When it comes to race, America's is the very opposite of a Habermasian ideal speech situation. No problem in American society is more in need of intellectual intervention. This topic is so systemically distorted that it is sometimes hard to imagine how any honest discussion occurs across racial divides. If the role of the intellectual is to help promote informed discussion about difficult social problems, then it is in the arena of racial affairs that intellectuals are most needed in America.

Consider how we speak about the issue in the political arena. When David Duke, the former Nazi and Ku Klux Klan leader, ran as the Republican candidate for Governor of the State of Louisiana, he campaigned in codes. He did not propagate explicit anti-black or anti-semitic ideas, but instead celebrated our Christian heritage and our right to sustain it, and defended the equal civil rights of whites. In principle, the idea of equal rights for whites is, of course, a perfectly reasonable one. Yet, when the injustice of race relations still clearly involves the privilege of whites over blacks, the slogan's racist meaning is apparent. This man used the language of civil liberties and tolerance to convey his xenophobic messages. He did get perilously close to winning the election (obtaining over 40% of the total vote, including a majority of the votes of whites). Yet with his loss, racist newspeak suffered a setback.

Walter Lippmann, John Dewey, C. Wright Mills, and Edward Said, two civil intellectuals and two subversives; a conservative and two radical democrats in the American tradition, and one radical critic of the Western tradition: they all helped their societies to deliberate. They all in their own ways provoked their compatriots to talk. As there are limitations to their individual accounts of the intellectual and the public, the type of talk they provoked each has limits. Lippmann sought to interject intelligence into elite discussion, but was silent about the intelligence gleaned from popular experience. Dewey built upon such popular wisdom, but did not consider the way power works to structure public deliberations. Mills took into account this power and tried to subvert the prevailing common sense that served the power elite, but he was quite unclear about who it was he hoped to address and what might be the venues of their deliberations and actions. About this Said has been quite clear, but as he has attempted to speak in the voice of the subaltern, he has left out of his account the possibility of civilized discussion with those who disagree with him. The intellectuals serve their societies well when they provoke talk in this variety.

Intellectuals are ambiguous characters. In societies with strong democratic traditions, such as the United States, they are the objects of popular and elite suspicions. In societies with stronger aristocratic traditions, such as those of Central Europe, they are often the objects of veneration and high hopes. Yet, despite the attention they often get, it is not at all clear who they actually are, and what they actually do. For my contention that intellectuals play a key role in democratic societies to be persuasive, I must clearly specify who it is I think is playing this important role.

The uncertainty about the intellectual's identity is an important sociological fact. It animates intellectual and anti-intellectual life as they function in societies. Sartre's popularity, his position as a celebrity in post-war France and then in much of the world, was predicated on a vague romanticism about the critical intellectual in battle against the regressive forces of injustice, inauthenticity, and Americanism. George Wallace's popularity as a national figure and Presidential candidate in the late sixties and the seventies, in parallel contrast, was based on a similarly vague paranoia directed against “pointy headed intellectuals” and their bureaucratic bedfellows.

Indeed, even some of the most interesting scholarly accounts for and against intellectuals represent their subject with a great deal of ambiguity and imprecision. Thus, Russell Jacoby's fascinating account of The Last Intellectuals makes sense only through the lens of a critical nostalgia for left-wing intellectual giants of previous generations, from Lewis Mumford to Irving Howe.

A vibrant intellectual life is not assured by the autonomy of cultural institutions. Our East and Central European colleagues are now struggling for a necessary but not a sufficient condition of their deliberative role in democratic society. This is most evident as we turn to the American scene, particularly to the American university. On the grounds of the American university, we often observe how the autonomy of a cultural institution may even work to undermine intellectual criticism and public deliberation. This is of great importance because much of America's public life is now found in the universities, overshadowing the traditional public spaces of cities. As painting, music, and theater have found their place in American universities, so has intellectual life. The strengths and weaknesses of the American university, as an independent cultural institution, therefore, have broad public implications.

