The Perspective Law of the Ego: Public Intellectuals and the Economy of Diffuse Returns
The average academic's hopes of immortality rest on nothing more substantial than a few footnotes in the work of former students. The more successful scholar may linger longer in the texts of followers or pedagogues, but the public influence and longevity of their work is generally muted and short-lived. Judged by the conventional criteria of authorship and its impact upon the republic of letters or public intellectual sphere, scholarship is neither a route to metaphysical survival nor a mode of any significant or direct effect upon the politics of the present. For some time now the academy has been blamed, often eloquently and wittily, sometimes in more portentous and acerbic tones, for the demise of an intellectual public sphere. It is blamed for the pedantry and obscurity of specialized disciplines that make no discernible contribution to the perpetuation of the classical tradition or to the debates over policy and law that define the media's coverage of contemporary politics. A recent and intriguingly paradoxical contribution to the litany of lament comes in the form of Richard Posner's economic analysis of the decline in quality and value of public intellectual work and its increasing insignificance in the public domain.1 His argument, in nuce, is that the market places no relevant constraints upon the credence goods that tenured public intellectuals heedlessly throw out from the myriad sites of popular media enunciation. Not only are there no costs incurred by getting it wrong, there is a premium upon outrageous and hence inaccurate claims, wild predictions as to the outcome of real-time events, and a virtue is made of travelling far outside the boundaries of disciplinary knowledge or native common sense. Posner himself is a curious mixture of academic, judge, and pundit and his work has been shredded by public intellectual reviewers who, defensively or otherwise, ridiculed his methodology and dismissed his conclusions. Judge or not, Posner had infracted two laws. The first is Nietzsche's perspective law of the ego: what is close to the ego seems inordinately large, and to the detriment of perspective there can be no doubt that Posner's highly polemical and frequently ad hominem text engages issues that are close to him. The second and related law is that of hierarchical preferment which Bourdieu, author of an earlier and arguably more rigorous survey of similar themes, formulated as 'the law which tends to make any classificatory utterance liable to betray the position of its author in the series