The Everything Expert (Page 3)

It is in the sections in My Brother's Keeper on his career as a public intellectual that Etzioni's memoir is most revealing. He is clearly a man who revels in the wonkish public-policy battles that take place beyond the seminar room (which was one of the reasons he moved to DC's George Washington University). And he is clearly a man of conviction--the "conviction" typically being that he is correct, his ideas on "the side of the angels." But it isn't enough to be right; it drives him crazy when he isn't credited for his insights. He writes, "I was pissed about those occasions in which I had been able to see around the corner--on matters of considerable public import--but for which my observations were not appreciated. Why do many people find such claims so annoying?" (I wonder.) Unlike most public intellectuals, Etzioni isn't satisfied merely to pen the occasional editorial, write a crossover book and appear on television. He yearns for "the special high that I tasted in Israel, of participating in a project that was larger than life, greater than self. For accomplishments that changed something in the real world."

Etzioni's memoir is replete with examples of his intellectual activism. In 1962 he implores Martin Buber to ask Pope John XXIII to defuse the Cuban missile crisis by placing calls to John F. Kennedy and Fidel Castro. Etzioni opposed the Vietnam War (Winning Without War, 1964) and railed against the diversion of money from the War on Poverty to space exploration (The Moondoggle: Domestic and International Implications of the Space Race, 1964). In 1968 he and his colleagues formed a human chain around one of the buildings occupied by protesting students at Columbia University, where he was a sociology professor. His 1973 critique of the budding bioengineering movement (Genetic Fix: The Next Technological Revolution) was nominated for the National Book Award. More recently, he has weighed in on campaign finance reform (Capital Corruption: The New Attack on American Democracy, 1984), privacy (The Limits of Privacy, 1999) and race (The Monochrome Society, 2001).

Academic departments are often ranked by the number of times faculty work is cited in scholarly journals, and the pecking order of policy advisers depends on the power of their advisees. But how is one to gauge a public intellectual's effectiveness? In Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline (2002), Richard Posner analyzed the "public intellectual market" using data provided by Amazon.com rankings and popular press citations. Posner considers the public intellectual a kind of intellectual soothsayer who should be judged by how often his "predictions" hit the mark (utopians need not apply). I didn't think anyone took Posner's suggestions seriously until I read Etzioni's memoir. In it, he provides exhaustive accounts of the reviews his books receive, as well as summaries--and quantitative analyses--of communitarianism's press coverage. For Etzioni, the medium is the message. He believes that evidence of communitarianism's influence lies in the number of times its "keywords" appear. "In the 1990s, the phrase 'rights and responsibilities' appeared some 6,183 times in the top fifty newspapers alone," he writes. These were Etzioni's Golden Years. "For months on end, we seemed to be on the front of most everyone's Rolodex."

The second half of his memoir is a cautionary tale for all would-be public intellectuals. I suspect Etzioni never recovered from his stint as a "member of the king's entourage" in the Carter White House, and has spent much of his energy since then trying to whisper in the ear--any ear!--of those in power. "The trick was to find ideas that were both honestly communitarian and not impolitical." Some trick, indeed.

While Etzioni's dealings with Clinton and Blair have been well documented, in his memoir it becomes clear that Etzioni's criteria for offering advice depend less on ideology than access. We witness him regress from a passionate intellectual to a Loman-esque figure, desperately hawking his communitarian wares to anyone who will listen. He tries to sell communitarianism to Helmut Kohl (not interested), Bob Dole ("There was no sign of their Christian spirit, that of reaching out and caring for vulnerable members of the community, which is so much a part of the values they were anxious to uphold." Shocking!), and George W. Bush ("His tone and demeanor were often soft and conciliatory; that is, communitarian"). Etzioni implores Janet Reno to rethink her commitment to the Fourth Amendment (she demurs).

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