Tracks of uncertainty

London’s O2 Arena can seat some 20,000 people. It usually hosts major music or sports events, but from time to time it will now host “public intellectuals,” who tour from continent to continent selling out venues as they go.

News organizations, meanwhile, have shifted from sending out reporters to cultivating stables of “talent”—columnists, commentators, people who’ll opine on any and every subject imaginable—while political influencers flourish on social media, where they “DESTROY” or “HUMILIATE” whoever’s on the opposing “side.” It’s a brave new world—in which it may be hard to imagine what role there is left for “public intellectuals.”

Is there one?

Raymond Geuss is an emeritus professor in the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and the author of Tracks in Chaos: Philosophical Orientation and Political Reflection. Geuss says the whole category of “the intellectual” only came into existence in the late 19th century, and that media personalities have largely replaced intellectuals since—usually people with no intellectual accomplishments to speak of, who don’t really address the general public but bands of like-minded followers. Given today’s extremely complicated society, where we’re all groping for understanding, there is no lack of influencers selling certainty.

For Geuss, though, losing the old-style intellectual isn’t all bad. By seeing and presenting themselves as general experts—an evident contradiction when you look at that word combination—intellectuals often ended up effectively in the pulpit, preaching to people on things they actually knew little about. Some of the now traditional work of the intellectual is still valuable—clarifying the meaning of words is one of Geuss’s examples—but understanding that value means first accepting that no category of person, the intellectual or the philosopher, is uniquely equipped for it …

Gustav Jönsson: What was a public intellectual, exactly?

Raymond Geuss: The word didn’t exist until the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, when French reactionaries coined it as an insult for their opponents in the Dreyfus affair. Alfred Dreyfus was a French military officer authorities unjustly accused, convicted, and imprisoned for spying, on secret evidence they hid from his defense—later forging more. The archetypical “intellectual” was the novelist Émile Zola, who ran a very public campaign in the newspapers to have Dreyfus’s conviction overturned and Dreyfus himself set free.

So before about 1900 there were no “intellectuals.” There were kings, presidents, judges, priests, philosophers, and recognized official experts in particular areas—military affairs, health, public speaking, city planning. Respected members of each category might carry a certain authority, but nobody called any of them an intellectual. When the term arrived, it meant people with no formal authority at all—Zola was a novelist, not a magistrate—who were on the “progressive” side of a political argument and agitated publicly for a particular decision. To speak of a “public intellectual” is in a sense a pleonasm: Intellectuals by definition speak out in public about political issues.