Henry A. Kissinger, the top intellectual on Richard A. Posner's list, which was compiled from Internet hits.
Picture credit:John Decker for The New York Times
Posted on 01/19/2002 5:31:34 AM PST by Pharmboy
January 19, 2002
Henry A. Kissinger, the top intellectual on Richard A. Posner's list, which was compiled from Internet hits.
Picture credit:John Decker for The New York Times
Things are not looking good for Isaac Rosenfeld. As a piece of intellectual property, Rosenfeld, one of the smaller lights of modern Jewish literature and cultural criticism, has always tended to fluctuate in value from footnote to fat paragraph. But investors holding large quantities of Rosenfeld stock may want to unload. As table 5.1 in Richard A. Posner's "Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline" (Harvard University Press, 2001) shows, Rosenfeld's name turns up only 89 times when entered on Google, a popular Internet search engine. A search of the Lexis-Nexis database, which covers journals and newspapers, elicits a mere eight mentions.
That leaves only one performance category, scholarly citations. The numbers are dismaying. While robust performers like the French philosopher Michel Foucault showed more than 13,000 scholarly citations this quarter, Rosenfeld could manage only two, putting him, as a public intellectual, in the same league as stocks like Enron and Lucent.
Many readers have protested that the value of thinkers like Isaac Rosenfeld cannot be quantified. But they are wrong, and stupid, too, according to Mr. Posner, just like most of the public intellectuals discussed in the 400- plus pages of his book. The marketplace in ideas is no mere phrase to Mr. Posner, an alarmingly prolific federal judge, author and scholar who has decided that the traffic in opinions can be usefully described in economic terms, with numerical values assigned to dozens of opinion- mongers who offer their wares in the great media bazaar.
The book has been catnip to journalists and intellectual scorekeepers, who have been bickering over the standings for weeks. The ups and downs of American intellectuals, especially the New York variety, fascinates the more bookish part of the population in the same way that college football rankings or Baseball Hall of Fame elections mesmerize sports fans. Was Lionel Trilling overrated? Did Robert Worshaw, a brilliant interpreter of American film, ever get his due? Is Lester Thurow past his prime? Can Dinesh D'Souza and Francis Fukuyama stage a rally and prove they are more than one-shot wonders?
Those are the questions that furrow high brows, especially in the current media-saturated era, when a horde of public intellectuals bark on talkfests from "Crossfire" to "Hardball" to "Larry King Live" to "Charlie Rose." America has entered the expansion-league phase of public intellectualism. The Internet and cable television now offer no end of forums for the exchange of opinions. As a result, intellectual-watchers must now keep up with dozens, if not hundreds, of new talking heads, experts, frustrated academics and think-tank fish.
Anyone who expresses himself or herself in an accessible way on matters of general public concern meets Mr. Posner's definition of a public intellectual. That's a potentially enormous pool, and as he sees it, a complete lack of quality control almost guarantees that anyone who wants to be a public intellectual can be. It's probably a good thing that Irving Howe did not live to see the day.
Mr. Posner defines "public intellectual" and explains the workings of the intellectual marketplace, complete with a discussion of supply and demand as it applies to ideas and predictions. But the only section of the book that really interests most people — and the one that is causing all the fuss — is a thin, succulent layer of lists and tables that allow readers to see who's up and who's down in the public-intellectual stock market.
Mr. Posner, in an attempt to quantify the market penetration of intellectuals both living and dead, fed a large assortment of names into his computer, using Google to enumerate Web-page hits, Lexis-Nexis to search popular journals and newspapers, and Science Citation Index, Social Sciences Citation Index and Arts and Humanities Citation Index to sift through scholarly publications.
His findings, an intellectual's list of who's in and who's out, has been keeping the natterati busy — especially the already notorious Table 5.3, a list of the top 100 public intellectuals, ranked by media mentions. Henry A. Kissinger leads the list, with 12,570 mentions from 1995 to 2000. No. 100 is George J. Stigler (a Nobel winner in economic science, just in case you didn't know). Mr. Posner himself checks in at a very respectable No. 70.
