What Is the Intellectual’s Duty to Society?

“In his new book, Hope & Scorn: Eggheads, Experts, and Elites in American Politics, historian Michael J. Brown adeptly probes questions such as these as he delves into ‘the uncertain role of intellectuals in a democracy.'”

What is the rightful role of the intellectual in a democratic society? In a polity premised on human equality and committed to majority rule, what exactly are intellectuals, those peculiar elites committed to the life of the mind and the health of the body politic, to do? What ought their fellow citizens allow them to do? At what point does such elites’ ability to drive public conversations and exert control over the levers of governmental and cultural power begin to run contrary to democratic principles?

In his new book, Hope & Scorn: Eggheads, Experts, and Elites in American Politics, Rochester Institute of Technology historian Michael J. Brown adeptly probes questions such as these as he delves into “the uncertain role of intellectuals in a democracy.” By examining a swath of post-World War II debates regarding the rightful role of intellectuals in American democracy, Brown’s history sketches out a number of potential paths and pitfalls of intellectual engagement in a democratic polity like ours. In doing so, Brown, unfortunately, does not focus enough on the most important thing an intellectual can do within a liberal democracy: simply to speak the truth as he or she sees it.

Questions of anti-democratic, intellectual elitism are important and worth reckoning with, as Brown does throughout the entirety of Hope & Scorn. However, excessive focus on the potential anti-democratic dangers of intellectualism elides the fact that in contemporary American political life, the real danger we confront is not the overpowering of democracy by intellectual elites but, rather, the quashing of said elites by democracy. By speaking the truth as they see it, intellectuals can serve as models for the independence of thought, reason, and logic that are the markers of sound, reflective citizenship. Intellectuals can nudge their fellow citizens—through both implicit example and explicit argumentation—out of reflexive partisanship, emotive politics, or absence from political deliberation and towards political engagement that couples moral principle with reason and prudence. Understood as such, robust intellectualism and democratic equality might not be at odds after all.

The first subject of Brown’s postwar case studies, Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter, was most attuned to the danger that mass democracy could pose to the life of the mind. In Hofstadter’s view, writes Brown, popular democracy “made intellect vulnerable in America. Its values were at odds with intellectual values, and its growth had often presaged intellect’s decline.” For Hofstadter, intellectualism consisted of critical thinking and the freedom to go wherever the mind may lead—values that he pitted against the anti-intellectual, group think-prone, emotion-ridden democratic masses. Admittedly, Hofstadter’s conception of the relationship between intellectualism and democracy—a relationship marked above all by tension—could have “elitist implications,” as Brown notes.