Risers and Fallers

What happened to the intellectual giants of the 20th century?

Which 20th century intellectuals have higher or lower status today than when they were in their “prime”? I think of status in terms of two factors: name recognition and idea penetration.

Name recognition can be thought of as a guess as to what percentage of educated Americans can give a one-paragraph explanation of the person’s main thought and its significance. Then we take this guess as of now and compare it to what we guess would have been true in that intellectual’s “prime.”

Idea penetration can mean that an intellectual’s insights and conceptual frameworks are part of everyone’s repertoire. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s plea to judge people not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character is an example, although it has become oddly right-coded.

An example of a Faller is John Kenneth Galbraith, who was known for claiming that the American economy had come to be dominated by large corporations. He described them as able to use advertising to ensure demand for their goods. He thought that the leaders of these giants cultivated a myth of entrepreneurship to hide their immense power and quasi-permanent status. In his prime, his books were bestsellers and many educated Americans were familiar with his line of thinking. Today, he is little read, and the business world has experienced considerable disruption.¹

An example of a Riser is Rene Girard, who is known for claiming that we acquire our desires by copying other people. He seems to be better known today than he was in his twentieth-century “prime.”

The case that interests me the most is Sigmund Freud. Although much of his work dates from the 19th century, his status in America peaked in the 20th century, and arguably he was the most important intellectual of the mid-century period. Relative to that superstar status, he is definitely a Faller. But today many people believe in psychotherapy (of various kinds) and the importance of unconscious desires. I need to read more about him in order to obtain a perspective on whether he has fallen 30 percent or 90 percent.

John Maynard Keynes is another interesting case. Like Freud, he is reviled by many. But everyone (except me) uses the framework of aggregate demand and aggregate supply.² Everyone (except me) thinks that spending creates jobs and jobs create spending. Relative to when he was alive, I would classify Keynes as a Riser. If you think his “prime” was the 1960s, you can argue that he is a (slight) Faller.

I find it easier to play the game by grouping intellectuals together by field.

Technology (E. F. Schumacher, Buckminster Fuller, Norbert Weiner, John von Neumann, Ralph Nader, Paul Ehrlich)

Thanks to computers, Von Neumann is a Riser. Nader is no longer the superstar that he was in the 1970s, but his movement is still strong and still matters a great deal. The others are steep Fallers.

Economics (Keynes, Samuelson, Friedman, Galbraith, Hayek)

The average college-educated person in the 1960s knew Samuelson from his market-dominant textbook. It no longer reigns, but its successors are recognizably Samuelsonian, so that his fall is not so steep. I think people still have an idea of what Friedman stood for, but they have no appreciation of his arguments, so I would call him a definite Faller. Keynes and Galbraith I discussed above.

With Road to Serfdom, Hayek was much more appreciated in middle-brow circles than by elite intellectuals. Now one could say that is reversed. So does that make him a Riser or a Faller?

You may be able to name many 20th-century economists. But they were not known outside of academia. If you insist on Greenspan or Volcker, then I would say that we need a separate category for policy makers, which is where you could put Kissinger. But I’ll pass on that category.

Psychology (Freud, B.F. Skinner, Carl Jung, Benjamin Spock, Erich Fromm)

As I said, I need to read more about Freud. Skinner may be the biggest Faller of anyone listed in this essay. There was a time when a class in psychology was almost all Skinner, and now it is almost none.

Spock’s book on child care was once as predominant as Samuelson’s economics textbook, and it was blamed by conservatives for “permissive parenting,” which according to them caused the 1960s. But if the thought of spanking a child horrifies you, then Spock has not fallen too badly. Jung is a bit of a Faller, but people think about archetypes and even the collective unconscious. Fromm is forgotten, as far as I can tell.

Sociology (Erving Goffman, Talcott Parsons, Robert Nisbet, Charles Murray, Matt Mark Granovetter, Robert Trivers, E.O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins, Stephen Jay Gould)

Is there not a good case to be made that we are living in Erving Goffman’s world? I think he coined the term “impression management,” and certainly with the advent of social media that is now a big part of our lives. But he is a Faller. Probably if you would read him now, you would dismiss him as offering Blinding Glimpses of the Obvious. Parsons and Nisbet are also Fallers.