He recognizes the conceptual problems with the tables. For one thing, a political figure like Mr. Kissinger is often mentioned in connection with his political career, not his pronouncements on foreign policy. Similarly, it cannot be possible that Bernard Shaw ranks 17th on the list by virtue of his opinions on economics and politics.
Many readers will also scratch their heads over the bizarre sight of Sidney Blumenthal's name in the top 10, between the economist Robert B. Reich and the legal scholar Arthur R. Miller. When did Mr. Blumenthal transmigrate from journalist and White House aide to public intellectual? The answer probably lies in the Monica Lewinsky affair, which kept him in the papers day after day.
Turn to table 5.1, and many oddities leap off the page. William Shawn a public intellectual? This editor of The New Yorker, famously reclusive, published only one article in his lifetime. He made fewer public statements than Garbo. Timothy Leary seems a little unusual, to say the least, as a candidate for the list. Was it simply to humiliate John Gray, the writer on liberalism, that his name was fed into the computer? It turned up precisely zero Web hits. Almost anyone can generate one hit, simply by virtue of being in the telephone book or having a pulse.
My own perplexity at the list starts with the concept of mention. Not all mentions are created equal. To return to the hapless Isaac Rosenfeld, a Google search turns up the following, in no particular order: a reader who wants to know how Saul Bellow and Rosenfeld came up with a Yiddish translation of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"; a news release from the University of Oregon about a forthcoming lecture on Jewish literature in the 20th century; an advertisement for a recording of Rosenfeld`s short story "King Solomon," read by William Shatner; and a Web page devoted to "great quotes to inspire, empower and motivate you to live the life of your dreams and become the person you always wanted to be."
The only thing missing was an offer to "Create for you, ISAAC ROSENFELD, your own family coat of arms!" As an experiment designed to give a sense of proportion to the debate, I fed two names into Google. Nostradamus accounted for 220,000 mentions on the Web. And Mortimer Snerd generated a healthy 18,200.
Some of the numbers require further study. How can it be that the economist Gary Becker generates a mere 494 media mentions, but 5,329 Web hits? Similarly, James Baldwin shows up 2,019 times in the media but 22,592 times on the Web. How is it possible that Rachel Carson generates twice the number of Web hits as Jacques Derrida? And what can account for the phenomenal staying power of Albert Camus, a titan with 32,370 Web appearances? I think I know why André Malraux and Ivan Illich fare so poorly. In the book, their names are spelled Malreaux and Ilych.
But the numbers, in the end, do not matter much anyway. As Mr. Posner takes great pains to demonstrate, the intellectual marketplace may involve heavy trading, but it often offers very little value. Just like your Uncle Max, public intellectuals often have the bad habit of spouting off on subjects they know little about; cannot stop themselves from offering erroneous predictions; lack the fundamental reasoning skills to construct or understand an argument; and have little or no influence on events or even public opinion.
Mr. Posner offers no solution to the problems he sets forth. But one model for economic intervention does suggest itself, a kind of farm-subsidy program that might encourage opinion workers to cut back their output and generate a higher-quality product. When a George Will — No. 3 — feels the need to opine, he could call a toll-free number and receive credit at the nearest bar, redeemable for a period of 24 hours. Then, as most Americans do, he could sit down, order a beer and complain all night about baseball's shrinking strike zone. This may not be the solution, but it's a start.
Ok, here's a start: Both Hayeks (Frederick and Salma)
Why was I unsurprised when I heard that?
As the article relates, "But they are wrong, and stupid, too, according to Mr. Posner."
What an arrogant little intellectual-climber.
Surprise, surprise. FYI he is also on the top of my s**t list.
It's hard to give credibility to any of these debauched New Yorkie 'elite' publications and their minions. Witness how the NYT favorite historians are dropping like flies because of their now revealed plagiarism. These New Yorkies have no principles.
Yeah,but I thought Spinks would be a better fit on any list that included Kissinger. I never thought that guy was smart enough to come in out of the rain,and never could figure out why anybody thought any different. Must have been the glasses and accent.
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