The Last Intellectuals

Rating:
Summary: A Narrative of Intellectual Defeat Lacks Rigour
Review: A witty polemic but not a systematic analysis of the growing irrelevancy of criticism to the American public. Jacoby's strengths are his terse and punchy style, his wide reading, and his abilities to discern fine distinctions between several, often similar, schools of thought. The broad outlines of his argument make sense - that with the academization of the American Left in the early 1970s - American culture experienced a decline in the quality of public-oriented critical writing. The brilliance of Mumford, Edward Wilson, Veblen, and Dwight MacDonald sequed into that of medicore careerists appealing to whatever theoretical prejudices were fashionable to secure tenure. Jacoby provides a wonderfully concise examination of several key authors's work to demonstrate the increasing introvertedness of American letters especially in its tendencies to use obfuscatory language, to employ ever-narrowing bands of specialized opinion, and to address concerns that are mainly disciplinary in origin. The problem comes when you examine this argument up close: Mumford and Wilson were so special because they were a unique collection of unusually perceptive observers whose achievements were not spread among a broad academic culture. Veblen writes very clearly of this in "The Higher Learning" where, as early as 1918, he already observes many of the fallacies of academic-based research. It's hard to consider these great early 20th century writers as a generation (I doubt even they would've saw themselves as such) especially since Jacoby himself comments on the very distinctiveness of their accomplishments. Moreover, Jacoby is slippery when it comes to pinning down what he means precisely by a "public intellectual". Obviously, he mourns the loss of any truly Leftist poltical argument but doesn't seem to feel that conservative opinion merits the same sort of regard. Howevermuch one may want to sympathize with this, it's a failure on Jacoby's part to suggest that conservatives cannot themselves ! provide social criticism worthy of the name "public intellectual." Jacoby argues that conservative critics are rather one-sided polemicists themselves (his discussion on Daniel Bell is excellent on this point) but it's a bit myopic of him to argue that their ascendancy necessarily means that American culutre criticism is in inevitable decline or that a critical public sphere can only legitimately exist if it's staffed with Lefties. If anything, the book would've been far richer if he attempted to analyze how the American right asserted control over public discourse as the Left entrenched itself in the academies. This would have led to more interesting questions such as: how does this change affect the way we debate on certain issues? what perspectives are jettisoned and what are restored or introduced? At the very least, Jacoby's book provides a good introductory text to the history of 20th century American critical thinking and he hammers his ideas home with real conviction. It's very refreshing to see a liberal critic challenge the pomposities of his fellow brethren. I don't disagree his thesis but I would have preferred a more "dialectic" approach in this narrative of Lefty defeat.