Cornering the Market in Chutzpah

Did you know that if I were writing this review for big bucks, it would be better--at least according to Richard Posner? Posner adores the free market; his only regret is that salaried teachers like myself escape its beneficial imperatives. Posner is a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals; he is a well-regarded professor at the University of Chicago Law School and an author who writes with astounding energy on an astounding number of topics. He has published books--just to stick to the A’s--on aging, AIDS and antitrust law. Recently he has tackled former President Bill Clinton’s impeachment and the 2000 Florida election debacle. Associated with a movement that applies economics to law, Posner belongs in the front ranks of legal thinkers in the United States today--and perhaps the qualifier “legal” suggests a specialization he has increasingly abandoned.

Indeed, in his latest book he assumes the role of wide-ranging social critic. Posner was “surprised” by the “low quality” of public commentary on the Clinton impeachment by philosophers, historians and law professors. The discussion was no better on the Microsoft antitrust case, in which he served as mediator. This spurred him to consider the nature of “public intellectuals,” which, he claims, “has never been studied systematically before.” With his usual industry and boldness, Posner seeks to remedy this deficiency and explain the sorry state of public intellectuals.

What is a public intellectual? (Disclosure alert: Posner credits me, in my “The Last Intellectuals,” with coining the term, and I marginally figure in his book.) Standard accounts trace the term “intellectual” to 1890s France, when writers such as Emile Zola protested the framing of Alfred Dreyfus; they were “the intellectuals.” In the course of the 20th century, especially in the United States, intellectuals migrated into expanding universities and became specialists and teachers; they were still intellectuals, but they addressed themselves to colleagues and students. Only a few of them, the “public intellectuals,” continue to court a wider educated audience on political and cultural matters.

To Posner, the Dreyfus case was almost the last time intellectuals got things right. He knows why. Once upon a time intellectuals plied their trade in a market that adjudicated by ignoring defective goods and rewarding quality. Intellectuals were essentially independent producers with something to sell--their words. Inasmuch as public intellectuals are now largely tenured professors, they escape the dictates of the market; they can write (and talk) trash in public and still pick up their checks from the bursar.

Posner seeks to substantiate this proposition by case studies illustrating the defective quality of contributions of public intellectuals and by a series of tables, graphs and equations demonstrating an inverse relation between public attention and real scholarship. Pos- ner (or his assistants) have counted up the number of media “hits” and scholarly citations for more than 500 intellectuals to show that intellectuals pay for public attention by diminished professional legitimacy. In the service of this argument, he has collected a dizzying amount of miscellaneous data. Wannabe public intellectuals can pick up career tips. To gain media attention, “other things being equal” it is better to be alive than dead. Take note, students: Being dead can reduce your media attention by a whopping 30%.

To follow Posner as he picks fights with everyone from Stephen Jay Gould to Gertrude Himmelfarb and Richard Rorty is worth the price of admission; he is a formidable critic of academic pretense and sloth. Yet too much of this book is pure bravado. Posner wants to prove that not only can he draw upon technical articles on “restaurant pricing” and supply bristling formulas on the benefits of market regulation and the costs of divorce, he can also discuss Shakespeare, Dickens or T.S. Eliot with the best of them--and best them. Irving Kristol opined that the later poetry of Eliot, such as “Four Quartets,” is “much superior” to his earlier work. This judgment, Posner sniffs, “raises a question whether Kristol is a serious reader of modern poetry.”

Nor is Posner above playing both sides. He makes much of the erroneous predictions and hyperventilated idiom of public intellectuals, complaining, for instance, that the rhetoric about the Clinton impeachment by Princeton University historian Sean Wilentz was typically hysterical and uninformed. (Posner legalistically thinks the impeachment crisis was about the obstruction of justice by Clinton.) Yet Posner himself (in Harper’s magazine) defended the Supreme Court’s decision in the Florida election on the grounds it resolved a “dangerous” crisis. “Instability” threatened the republic. This sounds like the rhetoric Posner detests in others.

