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Tensions Within the Public Intellectual: Political Interventions from Dreyfus to the New Social Media

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Abstract

Drawing loosely on positioning theory, this article proposes two new claims about intellectuals and their public engagement. Firstly, we argue that the modern notion of the intellectual incorporates four core tensions or contradictions. Those four tensions centre round the following axes: hierarchy versus equality, generality versus expertise, passion versus distance, and the individual versus the collective. We show how these four tensions were present at the outset of the modern notion of the intellectual, and have regularly come to the surface in the course of the twentieth and early twenty-first century. Secondly, we contend that the same four tensions have taken on new forms, potentially affecting how intellectuals engage with the public. To develop this point, we focus on recent technological developments that enable novel intellectual interventions in the public sphere, in particular interactive online blogging and micro-blogging platforms.

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Notes

  1. This process is similar to the intellectual marketing strategies outlined by Steve Woolgar, in which ideas are reshaped in accordance with the user’s needs. Users too can be reshaped through marketing as a process of “social ordering” (Woolgar 2004, pp. 453–4).

  2. As Felix Salmon put it in an article for Reuters, “[t]he difference between linking and citing is the difference between showing and telling” (Salmon 2012).

  3. Though there is disagreement over the principal reason for this denial (see Goldberg 2006; White 2006).

  4. In a comment on the Cole affair, DeLong wrote that “[a]cademics who blog think more profound thoughts, have a bigger influence on the world—both the academic and the broader worlds—and are happier for it . . . Michigan [Cole’s employer] gains in reputation and mindshare from having a Cole on its faculty. Yale loses from not having an equivalent.” (DeLong 2006)

  5. As may be expected, some of the most prominent intellectuals to do so have careers that relate in some way to the internet—among them were Tim O’Reilly and Cory Doctorow.

  6. Benkler (2006, pp. 220–23) provides another excellent illustration of the speed and fluidity of this process in his description of blogging intellectuals’ campaign against Sinclair Broadcasting before the 2004 presidential election.

  7. Even so, the network of the blogosphere is “skewed”, with only a few bloggers emerging as “focal points” to which a disproportionate number of links point (Drezner and Farrell 2004).

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  1. Faculty of Human, Social and Political Science, University of Cambridge, Free School Lane, Cambridge, CB2 3RQ, UK

    Patrick Baert & Josh Booth

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Correspondence to Patrick Baert.

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Baert, P., Booth, J. Tensions Within the Public Intellectual: Political Interventions from Dreyfus to the New Social Media. Int J Polit Cult Soc 25, 111–126 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10767-012-9123-6

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