Preface, 2003 Introduction Part One: General Theoretical and Empirical Analysis 1. Setting the Stage 2. The Market for Public Intellectuals 3. Care and Insight 4. Prediction and Influence 5. More Public, Less Intellectual Part Two: Genre Studies 6. The Literary Critic as Public Intellectual 7. Political Satire 8. The Jeremiah School 9. The Public Philosopher 10. The Public Intellectual and the Law Conclusion: Improving the Market Epilogue, 2003 Acknowledgments Index
Richard A. Posner retired as a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in 2017. He was previously a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School.
Posner is, despite it all, a marvel. He is hyperactive like Harold
Bloom, audacious like Christopher Hitchens and a practical man of
the world like Alan Greenspan. About how many Americans can that be
said? So he deserves attention no matter how infuriating he can be.
Moreover, he charges gaily into the fray, voraciously aware of his
own superiority.
*New York Times Book Review*
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.
*New York Times*
In Public Intellectuals Posner turns his poison pen on scores of
public intellectuals, including the likes of Noam Chomsky, Edward
Luttwak, and Paul Ehrlich, those "talking heads" who disseminate
their thoughts to the wider public on issues of political and
ideologically import. Of particular interest are environmental
decay, the darker side of realpolitik, the Monica Lewinsky scandal,
former President Bill Clinton's impeachment, and the deadlocked
2000 presidential election. Through the application of market
economics and statistical analysis, Posner first identifies the
seemingly endless supply of and demand for public intellectuals to
pontificate on these matters and their various genres...He also
highlights the fact that market discipline is sorely
lacking...[Posner's] marshaling of arguments, combined with his
copious footnotes and extensive source material, makes for an
engaging and thought-provoking read.
*Christian Science Monitor*
[Posner] writes faster than you can read. And he's a public
intellectual in the specialized sense he describes and decries in
his book: a "critical commentator addressing a nonspecialist
audience on matters of broad public concern"...Judge Posner's main
argument is that "public intellectuals are often careless with
facts and rash in prediction." They lack, moreover, "insight and
distinction, the filling of some gap in intellectual
space"...Posner's writing is indeed limpid and muscular, but it's
grounded (the celebrity-intellectuals tables notwithstanding) in
substantial evidence carefully marshaled into showy and sometimes
pedantic footnotes. His conclusions follow from his fully
disclosed, if controversial, analytical methodology.
*New York Observer*
In Public Intellectuals...Posner trashes fellow smarties who
expound on public issues outside their expertise. He says they
abandon rigor when they write general interest books and op-ed
pieces, publish open letters, and speak on television. They are in
decline, he says, because more of them than ever have safe jobs as
professors, protecting them from the consequences of bad
predictions and stupid proclamations...Posner fires both left and
right, nearly always hitting the mark.
*Business Week*
Richard Posner is a polymath, a one-man think tank, the grown-up
version of the kid who always sat in the front row and knew the
answer to the teacher's questions...The latest of his countless
books is an occasionally insightful, often maddening effort to kill
off all rival claimants to the throne.
*Wall Street Journal*
It is an intense and often angry book, a high-spirited, richly
provocative moral diatribe against trivialization of the national
culture...This is an intense and studious book--brilliant with
energy, commitment and proper zeal...Posner's mind is so acute and
often so surgically ironic that his prose can be delightful.
*Baltimore Sun*
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