Public Intellectuals and Their Discontents by Yadullah Shahibzadeh

Author:Yadullah Shahibzadeh
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030565886
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Last Intellectuals

In the Last Intellectuals, Russel Jacoby makes a distinction between private intellectuals who are unable to engage the public in their technical discourse and public intellectuals who communicate their message to an educated public. Jacoby argues that since the early 1970s, the increasing employment of the intellectuals as professors by the university system to teach humanities and social sciences has not made public intellectuals a more influential social group in the public sphere. It caused their removal from the public realm. Unlike public intellectuals, university professors and scholars address their colleagues and students in the classrooms, academic conferences, periodicals, and books, which make them distinguished sociologists or historians, but keep them unknown outside their disciplines. Confined within their academic environments and satisfied with their regular audience, scholars have deemed the educated public as insignificant. Hence, the young people who because of their attraction to to the radical leftist ideologies entered the universities in the 1960s to abolish or at least revolutionize the university as an ideological state institution that protected the existing socio-political order, became, since the mid or end of the 1970s, radical sociologists, Marxist historians, and theorists of feminism in the same institutions but they have never become public intellectuals.63 Jacoby refers to the disappearance of the Bohemia in the US as the main reason behind the disappearance of the American public intellectuals because the Bohemian romanticization of poverty could guarantee two things: their intellectual freedom and their hatred for the bourgeoisie.64 As the American suburbia emerged, in the 1950s, the urban Bohemian life began to vanish. Unlike the older generation who were interested in the big cities, the young students who grew up in the suburbs were interested in the college towns and wanted to live far away from the big cities.65 Since the 1960s, young people in the big cities became more attracted to the idea and practice of counter-culture than Bohemian life.66

As the students of the 1960s became professors in the 1970s and 1980s, they were only interested in writing for the students and colleagues within their disciplines because they shared the same academic concerns and used the same idioms and concepts and published their work only in professional journals and monographs. As the former leftist students became confined within the universities, they became ideologically tamed because they realized that people do not enter universities to become dissenters but to find jobs. The new means of controlling academic intellectuals are no longer imprisoning, blacklisting, or secrete police supervision, but professional insecurity. Jacoby claims that what is threatening academic freedom is not external restraints and prohibitions, but the agreement of academic gentlemen that promotes the belief in self-control, discretion, and balanced judgments. Hence, what guarantees academic success is not scholarly excellence but conformity and connections with influential people and institutions.67 The fact that the few Marxists and radicals who demonstrate scholarly brilliance need introductions and interpretations of other scholars to make their views understandable to other colleagues and students indicate how redundant academic discourse has become.

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