Introduction: Twentieth-Century Writers As Public Intellectuals‪.‬

Public intellectuals operate within a field of forces marked by multiple tensions, including those between theory and practice, between elitism and mass appeal, and between academic specialization and generalist inclusiveness. As for the latter tension, although intellectuals usually excel in one specific discipline, be it literary criticism, law, science, medicine, or creative writing, they often transcend the narrow confines of any specialty by addressing a general audience about matters of economics, education, science, and power politics--fields in which they have not been formally trained. People like Bill Moyers, who seem to be comfortable discussing topics ranging from anthropology to literature to technology, remind one that a full-fledged public intellectual needs to be not only media savvy but multidisciplinary to boot. However, since more and more public intellectuals have in recent decades affiliated themselves with an academic institution or think tank, and since specialization has become such a necessary condition for professional advancement and promotion in academia, the knowledgeable generalist who can establish connections between disparate fields and produce valuable insights based on synthetic and holistic thinking is on the retreat. The consequence of the gradual rise of the specialist intellectual at the expense of the generalist all-rounder is, according to Richard Posner, a decline in the quality of public intellectualism. Indeed, Posner argues in Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline (2001) that "the public protects itself against the high variance and low average quality of public-intellectual work mostly by not taking it very seriously.... The academic public intellectual has little power" (388, 393).