How Intellectuals Create a Public

By Corey Robin. As an archetype, the public intellectual is a conflicted being, torn in two competing directions.
On the one hand, he’s supposed to be called by some combination of the two vocations Max Weber set out in his lectures in Munich: that of the scholar and that of the statesman. Neither academic nor activist but both, the public intellectual is a monkish figure of austere purpose and unadorned truth. Think Noam Chomsky. More...