More than a half-century ago, Noam Chomsky’s seminal essay, "The Responsibility of Intellectuals," appeared in a Feb. 23, 1967, special issue of The New York Review of Books. That was then, at the height of the controversial war in Vietnam, when the question was who bore responsibility for speaking truth to power, for holding to task those responsible for prosecuting such an undeclared, unpopular and unwinnable war.
This is now, today, when We the People are enjoined to raise this question anew, in light of the results of the recent presidential election and in anticipation of those who will soon occupy the corridors of power, presuming to do so on our behalf. The United States is not now at war in any traditional sense of the term; but the country is in an acute state of turmoil and drift, at home and abroad, that is every bit as serious and demanding as anything we have faced in recent memory.
The incoming president will have all three ostensibly coequal branches of the federal government in his pocket, staffed with political and personal loyalists who have essentially forsaken their institutional responsibilities for checking and balancing one another in order to secure self-interested presidential favor. It promises to be a heretofore unequaled imperial presidency — unitary executive theory made real, but on steroids.
Related
As it was then in 1967, so it is now: The responsibility of "intellectuals" is, at least arguably, to act as the vanguard of republican democracy by filling the institutional void we have inherited, to serve as a mediating mechanism between government and the people, provide voice for the voiceless, think for the unthinking legions among us and perhaps thereby enable the public to live out the true meaning of popular sovereignty through informed civic engagement.
Two questions that have forever encumbered treatment of intellectual responsibility remain with us. First, who are we talking about? Who are these privileged, specially endowed individuals whose expertise and experience equip them to speak with authority, to those both in and out of power? Are they academics, scholars and scientists, or do they also include those of less elevated standing — technocrats, policy wonks, apparatchiks, pundits, journalists — who command a sizable public audience? The question, unanswerable on its face, assumes special importance when national security is at stake. When all is said and done, virtually every area of public policy is connected in some fashion to national security, robustly defined.
Second, what is the proper........