Intellectual Bashing

Russell Jacoby just reviewed Thomas Sowell's Intellectuals and Society at http://chronicle.com/article/Skewering-Intellectuals/64113/. The review and the comments it elicited aroused my curiosity, so I read the first chapter on amazon.com to see how he sets up his argument.

While I can't quite endorse Jacoby's review based on this limited reading, Sowell's analysis appears to suffer from a number of potential critical thinking errors.

First, he defines intellectuals in a curious way. He argues that intellectuals is an occupational career for people whose career requires them to deal with ideas (Sowell 2). Then, in a footnote, he observes that many intellectuals do not earn their living from selling their ideas. This is strange because you have an economist defining an occupation in terms that do not include compensation for the work they do. Nor do intellectuals receive ownership interests in their ideas either (as an entrepreneur would who opens a business). So, they don't economically benefit if they are right, nor do they loose money if they are wrong. What they can do is benefit from their copyrights, trademarks and/or patents!

There must be some reason for this odd occupational definition of being an intellectual and this leads us to the second difficulty. By page five, Sowell wants to examine "Ideas and their Accountability." And this is where the critical thinking errors begin to multiply. In this section, Sowell wants to create a system for evaluating the quality of the ideas generated by these intellectuals and make judge intellectuals whether there ideas are "right."

And this is where Sowell has made his greatest analytical error (This may not shoot down his general critique of intellectuals but his methodology for doing so). By most accounts, the measure of an intellectual is his or her effect, not whether he or she is correct. This is even more true by the kinds of economic analyses Sowell tends to favor and employ. Intellectuals, even the most Marxist of intellectuals, do not own their ideas but they do write books and essays, make films, give lectures, and teach classes. From what I understand of traditional market economics, economics ought to frame intellectuals as in the business of selling the material products that result from their ideas, much like Walmart is in the business of selling low-cost goods. While Sowell wants to define them as non-market actors (hence his strange definition based in the language of occupation), most if not all market intellectuals are selling a brand. Books by Foucault, Derrida, and even his beloved Milton Friedman mostly sell because of the brand these guys (or their admirers) have created, not because of their truth. One would think that a free marketer like Sowell would understand this!

What I find ironic here is economists are typically not all that bothered by mistaken judgments as they are part of the market mechanisms. If a company errs in their understanding of the market and plans to sell a product at too high of a price, free marketers don't mind if they go out of business. Or conversely, if a business misunderstands what the public wants, they ought to go out of business even if there product is good. Consider the case of the mom-and-pop hardware store getting run out of business by a big box store, like Home Depot. Free marketers will argue that customers merely preferred lower prices to personal customer service or something like that.

The issue that really appears to be bothering Sowell is that intellectuals, particularly left intellectuals continue to make movies, write books, and give lectures even if many of their central arguments turn out to be wrong. He seems to be suggesting that the market is wrong and should not be purchasing their books. But how can markets be wrong? If you are a free market economist, they are not. Perhaps the market values the moral outrage, the theoretical language, and hearing tales of corporate greed and injustice.

In response to this apparent failure of the market to act rationally, Sowell trots out the truth standard as some sort of verification mechanism. The problem with this methodology (like much economic analysis) is you cannot evaluate a prediction about the future until the future arrives and you know all the contextual data. By then, it is too late to change course. (Consider how many economists -right or left- predicted it in its full misery). It is this point that Jacoby really grabs onto. What Jacoby and Sowell seem to miss is that intellectuals do a lot more than offer predictions about the future. Sowell appears to reduce intellectuals to mere political pundits. Most intellectuals ideas are way too nuanced to get fully enacted even if they can provide some of the general scaffolding for government action. So, what do intellectuals do best? Intellectuals ask provocative questions and examine our moral responsibility. I think many intellectuals leave the question of verification and experimentation to others (whom Sowell does not define as intellectuals).

Now, I am not disagreeing with Sowell's observation that intellectuals have been wrong a lot and those errors probably have social consequences. He is probably correct about this and, who knows, he might even be correct that left intellectuals are wrong more frequently than right intellectuals. However, this cannot save the form of his argument. Intellectuals are both market actors and interested in generating more ideas and in evaluating the morality of our current habits and social structures. We cannot merely evaluate them as intellectuals based on their predictions about the future (especially if you promote free market economics like Sowell).

As for Jacoby, I think he too readily takes the bait and tries to refute Sowell's attack on past left positions. For a supposed leftist, I also thought he missed an obvious opportunity to explain why someone like Antonio Gramsci relied on the figure of the intellectual as an antidote to the rise of modern capitalism and totalitarian dictatorships. I have not read his Prison Notebooks in a long time, but I always thought this metaphor was to remind workers that they were not mere cogs but human beings with minds and morality.

Sowell's form of economic thinking seems to find wisdom and morality in markets but not individuals, certainly not "experts or intellectuals". As a result, he appears to want to severely curtail the rhetoric of wisdom and morality in political discussions of markets and/or government action. I would think that Jacoby would have been more effective if he stayed focused on this disagreement with Sowell (are markets or individuals the locus of moral insight and wisdom?) and would have identified the real consequences in Sowell's efforts to rely on his brand of economic thought to evaluate the work of intellectuals.