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Ever since I read it 16 years ago or so, I have thought Russell Jacoby's book, The Last Intellectuals, was intellectually thin and historically wrong. And I thought for sure that the loud flock of young public intellectuals at work today would have drowned out any lingering affection for it.

Not so. Jacoby still believes that there are none of us out here.

How does he know? Because he has never heard of any of us. Here is what Jacoby wrote in the Chronicle of Higher Ed last week:

... Yet valid criticisms have been raised about my argument, and only the obtuse could claim that nothing has happened in the last two decades that might recast the terms of intellectual life. For starters, a new group of African-American intellectuals like Henry Louis Gates Jr., Gerald Early, and Cornel West, as well as several tough-minded women columnists like Maureen Dowd and the late Molly Ivins, emerged. Yet their appearance may qualify my argument, not refute it. Perhaps beyond the stage lights, a new group of younger intellectuals has taken shape. That is what one of my angrier critics, the New York-based freelancer Rick Perlstein claims. "A well-stroked three-wood aimed out my Brooklyn window could easily hit half a dozen" bright, talented, gutsy public intellectuals, he claims. But who are they? He doesn't say. ...

Rick didn't have to. We all know who they are. Rick Perlstein leads the list, in fact!

Also on that list would be Scott McLemee. And those are just the freelancers, the non-academic public intellectuals. The academic list of significant public intellectuals under 50 is probably a couple dozen people long by now.

Academia rewards public work, relevant work, folks. It actually rewards good writing and broad thinking. That's not to say that one does not have to resort to undignified, specialized, jargon-filled writing along the way to success. But please. Check out the book ads in the NYRB and see all the publicly relevant work being published by academics writing for Yale University Press, W.W. Norton, or Basic Books. There are too many to mention. How many academics had op-eds in the NYTimes, WaPo, or WSJ in 2007? Again, too many to count.

In fact, I would say that today the biggest problem a public intellectual has influencing public debate is that there are too many damn public intellectuals competing for too few outlets! That's why Crooked Timber and the Volokh Conspiracy exist.

Alas, it looks like Scott drank the Jacoby Kool-Aid as well:

But this seeming consolidation of the market for the public intellectual’s wares (however compromised it might be, however permeated by the mores of infotainment) was hardly a fulfillment of the longing that had suffused The Last Intellectuals. The professor with a publicist was not, after all, operating outside either academe or mass culture, and it was not as if rents had gone down or as if carving out a freelance life had become any more plausible.

An individual might still pursue such a career, here or there. But no generational cohort had emerged to do so. And one of the defining emphases of The Last Intellectuals had been precisely that of generation: the way common patterns of life shaped, and were shaped by, the shared structures in which young intellectuals thought and felt and (when necessary) yelled at one another.

So one could only pity any obtuse soul who, at the age of twenty-five, had taken The Last Intellectuals as a guidebook to the promised land. By forty-five, he might be yelling only at himself—for who else would want to listen? Indeed, whom else could he blame? Jacoby had made it quite clear, after all, that the material conditions sustaining the possibility of an unattached intelligentsia did not exist and were unlikely to return.

I have said it before. I will say it again. There has never been a better time to be a public intellectual.