Letters to Power: Public Advocacy Without Public Intellectuals

Chapter 1 Minor Political Rhetoric, Major Western Thinkers

It seems to me that we are now at a point where the function of the specific intellectual needs to be reconsidered. Reconsidered but not abandoned, despite the nostalgia of some for the great “universal” intellectuals. —michel foucault The Usable Past When did “intellectual” become a noun? Isolated instances of the term date from 1652, but it did not enter into popular usage until the 1890s. The catalyst seems to have been the Dreyfus Affair—a decadelong political scandal surrounding the wrongful conviction of a Jewish artillery captain, Alfred Dreyfus. Among its defining moments was the 13 January 1898 publication of Émile Zola’s open letter to the president of France, in which the renowned novelist accused military officials of anti-Semitism and obstruction of justice. Support for Zola’s letter arrived a day later in a “Manifesto of the Intellectuals” signed by 1,200 artists, writers, and academics, all of whom, in an act of solidarity, now identified themselves as “intellectuals.” It was the radical political rhetoric of these educated elites—more than their artistic, literary, and scholarly achievements—that crystallized the social category of “the intellectual.” Much has been written about the subsequent history of intellectuals in conflict with public authorities. But the history of these conflicts before the Dreyfus Affair has not been sufficiently traced. This book attempts to provide 1 minor political rhetoric, major western thinkers McCormick_01.indd 1 9/21/11 11:58 AM such a tracing. It is at once a genealogy of learned advocates prior to Zola and the Dreyfusards; an inventory of the persuasive techniques, resistant practices, and ethical sensibilities on which they relied; and, to this extent, a recovery of their status as rhetorically skilled and morally inclined political actors. My aim is neither to exhaust nor even to delimit the political tradition in which these educated elites participate. Instead, I attempt to bring several of this tradition’s key moments into alignment with one another, and in so doing to arrive at a constellation of situations and strategies in which to reenvision the political potential of today’s learned men and women. At issue in the following chapters, then, is not a comprehensive historical survey, but a version of the past that is useful to learned advocates in the present. The utility of this past is nowhere more apparent than in today’s colleges and universities. From Russell Jacoby’s classic lament for The Last Intellectuals to Richard Posner’s more recent eulogy for Public Intellectuals, scholars have accused late-modern academics of relinquishing much of their former authority, especially in the realm of public affairs.1 So much authority, in fact, that many now doubt the ability of American academic culture to sustain anything like “the intellectual”—a political identity that continues to derive its meaning from open and often radical opposition to the state. Although certainly a cause for concern, the scarcity of intellectuals among today’s academics is also a challenge to explore alternate, more elusive forms of political intelligence. And many of these forms, as we shall see, await discovery in ancient, medieval, and modern traditions of learned advocacy. Only by venturing beyond the historical and conceptual limits of “the intellectual,” I argue, can we begin to address the political predicament of late-modern academics. In service to this argument, the following chapters focus on the political and theoretical writings of four renowned scholars: the Roman Stoic Seneca the Younger, the late-medieval feminist Christine de Pizan, the key Enlightenment thinker Immanuel Kant, and the Christian anti-philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. What separates these educated elites from other figures in the history of ideas is also what connects them to late-modern academics: their use of epistolary rhetoric as a semipublic form of address in which to contest, without directly challenging, established figures of authority. Anticipating much of today’s online advocacy, in which educated elites have only begun to participate, their letters help us understand the economy of personal and public address at work in existing relations of power, suggesting that the art of lettered protest—like letter-writing itself—involves appealing to diverse, and often strictly virtual, audiences. As the public sphere continues to dissolve into the blogosphere, few modes of political contention could be more relevant to American academics. 2 letters to power McCormick_01.indd 2 9/21/11 11:58 AM Seneca perfected this subtle form of dissent in a...