THE LAST INTELLECTUALS
American Culture in the Age of Academe
Russell Jacoby
New York: Basic Books, 1987
290 pp., $18.95
During the 1970s, Russell Jacoby was perhaps the most vehement advocate in this country of the work (then obscure and largely untranslated) of the German neo-Marxist social thinker Theodor Adorno, one of the principal figures associated with the so-called Frankfurt School. Indeed, Jacoby's advocacy went so far, according to the historian Martin Jay, "that he emulated many of [Adorno's] stylistic mannerisms, [and] soon became his major defender against all attacks from the right or left." Adorno, of course, is best is best known for the exasperating opacity and difficulty of his prose, an expository strategy he quite consciously adopted as a means of baffling popularizers and middlebrows, and keeping them off his turf; "the advocates of communicability," he scolded, are "traitors to what they communicate." The appeal to "common sense" was a mere reinforcement of late-capitalist ideology, disguised as "reality." So firmly aloof and incurably snobbish a German mandarin would, despite the extremity of his views, seem an unlikely hero for a young American radical intellectual. But not the young Russell Jacoby. Jay's description of him in those days suggests how zealous was his embrace of the orphic Adorno: "intransigently insisting" on the revealed truths of Adorno's knotty texts, Jacoby "quickly became notorious for his sharply worded critiques of all attempts to make sense of the Frankfurt School's work in less glowing terms" than his own.
Nearly two decades have passed, and yet Jacoby seems to have lost none of his appetite for sectarian disputation, especially within the small world of the radical Left. But judging from The Last Intellectuals, the principal objects of his ire has shifted since the days he was cheerleading for the inaccessible delights of Adorno. Now, it seems, the chief sin afflicting contemporary American intellectuals lies in their inability and unwillingness to address a general audience, to write in clear and effective English prose, to be what he calls "public intellectuals." So much for the doctrine that communicability equals intellectual treason; now, it appears, we need precisely the popularizers that Adorno loathed. If this book did nothing else, it would deserve at least one cheer for reminding us of the intellectual and moral perils of obscuration, the very same perils George Orwell so splendidly set forth in his essay "Politics and the English Language." It would be an even more instructive book if Jacoby admitted that he had changed his mind, and he approached his present subject in a humbler tone.
Unfortunately, the book is not content to offer sober reminders. Zealots change only their religions, not their temperaments. Thus a potentially important book, one that makes many useful points about the weaknesses and debilities of our intellectual life, becomes hopelessly mired in the peculiar assumptions and intramural politics of the far Left--an unfortunate development that, oddly enough, serves to confirm part of the book's gloomy thesis. Jacoby laments the fact that his old political allies from the salad days of the sixties have entrenched themselves in the academy, becoming successful, tenured, grant-chasing professors. Precisely the same observation has been made, from an entirely different perspective, by such writers as Stephen Balch, Herbert London,
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