Paul A. Rahe: The Intellectual as Courtier
[Paul A. Rahe is a professor of history at Hillsdale College and author, most recently, of Soft Despotism, Democracy's Drift and Montesquieu and the Logic of Liberty (both Yale University Press, 2009).]
What would it take to elicit servility from an intellectual? Money would help, of course. Just ask the Harvard professors who founded the Monitor Group—which for a time shilled for Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi in return for a quarter of a million dollars a month. And query the administration at the London School of Economics, recipient of a £1.5-million pledge from a foundation run by Seif, the tyrant's notably generous, charming, and debonair son and presumed heir, who earned a Ph.D. at the school with a dissertation alleged by some to have been at least partly plagiarized (LSE is investigating those allegations).
But money is certainly not the only coin in which the modern intellectual likes to be paid. There is, after all, nothing quite like celebrity, and proximity to power can easily become for an intellectual in search of renown what a candle is for a moth. If, as they say, power corrupts, then lack of power corrupts absolutely.
The allure of the tyrant is, to be sure, nothing new. Long before Lincoln Steffens traveled to the Soviet Union and returned to say, "I have been over into the future, and it works"; long before Mussolini and Hitler, Stalin and Mao, Castro and Hugo Chávez attracted intellectual acolytes from abroad; the poets of late archaic Greece flocked to the court of the tyrant Peisistratus of Athens at the behest of his free-spending sons. Plato advised Dionysius of Syracuse. Aristotle tutored Alexander the Great. The humanists of Italy flocked around Cosimo de' Medici and Lorenzo the Magnificent. Erasmus and Machiavelli wrote famous tracts with an eye to becoming counselors to princes. To the same end, Voltaire sojourned with Prussia's Frederick the Great, and Diderot spent time at the court of Russia's Catherine the Great....
Read entire article at CHE
What would it take to elicit servility from an intellectual? Money would help, of course. Just ask the Harvard professors who founded the Monitor Group—which for a time shilled for Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi in return for a quarter of a million dollars a month. And query the administration at the London School of Economics, recipient of a £1.5-million pledge from a foundation run by Seif, the tyrant's notably generous, charming, and debonair son and presumed heir, who earned a Ph.D. at the school with a dissertation alleged by some to have been at least partly plagiarized (LSE is investigating those allegations).
But money is certainly not the only coin in which the modern intellectual likes to be paid. There is, after all, nothing quite like celebrity, and proximity to power can easily become for an intellectual in search of renown what a candle is for a moth. If, as they say, power corrupts, then lack of power corrupts absolutely.
The allure of the tyrant is, to be sure, nothing new. Long before Lincoln Steffens traveled to the Soviet Union and returned to say, "I have been over into the future, and it works"; long before Mussolini and Hitler, Stalin and Mao, Castro and Hugo Chávez attracted intellectual acolytes from abroad; the poets of late archaic Greece flocked to the court of the tyrant Peisistratus of Athens at the behest of his free-spending sons. Plato advised Dionysius of Syracuse. Aristotle tutored Alexander the Great. The humanists of Italy flocked around Cosimo de' Medici and Lorenzo the Magnificent. Erasmus and Machiavelli wrote famous tracts with an eye to becoming counselors to princes. To the same end, Voltaire sojourned with Prussia's Frederick the Great, and Diderot spent time at the court of Russia's Catherine the Great....