“Philosophers no longer write for the intelligent, only for their fellow professionals.”

—  Jacques Barzun

"Culture High and Dry" (1984), p. 9
The Culture We Deserve (1989)
Context: Philosophers no longer write for the intelligent, only for their fellow professionals. The few thousand academic philosophers in the world do not stint themselves: they maintain more than seventy learned journals. But in the handful that cover more than one subdivision of philosophy, any given philosopher can hardly follow more than one or two articles in each issue. This hermetic condition is attributed to "technical problems" in the subject. Since William James, Russell, and Whitehead, philosophy, like history, has been confiscated by scholarship and locked away from the contamination of general use.

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Jacques Barzun photo
Jacques Barzun 46
Historian 1907–2012

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