Thinking, Public and Private: Intellectuals in the Time of the Public

By Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft

"Since “intellectual” already carried a sense of publicness, Jacoby’s term “public intellectual” could be seen as either semantically redundant or else as an effort to amplify one meaning contained within it, as if that meaning had gradually died down between the 1890s and the 1980s and needed a signal boost. Such amplification could also be read as a sign of anxiety, an uncertainty about the actual social role intellectuals play, or should play. (A slip from the descriptive to the normative is practically inevitable in writings on public intellectual life.) An alternative is to read the term’s semantic doubling in specifically national terms, perhaps as an American insistence that intellectual life take on democratic qualities of accessibility, or pragmatic qualities of effectiveness."