Review by Choice Review
Posner, a federal appeals court judge and himself a public or at least semipublic intellectual, has penned an unstintingly critical but also avowedly empirical evaluation and lament of contemporary American public intellectuals spanning much of the current ideological spectrum. In the main, he identifies public intellectuals today as academics who, when venturing outside their narrow specialties to write on broadly political topics for relatively broad audiences, operate in a market-like environment absent academic or other quality controls. Secure in their university specialties and the rules of the academic marketplace, public intellectuals often venture beyond the reach of the ivory tower to inform, entertain, and build solidarity within broader publics. But absent academic discipline, vigilant media, and critical consumers the result, says Posner, is an overabundance of error-prone media-friendly instant analysis, inaccurate prognostications, and misguided policy ideas responsibility for which public intellectuals can easily shirk by exiting the public sphere back to the academy. Various forms of intellectual and financial disclosure, Posner suggests, may alleviate this accountability problem. But of what pressing public significance is reform of the public intellectual market? The reader may hope Posner does not prematurely exit the discussion. Recommended for general collections and academic collections for upper-division undergraduates and above. T. Fackler University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Any free society thrives on public discussion, much of which is instigated by public intellectuals journalists, academics and writers who convey their ideas through a complex array of media. In this extensive, if idiosyncratic, study Posner charges that the quality of American public intellectuals' thinking and writing has steadily declined over the past seven decades. Posner admits that his subject is huge and "formless." But even after he painstakingly creates his own definitions that "demarcate a coherent albeit broad body of expressive activity," this topic still feels unwieldy. Noting that "not all intellectuals are professors... but most are," Posner casts his net wide discussing writers as disparate as Milton Friedman, Martha Nussbaum, Lani Guinier, Noam Chomsky, Gertrude Himmlefarb and Stephen Jay Gould, as well as nonacademics such as Andrea Dworkin and George Orwell. Posner, formerly a tenured academic and now a U.S. Appeals Court judge, uses a wide variety of criteria (hits on Web pages, mentions in print media and books sold) for judging the appeal and effectiveness of public intellectuals, and covers such a wide range of topics and types of intellectuals (from the "politically inflected literary criticism" of Stanley Fish and Michael Warner to the "Jeremiah school" of Christopher Lasch and Robert Bork) that his attempts at synthesis often fall short of satisfactory cohesion. While he makes many good points in charging that much public intellectual and academic writing is flawed by sloppy thinking, overt political advocacy and conflicts of interest, his conclusions and remedies which include a public Web posting of "public intellectual activities" feel impractical and, as he admits, politically dangerous. While offering the provocative beginning of a public discussion, Posner falls far short of his intellectual goals. (Jan. 14) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
A U.S. Court of Appeals judge and senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School, Posner (An Affair of State) defines a public intellectual of which he himself is a distinguished example as one who plays the role of critical commentator for nonspecialist audiences on matters of broad public concern. After extensive theoretical and statistical analysis, he concludes that few modern public intellectuals have the requisite temperament, perspective, character, and knowledge to sustain the high level of performance demonstrated by pundits of earlier years. Furthermore, today's public intellectuals are often not prudent or even sensible in their commentaries and predictions many of which are wrong. He shows how the combination of more media outlets and more narrowly focused academics has led to a greater proliferation of inaccurate public discourse. Yet Posner's proposal for improvement a fuller disclosure of the activities and earnings of public intellectuals that would make them more accountable is not very convincing. An optional purchase for academic libraries. Harry Frumerman, formerly with Hunter Coll., New York (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Is the state of public intellectualism in decline, or is Posner just really smart and terribly grumpy? The answer: a bit of the former, a lot of the latter. Anyone who watches cable news knows the punditocracy has lowered the requirements of admission, as volume has replaced reason in public debates. The proliferation of cable channels and other media outlets has created a booming need for talking heads, but these heads often fail to talk as intelligently as they should. Posner (An Affair of State, 1999, etc.) strings together a slew of charts and graphs to document empirically the decline, meticulously counting and then comparing the number of scholarly citations of a public intellectual's works versus the number of media citations. (In a dazzling display of his math skills, Posner also asserts that U¹(t,b)-U2(t,d)=Z¹> 0, but there he's just showing off.) Of course, Posner is right in many of his assertions, especially his argument that much of the decline is due to academics who write outside of their discipline, but he's also a bit of a crank, one not above taking a few underhanded swings at his personal foes. Sure, it might be clearly demonstrated that Camille Paglia deserves ridicule, but Martha Nussbaum? If Nussbaum represents the decline of the American intellectual, then we're in pretty good shape. Likewise, Posner rightly savages the self-serving antics of Paul Ehrlich and Edward Said, but he tosses Lani Guinier into the mix as well, with not much of a hint as to what she did to deserve his opprobrium. To his credit, Posner does achieve a left/right balance in his attacks, positioning himself somewhat above the ideological fray, and his analyses of such figures as Stephen Jay Gould and Noam Chomsky are detailed and articulate. The jeremiad closes with a few impractical suggestions for improvement that will never be adopted. It takes the wind out of a reviewer's sails when the author predicts one's criticisms; predicting them, however, does not entail that he doesn't deserve them. Dour.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
