More findings from Richard Posner.

Richard Posner's census of the 546 "public intellectuals" in America is now online, as is his expanded list of 607. If you are a public intellectual, or aspire to be one, please take a moment to look over this data, which is the basis of much analysis in Posner's new book, Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline.

Done? Let us now stipulate that it is a goddamned outrage that [your name here] and/or [your friends' names here] were not included, and that [your enemies' names here] were. Restitution can and must be sought in the courts.

Breathe out, breathe in. Breathe out, breathe in. Is your pulse back to normal? If so, let's continue with our rational discussion of Posner's findings. (To read Part 1, click here.)

As Chatterbox noted earlier, Posner's list of public intellectuals is not, and does not pretend to be, comprehensive. Rather, it is a respectably large sample made with no systematic political bias. (Although Posner is a conservative, two-thirds of his public intellectuals are left-of-center, which strikes Chatterbox as about right.) There is, to be sure, a systematic bias toward the conventional in defining who or what a "public intellectual" is. You can argue that all sorts of people not usually classified as "intellectuals" ought to be. One Slate colleague suggests that Joe Lieberman, who has written a few books (but is not on Posner's list) is a public intellectual. Sounds like a stretch to Chatterbox, but to each his own. Another colleague suggests that Pat Buchanan is a public intellectual. Chatterbox agrees (that's no endorsement of his views!) but doesn't particularly mind that Posner shooed him away from his clubhouse. By being conventional (even a bit snobbish) in defining who is and isn't an intellectual, Posner ensures that his readers will have a good grasp of the sort of people he's writing about. They're the people who are conventionally (rightly or not) thought of as public intellectuals.

Let's return to Posner's list of the 10 public intellectuals most cited in the media. They are, as Chatterbox mentioned earlier:

Henry Kissinger (12,570 media mentions between 1995 and 2000)
Daniel Patrick Moynihan (12,344)
George Will (10,425)
Lawrence Summers (9,369)
William J. Bennett (9,070)
Robert Reich (8,795)
Sidney Blumenthal (8,044)
Arthur Miller—the law professor, not the playwright—(7,955)
Salman Rushdie (7,688)
William Safire (6,408)

Because of their prominence as political candidates, Buchanan and Lieberman might well have knocked one or two of these domes off the list. But the trends observed by Posner would still be unchanged. It would still be true that the top-10 domes tend not to have current university affiliations and, more surprisingly, tend not to be affiliated with the three most famous Washington think tanks (Brookings, Heritage, and the American Enterprise Institute). A more obvious generality is that the media-heavy domes tend to be people who have worked in government. Their media citations therefore reflect not their intellect, but their proximity (or former proximity) to power. Posner writes: "An academic who wants to succeed as a public intellectual might be well advised to substitute government service for additional scholarly publications!"

Some may argue that a list skewed by proximity to power doesn't tell you much about who gets sought out just for their brains. If we filter out of the top-10 list people who are known mainly for having worked in government, here's what we get:

George Will (10,425 media mentions between 1995 and 2000)
Arthur Miller—the law professor, not the playwright—(7,955)
Salman Rushdie (7,688)
William Safire (6,408) (Note: Safire's fame as a Nixon speechwriter got him his New York Times column three decades ago, but most people today know him as a columnist, not as a former government official.)
George Orwell (5,818)
Alan Dershowitz (5,778)
Toni Morrison (5,633)
Tom Wolfe (5,342)
Norman Mailer (4,860)
George Bernard Shaw (4,835)

We're still relatively thin on university affiliations (only Dershowitz, Miller, and Morrison have them). We're still bereft of affiliations with Brookings, Heritage, and AEI. More than half this group is literary, a small surprise in our supposedly nonliterary age. Three of these litterateurs (Rushdie, Orwell, Shaw) are foreigners, which is more than Chatterbox would have guessed. Unsurprisingly, all three write in English, making them much more accessible to an American audience than would be the case if they wrote in a foreign language. Two of them (Orwell, Shaw) are dead, which tends to keep you out of the media. Their inclusion so high up is a testament to their persistent fashionability, which, in turn, derives (in this case) from their unusual genius.