Henry: I took you to be making two claims, which I questioned: 1) there used to be a “high culture” that left intellectuals could appeal to in reforming policy, 2) writing for the masses is less politically effective than writing for other intellectuals. I wasn’t making any broad points about the impact of intellectuals on politics. I certainly wasn’t trying to argue that Dean was an intellectual! (My point was simply that the population turned against this war a lot more quickly than the last one—certainly more quickly than the mainstream intelligentsia did—and I think this is in part due to the increased readership of leftish intellectuals (e.g. on blogs).)

I think it’s possible for intellectuals to create, if not a movement, then something of a community. You see something of it here on Crooked Timber: a half-articulated value system, a set of heroes (e.g. George) and villains (e.g. Megan), a sense that there are at least a couple other people who understand us (the few, the proud, the lefty interdisciplinary social-science-and-philosophy wonks with a thing for old comic books) in a heartless world. I think the netroots did something similar around roughly Lakoff’s model of the mixed voter (Lakoff was rarely mentioned, of course; what I mean is that it was widely argued that Democrats could win votes by moving left), culminating in Howard Dean blurbing Lakoff’s book, adopting his ideas, and winning netroots support.

But let’s try getting down to cases for a moment. As a blogger, I imagine you could write a piece pointing out that Megan McArdle got something badly wrong. Megan would probably respond and mock you to her readers and perhaps admit a minor technical point but not really back down. As a result, you would probably persuade just the handful of open-minded people who happened to read both posts, which seems like a fraction of either of your readership.

Instead, you could write a piece about how some neglected aspect of policy was badly bungled and how it could be fixed, in the hopes that your piece could help turn the tide. You could tell an engaging story that exemplified some larger social democratic point. You could write about how democratic institutions work and how people can influence them.

Probably none of these will have much effect; but occasionally they will. I’m told Michael Harrington and Dwight MacDonald helped turn the tide on poverty policy; the engaging story my group’s been running has gotten in dozens of papers and on Rachel Maddow and persuaded people to contribute $100,000 and forced a Senator to make a statement; and I don’t think I exaggerate when I say the netroots writing about democratic institutions almost won the Democratic nomination. You can poke holes in all of these stories, no doubt. But you can’t even make a similar claim for a Megan McArdle rebuttal.

In short, I see a theory of change for writing to the public: I see a way, however tenuous or unlikely, that my words could make an impact. I have trouble seeing what your theory is when writing to other intellectuals.

Ian – dunno about Gintis, but I can assure you that as of May this year, Sam Bowles not only was still a self-professed Marxist leftist, but took some temporary umbrage when he misunderstood me to be suggesting the contrary.

Aaron, if you’re serious about that fan club I’m in. I’ll never make it through Bowles’s “Microeconomics” on my own.

Ian, thanks for the link. I’m gonna check that out.

I don’t think we disagree. But you’ve reminded me of the question I had for Henry when he made some of these same arguments in a comments thread here a while back: Why is there a conflict between options 2 and 3? Aren’t the counter-hegemony and inorganic intellectuals much more complements than substitutes?

Garrity appointed his council in 1975. TTOH was published in 1991. If the lack of “indigenous leadership” among the white city dwellers Lasch seems to feel so strongly for is still an issue after thirty-five years—to such an extent that there’s no need to take note of anything that might have changed in the interim—it’s worth thinking hard about why that might be the case.

My readings of Coyle’s “The Soulful Science” and Rosser, Colander’s, and Holt’s “The Changing Face of Economics” gave me no reason to hope that Econ 101 will ever change. My conclusion was that the most influential economists (the compact majority of the profession, unnamed in either book) like things pretty much the way they are, and that getting the students to “think like an economist” (rather than thinking like a citizen, etc.) is more important to the leadership than rescuing the students from Econ 101 fallacies.

I see the problem as being that Econ 101, as befits its role as official reference for the true nature of economics, is actually more accurate/consistent than economics as widely practiced and especially, preached.

All the crazily unrealistic assumptions underlying perfect competition, general equilibrium, revealed preference, pareto efficiency, bracketing of welfare economics as a separate specialism etc are mentioned and unobstrusively described for what they are. It’s after that that those devastating caveats are locked away out of sight, so as to get on with the much more rewarding tasks of putting all those mathematical models to use

lemuel pitkin @4 What were the roles in each of these cases of counter-hegemonic, more or less organic intellectuals like Chomsky, versus inorganic intellectuals operating within elite discourses? It seems awfully hard to argue that the contribution of the former wasn’t greater than the latter.

Just as long as you are accounting for the influence of the former on the latter. I mean, Chomsky didn’t come up with his stuff in a vacuum (not that he is necessarily the best example). The ivory-tower theorist’s influence on the wider political culture is mediated by the work of the populariser.

