The Public Intellectual and the Ghostly Scholar
Fun with Online Polls: Hayekian Public Intellectuals Edition
How can the public even place a value on scholarship when it is inaccessible to them?
Posted by: JH | April 07, 2009 at 11:34 AM
JH makes an interesting point. Most scholarship (yesterday and today) is not intended for the public, and more often than not they find it unreadable. Scholars (qua scholars) talk among themselves -- that's the community of science, the community of scholars. And that's fine. It's the public intellectual who, ideally, interprets the scholarly research in ways that make more sense to the public.
By the way, having taught in two state undergraduate programs, I often joke -- though with seriousness, too -- that we often don't have a community of scholars in these programs, we have a community of committee members!
Posted by: Dave Prychitko | April 07, 2009 at 12:10 PM
I'm with JH on this. Academic scholarship is a closed shop and should rightfully be distrusted by the public. I just listened to a Douglass North lecture in which he says, "Everybody would like to have a monopoly, including us academics, more than anybody else, because, after all, a competitive world is very insecure world." He said it during his discussion of how elites try to restrict competition. One comment on the present post above in particular sounds like old (academic) money sneering at new (public intellectual) money, for reasons analogous to those mentioned by Douglass North.
Posted by: Chris | April 07, 2009 at 12:41 PM
Chris:
I don't agree with you that scholarship ought to be distrusted because it is done in the academic community. To move outside of economics, would your criticism apply to physicists, chemists, geologists, and so on who also appear to be doing research in a "closed shop" environment.
Posted by: Dave Prychitko | April 07, 2009 at 01:09 PM
Dave:
Maybe my understanding of the terms "scholarship" and "scholarly method" is anachronistic, but I didn't mean to include natural science.
I think natural science is a - no pun intended - naturally closed shop, as it's not something you can get into without being taught the (in some important respects non-arbitrary) basics. Economics, on the other hand, seems to be a kind of artificially closed shop, as the basics seems to be arbitrary or at least questionable, and the whole process of spending years playing with equations and fiddling around with utterly unrealistic models seems more like some strange, time-consuming and expensive initiation into a closed-off community than anything to be found in natural science.
Of course, I don't mean that all scholarship should be rejected. I was reacting to what seemed to be the implication by one or two people above that non-academic writing should be distrusted precisely because it is non-academic (at least in the case of economics). Peter has pointed out that I certainly misunderstood the comments.
But I still think economics is closed in a way that isn't healthy. An illustrative comparison here may be one between economics and programming. Programming is pretty complicated, but there are plenty of programmers respected by the programming community who are self-taught. The/a leading textbook on the ultra-academic Lisp programming language, for example, was written by someone with a degree in English lit. Can you imagine someone with a degree in English literature being taken seriously in the field of economics by the economics profession? Surely not. But I doubt Hayek on prices is more difficult to understand or communicate than Common Lisp. It's not a perfect comparison, but my point is that programming - which gave us the Web, Google, iPods, you name it - is an open shop, whereas economics - which gave us the grand total of one economist who credibly predicted the recent financial troubles, along with a lot of scholarship over the years - is a closed one, and that this relative performance surely relates to how open or closed each is.
Posted by: Chris | April 07, 2009 at 02:44 PM
