Johnson had a theory and was out to prove how right he was. Intellectuals and Publics is a far more tentative collection. It originated in a one-day conference called ‘The Public, the Intellectuals and the Public Intellectual’ held in May 1996 at Latrobe University. The book offers more than a typical set of conference papers, but the analogy is not inappropriate. Much of its appeal is in the way that contributors are prepared to chance an idea and in the directness with which they react to each other. It is more like a series of rushes than the final cut.

There are some memorable images of being intellectual. Christos Tsiolkas asks why ‘the St Kilda Australian Rules footballer Nicky Winmar pointing proudly to his naked chest when faced with taunts from a racist football cheer squad’ should not be considered ‘intellectual’ because such an action is a way of trying to shape a culture according to an idea.

Liz Conor reports on her experiences of trying to present ideas to a public and describes what happens in an environment in which authority is strangely identified with celebrity: ‘Despite the public intellectual being required to be a disembodied authoritative voice, as embodied people this voice is often thrown back on them and they become celebrities.’ At one stage, Conor formed a Coalition Against Sexual Violence Propaganda, having found fifteen minutes of fame, also found herself being asked to comment on anything and everything. When she referred media enquiries to people who actually knew something about a given topic, the leads were seldom followed up because they led off the celebrity trail. Terry Threadgold writes tellingly of the most important, industrious and responsive public in her intellectual life, namely, the students she teaches at university.

On the other hand, there are some grumpy moments in these papers and the same names (such as David Williamson and Paddy McGuinness) keep cropping up as evidence of an ascendant anti-intellectualism.

Nevertheless, for all the difficulty of peeling away personalities from the exchanges, it is possible to distill some issues to take away from Intellectuals and Publics. The first of these, and the most difficult to get a handle on, concerns the role of theory. This book does contain some of the more lucid explorations of postmodernism I have encountered. Brian Fitzgerald, for example, crisply describes three models of postmodernism: the first is a loss of criteria in which ‘life is to be organised by a discontinuous set of language games rather than by meta-narratives’, the second ‘is a cultural and global condition and a historical epoch’, the third believes ‘postmodernism is obscurantism, not learning’. Such ideas make a considerable impact on the perceived role of a public intellectual because if, in the words of Alison Caddick, ‘there appears to be no firm, collective reality to illuminate’, then the intellectual needs to find something else to do. Although this book does struggle with the idea of authority, one writer who appears in the witness box occasionally as an authority on postmodernism is Lyotard. His version of postmodernism involves ‘incredulity towards meta-narratives of any kind.’ It’s a pity, because I warm personally to the image of the intellectual as the wise story teller.

A way from theory, both Dennis Altman and Helen Daniel raise issues about the ever-diminishing areas in which intellectuals get a hearing. Altman points to the cultural cringe of the media, the growing specialisation of academic language and, most importantly, ‘the general decline of the liberal sense of the public sphere in which we can meet as public citizens.’ Daniel laments ‘a major cultural chasm between the academic world and the world of journalism’. Altman also makes explicit what lies implicit in several other essays: ‘there is a moral dimension to the role of intellectual life, and the best public intellectuals are those impelled by a strong commitment to certain universal principles of respect for human dignity.’ There are enough contentious points in that one quotation to sponsor another conference. And another book.