Knowledge And Decisions

The occupational self-interest of intellectuals is served not only by product differentiation, but by “relevance.” Many cognitively intellectual productions are of no immediate applicability, because (1) they have not yet been subjected to empirical validation or cannot be in the real world, or (2) their very nature and thrust are different from political discussions on the same subject matter, or (3) the time horizon of the scholarly endeavor may far exceed that of politics, so that no cognitively authenticated conclusion may be available within the time in which a political decision has to be made, and (4) such articulated knowledge as may be available may go counter to what is politically desired. Making intellectual output “relevant” involves resolving such dilemmas. Cognitive incentives mean less relevance and lower occupational rewards in money, status, power, popularity, etc. Occupational incentives obviously mean more of such rewards and less cognitive authenticity.

The incentives sketched are intended to depict the behavior of an intellectual motivated solely by occupational rewards, and prepared to trade off as expendable considerations such competing incentives as cognitive principles, ethical standards, and democratic freedoms. The point here is not to define a priori how many intellectuals will behave what way but to provide a framework within which to judge the observable behavior of actual intellectuals in a variety of social, political and historical settings.

“RELEVANCE”

Intellectuals have long sought to be politically “relevant.” More than three centuries ago, Hobbes expressed the hope that his Leviathan would someday “fall into the hands of a sovereign” who would “convert this truth of speculation into the utility of practice.”⁹⁷ Karl Marx eloquently expressed the psychic importance of “relevance” to the intellectual:

... the time must come when philosophy not only internally by its content but externally by its appearance comes into contact and mutual reaction with the real contemporary world ... Philosophy is introduced into the world by the clamour of its enemies who betray their internal infection by their desperate appeals for help against the blaze of ideas. These cries of its enemies mean as much for philosophy as the first cry of a child for the anxious ear of the mother, they are the cry of life of the ideas which have burst open the orderly hieroglyphic husk of the system and become citizens of the world.⁹⁸

It is noteworthy that this was not an expression of the satisfaction of promoting a particular doctrine or cause. Marx at this point had not yet met Engels, who converted him to communism, and so there was not yet a Marxian theory to promote. It expressed simply the general joy of intellectuals at being taken seriously and talking about big things.

Nor is it solely in political subjects that political “relevance” is sought. Demography was heavily involved in politics literally from the first page of the first edition of Malthus’ Essay on Population in 1798.⁹⁹ Biology was made the basis for political theory in the nineteenth and early twentieth century intellectual vogue called “social Darwinism.”¹⁰⁰ Psychology was politicized in the decades long controversies preceding the drastic revision of American immigration laws in the 1920s. In the political crisis of the Great Depression, virtually all of the so-called “social sciences” attempted to be politically “relevant” rather than simply cognitively valid, and the rise of the welfare state institutionalized this tendency of applied intellectual activity among “social scientists.” In totalitarian nations, virtually every intellectual field is politicized. Genetics and economics acquire ideological significance in the Soviet Union,¹⁰¹ and Nazi Germany proclaimed the existence of such intellectual entities as German physics, German chemistry, and German mathematics.¹⁰² The concern here, however, is not so much with what governments have done to the intellectual process, but what intellectuals themselves have done in the quest for “relevance.”