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The Trials of a Public Intellectual
By Debra Shore
As appeared in the University of Chicago Magazine, June 1996
It is 1953 in Timnath, Colorado, Population 180. One or the towns younger residents endeavors to publish her own newspaper for friends and family. Jean Bethke, age 13, names it the Timnath Courier, and includes in her inaugural issue book and movie reviews, as well as a page-one think
piece addressing this question: Was the Yalta Agreement a good idea? In addition, the editor thoughtfully solicits reader comments, thus inducing best friend to respond, "I think you're crazy."
The Timnath Courier has remained in publishing recess since its first two editions, but the former
editor and publisher, now Jean Bethke Elshtain, has stayed in the writing and reflecting biz in earnest. Elshtain - who joined the U of C's faculty in 1995 as the first Laura Spelman Rockefeller
professor of social and political ethics in the Divinity School- has published more than 200 articles and several books on topics encompassing feminist theory, theology, international relations, war, the
family, and political theory. Currently she's finishing a biography of Jane Addams and will soon publish The King Is Dead: Sovereignty at Century's End.
lt was her 1995 book, Democracy on Trial, however, that Firmly established Elshtain's reputation
as a public intellectual. The New York Times Book Review called her treatise on the decline of civil society "wise, humane, and profoundly reflective," while the magazine Utne Reader named the
author to its list of 100 visionaries for the next century. A whirlwind book tour established her reputation as a gifted orator; soon speaking requests came pouring in - including one from Bill
Clinton, who had hoped to engage Elshtain and a few other scholars in a discourse on the state of American life. (She had the impression the President was idea-trawling for his upcoming State of the
Union Address.) "It would have been great fun," says a thoroughly regretful Elshtain, who had to decline because of a planned trip to South Africa.
A diminutive woman in her mid-50s, Elshtain appears modest, serious - and, these clays, extremely busy. While ruefully conceding that "the danger of being a public intellectual is that it becomes more
and more public and less intellectual," for now, at least, she seems thoroughly comfortable in the role. "If we're doing our job," she says of herself and others who do their scholarship in the public
eye, "I think what we do is to offer the richest, most complex description of a situation that we can and then try to alert people to what political, civic, ethical, and philosophical resources we can draw
on to help us see our way through this mess." Reluctantly she adds, "I think it's a toss-up whether we are going to make it or not."
Her message - that America's in trouble with a capital T - is clearly in demand. "I have a feeling I'm expressing what people feel in their bones," she says, citing polls that show how more Americans
than ever before believe that, as a nation, we're on the wrong track. Their response to the question "Do you think most people most of the time can be trusted?" is also at an all-time low.
"Democracy requires laws, constitutions and authoritative institutions," Elshtain writes in Democracy on Trial (BasicBooks) "but it also depends on what might be called democratic dispositions." These
dispositions include "a preparedness to work with others different from oneself toward shared ends; a combination of strong convictions with a readiness to compromise in the recognition that one can't
always get everything one wants; and a sense of individuality and a commitment to civic goods that are not the possession of one person or of one small group alone.
"But what do we see when we look around?" Elshtain asks her readers. "We find deepening cynicism; the growth of corrosive forms of isolation, boredom, and despair; the weakening, in other
words, of that world known as democratic civil society, a world of groups and associations and ties that bind."
Those ties can take the form of PTA or church membership, volunteer work in political campaigns,
neighborhood organizations, even bowling leagues. She frequently mentions the wake-up call delivered by Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam. His essay, "Bowling Alone: America's
Declining Social Capital," published in the Journal of Democracy, charted a steep decline in bowling-league membership across the country. Many people still bowl, Putnam pointed out - in
fact, more bowl than vote - but they're bowling alone, reflecting a growing reluctance of Americans to join groups of any kind.
We've developed an excess of hypersensitivity," says Elshtain with her characteristically rapid delivery. "We don't engage for fear someone will take offense, so we walk away from opportunities
for engagement - yet democracy requires that we make leaps of imagination, requires that we attempt to listen to the other, that we make empathetic understanding of what that experience once
might be like. That's what the civil-rights movement was all about. Yet while we descend into isolation and refuse to engage, emerging democracies all over the world are looking to the American
experience for signs of hope and signs of inspiration."
Elshtain blames two general trends for draining the vitality of American democracy. One is the
emergence, or triumph, of a "juridical" model of politics. By this she means the exercise of politics has become more and more like a courtroom in which there are accusers and accused, winners and
losers - and the winner takes all. Such a process, she says, "refuses to acknowledge there can be real honor in the process of democratic negotiation or compromise."
"Comprise can be an ideal," she stresses, "rather than a sign of collaboration with the regime. It can be a way in which we make pledges to one another. It is, in fact, a democratic way to do politics."
Certain issues - slavery, for example - do "violate so deeply the constituted principles democratic order that compromise isn't warranted. But most issues aren't like that."
