Are you a confused intellectual?

Walter Russell Mead writes about the crisis of the American intellectual.

Since the late nineteenth century most intellectuals have identified progress with the advance of the bureaucratic, redistributionist and administrative state. The modern corporation was supposed to evolve in a similar way, with business becoming more stable, more predictable and more bureaucratic. Most intellectuals today still live in a guild economy. The learned professions – lawyers, doctors, university professors, the clergy of most mainline denominations, and (aspirationally anyway) school teachers and journalists – are organized in modern day versions of the medieval guilds. Fortunately for the rest of society if not for the guilds, developments in IT and telecommunications now make it possible to reduce costs dramatically in the learned professions. Increasingly, people will seek and acquire more control over the decisions that shape their lives.

Read more here: http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2010/12/08/the-crisis-of-the-american-intellectual/