The disappearance of the humanities from the public signals the evacuation of historical perspective from the age of expert rule. Obscurantism, publish-or-perish, and electronic publication produced a proliferation of publication coupled with the narrowing of readership. A true market of ideas tends to demonstrate growth in both sectors. Unread publications suggest academic stagflation. In other words, the humanities in America have lost their public. Imagine two possible futures: a future of academics as academics, experts enshrined in libraries, arguing amongst themselves, directing the progress of knowledge through a series of well-honed essays and monographs, while public culture proceeds to digest the sea of information into an amateur, enthusiastic mythology of truth. Wikipedia articles in this scenario will continue to resemble their current pastiche of fact and spurious conclusion, rambling detailed explanation and spurious, old-fashioned proclamation of the great good of progress / success of the nation / triumph of the free market / triumph of communism. The opinions of the public will be fought out in a real estate war on Wikipedia, with academic debate rarely if ever offering an alternative view or playing the moderator. In another scenario, the public intellectual returns. She seeks out new ways to enter the public discourse. She refuses to be confined by the format of academic journals, monographs, and NPR interviews. She has memories of past societies, and visions of future societies that threaten to evolve. She is an active translator in the culture wars, an active participant in the process of social change, and an active member of a public, where experts engage, without jargon, a world of common sense, diverse experience, and deep prejudice. Humanities departments across the nation would welcome such individuals as paragons of civic responsibility and transdisciplinary excellence. They would adopt new rubrics for rewarding intellectual activity in the public sphere out of preference to journal citation. Recognized, rewarded, a thriving public culture would transform world politics on a grand scale. Plentiful opportunity for intellectual engagement with widely available archives would characterize public culture, and participatory politics would flourish in an environment of engagement and criticism. The construction of the future is in the hands of those who choose it. Individuals who admired such a public culture would therefore pursue the activities most likely to bring about an alternative to academia in its contemporary situation. Social change has to operate through the structures of dissemination, therefore through the media, through celebrity culture, and through politics. The public intellectual is aware of the flux of history and favors intellectual work within history rather than the building of knowledge for knowledge’s sake. She is constantly on the lookout for separating tectonic plates, the eruption of magma, the shift in the wind, the freezing over of continents, the implosion in the free market, the nuclear winter, and the devolution of the social fabric into fighting in the streets which may herald an entirely new age. The public intellectual would be ashamed to make naïve conservative arguments like “modern democracies have always embraced these values and therefore they will never chance,” or “the stability of the current regime presages,” having in his pocket a host of counterexamples of radical shifts in perspective, including the earthquake in Lisbon, the sack of Rome, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the striking of his own uncle by lightening, the successes of Maoist China, and diverse other anecdotes that illustrate the unpredictability of nature and the reality of historical change. The public intellectual fights for life against death. The culture of death is all around one: in the punitive tendencies of state, law, and school; in the cult of those fixated on reciting the lessons of the past as if they were still pleasing their sixth-grade teachers; in the weak and repetitive politics of pundits. The public intellectual is on the side of life: curious about teenagers, curious about outsider artists, curious about undiscovered cultures, not fully integrated intellectual positions – anything, in short, which can promote vitality, conversation, argument, and proliferation. In politics, the culture of death stresses sacrificing culture on the altar of economic growth, bowing to the current ideas in circulation, and a preference for old forms. The public intellectual presses the suit of justice and mercy; everywhere, in many forms, the cause of life.