By James M. Jasper, October 11th, 2012 
When I lived in Boston in the late 1970s, I came across a small news article about the energetic Ayn Rand Club at MIT. I had read three of her novels in high school, the appropriate time for sophomoric works. Along with Catcher in the Rye, Winesburg, Ohio, and many other books, I had already – at the age of twenty – begun to think of her novels as part of a wasted youth (too much reading, not enough sex). No one over twenty should – or could – take them seriously.
Apparently Rand was different, and appealed to a kind of person plentiful at MIT. She presented a logical social philosophy for people who knew little about social life. They were immature, yes, but there was no sign they would ever grown up. They were smart, not wise. Today we might suspect them of Asperger syndrome.
Paul Ryan is smart, too, in the style of an autodidact who has read widely without putting what he knows together into the big picture. Or perhaps putting it into a too simple a big picture. There is no mystery why a partially educated fellow like Ryan might cling to an adolescent worldview. The mystery is why he has accumulated followers who seem to find him some kind of profound guru. Even most Republicans, who as Rick Santorum reminded us do not even hope to attract smart people any more, must see through Ryan.
Or maybe not. Ryan reminds me of another would-be politician who used a similar kind of pseudo-intellectual style to attract a small but viciously devoted following, Lyndon LaRouche. There was one thing constant in LaRouche’s bizarre move from the authoritarian Left to the authoritarian Right: his use of impenetrable prose and technical jargon to “prove” his worldview. His main publications were couched as “executive reviews” and a magazine on the technical details of the fusion energy that would save the world. The very idea that a worldview can be “proven” is a telling mistake.
At the risk that I’ll sound like a crowd theorist of the . . .
Read more: The Pseudo-Intellectual in American Politics
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, March 18th, 2011 
“I believe that intellectuals have played crucial roles in the making of democracy and in the ongoing practices of democratic life.” With this sentence, I opened my book Civility and Subversion. Motivating the writing of that book was a developing misinformed (to my mind) consensus that intellectuals played an important role in the democratic opposition to the Communist order, but they would be relatively unimportant for the post Communist making and running of democracy. I thought that this was a terrible mistake, and I tried to show that in the book. In short, my argument was that intellectuals play a democratic role, not when they purport to provide the answers to a society’s problems, but when they facilitate deliberate discussion. Intellectuals are talk provokers. Discussions at Deliberately Considered over the past week demonstrate my point. We have considered and opened discussion about important problems.
On Monday, Vince Carducci introduced and analyzed the photography of John Ganis, art that confronts the damage we do to our environment, showing beauty that displays destruction. Carducci observes that “Ganis describes himself as a ‘witness’ rather than an activist. And yet his subject matter and its treatment clearly indicate where the artist’s loyalties lie.” But it is the ambiguity of the work, its internal tension that provokes and doesn’t answer political questions that facilitated a discussion between Felipe Pait and Carducci, comparing the destruction of the BP oil spill with the devastation in Japan. This could inform serious discussion about my reflections on man versus nature. We are present. We have our needs. How does it look when we satisfy them? What are the consequences? I think that this reveals that the power of the witness can sometimes be more significant than that of the activist. Carducci and I have an ongoing discussion about the value of agit prop. He likes it. I abhor it. I think Ganis’ work, with Carducci’s analysis of it, as the devastation in Japan was unfolding, supports my position.
![]() DC Week in Review: Art, My Town, and Japan
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, November 15th, 2010 
 I had to make a decision about this blog early on.
Would it be DeliberatelyConsidered.org or DeliberatelyConsidered.com, non-commercial or commercial? I chose the commercial route in the hopes that the blog would be self-sustaining and self-defining as much as possible from the start, and if it grew, if I needed more support in providing a space for serious reflections and exchanges about pressing issues of the day, it wouldn’t cost me and I wouldn’t need to raise funds.
For many people, this decision would be straightforward. For those who are sure that capitalism is the root of all evil, who imagine a systemic alternative to capitalism, in socialism, it’s clear, “.org” is clearly the way to go. For those who see the free market as the answer to all problems, the decision is equally clear. But I am more ambivalent, less sure than such true believers, as I wrote about in an earlier post.
