“that the public intellectual function is criticism. And if intellectuals are in a better position to perform that function it’s not because they are uniquely blessed with wisdom—and it’s certainly not because they are uniquely equipped to wield social or political power. It is only because learning the processes of criticism and practicing them with some regularity are requisites for intellectual employment. It’s what we do at our day jobs.”Both Mack and Elshtain are absolutely right, but it seems that a job of a public intellectual goes beyond just questioning and criticizing, and in order to make a bigger difference in this world you have to try to take actions, just like Michael Ignatieff did.
One of the worldwide best-known public
intellectuals who always raises questions about what is our role as a
Western society in the rest of the world is Michael Ignatieff.
Ignatieff is a son of famous Canadian diplomat and prime minister
aide, and the grand son of a generation of influential advisors in
Imperial Russia. Politics, intellectualism and a global view of the
world were in his blood. In 2005, Foreign Policy and Prospect
Magazine named Michael Ignatieff as one of the world’s 100 most
famous and influential public intellectuals, which they defined as
“[s]omeone who has shown distinction in their own field along with the ability to communicate ideas and influence debate outside of it.”
It is not surprising that Ignatieff deserved such fame considering
his successful, diverse and active career. After getting his BA in
University of Toronto, being granted a MA in Cambridge, starting his
Ph.D in University of Oxford, and completing it in Harvard University
in 1976, he moved to the United Kingdom where his professional career
as a writer, journalist and professor took off. During his successful
career he taught at the world top universities like University of
British Columbia, Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard and etc. His books like
The Russian Album, Blood and Belonging, and a novel
called Scar Tissue were honored, nominated, and won multiple
prestigious prizes like Lionel Gilbert Prize, Booker Prize, etc.
While in London, with help of his telegenic appearance and eloquence
Ignatieff won praise from audiences as a personality on the BBC and
wrote a column for the Observer as well as New York Times.
In Ignatieff’s 1990s works one
of the most famous and important topics was Yugoslavia, where over
than 130,000 people died. It was a painful experience for Ignatieff
to see that happen especially because of Western countries’ delay
in intervention. As Jordan M.Smith writes in The Boston Globe
“Amid an earlier generation of liberals that had seen American power misused in the terrible war in Vietnam, Ignatieff emerged as a leading voice among “liberal hawks,” arguing that Westerners could not leave Bosnians and Rwandans to die. He was an advocate for the wars in Kosovo and Iraq, citing them as necessary humanitarian ventures. He also helped formulate the doctrine that the international community bore a “Responsibility to Protect.”
He
wrote in 2003,
“The disagreeable reality for those who believe in human rights is that there are some occasions—and Iraq may be one of them—when war is the only real remedy for regimes that live by terror.”
His stand in support of modern liberal interventionism
became one of the Ignatieff’s strongest ideas that simultaneously
brought him triumph as a writer and academic and a tremendous loss as
a future politician.
In October 2004, three Canadian
Liberals, “men in black” as Ignatieff calls them, showed up at
Cambridge and offered him to come back to Canada and run for a leader
of Canadian Liberal Party in order to eventually become a Prime
Minister of Canada. It was a big surprise for everybody, including
Ignatieff himself, because he couldn’t believe that his
“political writing qualified [him] to become a politician”(The Boston Globe, Smith).
It is not surprising that Ignatieff accepted this incredible
offer because that meant that he could possibly achieve the all
“intellectual’s ultimate dream: bringing ideas—in this case, interventionist ideas—into being in the real world of politics” (World Affairs, Smith).
It seemed that Ignatieff was perfectly suited
for this job, he had big ideas, and he knew theory of political world
from inside and out, which is such a rare commodity for a politician
in this day and age. Unfortunately, for Canadian Liberal Party and
Michael Ignatieff it wasn’t all so easy. The world of politics has
very different requirements for a successful politician than academia
for a successful scholar.
“ When Michael Ignatieff resigned as leader of Canada’s Liberals at a press conference in Toronto on May 3rd, members of his team were seen at the back of the room in tears. They were grieving not just for their party—which the previous day had suffered the worst defeat in its history, coming a first-ever third place in the federal election, behind not only their Conservative Party tormentors but also the left-wing New Democrats. They were grieving even more for the death of a dream, the sad end of a six-year experiment that they had once believed would conclude with a unique man, Ignatieff himself, pulling the sword of political governance out of the stone of political theory and coming to power in Canada as a contemporary philosopher-king ” (World Affairs, Smith).
Here we have a beautiful and sad
example of extremely influential public intellectual, with impressive
credentials and name recognition who tried to take his theory and
thoughts and implement them in practice. However, reality of the
academia is different from political reality. During his time in
Congress, Ignatieff certainly was able to use his skillful academic
background like
“Maclean’s, Canada’s major newsweekly, labeled Ignatieff as the ‘best orator’ in Parliament for his ‘profound’ use of alliteration and flights of Ciceronian rhetoric. ‘Mr. Speaker, you can’t get development, diplomacy, and defense to work together in Kandahar if you’ve got muddle, misinformation, and mismanagement in Ottawa,’ he once said. ‘You can’t win hearts and minds in Afghanistan, if all they see are troops, tanks, and guns’ ”(World Affairs, Smith).
