In Hayek’s view, when someone is performing the intellectual function he or she is not an “original thinker” nor a “scholar or expert in a particular field.” In performing intellectual work he or she does not “possess special knowledge of anything in particular” and “need not even be particularly intelligent.” What the intellectual does have is “the wide range of subjects on which he can readily talk and write” and “a position or habits through which he becomes acquainted with new ideas sooner than those to whom he addresses himself.”
Hayek presents a bleak picture. He is clearly saying that this large class of intellectuals consists of two categories. In the first are the people who are expert at conveying ideas but are complete and utter amateurs when it comes to substance and need not even be particularly intelligent. In the second are people who are the true experts in a particular small area; unfortunately this gives them the standing such that they are listened to with respect in all kinds of other areas well outside their areas of competence.
Hayek often told the story of how he nearly turned down the award of the Nobel Prize for Economic Science in 1974 because he feared the impact on him of being asked to comment on anything and everything under the sun with people hanging on, and possibly acting on, every word. Likewise former world number-one-ranked golfer David Duval (whose tour nickname is “the intellectual” because he says he both reads, and understands the ideas behind, the novels of Ayn Rand) was staggered at the range of questions, from astronomy to zoology, put to him while he enjoyed that top spot. Fortunately for both golf and society he was sufficiently intelligent to laugh off such inquiries.
Hayek’s point about the intellectual not needing to know too much was brilliantly illustrated in Don’t Quote Me: Hi, My Name Is Steven, and I’m a Recovering Talking Head by Dr. Steven Gorelick in the Washington Post Outlook Section, Sunday, 27 August 2000. Dr. Gorelick is special assistant to the President at the City University of New York’s Graduate School and University Center, and his Outlook piece was condensed from the 21 July issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Gorelick is an expert on how communities on the one hand, and news organisations on the other hand, respond to high-profile violent crimes. Over a ten-year period he found that having the Dr. title, holding an academic job and being the kind of person who keeps up with the issues of the day, he experienced “expertise creep” and was soon commenting on topics far outside his general area of expertise.
His moment of truth came when he was asked, “Should adopted children be encouraged to locate their birth parents?” He framed a suitable response in his mind: “It is probably not possible for an adult to form a complete, integrated personality without knowing fundamental facts about his or her personal history.” Suddenly he realised he “knew absolutely nothing about adoption.” He declined to comment and ever since has taken “the pledge” under which he refuses to be given a platform as an expert on something he knows nothing about. One would think this would be easy. Why would people want your view on something you know nothing about? He reports it is hard, as the telephone rings with requests for his views on euthanasia, socialisation and military readiness.
In the Hayekian vision of change there are experts and original thinkers or scholars, that is, firsthand dealers in ideas. But we are “almost all ordinary men” outside our specialist fields and thus terribly dependent on the class of intellectuals or secondhand dealers in ideas, including novelists, for access to the ideas and work of the experts. The intellectuals truly are the gatekeepers of ideas “who decide what views and opinions are to reach us, which facts are important enough to be told to us, and in what form and from what angle they are to be presented. Whether we shall ever learn of the results of the work of the expert and the original thinker depends mainly on their decision.”
Time and again IEA authors have turned to the theme of what makes public opinion from Not from Benevolence: Twenty Years of Economic Dissent3 to The Emerging Consensus? Essays on the Interplay Between Ideas, Interests and Circumstances in the First Twenty-five Years of the IEA;4 and from Ideas, Interests and Consequences5 to British Economic Opinion: A Survey of a Thousand Economists.6 A recent Liberty Fund video, in its Intellectual Portrait series, in which Lord Harris and Arthur Seldon are interviewed about the IEA’s influence on opinion, is in the same tradition, and, as this Readings concerns itself with “writers of fiction,” mention must also be made of Michael Jefferson’s chapter, “Industrialisation and Poverty: In Fact and Fiction,” in The Long Debate on Poverty.7
In the chapters that follow, one is faced with a rather damning picture of prodigiously wasteful, yet Scrooge-like businessmen who are abnormal and antagonistic; corrupt, cunning and cynical; dishonest, disorderly, doltish, dumb and duplicitous; inhumane, insensitive and irresponsible; ruthless; unethical and unprincipled; and villainous to boot. Direct data, loved by economists, are not available, but in the closely related field of TV entertainment some relief is to hand.8 The Washington, D.C.-based Media Institute tracked the portrayal of businessmen in two hundred episodes of fifty prime time TV programmes. It found that:
“Over half of all corporate chiefs on television commit illegal acts ranging from fraud to murder.”
“Forty-five percent of all business activities on television are portrayed as illegal.”
“Only 3 percent of television businessmen engage in socially or economically productive behavior.”
“Hard work is usually ridiculed on television as ‘workaholism’ that inevitably leads to strained personal relationships.”9
Put another way, 97 percent of business is either illegal (Crooks) or duplicitous (Conmen) or foolish (Clowns), and those who practice it have rotten marriages and unhappy kids . . . . Of course they would have because they are all emotionally atrophied. Would the data for our novelists be any different? I doubt it.
The only possible TV bright spot is small business. Here the protagonist is not so much a vicious, corrupt, murdering drug dealer masquerading as a city banker, as a dumb, inept, social climber, way out of his league and subject to ridicule. So it is not much of a bright spot.
And in The Businessman in American Literature (University of Georgia Press, 1982), Emily Stipes Watts lights on a similar vein, namely “small, private businessmen” but even then openly admits that “four sympathetic protagonists . . . created by three important post-1945 novelists do not compose a dominant trend” (149). Indeed, less than twenty years later, my U.S. bookstore could not find one of the four titles and was unsure of another.
In some fields of literature, the portrayal of business is more positive. Popular writers such as Neville Shute and Dick Francis between them populate some three score or more high-selling books with lots of self-employed small business characters who are heroic yet humble; problem-solving and law-abiding; self-reliant and self-interested but not selfish. Long-running British soap operas such as Coronation Street and Eastenders have their fair share of used car dealers of all types, but many of the main characters are utterly respectable smaller business people making wonderful contributions to all the lives around them. It is when one moves to a Dallas or to a Booker prize candidate that the picture changes and it is difficult, nay impossible, to point to “literary capitalism” while “literary socialism” abounds.
So why is the picture so bleak? Why does the novelist, the writer of fiction, spit at the market, despise its institutions such as private property and the rule of law, and try to bite off the hand that feeds him? Surely Hayek again has part, at least, of the answer for us, when later in The Intellectuals and Socialism he discusses the role of disaffection.
For Hayek, the talented person who accepts our prevailing current norms and institutions faces a wide range of good career paths. However, to those who are “disaffected and dissatisfied” with the current order “an intellectual career is the most promising path to both influence and the power to contribute to the achievement of his ideals.”
But Hayek goes further. The top-class person not “disaffected and