Last Intellectual

In 1997, writing in the journal Contemporary Sociology, Russell Jacoby passed along the pithy advice a literary agent once gave him. “Put ‘Intellectuals’ in your book title,” he was told, “and kiss sales good-bye.” Jacoby ignored the advice, or defied it, and wrote The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe, published twenty years ago this fall. The book did well, going into a second printing within weeks. It remains in print and continues to produce cultural effects—most of them indirect and densely mediated, for its argument has long since circulated much further than the book itself.
That is one way of putting it. Another would be to say that, after two decades, The Last Intellectuals is a classic: that is, a work more often cited than read. A thumbnail version of recent cultural history has become familiar from its pages: Once, we are told, a hardy species of freelance thinker roamed the landscape of the American mind. This breed was independent, fiercely so. It practiced social and cultural criticism but never used jargon, and its accessible manner won a large audience. It prospered until not much later than the 1950s. Indeed, it is possible to speak of that decade as a kind of golden age.
But then something happened. More particularly, the 1960s happened, and the 1970s— an era of disintegrating consensus, of proliferating theoretical schemata, of perverse refusals to follow the guiding example of one’s elders. Smart young people decided not to write well. They used jargon like jouissance and the incommensurabilty of discourses. (Worse, they seemed to take jouissance from the incommensurability of discourses.) They sought tenure and tenure alone. They built careers and talked only to one another, while construing their own texts as radically democratic in spirit, somehow, and subversive of the established order.
And so something disappeared from American discourse. The give-and-take of serious discussion was damaged. Ideas did circulate, but only in narrow channels. This situation was unhealthy. It enfeebled the public’s critical intelligence while doing considerable damage to the ideas themselves; they became inbred and started to grow in peculiar shapes.