intellectuals...

...290 pp...

...Caplan's failure to analyze the concept of the rule of law is the major flaw in this otherwise superb study...

...Impassioned and partisan books of the kind that inspire popular movements—Rachel Carson's Si-lent Spring, Michael Harrington's The Other America, Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, Paul Goodman's Growing Up Absurd, Jane Jacobs's The Death and Life of Great American Cities, not to mention works by Martin Luther King Jr., James Baldwin, Malcolm X, and C. Wright Mills (all but Mills free-lance intellectuals)—are not being written...

...Where have all the young intellectuals gone...

...Statutes have been flouted, Supreme Court decisions challenged, and international law ignored...

...Fried is the worst Solicitor General in memory...

...Jacoby is also accurate in targeting Marxian literary criticism...

...The current situation, as Jacoby sees it, is that academe is filled with former New-Leftists, many of whom still consider themselves as part of the Left...

...Their outpouring of scholarship is "extraordinary, without precedent in American letters...

...They were engaged in public issues and articulated dissident political views...

...As Caplan puts it, he has "advanced the President's positions without regard to the divisions they deepened in American society...

...Timer-man estimates that 500 soup kitchens serve about 10,000 people a day...

...The First Amendment was simply ignored by the Department of Justice and the judges...

...Government does what is politically palatable, whatever the Constitution seems to say—or does say...

...The Justices have long trusted the Solicitor General, an attitude that Caplan says has dissipated and even vanished under Reagan...

...To academe, Russell Jacoby says, there to lose their critical irreverence, their concern for popular issues, and their eagerness for public discourse...

...Incensed though he is on the abuses of human rights, Timerman is nostalgic about Chile's natural beauty, its wines, and its fish...

...But having once advanced a vision of society that spectacularly failed, they (or we) are not likely to come up with a bold new prescription again...

...Poverty and unemployment in tree-lined Santiago are staggering...

...For decades the Solicitor General enjoyed a special cozy relationship with the Supreme Court...

...The generation that should have followed in their steps—the activist, New Left intellectuals of the 1960s—has not fulfilled its promise...

...Radical economists, contrary to what Jacoby says, have been doing good work analyzing social policy, and radical historians have uncovered the hidden history of women, blacks, gays, and the radical movements of the past, which earlier generations of intellectuals mostly ignored...

...A stunning indictment...

...And the radical journals that were started as activist-oriented alternatives are becoming indistinguishable from their stolidly conventional academic forerunners...

...All of this, Caplan says, subverts the rule of law, a concept he does not define...

...In Chile he had known the poet Pablo Ner-uda, fellow journalist Augusto Olivares, and President Salvador Allende...

...The Tenth Justice should be required reading for all students of the American constitutional order...

...18.95...

...But it is also "largely technical, unreadable, and—except by specialists—unread...