As mentioned earlier, Michael
Ignatieff had a very strong opinion regarding liberal interventionism
and he didn’t try to hide it in the politics either. He freely
spoke his opinion on Israeli Palestinian relations and that did not
improve his image in political arena. Frankly it did the opposite.
“The things prized in academia—independence of thought, bold ideas, speaking out—are not the things that necessarily make a good politician,” says Joseph Nye, a professor at the Kennedy School (The Boston Globe, Smith).
Speaking just the truth didn’t do the
job for Ignatieff, he realized that politicians, unlike public
intellectuals, said what they had to say when they needed to. Unfortunate for Ignatieff’s
political career while
“he was the fox in many things, he was the hedgehog in one: he was above all an acute political observer and theorist who became particularly concerned with the reluctance of rich, secure states to use force to save lives” (World Affairs, Smith).
Conservatives, as well as many Liberals and public voters
didn’t support such a straight-forward attitude of Ignatieff and as
Jane Taber writes in her essay
“[b]eing an intellectual doesn't always make a good politician either, ‘because as an intellectual you are seeking truth and as a politician you are seeking power and those lines are still crossed.”
It was even more important for
Canadian people, and I agree with them, that Michael Ignatieff was
out of Canada for about 30 years traveling and working around the
world and now he was back trying to win over people’s hearts, trust
and votes. In order to defend himself and prove his devotion and
commitment to Canada and its people Ignatieff said that
“[l]oving a country is an act of imagination,” a line which caused one reviewer to quip, ‘I’m not even sure what it means, but you wouldn’t write that if you were really secretly a Harvard professor at heart. Right?’ Ignatieff never overcame the impression that he was in the country only insofar as he could profit from it. He suffered from the fact that intellectuals do insincerity much more clumsily than do ‘natural’ politicians (World Affairs, Smith).
Ignatieff admits
“ ‘I’ve spent my life as a writer, but you have no idea of the effect of words until you become a politician,’ he told The New Yorker with a sense of wonder. ‘One word or participle in the wrong place and you can spend weeks apologizing and explaining’” (World Affairs, Smith).
While he had a great intellectualism,
profound knowledge and a perfect plan of action for Canada in the
world arena, he didn’t know what it takes to become a wise, sharp,
power hungry politician.
It seems that my thesis, explained
above, has been crushed on the example of Michael Ignatieff’s loss.
You may also think that a public intellectual after he finds his
niche should stay there and continue what he is best at, i.e.
criticizing others, “keep the pot boiling,” and try not to repeat
Ignatieff’s mistake, you can even call it failure. However, it
takes a lot of bravery and courage, some may call it arrogance, to
take such action. Moreover, it is honorable enough to take a chance,
to make a step and try and do something instead of beating yourself
up for the rest of your life for letting an opportunity slip by,
never having take your chance to make your theory in a reality. Even
more honorable is Ignatieff’s humble acceptance of his mistakes
“I entered politics with a lot of baggage and I paid full freight for it, but it’s better to have paid up than to have lived a defensive life,” he writes in “Fire and Ashes.” “A defensive life is not a life fully lived” (The Boston Globe, Smith).As a support to my call for actions from public intellectuals, Jordan Smith says
“[i]t may be difficult for philosophers to become kings, but just by being in the royal palace they are able to have some influence”(World Affairs, Smith).We should treat Ignatieff’s experience as a good example for other public intellectuals that try themselves in the world of politics. These intellectuals should make sure that they are up to this type of job, pressure that comes with it, and other under water stones that may not seem obvious before. Finally, on their tough journey to politics, public intellectuals should keep in mind very powerful words of Margaret Wente that she wrote in her essay
“The confessions of Michael Ignatieff, ” “[l]ike a flawed Greek hero, Mr. Ignatieff believes that his greatest sin was hubris - which, in case you have to look it up, is ambition combined with pride and ignorance.”
Works cited
Mack, Stephen. "The "Decline" of the Public Intellectual." Web log post. The New Democratic Review. N.p., 15 Jan. 2014. Web. 01 Feb. 2014. <http://www.stephenmack.com/blog/archives/2014/01/the_decline_of_10.html>.
Herman, David. "Thinking globally." Prospect (2005). Web. 1 Feb. 2014. <http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/thinkingglobally/#.Uu3wM3ddWYk>.
Smith, Jordan M. "Iggy Pops: The Michael Ignatieff Experiment." World Affairs (2011): 25 pars. Web. 1 Feb. 2014. <http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/article/iggy-pops-michael-ignatieff-experiment>
Smith, Jordan M. "Michael Ignatieff, the intellectual who wanted to be a politician." The Boston Globe (2013). Web. 1 Feb. 2014.
<http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2013/11/17/michael-ignatieff-intellectual-who-wanted-politician/c5XKjVRISmnmX3NFHpJjAK/story.html>.
Taber, Jane. "Newman rewrites Ignatieff's history." Globe & Mail [Toronto, Canada] 28 May 2011: A17. Biography in Context. Web. 1 Feb. 2014.
Wente, Margaret. "The confessions of Michael Ignatieff." Globe & Mail [Toronto, Canada] 26 Sept. 2013: A15. Biography in Context. Web. 1 Feb. 2014.
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