When we look for intellectuals in American society, the natural starting point is the universities. It has not always been the case. Through much of American history, intellectual life was a component part of the liberal professions, and even up to the post-war era intellectuals tended to center around independent journals and magazines more than in university departments and research institutes. But today general interest magazines and critical political and cultural reviews no longer are profit making enterprises on the open cultural market. They are more often appendages of academic departments.

Thurgood Marshall did all he could to remain on the Supreme Court beyond the years of the Reagan and Bush administrations. His last great battle was against his very mortality. He desperately wanted to outlast the Republican reaction, to reserve his seat for a like-minded jurist, which he hoped could be achieved with a Democratic President. When he looked at Malcolm X, he saw a political firebrand, disturbing the peace and not helping to change the shape of social justice. We have observed the limits of Marshall's view, but also the limits of the views to which he was opposed. Yet, when the great hero of the civil rights movement, the “conscience of the court,” considered his likely successor if he or she were chosen by Ronald Reagan or George Bush, his fears were much greater. He feared that racism would prevail over justice. He feared that their candidate would unbalance the court, and that the civil rights achievements for which he fought so hard would be significantly undermined by a conservative appointment, insensitive to the concerns of poor and black folk. Their great defender worried that they would be left defenseless. In retrospect, from his point of view, his worst fears seem to have been realized with the appointment of Clarence Thomas.

If the intellectual's role is to provoke serious discussion about pressing social problems in public and not to bring truth to the world, as I have maintained, we can recognize the wisdom and limitations of both the civil society and the subaltern position, the importance of civility and subversion. Intellectuals who cultivate a civil public realm do provide the time and the place for deliberations and may reap remarkable fruit, as the experience of East and Central Europeans has demonstrated. These intellectuals, though, must realize that restrictions on deliberations, concerning who can deliberate and about what, may turn the ideal of civil society into its opposite, into a mechanism of constraint, a façade of freedom working to enforce the silencing of subjects (as topics and as people). Yet, the advocates of the silenced subjects should be aware that the speech of the subaltern must be heard and considered in a civil fashion. They must demand their right to speak, but they must convince and not simply declare their position, if democracy is to be practiced. Malcolm X's political position unsupported by a commitment to a free public sphere leads to profoundly undemocratic political positions such as those of Farrakhan and Jeffries. These positions present stark but limited alternatives: Orientalism versus Occidentalism, patriarchy versus matriarchy, one sort of class rule or another, one sort of racial domination or another.

My research experience in Central Europe, from a marginal cultural movement, Polish Student Theater of the post-war era, to a marginal but articulate political movement, the Polish democratic movement of the seventies, to a broad and profound societal movement, Solidarnosc of 1980 and 1981, to an underground oppositional cultural movement, Underground Solidarity of the eighties, to the major transformations of 1989 world-wide, testifies to the potential power of the intellectual in democratic society. It points to the importance of the ideal of civility and the intellectual's relationship to it. This experience suggests that when we reflect on the significance of the intellectual in democratic society, we should keep in mind that the consequences of intellectual actions may seem relatively isolated with fleeting duration, but can become wide ranging with long-term consequences.

My experience further suggests that the intellectual may be not only a public scholar or scientist, or a scholarly or scientific political actor, but also an artist with public concerns. The Central European intellectuals, who acted as if they lived in a free society, constituting freedom and revitalizing the idea of civil society, often were artists, poets, painters, musicians, the makers of film and theater. Their experiences, and the relationship between these and the experiences of others, provide us with an opportunity to consider more closely the changing role of artists as intellectuals in the making and substantiation of democratic society, and to consider the connection between the artists' struggle for cultural independence and the task of constituting the institutional supports of civility.

We see, then, intellectuals contributing to democratic society. They are people concerned about gender injustice and the problems of race, with the importance of cultural freedom and the continuities of tradition, people who defend Western civilization and people who radically question this civilization. They are distinguished by the abnormal attention they pay to their critical faculties. They use their specialized skills and knowledge to address and constitute public life. They contribute to society's capacity to deliberate about its problems. Some address themselves to elites, some to broader publics. They do so by both cultivating civil society and subverting the constraints of common sense. They promote a civil consensus, and they subvert the limitations of conventional wisdom. They are talk provokers.

