ABSTRACT

‘Public intellectual’ is a term that is en vogue. Over the last few years, often in relation to the debates on the roles and functions of academics in the changing relationship between higher education, media and the public, the conceptual figure of the ‘public intellectual’ has appeared more and more frequently. When the English magazine Prospect published a special issue on the theme in July 2004, it was immediately followed up by polyphonic comments in the daily newspapers. A series of new books on the theme has appeared (for example, Posner, 2001; Small, 2002; Melzer, Weinberger and Zinman, 2003). New academic courses with the term in their titles are being arranged. Special professorships and centres for advanced studies have been established to enhance the role of the public intellectual. Meanwhile, in a quite different sphere of thought, in one of the bulletins of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, the economist Milton Friedman is described as a prominent ‘public intellectual’ (Formaini, 2005). Apparently, almost everyone seems to agree that public intellectual is a good thing to be, and a resource of common importance which society at large benefits greatly from.