Fifty-two years ago, Noam Chomsky published an article in the New York Review of Books on the responsibility of intellectuals. He rebuked intellectuals for the way they supported and justified the Vietnam War. And that they did so despite having the social privilege and influence to push American power in different directions.
With respect to the responsibility of intellectuals, today we live in a different world. I’ll argue that it’s invisibility that defines the intellectual now. Whether intellectuals defend and justify American atrocities is, in a way, beside the point. Because American power no longer relies on intellectuals in the ways it once did.
From there, I’ll sketch some thoughts about how to address this new world.
Chomsky’s Argument on Intellectuals
Chomsky’s a bit long winded. But his argument is relatively simple.
He takes as his first premise that intellectuals have a responsibility to tell the truth, to expose lies, and to analyze the actions of the powerful for their real causes and motives, among other responsibilities. They also have the access to power that’s necessary to do these things, including job security, social privileges, key positions within the institutional structures of American government and corporations, and the leisure time needed to conduct independent research.
However, intellectuals don’t take up this project. They distort the truth, ignore the abuses of the powerful, and use their work to justify atrocities around the world. That’s his second premise.
Hence, Chomsky’s rebuke. If intellectuals should act, and we find they can act, and they don’t act, that’s a problem.
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
Historian and noted Kennedy apologist Arthur Schlesinger is one of Chomsky’s lead examples. Chomsky documents an instance where Schlesinger suppressed information about the Bay of Pigs invasion, only to boast about it later.
This was but a lead-in to the invasion of Vietnam itself, where both Schlesinger and the New York Times suppressed information about the upcoming US escalation. In practice, they led the US public to believe that the invasion was a strategic opening for a peace settlement. The actual facts, as Chomsky argues, show that the US invasion in fact blocked any realistic route to peace.
The US public knows Schlesinger primarily as a historian of the Kennedy Administration. An intellectual who frames public perception of JFK. On Chomsky’s reading, he’s really more of a servant to power who corralled his influence into celebrity-like status. That makes him more of a lackey and sycophant.
Responsible Critics and Hysterical Critics
Chomsky points out that intellectuals set the frames of public debate. They’re enforcers of the boundaries of proper discussion. On Vietnam, he attributes to Irving Kristol a distinction between ‘hysterical criticism’ and ‘responsible criticism.’
The difference between hysterical and responsible criticism is that the former rejects the “fundamental political axiom” that the US has a right to extend its sphere of control and influence as far as it likes. The starting point of domestic discussion of US foreign policy is that the US can do what it needs to do to serve its interests. Responsible critics, on the other hand, accept the axiom. They merely object to the way the US carries it out in specific instances.
We can see this distinction as clearly now as we could 50 years ago. ‘Responsible critics’ complain about the number of deaths in Syria or Afghanistan. They nitpick at whether Juan Guaido is the right person to lead the coup in Venezuela. Only ‘hysterical critics’ argue that the US has no business invading Syria or Afghanistan. Only ‘hysterical critics’ argue that the US has no business backing coups in Honduras or Venezuela.
Intellectuals, according to Chomsky, invent this framing. And they provide to it a kind of intellectual veneer of legitimacy.
Chomsky’s Assumption
Chomsky argues on grounds of responsibility, access, and power. Intellectuals should act in part because they have access and power. And we all know you have to have the means and opportunity to do something before anyone can say you have the responsibility to do it. Ought implies can.
Chomsky assumes, of course, that intellectuals in fact do have such access and power. In 1967, the assumption was almost too obvious to state. If you looked at government, major corporations, major media organizations, etc., intellectuals were everywhere.
But what do we make of all this in a world where intellectuals lack access and power?
The Invisibility of Intellectuals
I think we live in that world.
Why?
Intellectuals in Government
First, intellectuals no longer routinely hold powerful positions. At least in the US. Let’s compare the administrations of John F. Kennedy to more recent ones. Among the nine members of JFK’s cabinet (minus the Postmaster General position, which was dropped from the cabinet in 1971), there were three professors (Dean Rusk, Robert McNamara, and Arthur Goldberg). Even among the other six, one was a journalist covering foreign policy (Robert F. Kennedy) and one edited an academic journal (Abraham Ribicoff).
By contrast, among the ten people who Trump originally nominated for similar positions (Health, Education, and Welfare is now two positions), none were professors. One, Andrew Puzder edited an academic journal. Trump’s cabinet is essentially a collection of business interests.
Lest one claim this is some kind of fluke, Obama’s cabinet doesn’t fare much better. Among ten officials, one was a professor (Robert Gates). And he became a professor after a career as CIA Director, not before.
The Career Prospects of Intellectuals
Second, the career and status of an academic is far more precarious than it was 50 years ago.
While the academic once occupied a cultural position as a high socioeconomic status, upper middle income professional, much like a doctor or lawyer, those days are largely gone. It has been at least a couple of decades since anyone could compare professors to doctors or (some) lawyers with a straight face.
Even humanities academics with good tenure track jobs are now at least a step lower. They’re now closer to moderate SES, middle income professionals. Much closer in status to, say, high school teachers than doctors or lawyers. The academics working in most non tenure track positions, especially adjunct positions, occupy a status much closer to what Guy Standing once called the ‘precariat’.
Non tenure track academics are clearly proletarians in class status. Even many tenure track academics, aside from department chairs, are arguably proletarians as well.
Universities increasingly replace tenure track positions with non tenure track ones. Whereas more than half of teaching staff were on the tenure track in the late 1960s, about 70% of staff are now non-tenure-track.
Universities hire non tenure track faculty particularly during periods of economic difficulty, such as the mid-1970s and late 2000s. But these are crimes of opportunity, not necessity. The goal of saving labor cost and breaking down faculty power is one universities pursue at all times. Not merely during times of economic difficulty.
Along with these attacks on labor power, universities rely on management staff and shut faculty out of shared governance processes. Again the goal is to marginalize faculty.
These efforts are all key to the proletarianization of academics, which is one part of why academics are now less likely to serve in positions of government or corporate power.
The Rise of Pseudo-Intellectuals as Replacement
Third, governments and corporations increasingly turn to non-academic and arguably pseudo-intellectual degree programs within universities to fill their powerful positions. This is why government officials, politicians, corporate managers, and even professors themselves are increasingly likely to have an MBA degree rather than a PhD.
The MBA, though, is a professional practitioners’ degree, not an academic one. It qualifies one to conduct various kinds of business administration within a neoliberal capitalist system. But that’s about it. It’s not a public service degree, and it certainly isn’t one we should expect to impart the skills needed to think through difficult political, moral, economic, and philosophical issues. That’s just not what it’s designed to do.
Admittedly the MBA is a bit outré at the moment. Enrollment is down in recent years. But we have to look at the longer term trend. Before about 2014, enrollment and programs flourished. And there are far more students and programs now than there were a few decades ago.
What is to be Done?
Given that intellectuals have neither the access not the power needed to do these things, they can’t have the responsibility Chomsky assigns them. They just can’t. You can’t be responsible for doing that which you’re unable to do.
And so that’s that. But I’ll leave you with a caveat: the statement only applies to intellectuals as a group. There are certain rare individual intellectuals who still have access and power. They can very well get to work.
Beyond that, given the proletarianization of academics, in particular, it’s time for workplace organizing. And that’s already happening in many places. Graduate students organize unions. I was a member of one as a graduate student. Existing unions help faculty organize across tenure lines.
So those are positive steps. As faculty become workers, in the same sense others are workers, they can organize as workers. And as intellectual workers with insight into particular social and historical conditions, they can make valuable contributions to workers’ movements.
