Posner’s “Public Intellectuals”: an odd book

Americans love their lists. Remember the bestselling “Book of Lists” from the ’70s? Richard Posner, the federal judge who attempted and failed to mediate the Microsoft Antitrust case, is a prolific author whose latest work tries to quantify the top intellectuals. He uses the investigative tools of our times, the Google search engine, the Lexis-Nexis database, and several indexes of scholarly publications, to generate several listings. Henry Kissinger leads the media mentions list, while the author ranks 70th. Alan Wolfe, who shows up at 98 on the list, excoriates the methodology and results of Posner’s work, saying that in the end, Posner had to choose between the academy and the marketplace and although his heart said market, he couldn’t shake loose his fears and wrote academy. I doubt this book will make it onto many reading lists.