On ‘Public’ Intellectuals
The ‘professionalization’ of academic writing - and the self-conscious grasping of humanists for the security of ‘theory’ and ‘methodology’ - favors obscurantism. This has encouraged the rise of a counterfeit currency of glib ‘popular’ articulacy: in the discipline of history this is exemplified by the ascent of the ‘television don’, whose appeal lies precisely in his claim to attract a mass audience in an age when fellow scholars have lost interest in communication. But whereas an earlier generation of popular scholarship distilled authorial authority into plain text, today’s ‘accessible’ writers protrude uncomfortably into the audience’s consciousness. It is the performer, rather than the subject, to whom the audience’s attention is drawn.
(Not the most poetic of paragraphs, but it has the merit of clarity even though its subject for most of us is a bit arcane. The late historian Tony Judt was the master of clarity and more. The lines are from his last book The Memory Chalet which was published shortly after his death in August 2010. His best book is Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945.)