As damaging as the current lack of compromise, says Elshtain, is emergence of a therapeutic, or "pop-psych," worldview. This "psychology of me" feeds into "a politics of me" - a process that, she
believes, ultimately undermines notions of accountability and responsibility.
"We don't have sin anymore," she quips. "We have syndromes." In essence we are saying, "I'm interested in the world only so long as it is interested in me."
Contrast our present state with the era of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Elshtain says, when large audiences sat for hours in the hot sun to listen to these two men make their case on matters of
premier importance. "My worry - is that we wouldn't even know how lo listen anymore. ...I understand the need for concision in political argument," she adds, "but my worry is that's all there is."
"Life is never simple for the earnest child - alert to the ebb and flow around her...driven to make sense even of the senseless, wanting simultaneously to stand out and to blend in,
seeking the self within available and conventions but determined at the same time to be the bringer of new forms, new ideas, daring possibilities."
Thus did Jean Elshtain describe the young Jane Addams in a lecture at Swift Hall last fall, but she might have been describing herself. She, too, was an earnest child. And like Addams - the Nobel
Prize-winning social reformer and pacifist who founded Chicago's Hull House as one the first settlement houses in North America - Elshtain was ever "alert to ebb and flow around her." As a
friend said of Jean's childhood, "You seem to have been thinking about stuff all the time."
Growing up in the virtual shadow of the Continental Divide, where the eastern flank of the Rockies
begins smoothing into the Great Plains, young Jean Bethke felt a sense of space where the public and private became one. As a citizen of tiny Timnath, she learned to feel that "what you said made a
difference. ...It mattered somehow."
The oldest of five children, Elshtain found herself negotiating the "rough waters" between her mother,
a powerful woman of volatile temperament ("she tended to see the worst and was rougher than she needed to be, yet there was a kind of tough-mindedness to her"), and her father, the Timnath schools superintendent,
"a person of exquisitely cheerful temperament who always minimized problems, always downplayed them, and so he seemed this kind of saintly person," she recalls. Thus from an early age Jean
developed an affinity for thinkers who understood extremes and who struggled to find some balance between the two.
An avid reader, she was especially drawn to war stories ("My mother thought this was extremely
peculiar," she remembers) and consumed the entire opus of Nancy Drew mysteries. At age 9 or 10, she attempted to compose a novel herself: "Some completely preposterous adventure story involving
gold miners in the Southwest," she says, dismissing with a laugh her youthful audacity. "I can't ever remember a time when I wasn't writing."
Elshtain also developed a talent for speaking, via 4-H contests, where she composed and delivered four-minute orations on such topics as "Responsibilities of Citizenship," and "What the 4-H Club
Means to Me." (More than 40 years later, she can easily reel off the 4-H pledge: "I pledge my head to clearer thinking, I pledge my heart to greater loyalty....") Her talent for making the compelling
case won speech contests year after year. She was introduced to the East Coast during a high-school trip to Washington, D.C., to attend a meeting of the Future Homemakers of America as
its national vice-president. Such biographical minutiae charmingly evoke a Norman Rockwell image of small-town America, but they also foretell many of the essential concerns of Elshtain's adult work:
family, community, democratic argument, and civic duty.
The other inescapable influence on Jean's youth was polio, which struck her at age 10. Doctors she
would not walk again, and she spent months a Denver hospital, recuperating with the support of her family. The experience, she says, taught her that "there's just a lot that's dealt. A lot of life is just
dealing with what's dealt, and I think we forget that at our peril."
After high school, Jean Bethke went to Colorado State University in Fort Collins to study History, later transferring to the University of Colorado, where she received B.A. But she had also married
at 18, borne three children, and divorced her husband by the time she was 23. As a single parent with three young children, she relied on help from her mother and sister while commuting to Boulder
to complete a master's degree. In 1973, she earned a Ph.D. in Politics from Brandeis. Her second marriage, to a Errol Elshtain, AB '64, produced another child and has endured more than 30 years.
Errol adopted Jean's three children and now works in Tennessee's Office of Disability Affairs. At present they maintain commuter marriage between Nashville, where several children and grandchildren live, and Chicago.
"It's interesting for someone like me who married young and had children, to look at a woman who never married and had no children because it's like the path not taken," Elshtain muses about her
current project, researching the life of Jane Addams. "So it was foreordained, I guess, that when I read Hull House" - Addams' two-part biography - "she would latch onto me and I would not be
able to shake her."
Elshtain also feels that Addams has been neglected as a feminist heroine, and the urge to redress
past wrongs motivates her in no small degree. "Part of it is wanting to give people their due. You want to do justice," she says. "I would never underestimate the urge to do justice as part of scholarship."
Perhaps it is this urge "To Do justice" that has placed Elshtain at the forefront of communitarianism - a movement that has emerged in the last decade as a response to the limits of liberal theory and practice.
Communitarianism stresses that individual rights need to be balanced with social responsibilities and that families and communities ought to be supported in the deeply important task of moral education.
For several years, Elshtain has headed the board of the Institute for American Values and served as co-chair of the Council on Families in America, both of which support a communitarian agenda.
Elshtain is also a board member of the Women's Freedom Network, founded in 1993 by American University law professor Rita Simon, PhD '57, to serve as an alternative voice to orthodox feminist
positions. "We do not feel that American women today are victims," Simon says, "nor that me are enemies." The Network opposes Affirmative Action, she adds, believes in the free market, and
seeks to celebrate the enormous gains made by women in the last three decades.
Elshtian's associations with the Women's Freedom Network, as well as her determination to focus
on families and values, has lead to read to frequent charges that she's playing into the hands of the conservative right. "Every time I start talking about not ceding the issue of family values to the right,
some feminists tell me that I oppressing women," Elshtain recently told the Chronicle of Higher Education. "Especially in the academy, its hard not to get hooted out of the room."
Indeed, Elshtain angered feminists from the very start of her academic career. At the University of Massachusetts, where she taught from 1973 to 1987, Elshtain drew fire for including male authors
on the reading list, for allowing men in her Feminism classes, and for teaching an array of different feminist positions. "Most teachers of women's studies presume that if you don't see yourself as a
victim, you're in a stale of false consciousness, you're 'male-identified,'" Elshtain said at the time. She left for Vanderbilt, where she said the professors "recognize that feminism is in part an argument."
Elshtain's views gained national attention in 1979 when her cover story for The Nation criticized feminists for what she saw as their antipathy to child rearing, heterosexuality, and the family in
general. "The family, however shakily and imperfectly, helps to keep alive an alternative to the values which dominate in the marketplace," she wrote, sparking a wave of angry letters.
Fifteen years later. The Nation ran a cover story by Judith Stacey, a professor at the University of
California, Davis, that slammed Elshtain and other scholars in the Council on Families in America for ignoring the damage caused to families by economic trends like corporate downsizing in favor of an
agenda of prejudicial values, such as heterosexual-partner-headed households. Responding in The Nation, Elshtain said that the council had in fact set aside the matter of gay parenting to focus on the
more pressing problem of the large percentage of children growing up without two parents. She also accused Stacey of "ideological stalking."
Fellow council co-chair David Popenoe, an associate dean of the faculty of arts and sciences at Rutgers, observes that "Jean is really a believer in, and is willing to talk about, the importance of
morality and virtue, and yet I've never met anyone who's harder to pin down politically. I don't know anyone else who consistently and simultaneously writes for both left-wing and right-wing
journals and gets away with it, but Jean does."
That Elshtain refuses to endorse a particular brand of political ideology should be no surprise to anyone who has read Democracy on Trial or has heard her warn about the dangers of what she
calls "the politics of resentment," in which people are driven not by a desire for authentic transformation but, rather, by a yearning to get what others have. In the politics of resentment, we
see ourselves as victims in relation to others and merely want to change places, to turn the tables, and climb to the top of the heap.
"What about the notion of an inclusive community," Elshtain asks, "not one which the slave becomes the master?"
To bring back this community, "we can't rely on the market alone," Elshtain stresses. "We've got to rebuild our basic institutions. How can we restore sufficient social trust so that we can work with
one another and talk with one another and even disagree, which you can't do unless you have a conversation?"
It's not dissent itself that tears at the fabric of democracy, she argues, but rather the current lack of shared and public spaces - community halls, libraries, places of worship, family den - where
arguments become solutions, where the "I" becomes "we."
Yet no matter what values America decides to embrace, Elshtain acknowledges that many aspects
of its essential character have irrevocably changed: a realization evoked in her recent New Republic review of Hillary Rodham Clinton's book, It Takes a Village. Recalling a visit to her grandmother's
house some 20 years earlier, Elshtain wrote, "She was by then utterly bowed over - the years of stoop labor had taken their toll - but she came out to the car for a last goodbye, thrusting into my
arms more homemade noodles, another loaf of rye bread, freshly gathered eggs, a new apron, another remarkable quilt."
In that moment, Elshtain wondered what she might one day place in the hands of her own
grandchildren. "Will I give them off-prints of articles? Copies of my latest books? I suppose I will. But I will not comfort myself with the notion that this is the same as rye bread and quilts. It isn't. I
made a choice. That is sometimes called growing up."
And does Elshtain have any words of solace for a nation that itself is smarting from the growing
pains that come with facing a future so different from its past? "Remember," Elshtain tells her listener "the American story is a story of deepening complexity. Be not afraid. One of the things we have
learned is that democracy is an unpredictable enterprise.
"The freer you are, the more responsible you must become. That is the task of democratic citizenship."
It's a message that could win applause at some 4-H contest from her distant past. And whether one agrees with them or not, Jean Bethke Elshtain's words hold the undeniable power of a familiar voice, calling us home.
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