Russell
Jacoby published a book in 1987 called The Last Intellectuals in which
he argued that for fifty years the support for public intellectuals had been magazines
which no longer could pay enough to support intellectuals and the few
remaining ones were forced into academia where they had little
opportunity to offer free ranging, widely important views.
I want to point out that public intellectuals now, 2007, have a wide range of think tanks as homes for their free ranging minds, many new foundations that support broad intellectual thought, plenty of prosperous self-employment and consulting occupations that support intellectuals and lastly the combination of blogs, jobs, speaking engagements, magazines and books to offer support.
Now, in an open successful commercial society, we have more public intellectuals and more opportunity for them then ever in the past. (Most of the anti-commerce Marxists are still in academia.)