The Dialogic Resurgence of Public Intellectuals

About the Book

The premise of this book, inviting the resurgence of the public intellectual, is that dialogues activate the process of citizen education such that the dialogic deliberation process reveals the public intellectual, who bridges the gap between touted experts and ordinary, informed persons. Dialogues engage public policy issues and invite citizens to focus on choices and their consequences. When, where, and about what do you, the citizen, get involved? The first dialogue in this book radically wonders about why so many intellectuals talk about dialoguing, but so very few write dialogues or even use the dialogic method. Is it that the kind of scientific knowledge and research we now pursue is undialogic in nature? Or is it that we just want and need to arrive at some bottom line to get it over with? Have we lost the art of public deliberation because our private sector (needs, urges, passions, and drives let loose) overwhelms our public realm (what we all have in common)? A political culture accommodating rampant individuals makes it difficult and time consuming to discover the common good. To draw whatever informed public into the deliberation process, I present public policy issues of broad public significance (don’t they affect just about all of us?): social security reform, electricity deregulation, genetically-engineered food, physician-assisted suicide, and human cloning. The first two dialogues clearly are issues where we can negotiate some middle ground, or at least require qualifications and conditions, if we choose to proceed in the direction of privatization. The second three dialogues do not offer much of a middle ground, since you either permit or do not permit some line to be drawn. Here we are required to choose between two equally principled and opposed standpoints regarding the use of modern technology. The consequences of where these principled standpoints may carry us are quite decisive. At this point, especially in the area of medicine and biotechnology, where there is such great extension of human powers, the matter of religion intrudes. To enlarge our perspective beyond specific public policy controversies, two twentieth-century, quite unorthodox, but orthodox writers, Simone Weil and Flannery O’Connor, come together in an imaginary dialogue to deliver up their religious and philosophical wit and insight. Ultimates are at stake. In some sense, encountering those final ends of life and death, the public intellectual may turn to religion, if not philosophy. With or without religion and philosophy, the issue of the proper role of government remains before us. For public intellectuals today, the central political choice is between traditional conservatism and democratic socialism, despite the fact (or because of the fact) that libertarian capitalism carries the day at the close of the twentieth century. Let us then turn to two, recently departed publicists, Russell Kirk and Irving Howe, worthy guides for us in their office of public intellectuals, representing respectively the political right, traditional conservatism, and the political left, democratic socialism. In the end, a dialogue between the owl and the fox is necessary because the appearance of the public intellectual will be a choice between the Platonic and Machiavellian, when we decide upon what mode of deliberation we will use.

About the Author