Intellectuals: It Takes One to Know One

By R.Z. Sheppard

THE AMERICAN INTELLECTUAL ELITE by CHARLES KADUSHIN 389 pages. Little, Brown. $8.95.

Between the time Spiro Agnew became a household word and the moment he passed into the garage sale of history, many of America's intellectuals feared a recurrence of McCarthy fever. But with the notable exception of Daniel Ellsberg, the Administration was not out to get those who, in the early cold war, were derisively called eggheads. The Vice President's bark was reserved for TV, newspaper and magazine journalists, a motley lot whom intellectuals sometimes refer to as middlebrows.

But what precisely is an intellectual?

Four years ago, Columbia Sociologist Charles Kadushin and a fleet of researchers decided to find out. On the arbitrary and probably wrongheaded assumption that an intellectual is a generalist who writes literary or social criticism, Kadushin eliminated the hard scientists, theoretical physicists and mathematicians. He narrowed his field to 8,000 humanists and social scientists from leading schools who had contributed articles from 1964 to 1968 to the top 22 intellectual journals.

From these, 110 intellectuals were chosen to be interviewed. Working from the premise that it takes one to know one, the professor asked each to name the intellectual they thought had the most prestige and influence among intellectuals. What resulted was a list of "The Seventy Most Prestigious Contemporary American Intellectuals," broken down into four groups.

The list reflects almost totally the shades of liberal-left opinion from conservative to radical. It also reflects a certain confusion in the criteria. Listed in the first group of eleven, for example, is Robert Silvers, the editor of the New York Review of Books, the magazine that the study indicates is favored by intellectuals who want to reach other intellectuals. Silvers is an able editor but an infrequent writer; it must be assumed that his ranking at the top, along with Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling and Norman Mailer,* is due to a power not unlike that of the maitre d' of an exclusive restaurant.

The decline of an interest in literature and the currently overwhelming concern with public affairs is evident too. Among the 70, only two poets are listed (the late W.H. Auden and Robert Lowell) and four major novelists (Mary McCarthy, Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth). Popular critics also appear: The New Yorker's film reviewer Pauline Kael, who is in the third group, a fact that may curl the lip of New York magazine's theater critic John Simon, who just squeaked into the fourth and lowest category. Half of the chosen live within what Kadushin calls "lunch distance" of New York --a 50-mile limit he considers convenient for day trips to the city. Wherever they live, these intellectuals are well paid (average income: $35,000 a year). They write most frequently in such magazines as Partisan Review, the New Republic, Commentary, Dissent and the New York Review of Books.

Kissinger Syndrome. The direct power of Kadushin's intellectuals seems limited mainly to the ability to enhance or diminish each other's reputations. It is a power exercised largely through their journals, around which loose groups or cliques form, and it is diminished by the fact that intellectuals who take high jobs in Washington tend to lose their credentials temporarily. The most obvious case is Henry Kissinger. His name is nowhere on the official list, an omission that Kadushin informally corrects by noting that Kissinger is "a leading American intellectual." The Kissinger syndrome may also explain the absence from the list of Daniel Boorstin (author of The Image, or What Happened to the American Dream and Decline of Radicalism), who in 1969 was a divisional director of the Smithsonian Institution.

But no amount of sterilized sociological data can refute the fact that inside the "intellectual mafia" the elite sometimes gangs up to wield its power in peevish and arbitrary ways. Still Kadushin's study should reduce some of the paranoia that frequently afflicts non-New York intellectuals. For example, the reasons that Jews account for one half of his list are historical and cultural, not part of some ethnic conspiracy. Moreover, some of the nastiest splits and squabbles in literary New York have occurred between Jews. When Commentary Editor Norman Podhoretz published Making It in 1968, for example, another Jewish editor and writer, who ranks slightly lower on the list, began referring to the book as "Kike's Peak."

The most obvious fact about the select few is that most are over 50 (in fact, six on the list are dead). In the top groups, only 41-year-old Susan Sontag can be considered new blueblood, and she made her debut with an essay on camp more than a decade ago. Kadushin found that in general the people interviewed were "systematically ignorant" of up-and-coming young intellectuals. Brilliant youthful Catholic writers like Gary Wills (Nixon Agonistes, The Bare Ruined Choir) and important new journals like Theodore Solatoroff's American Review do not appear to be taken with sufficient seriousness.

Art Critic Harold Rosenberg (he made the fourth group) once described intellectuals as a "herd of independent minds." That is largely true of the 70 leading intellectuals on Kadushin's list. Yet leading is precisely what contemporary intellectuals do not do much of. The record indicates that most of them followed black activists into the race issue and young antiwar militants into opposing the Viet Nam War. But then so did nearly everyone else who was not furious at being denied a job because of his color or threatened with having to fight a tainted war.

Mixing sociology with aspects of market research, The American Intellectual Elite substitutes too many measurements for the men and women it purports to study. Chancellor of the New School Harry Gideonese put more life into the subject when he casually defined an intellectual as "a person living articulately beyond his intellectual means --if he lives within his intellectual means, he is a scholar." "R.Z. Sheppard

* The others: 1) Daniel Bell, 2) Noam Chomsky, 3) John Kenneth Galbraith, 4) Irving Howe, 5) Dwight Macdonald, 6) Susan Sontag, 7) Mary McCarthy.

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