I dunno, Bianca. I don’t think it was constitutional originalism or a liberal failure of nerve. I think the key sentence in Lasch’s discussion of busing (which extends over pp. 496-504 of True and Only Heaven) is this one: “The wrongs suffered by black people in America were so glaring and their demand for reparation seemingly so compelling that advocates of busing found it impossible to admit that white workers had important grievances of their own, especially when those grievances were couched in the idiom of racial abuse and championed by leaders who exercised no control over their own followers.” It’s true, as Lasch admits straightforwardly here, that opponents of busing were mostly racists and generally used racist arguments and language. But if you listened patiently to them, as Jonathan Rieder, Jim Sleeper, Anthony Lukas, and others did, you had to recognize that they were also, at least in their own minds, defending honorable ideals: local autonomy, rootedness, historical continuity, community loyalty, equality of sacrifice. The people who advocated and implemented busing (see, in Lasch’s footnote on p. 499, the list of members of the Coordinating Council appointed by Judge Garrity—all bankers, executives, and university presidents) had no knowledge of or stake in the lives and neighborhoods they were intervening in. They were, or identified with, elite managerial types, used to ordering working people around. This is what galled the orderees.

Busing, for Lasch, was a lost opportunity, a chance for elites to demonstrate good faith by sharing the sacrifices they freely imposed on ordinary people, and by demonstrating some sympathy with, or at least understanding of, the values of large groups of fellow citizens. The fact that such a thought never occurred to them is as deplorable as the racism their policies churned up.

Also, it would be nice to make the argument more historically concrete. Let’s take some actual instances of historic progress, like the end of the patriarchal family and women’s entry as full participants in public life. Or the social and (increasingly) legal recognition of gay relationships. Or, going back a bit, the rise of industrial unionism. What were the roles in each of these cases of counter-hegemonic, more or less organic intellectuals like Chomsky, versus inorganic intellectuals operating within elite discourses? It seems awfully hard to argue that the contribution of the former wasn’t greater than the latter.

Finally, the limits of the elite-discourse approach aren’t really engaged with. I took a couple classes with Sam Bowles at the University of Massachusetts; he’s clearly a very smart and decent guy. But isn’t it possible that the reasons the political face of economics is the degraded 101 form run a bit deeper than that no one has made sufficiently clever arguments against it?

Ian

I have spent a lot of time over the years on Lasch, and unfortunately, I finally regret that time, unlike the time I have spent on Rorty. (I’ve read nothing by Chomsky except Syntactic Structures, though I’ve heard so much about him I feel like I know all about him.)

Looking for something I didn’t find, I picked up The True and Only Heaven. What I did find was Lasch inhabiting the mind of a member of the Federalist Society, in describing why the Boston busing ruling was judge made law, as if there were no argument among legal scholars, usw, about how to think about similar cases. Surely he could have found an equally cogent opposing argument if he had looked; he would not have had to go grubbing around in cases and statistics and then build his own case from scratch.

I can imagine a possible train of thought (or a couple) that might have led Lasch, and a few other isolated thinkers, to conclude as he did: this involves a wish to think everything through for oneself, to be clear about one’s ideas before moving forward, to refuse unexamined assumptions. But if there is a broader trend—something I’m not sure about—this doesn’t seem sufficient. A liberal failure of nerve doesn’t seem quite it either, but maybe closer.

(OT, but I am always stunned by Riesman’s treatment of his mythical liberal lady from Peoria: she is quite right, and I agree with her entirely from my safe perch here in Cambridge, but there is nothing she can do and it is harmful for her to profess ideas like my own, therefore I let her know in no uncertain terms that her local McCarthyites really basically have the right idea.)

As for the strategy of inorganic intellectuals, again I have trouble seeing the empirical case. They seem neither to be taken seriously by the people they critique (Waltzer engaged with Scialabba more seriously than I’ve ever seen any orthodox economist debate Henwood) nor do they capture the large following of the counterhegemons (where do I sign up for the Samuel Bowles fan club?). And this is exactly what you’d expect if intellectuals were truly servants to power—Gregory Mankiw does not seem to be trying seriously to get it right but merely to promote his ideology. If you point out a place where he’s gone wrong, he’ll just stop talking about that particular piece until you’ve gone away, when he’ll quietly take it back up again.

I, for one, would be happy to fund Tom Slee to write books in perpetuity (on the condition that future books have titles that don’t make them sound like conservative think tank output [hi, tom s.! can we start up a collection?]) and would delight to see literary intellectuals engage more on the theory and the facts, but the idea that this is a politically-effective strategy seems to me quite far-fetched. Henry, I’m curious if you have any reason to think different.