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March 3, 2008
David Burchell is now singing the conservative line of The Australian and doing the bog standard attack on intellectuals in politics. He reaches back to the French Revolution to do so:
Intellectuals are famous for their poetical and metaphorical conceptions of public debate. Yet, being on the whole cloistered types, they tend to shape these metaphors out of the material of their own quiet, logical and ordered existences.When the intellectuals of the French revolutionary era dreamed up the notions of public opinion and the public sphere, they had in the back of their minds the kinds of arguments carried on in books and letters by leisured but discontented folks such as themselves. In short, the public was them, or at least an imaginary entity conceived on an analogy with themselves.
And so with Australian intellectuals today:
Likewise, when intellectuals today talk of resuming a conversation between themselves and government, they usually have at the back of their minds a scholarly conference, complete with ritual niceties and polite jousting over airy theoretical differences. Yet relations between government and intellectuals, even those who like to style themselves public intellectuals (another elusive but gratifying term), have never worked remotely like this...Academic debate about policy-making moves far slower than does policy-making itself. And despite their self-image, intellectuals nowadays are more often found in the baggage-train of history than the advance guard.
Governing, he says, owes very little to the prognostications of critical intellectuals who, on the whole, are inveterate ideologists. The latter is bad because they are not concerned with the solution of practical problems of social and economic policy; rather they represent a loose assemblage of perennially grumpy cultural critics who imagine themselves to be the true intelligentsia.
And with that op-ed Burchell has crossed to the Rubicon to being a conservative ideologist attacking the left whilst posing as one who adopts an essentially empirical approach to public policy. Posing because he never talks about the specific issues of public policy in his various op-eds for The Australian over the last year.
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We should welcome intellectuals into the debate but they should be reminded that not all the good players are on the same team. Intellectuals, and might I add faux intellectuals, waste too much energy denigrating the Left or Right, depending upon their own views. I would also like to say that journalists are welcome to join the debate however, the ability to throw a newspaper column together does not qualify that person as an intellectual.