Customer Reviews

What Are Intellectuals Good For? -- (with a Foreword by Scott McLemee)

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There was once an era where great men strode among us. The Intellectuals, as they were known, had an opinion on everything and would share it, at length, with elegance and verve. Unfortunately, the explosion of information beginning in the sixties rendered them all-but-extinct and the electronic transformation of the past few decades threatens to finish the job. Still, we can't but admire them and their milieu.

This certainly seems to be George Scialabba's position. The greatest working book reviewer -- when the National Book Critics Circle inaugurated their Excellence in Criticism award, he was their first recipient -- collects his reviews of these grand men's work and a sampling of his own in his new collection, _What Are Intellectuals Good For?_ The result is a delightful introduction to this world of ideas.

Scialabba's own position is best summarized by his dedication: "For Chomsky, Rorty, Lasch." In other words, he is a man of impeccable left-wing politics, a refusal to believe in any philosophical verities, and a deep skepticism about the benefits of Enlightenment progress. This is not exactly a popular combination -- surely Chomsky and Ehrenreich have more fans than Rorty and Lasch -- but it is a provocative one. And Scialabba's genius is that he can make such counterintuitive ideas, expressed by such Olympian intellectuals, seem not just clear but common sense. A dedicated follower of the left-rationalist-progressive tradition, I had to continually catch myself from nodding along in agreement.

Recommended for anyone who's a fan of the Intellectual Scene and the men and women who inhabit it.

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.

Compelling, provocative, and well-written ... also slightly disturbing, in the sense that he made me worry that "public intellectuals" don't have much of interest or value to contribute to the conversation about the state of our society and our politics. He seems to think that "more precise information" is the most we can hope for. Gah. Still, I continue thinking about his analysis.

This book inspired me to discover some great works by those intellectuals critiqued. And those works by Trilling, Rorty, Said, Hitchens et. al. have led to further exploration and wonderment. Thank you George!

George Scialabba is that rarity, a public intellectual who has supported himself out of academia or publishing, preserving his independence from even his colleagues on the Left. He's an old fashioned skeptic and an old-fashioned reformer, by which I mean one who has an unerring nose for sniffing out Hokum on all sides but who persists in thinking there are better ways to do things in this complicated world. His role models are such non-clichéd thinkers of the traditional and New Left as Christopher Lasch and Russell Jacoby and the great, tough feminist critic Vivian Gornick. There are essays about all three in this book, and two about Lasch, who is one of my own particular heroes. He gets along well with Richard Rorty, who is quoted on the back jacket cover, praising Scialabba's earlier book, Divided Mind.

He is skeptical about Martha Nussbaum's defense of cultural humanism in her Cultural Humanism (1997). He's not against the ideals she espouses but he finds her methods of inquiry flawed and her conclusions overly general and Pollyanesque. (He characterizes her, not completely fairly, as "a slightly sententious Socrates.") The title of the essay discussing Nussbaum's book is "Pollyanna and Cassandra." Nussbaum is the Pollyanna in the essay; fellow classicists Victor David Hanson and John Heath, who wrote Who Killed Homer? The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom (1998) the Cassandras. It is a measure of Scialabba's fair-mindedness that he praises Hanson, a notorious political conservative and a supporter of many causes with which it is difficult to find Scialabba in sympathy, for Hanson's earlier work on the Greek experience, focusing on the countryside rather than the polis. The Greeks, Hanson argued, "first created `agrarianism,' an ideology in which the production of food and, above all, the actual people who own the land and do the farm work, are held to be of supreme social importance." Hanson on the right, like Lasch -and Scialabba--on the left, is disturbed by what Scialabba characterizes as "contemporary cultural weightlessness." Scialabba notes how much Hanson's and Heath's Greece looks like late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century America, "the high-water mark of democratic republicanism in modern history." He closes this exemplary critical essay by arguing that we do not have to choose between the cosmopolitan ideal touted by Nussbaum or the agrarian ideal of Hanson and Heath. "The liberal virtues and the republican virtues are both indispensable. But that does not mean they are, at this moment, equally urgent or equally vulnerable. The apparently irresistible thrust of global capitalism threatens the latter virtues far more than the former..." And he goes on to spell out the ways in which that is true.

It is difficult to pick out favorite articles in a collection so good as this one. I especially enjoyed his dismantling of the pretentious garbage of Edward Said, who seemed able to transmute any thought at all into colonialist oppression. He has equally devastating criticisms to make of the contradictions in Noam Chomsky's political writings. (Scialabba does not admire fuzzy thinking of an kind.) I knew next to nothing about Vivian Gornick but now want to read her. I don't think it will be a comfortable read for me but it seems a necessary one. Obviously, I admired the essays on Christopher Lasch, whose neo-populism seemed to offer a way out of the increasing sterility, overly academic superstructure and needless infighting characteristic of too much of New Left thought.

Scialabba is the best kind of radical. He wants open communication, no lying or pettifoggery. He wants us to remember the little guy but he's not sentimental about him nor overly optimistic about improving his -and her- lot. He's got marvelous antennae for phoniness, whether in positions or language. You won't always agree with his conclusions when you've read his essays, but he will make you think -better, more clearly. That has to be a Good Thing.

I have a hard time reading small text. So be warned. Vision-impared readers make sure you have a magnifying glass. Other than that, the language is meaty and deep. This is not for the light reader who's into bestsellers.

High density, highly abstract writing that makes little attempt to engage intelligent readers who have something other than a Ph.D. in philosophy. A fine cure for insomnia.