William Voegelli has a wonderful essay up at Opinion Journal. An excerpt:
After Schlesinger’s death, Sam Tanenhaus, editor of the New York Times Book Review, lamented the loss of America’s “last great public historian,” who was unique for commanding “broad cultural authority.” More generally, the disappearance of public intellectuals like Schlesinger was decried 20 years ago by Russell Jacoby in “The Last Intellectuals” (1987): “Younger intellectuals no longer need or want a larger public; they are almost exclusively professors. Campuses are their homes; colleagues their audience; monographs and specialized journals their media. . . . Their jobs, advancement, and salaries depend on the evaluation of specialists, and this dependence affects the issues broached and the language employed.”
We should be careful what we mourn for. Like two magnets turned the wrong way, the words “public intellectual” (or “popular artist”) resist each other. There’s a tension between engaging with public life in order to influence political outcomes, and following the evidence wherever it leads in pursuit of truth. Any combination of the two requires ruthless candor, with the public and oneself, about when one is speaking as a partisan and when as a truth-seeker.
Throughout his long career, Arthur Schlesinger was not, to put it gently, zealous about fulfilling this duty. There was such perfect congruence between Schlesinger’s political preferences and his scholarly conclusions that neither happy coincidence nor honest error can possibly account for it. In the devastating “Coolidge and the Historians” (1982), Thomas Silver showed that Schlesinger repeatedly and flagrantly tortured the evidence until it confessed. “What the hell,” Schlesinger said in defense of one book. “You have to call them as you see them.” It’s the umpire’s credo–but Schlesinger always wanted to have it both ways, to speak with the authority of an umpire, while competing fiercely as a member of his team.