In going commercial, I had in mind an observation Russell Jacoby made in his book, The Last Intellectuals. He mourned the substitution of academic life for the culture of urbane intellectuals, the culture of university cafeterias for café culture, academic journals for the small magazines that sustained such intellectuals as Edmund Wilson, Irving Howe, Mary McCarthy and others like them.
Jacoby celebrated a world in which people actually could make a living from critical writing. They had a freedom and independence that supported a style of intellectual life that appears to be a thing of the past, a lost golden age as Jacoby sees it.
While I am not so nostalgic, I thought that a commercial blog may provide a space for a revival of the sort of critical culture he and I admire. I would create a space for critical reflection that was not dependent on academic priorities but upon public concerns, of everyday, in the Kitchen Table, of interdisciplinary scholarly concern, in the Scholars’ Lounge, of general intellectual and public concern, at Joe’s Café, and in the emerging but not completely formed world of global public discussion, in Global Perspectives. The spontaneity and flexibility of the market and . . .
Read more: “.Org” or “.Com”?
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, October 28th, 2010 
A few days ago I asked the question “Where are the conservative intellectuals?” I posed the straightforward question, but also gave a reason why I, as a person who is generally on the left, asked: I used to be challenged by conservatives, but not these days, and wonder if there are any out there who are still challenging. I received interesting replies.
Michael suggested the Heritage Foundation, and Alex suggested Tyler Cowen’s Marginal Revolution Blog and Kosmos, a career networking site for classical liberals. I found the Heritage site very predictable. The Cowen site an interesting place for the discussion by conservative economists, or more precisely classically liberal economists, and Kosmos a networking site for like minded people. Scott later pointed me in the direction of American Conservative Magazine, Reason Magazine, and sometimes the Frum Forum: a site of traditional conservativism, one for significant libertarian thought, and a kind of Huffington Post for conservatives.
So there are places to explore, but as a looked around, I didn’t find anything that challenged me. Where are the conservatives who have ideas that I must consider because of their intellectual power and insight?
Scott poses a hypothesis why I am having a problem. He wrote:
I think there are conservative intellectuals, but they use their brainpower however towards electioneering and must necessarily for the most part remain in the background. That is, they can’t be public intellectuals, or at least appear to be intellectual in public, but follow their own narrative which says that the elitist intelligentsia is out of touch with the majority of Americans.
This is ironic. There are conservative intellectuals, but because of their practical commitments and principled convictions that intellectuals are dangerous, they dare not show their faces, nor their ideas. In the past, they avoided this problem by calling themselves “men of letters,” reserving the label of intellectuals for despised leftists. This was the position of Paul Johnson in his book, Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sarte and Chomsky.
Now, apparently, or at least according to Scott, . . .
Read more: Have we Found the Conservative Intellectuals?
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, October 19th, 2010 
The political right has been successful in swaying the general public for the time being, but American intellectuals remain unconvinced: are there any serious conservative intellectuals?
I am not worried that the universities are dominated by tenured radicals, as one right wing ideologue or another regularly discovers. While the political center of American academics is significantly to the left of the center of the public at large, I see no reason to be particularly upset by this. Career soldiers are probably to the right of the American consensus and this too doesn’t put me up in arms. Better not, I guess. The experience of particular vocations informs political judgment, and people with common world views make common career choices.
But I do worry about the absence of intelligent conservative commentary and criticism in American intellectual life. It does seem to me that almost all serious thought these days is to be found on the left, and I don’t think that this is a good thing. The conservative tradition contributes too much for it to come down to this. And given the swings from left to right in the public mood (which I do regret, all I am saying is give leftists a chance) it would be a good thing if there were a sensible right.
Ideologues of the right, of course, do exist, those who know that there is a clear and present danger, and we must be vigilant, these days against “Islamofascism. “ I think that’s what they call it. But these use fantasy and fear to empower their arguments, not reason and careful observation. How else can you find a liberal Sufi cleric to be a terrorist sympathizer?
And there are those who cling if not to their guns and religion, to their absolute dogmatic beliefs and their assertions of the moral high ground, while fearing actual moral inquiry and debate. Better to worry about the attack on Christmas. And also those who know with certainty that the market is magical, and condemn government waste and inefficiency, who never met a tax cut they didn’t like, won’t ever concede that tax increases . . .
Read more: Where are the Conservative Intellectuals?
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DC Week in Review: Art, My Town, and Japan