William Deresiewicz ruminates:
An intellectual is not an expert, and a public intellectual is not an expert who condescends to speak to a wider audience about her area of expertise. An intellectual is a generalist, an autodidact, a thinker who wanders and speculates. As Jack Miles puts it in a stellar essay on the question, "It takes years of disciplined preparation to become an academic. It takes years of undisciplined preparation to become an intellectual."
Public also smacks of publicity, of the new apparatus of celebrity that turns scholars into showmen and makes pundits out of hacks.
Susan Sontag, already halfway towards a parody of the intellectual in the older sense—mobile in her moral positions, more a transmitter than originator of ideas, and not much of a writer at all—pioneered this kind of self-promotion. Now we have the likes of Cornel West, doing his shtick all over the airwaves.
But celebrity, like the institutionalization that comes with being an academic, is inimical to the intellectual’s mission: questioning the mental status quo. The more a part of things you are—the more embedded in the machinery of status and position—the harder that is to do.
Indeed. Which is why Hitch's commitment to posthumous writing remains – literally in my case – the gold standard to which this blog aspires.
(Photo: Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama greets his supporters as scholar Cornel West stands next to him during 'A Night at the Apollo' fundraiser event at the Apollo Theater November 29, 2007 in the Harlem neighborhood in New York City. By Hiroko Masuike/Getty Images)
The Dish 