What Are Intellectuals Good For? -- (with a Foreword by Scott McLemee)Here is a publishing idea: find a narrowly-known non-tenured freelance social critic who has written book reviews, mostly for left-leaning (Dissent, The Nation, The Village Voice) or regional (Boston) publications; collect several of these, including a substantial majority that date to the 1990s or even the late 1980s; then put them together with a couple of introductory essays into a paperback volume with limited distribution. Obviously the folks at Pressed Wafer will not get rich from choosing to do just this when they handsomely produced George Scialabba's What Are Intellectuals Good For?, but their cultural commitment is commendable.
Often such collections seem stale, the pieces having lost whatever freshness they may have had at the time of their original publication. Scialabba's typical approach cuts against that tendency in this case, however. He usually comments on the larger body of work of the authors he reviews, often includes some biographical information about them, and frequently draws comparisons or contrasts to other cultural figures. A good example is "A Whole World of Heroes," his review of Christopher Lasch's (posthumous) Revolt of the Elites, where Scialabba assesses Lasch's broad oeuvre in ten pages. Thus, for me this collection served as a good refresher on several thinkers whose work I had not picked up in awhile (for instance, Dwight Macdonald, Lionel Trilling, Richard Rorty, Alan Bloom, and others) and an introduction to a few with whom I was previously unfamiliar (notably Walter Karp and Nicola Chiaromonte).
Most of those Scialabba covers have been critics who, like Scialabba himself, have commented broadly on society, politics, and literature. They fit Irving Howe's definition of an intellectual as someone "who writes about subjects outside his field, he [or she] has no field."
Scialabba faced word-count constraints when he originally wrote these reviews and as a consequence his stated views are sometimes a bit too abrupt or sweeping, begging further development or explanation. Over the course of the entire collection, however, readers get a relatively complete and coherent picture of Scialabba's outlook. His own opinions are usually front and center.
His politics are from the left, but in no predictable knee-jerk fashion. He is certainly anti-imperialist (Chomsky receives much praise) and egalitarian. Yet, like several of the intellectuals he admires (Macdonald, Rorty, and Matthew Arnold, for example), he recognizes limitations inherent in the tension between democratic aims and those of "high" culture. He is skeptical about what he considers to be the excesses of multiculturalism in academic politics. He favorably quotes Rorty to the effect that the best that democratic societies may do is to help people get a little pleasure out of their lives, that those "who have a taste for sublimity will have to pursue it on their own time."
There is more than a bit of a conservative traditionalist in Scialabba. He claims Edmund Burke recognized that capitalism is subversive of "prejudice, tradition, customary morality", and he criticizes William Buckley for failing to acknowledge this. Scialabba himself has concerns about values that have eroded, and seems to share with John Gray (among others) a sense that the Enlightenment set us on a course toward nihilism, whereas we cannot do altogether without some certainties and some hierarchies.
One reasonably might ask whether Scialabba answers the question of his title: why do we need intellectuals, anyway? One answer is his (simultaneously left and conservative) view that "Only rootedness makes sustained resistance to the modern Leviathan state, corporations, and media possible," and our intellectual heritage helps sustain the requisite foundation. Reviewing Sven Birkerts' The Gutenberg Elegies, Scialabba ponders that there is now so much available information that it is impossible for anybody to "put together all of culture," although by intuition he continues to think there should be. I am reminded of what has been said of wilderness areas: most people do not go there, but it is good to know that they exist.