Tobias Endler, How To Be A Superpower: The Public Intellectual Debate on the Global Role of the United States after September 11.
Romaniuk, Scott Nicholas
Tobias Endler, How To Be A Superpower: The Public Intellectual
Debate on the Global Role of the United States after September 11
(Opladen: Barbara Budrich Publishers, 2012)
From the great rift that has emerged between the United States (US)
and much of the international community in a post-9/11 social and
political landscape, a disquieting thread of schisms concerning
America's political ideologies, democratic deliberation,
communication and societal discourse, have seen the academy and public
intellectuals seed the conditions for the adoption of the general view
that the US is in decline. Establishing an edifying prism through which
to engage with these and other problematic issues such as the
reformulation of America's global role in the 21st century, Tobias
Endler addresses the deep core of the matter by connecting with leading
political thinkers and America's luminary intellectuals to consider
America in the midst of an intellectual renaissance, and whether this
might appropriately be taken as postmortem or rebirth.
Recognizing the work and commitment of public intellectuals as
fruitful avenues for approaching and informing the foundations of
democratic ideals, Endler argues that, "deliberative democracy in
the form of comprehensive public debate represents the most promising
way for America to (re-)constitute its identity in a world that has
changed since September 11, 2001" (p. 278). Enshrining the heart of
the Habermasian concept of lifeworld, the chapters woven together
present an intellectual trade of ideas representative of the
contestation evident in American culture across the map today by
depicting the manner in which "America argues with itself,"
"argues about itself," and how it "goes through a
permanent process of self-legitimization and -affirmation" (p.
276). This is an exercise exacerbated by the exigency of the US
reasserting its position within world politics and heightened by
rivaling interpretations of the universalistic ambitions of a
pluralistic state in a "hopelessly plural world" (p. 276).
Endler introduces the reader to the reemergence of pessimism regarding
intellectual life within the US, and reveals the dangerous point at
which the country finds itself given the state of the US
population's indifferent disposition toward American intellectual
thinking and what they have to say to the (general) public. Eminent
academics are shielded by the negative repercussions as the providers of
faulty prediction, factual error, or simplification and sweeping
statements that continue to devalue the credibility of these elite (p.
15). While the contention resonates that the reputation of intellectuals
has been decaying for some time, Endler reasons that as they are once
again becoming widely respected, their voices are also becoming
positively engrained within US public discourse.
Endler's grounded methodological approach processes
information acquired though academics, journalists, think tankers, and
active or former politicians, however, the author considered engagement
with the nation's most prominent intellectuals necessary for
tiering the analysis of each chapter so as to combine what Endler refers
to as the "content-level" with the "conceptual
level" (p. 16). Drawing on information acquired through interviews
with notable academics such as Francis Fukuyama, Noam Chomsky, and
Howard Zinn, the author informs each chapter using a representative
sample of two to three "thinkers" clustered according to their
ideological orientation. In doing so, a robust debate is cultivated and
thread through the various chapters. Within the main body of this work,
Endler places the public intellectual within the context of American
society, considering the extent to which the public intellectual is a
necessary component in keeping the democratic debate alive. The
university setting is depicted as an alienated landscape that has
simultaneously fallen under extreme pressure in the same way as
political institutions and businesses. The discussion related to these
thinkers is employed to exemplify the nature in which society can
benefit from the posture of public intellectuals, and serves to express
how a particular relativity of knowledge exists that now compels the
intellectual to descend from the ivory tower. Endler's examination
hosts the reality of fragmentation existing within American political
streams. Noting that that US is "far from homogeneous," a
number of intellectuals and individuals alike have moved beyond their
respective political classifications (p. 45). Focusing on the
neoconservative movement, which Endler reasons, "grew out of a
contradiction," the author illustrates how intellectuals analyze
politics, political roles, and scenarios in which particular states
define themselves along different lines (p. 46).
A modality of the intellectual element toward the identification of
the US by neoconservatives within the context of the post-9/11 world is
a sparkling feature of this chapter. A nexus is achieved with the case
of power, ideas, and ideals as intentional designs of self-perception
and the imagery constructed to allow a nation to engage with the world
while viewing itself as the harbinger of a liberal democratic movement.
The reader comes to face the locus of moderate conservatives, referring
to their role, in part, as a "balancing act" that uncovers the
importance of considering multiple prisms of interpretation and analysis
of the US and its role after 9/11 (p. 123). Zbigniew Brzezinski hammers
the point in this regard questioning whether America can conduct a
foreign policy "that avoids the pitfalls of a beleaguered mindset
but still comports with America's historically novel status as the
world's paramount power" (p. 125; Brzezinski, 2005: p. xi).
Endler considers the status of superpower as a point of controversies
and a self-awarded special status in so much as the issue of status
retains competing dimensions that are ultimately dictated by the
position from which the perception is cast. Probing a weakened desire to
hold on to an idealistically charged approach to American
exceptionalism, Endler facilitates another rich exchange between leading
public intellectuals, fitting these "thinkers" and their works
together as a critical step in maintaining a debate that others have
effectively trumped through accusations of "un-Americanism" on
the part of several (i.e., the Chomsky-Zinn-Finkelstein quarter), and
for preserving these voices as features of necessity.
Endler has made a very interesting contribution to the fields of
political science and international relations, more specifically, for
structurally approaching important debates about American identity and
foreign policy as applied to the world as well as phenomena that are
hotly contested and struggling within the borders of the US itself. This
work suggests a great deal of planning and clearly shows that the author
has mined an extensive range of intellectual minds and to considerable
depths in order to deliver a synthesis of analyses from the full
political spectrum within the US today. Endler convokes an appreciable
field of secondary source material with primary source material obtained
through well-orchestrated qualitative methodologies. This
multidisciplinary work, while delivering evidence that supports the
central argument addresses a number of sub-questions that adds an
interesting dimension. The discussion and enlightening perspectives
marshaled within this book make it an attractive work to thinkers within
and beyond the United States so as to make it not only relevant to the
discourses taking place in other societies, but also renders the
exploration within very much timely and a piece on which members of
academic and non-academic circles alike might easily fall in the future.
Broadly appealing to an interested public as much as it is to members of
the academic community, Endler's work is a reminder, not
exclusively through its literary accessibility, that the connection
points between the public and scholarship should not only be preserved,
but also strengthened in order to reconsider the role of the
intellectual within American society today and tomorrow.
Scott Nicholas Romaniuk
Central European University
