I don't care much for Jill Lepore, a historian who trashed Howard Zinn shortly after his death in the New Yorker, but this is interesting.
http://chronicle.com/article/The-New-Economy-of-Letters/141291/ A quarter century has passed since Russell Jacoby coined the term "public intellectuals" in a book meant to mark their extinction. In The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe, published in 1987, Jacoby defined public intellectuals as "writers and thinkers who address a general and educated audience." The term was new, he explained, but there had been public intellectuals for centuries: "The greatest minds from Galileo to Freud have not been content with private discoveries; they sought, and found, a public." Since the 1960s, their numbers, never high, had been plummeting. Lewis Mumford and Edmund Wilson were born in 1895, Walter Lippmann in 1889. By 1987, Wilson and Lippmann were dead and Mumford was in decline. Where, Jacoby wanted to know, were the young Mumfords and Lippmanns and Wilsons? There were none. In 1987, Jacoby, then 42, reported that, in his view, no serious American thinker under the age of 45 was writing for anyone other than academics, or able to. ("Intellectuals who write with vigor and clarity may be as scarce as low rents in New York.") For this, Jacoby blamed higher education. The growth of the modern research university in the decades following the Second World War nursed a generation of intellectuals who had hardly ever lived off campus; they barely knew anyone who hadn't earned a Ph.D. These people couldn't hold a decent dinner conversation with an ordinary reader, much less write for one. When Jacoby claimed that there were no public intellectuals in America under the age of 45, he admitted that what he really meant was only that none of them were left of center. Conservative intellectuals had never retreated into the academy and had never abandoned the public. Also, Jacoby's favorite public intellectuals weren't professors; they were journalists. He also missed the flourishing of an entire generation of black intellectuals in the very years when he was writing his book. And he had taken almost no notice of intellectuals who were female. Except for Mary McCarthy, who happens to have been married to Edmund Wilson, the public intellectuals in Jacoby's pantheon were nearly all men, and their writing shares a certain toughness, the kind of thing vaguely and invariably euphemized by characterizing a writer as having "muscular prose." Suffice to say, if you're looking for Norman Mailer, you won't stumble across Willa Cather. (clip) _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
