Intellectuals, Academia, and the "Common" Person

Terry Eagleton, writing at New Statesman, reviews Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone? by Frank Furedi. Eagleton's review is rife with trenchant observations. Here's a sampling:

...We inherit the idea of the intellectual from the 18th-century Enlightenment, which valued truth, universality and objectivity - all highly suspect notions in a postmodern age. As Furedi points out, these ideas used to be savaged by the political right, as they undercut appeals to prejudice, hierarchy and custom. Nowadays, in a choice historical irony, they are under assault from the cultural left.

In the age of Sontag, Said, Williams and Chomsky, whole sectors of the left behave as though these men and women were no longer possible. Soon, no doubt, they will take to imitating the nervous tic by which the right ritually inserts the expression "so-called" before the word "intellectual". Right-wingers do this because they imagine that "intellectual" means "frightfully clever", a compliment they are naturally reluctant to pay to their opponents. In fact, there are dim-witted intellectuals just as there are incompetent chefs. The word "intellectual" is a job description, not a commendation....

[A] snap definition of an intellectual would be "more or less the opposite of an academic"....Literary academics are more likely than insurance brokers to be left-wingers....

University academics are discouraged from fostering adversarial debate, in case it should hurt someone's feelings....In what one American sociologist has termed the McDonaldisation of the universities, students are redefined as consumers of services rather than junior partners in a public service....

[T]he politics of inclusion...in [Furedi's] view belittles the capacities of the very people it purports to serve. It implies in its pessimistic way that excellence and popular participation are bound to be opposites....[H]e rejects cultural pessimism, decries the idea of a golden age, and applauds the advances that contemporary culture has made. It is just that he objects to slighting people's potential for self-transformation under cover of flattering their current identities.