Murray is still polarizing, but much lesser known than he was in the 20th century. So he is a Faller, but not too much of one.

Granovetter is a Riser, no? Social networks are a big deal now, and he is known for his work on those.

I put the sociobiology controversialists in the sociology category, since the public doesn’t care about insects or peacocks. I would say that Gould’s crusade against evolutionary biology failed, so he seems to be somewhat of a Faller. Dawkins and Trivers seem like Risers, but Wilson was much more well known, and controversial, in his prime.

Political Science (Harold Lasswell, Robert Dahl, Gabriel Almond, Anthony Downs)

Lasswell is another figure whose work seems like it ought to fit the Internet age. In the middle of the twentieth century, political science was adjacent to psychology, in part thanks to Lasswell. And Lasswell was also interested in political communication and propaganda, which is another hot topic these days. But he seems to be a Faller. Almond worked on comparative politics, culture, and political development, topics which were the basis for the latest Nobel Prize in economics. Yet Almond is another Faller. Robert Dahl theorized about the conditions required for democracy. Again, that might seem to keep him relevant, but he is also a Faller.

In the 1970s, political science became more adjacent to economics, in part thanks to Downs. It seems to me that Downs has fallen by less than the others, but that could be because I read economists much more than political scientists. But he has still fallen quite a bit.

Philosophy (Ludwig Wittgenstein, John Rawls, John Searle, Jurgen Habermas, John Dewey, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Bertrand Russell, Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, Michel Foucault, W.V.O. Quine, Robert Nozick, Murray Rothbard, Ayn Rand)

So many names! And I have left off quite a few.

How many people could understand Wittgenstein when he was in his prime? Or now? Not knowing the answer, I cannot say whether he is a Riser or a Faller.

I would say that Camus and Sartre are clearly Fallers. Who today brags about being an existentialist? Lots of people did in the 1950s and 1960s.

I thought that Rawls was way over-rated in the 1970s. Philosophers still swoon over him, but the rest of educated America has moved on. Faller.

Nozick and Rothbard are Fallers. By even more than Rawls. 1970s libertarianism, including Friedman’s, is mostly a pincushion these days.

By comparison, Ayn Rand has held up better. Maybe she is not even a Faller (her appeal was always limited)?

Searle is a riser? His Chinese Room example is kind of like the Turing test.

Popper and Kuhn are popular with people who separate the concept of truth from the concept of power, and Foucault is popular with people who don’t. Given the salience of the disagreement, can we call them each Risers?

I see Habermas, Dewey, Quine, and Russell as Fallers. People do refer to them, but not as much as when they were in their prime.

Feminism (Germaine Greer, Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Susan Brownmiller, Helen Gurley Brown, Gloria Steinem)

I like to say that the Boomer generation acts like we invented sex, and the Millennials and Zoomers act like they invented social morality. So my sense is that the 20th century feminists are Fallers, in that they are not given their due by young people who think of themselves as having discovered moral truths and the older generations were simply benighted.

Other (religious figures, novelists)

Except for Girard and Martin Luther King, Jr., the religious figures have all fallen out of sight. Neibuhr? Buber? Pope John Paul II? They were important in their day, if you can believe it. So were many novelists, including Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Dos Passos, Hemingway, Bellow, Baldwin…

Maybe Asimov and some other science fiction authors have held their own. And Tolkien is a Riser.

Final Thoughts

I should not pretend to be an expert on this topic. Tyler Cowen could probably give you a better-informed analysis. Charles Murray would probably come up with some clever quantitative approach. He is the Bill James of sociology.

As I said, I started noodling on the topic because of Freud. It’s hard to overstate how important he was to mid-twentieth century American conversations. People would seriously argue, for example, that the Nazis had emerged because German approaches to toilet training toddlers resulted in authoritarian personalities.

How much of today’s conversation can be traced to Freud? I’ll get back to you after I read more.

1. As Deirdre McCloskey put it, “In truth the list of companies that Galbraith held in awe as great forces in 1967 looks quaint now. U.S. Steel, AT&T, and General Motors belie his assertion "of great stability in [a great corporation's] position in the planning system." Eight years after the first publication of The New Industrial State, Bill Gates founded Microsoft.”

2. Keynes only talked about aggregate demand. Aggregate supply was added in the 1970s.