Observing my postcard publishing business from afar, for he receives practically everything I publish by means of this gritty medium, Bob Collén is in a privileged position to appreciate my frenetic activities. In a piece entitled “Intellectuals,” written on April 6, 2000, which I received today pasted on a postcard, he quotes from Schumpeter,[1] a hero of my youth:

Intellectuals are […] people who wield the power of the spoken and the written word, and one of the touches that distinguishes them from other people who do the same is the absence of direct responsibility for practical affairs. This touch in general accounts for another—the absence of that first-hand knowledge of them which only actual experience can give. The critical attitude, arising no less from the intellectual’s situation as an onlooker—in most cases also as an outsider—than from the fact that his main chance of asserting himself lies in his actual or potential nuisance value, should add a third touch.

I realized that his piece was a good-natured reminder of my own station only when I came to the “nuisance value” part of the quote. I am sure Bob himself will appreciate his rôle of a twice-removed onlooker—as well as an outsider—in my publishing business, and that he would relish the “nuisance value” of his own ever-so-slightly concealed barb. Perhaps the only difference between us concerns the second “touch” discussed by Schumpeter, the absence of “first-hand knowledge.” For Bob is an intellectual, too. And so was Schumpeter.

Footnote

1. Schumpeter, J.A., Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, Third Edition, New York: Harper and Row, 1962 (first published in 1942), p. 147.