Intellectuals have long been with us, but it is in modernity that they find themselves in a relatively stable position in independent cultural institutions. It is worth working for this independence, as our colleagues in post-communist Europe know. It makes it possible to sustain deliberations in a modern social order. But the independence of cultural institutions also entails problems. They can become distanced from the society at large and make it difficult for intellectuals to contribute to public life, as has sometimes been the case in American universities. Specialized languages, not understandable to the lay public, are used to sustain the authority of the professional. Political rhetoric develops, as is the case with political correctness, which has little to do with the concerns of the greater society.

Although it is natural for intellectuals to turn to the public, this does not come easily in modern democracies. The close interaction between the intellectual and his or her audience, as revealed in the case of Socrates, is replaced by distanced industrial and postindustrial processes: mass communications, public relations, the mass media, the cultural industry. In one sense, this is a very democratic development; mass culture includes more people in intellectual exchange. The political commentators on talk radio and television present their criticism to a much broader audience than classic intellectual writers, from Zola to Sartre, ever did. Yet, something is missing in this democratic development. While the new forms of public exchange are more democratic in that they are more inclusive, they are less democratic in that they are less participatory, less deliberative, and more manipulative. Democracy's self-rule of the people comes up short on the self and strong on the rule.

Some, such as those of the realist school of democracy, from Joseph Schumpeter to Robert Dahl, view this turn as inevitable. They understand that democracy can practically function in complex societies of the twentieth century only through a politics of elite competition and action, with the “people” taking a necessarily passive role. It is argued that the institutions of modern democracy necessarily should distance the citizenry from the actual practices of governance and policy debate. Officials are elected through free and fair elections.

Walter Lippmann and John Dewey both knew that there was something fundamentally wrong with public life in their day. They faced the fundamental dilemmas of intellectuals in modern democratic society, and they were early critics of the effects of mass media on American public life. They proposed radically different explanations for how the “eclipse of the public” came about, and considered radically different solutions to the problem. Lippmann turned to a scientistic elitism for the solution, while Dewey turned to radical democracy. Yet, despite these opposing positions, these men shared a lot. They were gentlemen. They imagined social and political life to be a gentlemanly affair, bounded by norms of civility. Lippmann was a contented realist; Dewey a contented idealist. Missing from Lippmann's and Dewey's analysis is a critique of power; also missing is a sense that sometimes disagreements in democracies are articulated in a rude fashion. We now turn, then, to the question of power and the appreciation of the limits of civility, and consider how these shape the life of the intellectual in democratic society. A logical starting point is the work of C. Wright Mills, a man who was a student of pragmatism, Dewey's philosophic orientation, and a harsh critic of conservatism, Lippmann's political orientation and personal disposition.

I believe that intellectuals have played crucial roles in the making of democracy and in the ongoing practices of democratic life. I further believe that the diminution of intellectual activity presents a major threat to democracy in our times. Intellectuals are central democratic actors, and when they leave the political stage, democratic performance ends in failure. I have such beliefs, and judge that they are especially pressing nowadays, because I perceive that intellectuals are particularly able to address one of the most pressing needs of democracies: the need to deliberate about common problems.

Intellectuals help societies talk about their problems. They contribute to a democratic life when they civilize political contestation and when they subvert complacent consensus; when they provide enemies with the discursive possibility to become opponents and when they facilitate public deliberations about problems buried by the norms of civility. This is the primary thesis of this inquiry. Intellectuals are key democratic agents as they stimulate informed discussion about pressing social problems, fulfilling this role by cultivating civility in public life and promoting the subversion of restrictive common sense.

In order to explore this primary thesis adequately, we will consider in this investigation the dilemmas and complexities of intellectual action in democratic society. I will attempt to depict the intellectual as a distinct type of social actor (chapter 2) and show how he or she establishes a field for social action in public (chapters 3 and 4).