Intellectual History and Its Ways

Abstract

THERE IS MUCH IN RusSELLJACOBY'S WORK that I respect and admire, especially his attempt to keep alive the tradition of critical theory and the role of the public intellectual. But there are aspects of A New Intellectual History? that I find questionable both in relation to my own work and to broader issues in the field. It might be useful to begin with an adaptation of a question raised by Jacques Lacan in the wake of Sigmund Freud: What does Jacoby want? From A New Intellectual History? it is difficult to answer this question. The essay recognizes some virtues in the intellectual history, but whatever is good in the new is really old. Whatever is more or less new tends to be bad, except of course for the begrudging qualification introduced by a conventional bow to the inevitability of change and the value of ferment. In the intriguing role of a populist increasingly conservative Theodor Adorno who has his doubts about newfangled ways, Jacoby elaborates a common-sense negative dialectics that merges with the good old genre of the jeremiad. (Lost in the process is Adorno's own sharp sense of the possibly necessary and desirable nature of difficulty and experimentalism.) For Jacoby, things are bad and they seem to be getting worse. Skittish colleagues are running after novelties and turning virtue into vapor. What Jacoby would himself propose as a constructive alternative is left to the reader's imagination. Thus he concludes on a note that mitigates resolute castigation with a token gesture in the direction of suspended judgment: