Intellectuals: An endangered species in the twenty-first century?

Abstract This article surveys the problems facing the existence of intellectuals in the twenty-first century by reflecting on the historical and conceptual conditions that have enabled them to flourish in the past but less so in recent times. The first part considers several strands of contemporary philosophical and social thought that, despite their progressive veneer, have served to undermine the legitimacy of the intellectual's role. This delegitimation is largely traceable to a scepticism about the existence of ideas that are simultaneously normative and manipulable. The second part deals with the rise of anti-intellectualism in philosophy and psychology in the twentieth century, focusing especially on the debates surrounding 'psychologism'. The third part examines what remains the most attractive expression of anti-intellectualism, namely, invisible-hand thinking and its late nineteenth-century transformation through the influence of statistics, evolution and epidemiology. In the conclusion, the main strands of the argument are drawn together in a sketch of an overall account of the rise and fall of the intellectual in the modern era. Finally, I provide one strategy for stemming the current tide of anti-intellectualism by reinterpreting the currently popular concept of 'heuristics'. Keywords: Intellectualsideologypsychologismheuristicsinvisible handsocial epidemic Notes Steve Fuller is Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick. He is best known as the founder of the interdisciplinary research programme of social epistemology. He is the author of nine books, most recently Kuhn vs Popper (Iconbooks, 2003) and The Intellectual (Iconbooks, 2004). He is currently completing two books: Re-Imagining Sociology (Sage, 2005) and The Philosophy of Science & Technology Studies (Routledge, 2005). In James's day, 'intellectualism' referred to a priori rationalism, an epistemology typically associated with Descartes but sometimes also Kant and Hegel, committed to the doctrine of innate ideas. For a pragmatist like James the main offence of intellectualism was its dogmatism in the face of experience. Nevertheless, the pragmatists, like the logical positivists and the Popperians in the twentieth century, retained a key feature of this dogmatism, namely, a principled resistance to default patterns of experience. However, the source of this resistance differed radically between James and the demonized 'intellectualists': for James it lay in a personal decision ('the will to believe', or 'convention', as the Viennese preferred) rather than the mind's pre-programming. This difference clearly has profound consequences for assigning fault for mismatches between the mind and reality: James (and the positivists and the Popperians) faults the decision-maker who is then burdened with arriving at a more effective means to achieve her ends, as opposed to simply saying that the actual facts are a corrupt version of an underlying truth that can be wished away through heroic idealization. At the risk of paradox, James's self-declared 'anti-intellectualism' thus upheld an 'intellectualist' approach to ideas, in the sense advocated here. See Fuller (2000: 266–80). Additional informationNotes on contributorsSteve Fuller Steve Fuller is Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick. He is best known as the founder of the interdisciplinary research programme of social epistemology. He is the author of nine books, most recently Kuhn vs Popper (Iconbooks, 2003) and The Intellectual (Iconbooks, 2004). He is currently completing two books: Re-Imagining Sociology (Sage, 2005) and The Philosophy of Science & Technology Studies (Routledge, 2005).