Summoning

Alan Jacobs takes issue with Corey Robin’s essay on “How Intellectuals Create a Public,” where he argues that public intellectuals shouldn’t write for readers who already exist but “summon” a new public into being.

Jacobs says that Robin writes a lot about summoning, which, Jacobs says, has two or three meanings: “first, a lord summons a servant; in the second, a magician summons a spirit. (Maybe three, if you add a court of law issuing a summons.)” What’s common is that summoning always summons a situation of domination: “These are tropes of mastery, in which the public intellectual assumes dominion over a servile public.”

Jacobs thinks Robin’s approach is “a recipe for political ineffectuality, because people know when they’re being condescended to, especially when the condescension is this flagrant, and simply will not agree to be summoned.” Even if “public intellectuals rarely become politicians,” they often “want political influence.” And to get political influence, “they need to take a lesson from Churchill. If you don’t actually have respect for the people you’re writing for, fake it.”

I’m not convinced of Jacobs’s linguistic or political analysis. I suspect Robin has another definition of the word in mind, one that Jacobs doesn’t mention: “to call into action; rouse; call forth.” Besides, it’s not clear why a public intellectual should eschew authority. Jacobs stacks the argument by talking about “mastery” and “dominion” and “servile” publics. Surely everyone who writes hopes to exercise some sort of authority. Why else would one aspire to authorship?

As for political ineffectiveness: Publics have indeed been called into being where they did not exist before. Is it really the case that political life depends on mobilizing coalitions that already exist? Or might a public intellectual aim instead to forge – nay, even to summon – a new coalition? As Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy pointed out, there were no Franciscans before Francis, nor Lutherans before Luther. Francis and Luther “summoned” a new coalition into existence, both with quite dramatic effects, not least in politics.