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chapter 3 Historians as Public Intellectuals What’s great about writing history is that everyone likes a good story, that academic jargon can often be kept to a minimum, and that a big readership, of a book or a blog, is rarely sniffed at as pandering to the crowd. Many historians find an audience far larger than that of their own professional discipline. Fulfilling such ambitions may be far easier today than two or three decades ago, because even if newspapers and journals of opinion are struggling, the Web, the blogosphere, and all the other social media have opened the door for just about anyone to be a pundit or a professor with worldwide reach. Editors and other gatekeepers have lost a lot of their veto power, their journalistic prestige, and their financial clout. With a little moxie, just about anyone can get thousands of people to read their stuff on virtually any conceivable subject—and sometimes make a living at it. Does this make for an abundance of “public intellectuals”? Ever since Russell Jacoby published The Last Intellectuals in 1987, academics of my generation have aspired to fill the vacuum Jacoby so provocatively identified.1 Unlike an earlier generation of intellectuals—Dwight Macdonald, Mary McCarthy, Daniel Bell, and I. F. Stone are prime examples—who wrote for the educated public, often without an academic pedigree, today’s thinkers, so ran the Jacoby indictment, have flocked to the universities, where the politics of tenure loom larger than the culture of politics. Too many intellectuals wrote only for each other in an increasingly narrow disciplinary vein, thus abdicating moral responsibility and cultural influence. In their place came a “public sphere” filled with facile journalists, think-tank policy mavens, and celebrity authors. As one might expect, conservative writers and publicists thrived in this atmosphere, if only because they generally had far fewer qualms than those on the left when it came to partisan policy analysis and culture-war polemics. Jacoby’s charge was overstated. True, the public intellectuals who seemed so prominent in the 1930s and 1940s had not originally come out of the academy. But in the postwar years, the universities, including the humanities, proliferated ; offered more posts to aspiring scholars; and for the most part dropped Lichtenstein_ContestofIdeas_TEXT.indd 38 5/24/13 8:04 AM Historians as Public Intellectuals 39 the genteel anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism, as well as the overt racism and institutional sexism, that had barred the gate to so many of the wrong sort. History departments all across the country were now home to men and women who had migrated to academia and to historical work precisely because it seemed the discipline most subversive of existing pieties and, if done right, a form of literature that might actually inspire others to action. Many in my New Left generation had a dusty copy of Edmund Wilson’s To the Finland Station stashed somewhere on their back shelves. More relevant yet was C. Vann Woodward’s The Strange Career of Jim Crow, which, when first published in 1955, put at the service of the civil rights movement and its vision of a desegregated South the authority and expertise of the nation’s most distinguished historian of that same region. And if C. Wright Mills had been abandoned by most mainstream sociologists, he remained an icon among historians like myself who sought to move beyond postwar pluralism in our quest for an understanding of where power and prestige lay within the American body politic.2 But it was not just that Mills, Woodward, and Wilson enjoyed a large audience. Rather, their oeuvre carried a moral weight that they projected onto everything they wrote, even when their expertise did not extend quite so far. Their voices enjoyed respect in part because they spoke at a time when lay Americans, including those on the left, took for granted a kind of cultural hierarchy that venerated the voice and work of those who wrote for Partisan Review, who taught at Columbia and other elite schools, or whose books appeared on the New York Times best-seller list. There are still writers and academics who enjoy such prestige: the late Tony Judt and Christopher Hitchens come to mind; likewise Garry Wills and Paul Krugman, and among historians Eric Foner, Gordon Wood, Robert Darnton, and perhaps Michael Kazin, now co-editor of Dissent. Among the younger historical set, Jill Lepore writes insightful essays for the New Yorker, while Timothy Snyder’s morally fraught commentaries...

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