American Intellectuals and Foreign Policy
![handle is hein.journals/fora45 and id is 600 raw text is: AMERICAN INTELLECTUALS
AND FOREIGN POLICY
By Irving Kristol
A recent letter to The New York Times, complaining about
the role of the academic community in opposing President
Johnson's Viet Nam policy, argued that it is not clear
why people trained in mathematics, religion, geology, music, etc.,
believe their opinions on military and international problems
should carry much validity. And the letter went on: Certainly
they [the professors] would oppose unqualified Pentagon generals
telling them how to teach their course.
One can understand this complaint; one may even sympathize
with the sentiments behind it. The fact remains, however, that it
does miss the point. For the issue is not intellectual competence or
intellectual validity-not really, and despite all protestations to
the contrary. What is at stake is that species of power we call
moral authority. The intellectual critics of American foreign
policy obviously and sincerely believe that their arguments are
right. But it is clear they believe, even more obviously and sin-
cerely, that they are right-and that the totality of this rightness
amounts to much more than the sum of the individual arguments.
An intellectual may be defined as a man who speaks with gen-
eral authority about a subject on which he has no particular com-
petence. This definition sounds ironic, but is not. The authority is
real enough, just as the lack of specific competence is crucial. An
economist writing about economics is not acting as an intellectual,
nor is a literary critic when he explicates a text. In such cases, we
are witnessing professionals at work. On the other hand, there is
good reason why we ordinarily take the man of letters as the
archetypical intellectual. It is he who most closely resembles his
sociological forbear and ideal type: the sermonizing cleric.
Precisely which people, at which time, in any particular social
situation, are certified as intellectuals is less important than the
fact that such certification is achieved-informally but indis-
putably. And this process involves the recognition of the intellec-
tual as legitimately possessing the prerogative of being moral
guide and critic to the world. (It is not too much of an exaggera-
tion to say that even the clergy in the modern world can claim this
prerogative only to the extent that it apes the intellectual class.](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/fora45&div=53&collection=journals&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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American Intellectuals and Foreign Policy
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