Sticking with Posner is sometimes exhilarating, but don’t look out the window. His book is a house of cards constructed in midair. Though Posner laments a declining quality of public intellectual work, he provides no base line for his judgment. Apart from frequent references to George Orwell, he does not even make a stab at indicating when it was higher. Of course, as a partisan of “measurement and objective evaluation,” Posner must be stumped by the impossible task of statistically proving that intellectuals once saw further and thought better. When? He cannot say.

Posner is a smart man bewitched by two ideas, specialization and the free market. Together, he believes, they can clean up intellectual pollution. For Posner intellectual specialization is next to godliness. It would be nice if he ducked into an academic department to check out what its excellent specialists are up to. On occasion he gets a glimpse and recoils. He takes up Wayne Booth and Martha Nussbaum as two public intellectuals delivering imperfect wares. Yet by their lucidity and range, he notes, they are “not in the mainstream of contemporary literary studies” which is generally composed of opaque and unappetizing fields like subaltern studies and deconstruction that “largely disable the practitioners ... from communicating outside their immediate circle.” Posner, who prides himself on his rigor, fails to draw the conclusion. He does not recognize here his own ideal, insular specialists who have lost touch with English.

The second idea is the rationality of the free market for resolving intellectual debate. Posner thinks the market is not too strong but too weak, exacting no financial penalties from tenured public intellectuals who depart from their accredited fields to deliver substandard goods. In the name of the free market, he outdoes Marx, who believed that intellectuals were lackeys of the bourgeoisie; Posner wishes it were so. Not the economic noose but its slackness bothers Posner. But does he really believe that the market can winnow out imperfect ideas and writings? “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a famous anti-Semitic text, is considered one of the bestsellers of all time. Thoreau once remarked that he had a thousand volumes in his library, mostly unsold copies of his own books. Are these examples of market rationality?

Does Posner believe that the free market can resolve a public controversy about, say, impeachment, war or intelligence testing? Apparently he does. Or does he? Consider his discussion of Gould’s “The Mismeasure of Man,” a book that contests the racial and genetic basis of intelligence. Posner won’t buy it, but many have. Gould is a best-selling Harvard professor published by a commercial press. The market has spoken. Posner should be pleased, but he isn’t. He returns to his first idea. In writing about intelligence, Gould has stepped outside his expertise. Posner admits this is not obvious. “Since Gould is a biologist, he may seem to have been writing within his field. The appearance is deceptive. He is a paleontologist and not an expert on the problem of intelligence.” Moreover, Gould’s belief that distilling intelligence into a number like IQ exemplifies a “reification” is nonsensical. Posner knows why; Gould is straying again. “‘Reification’ is a philosophical rather than a scientific concept ... so we should not expect Gould to be able to handle it deftly.”

Posner might be vulnerable to an antitrust action: cornering the market in chutzpah. Gould cannot understand IQ or philosophy (outside his field). Nussbaum cannot understand women in Africa (outside her field). Several hundred law professors protested the Clinton impeachment, but they were out to lunch, since “few were experts on impeachment.” In an open letter, 50 Nobel science laureates objected to the proposed national antimissile defense. Guess what? Appearances again mislead. Half the signatories were either biologists or chemists, and many others were “in branches of physics unrelated to the science involved in trying to shoot down missiles.”

Who decides when Gould transgresses? When professors of solid-state physics mistakenly address physics of motion? When professors of torts erroneously take up constitutional law? Herein the last card: Judge Posner judges. Posner decides who has the proper credentials. Want to discuss T.S. Eliot’s poetry in public? Judge Posner will inspect your license in his chambers.

But what exactly are Posner’s credentials that allow him to airily decide which physics professors are allowed to speak on military defense and which philosophy professors on Africa? He has opinions on everything but seems to lack, well, professional training on all things. He wants everyone to stay within his or her own field, while he lords over the estate. If the babble of public intellectuals irritates him, perhaps he should practice what he preaches and clam up. If he insists on adding to the din, his beloved market should shock him with sales figures. Don’t buy this book. If you must examine this maddening and provocative work, peruse it in a store or borrow it from a library. Posner may get the message: His cure for intellectual irresponsibility is worse than the disease.

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Russell Jacoby is the author of “The End of Utopia,” “The Last Intellectuals” and other books. He teaches history at UCLA.