Few problems have attracted quite so much hand-wringing in some sectors of the academy as the status of intellectuals. Do their privileged circumstances confer a responsibility to participate in political activism or to maintain a detached objectivity? Should they focus on advancing knowledge of specialized subjects or engaging a broader public? Have they become too marginalized from or too compromised by positions of political influence?

In Hope and Scorn, Michael J. Brown explores the trajectory of such questions since the middle of the twentieth century. Eschewing the polemical and elegiac tenor of many writings on related themes, he provides a judicious historical recounting of debates over the role of the intellectual in American politics. Brown’s lucid prose, extensive archival research, and careful narration of opposing views will make this a leading reference on its subject.

For much of the book, Brown focuses on university professors with public profiles, charting how such figures wrestled with the tensions between their academic identities and their political commitments. Thus, Richard Hofstadter’s futile work on behalf of Adlai Stevenson’s presidential campaign in 1952 led him to perceive a chasm between “mind and masses” (p. 51); H. Stuart Hughes struggled to reconcile his moralistic worldview with his profile as an academic expert during his campaign for the Senate; and Arthur Schlesinger clung to mandarin ideals even as his reservations about the Vietnam War grew increasingly grave.

During the 1960s, Brown suggests, such balancing acts came increasingly into question, as critics like Noam Chomsky and Christopher Lasch called for intellectuals to maintain an adversarial relationship to state power. Soon thereafter, popular conceptions of the intellectual began to broaden from a white, male, left-leaning, Ivy League stereotype—as conservatives built an increasingly robust think-tank apparatus, and as African American scholars including Harold Cruse, bell hooks, and Cornell West took leading roles in movements for social transformation.

Brown is explicit that his chapters provide entrances into, rather than an inventory of, debates about the role of the intellectual. To the extent that an underlying narrative trajectory emerges, it pivots around a broadening of the popular conception of the intellectual—charting how the “racialized and gendered blinkers and barriers” that produced a “simplified view of American intellectual life” eroded over time (p. 205). This is an important story, and a necessary corrective to anxieties about the public intellectual’s decline—although Brown’s research material, which foregrounds internal debates among scholars (with a disproportionate focus on historians), provides a narrow window into an expansive problem.

In other ways, Hope and Scorn reveals notable continuities between the 1950s and the present. In comparing Barack Obama’s scholarly persona with Donald Trump’s anti-intellectualism, for instance, readers will find striking echoes of Hofstadter’s portraits of Stevenson and the McCarthyite right. Brown tries to find positive momentum in the communal orientation of Obama’s rhetoric, arguing that we may be able to break out of the “dead-end dichotomy between elitism and populism” if we come to see “intellectual work as an ongoing collective endeavor.” Occupy Wall Street, he suggests, was an exemplary community of “intellectuals all” (pp. 256–257). But Brown’s history of the fraught politics of intellectualism is more richly elaborated than his advocacy of this communal solution, and there is a Lake Wobegon quality to the effort to universalize a category born of invidious distinctions.

Despite its author’s optimism, Hope and Scorn may be most powerful as a story of disappointment. Leading intellectuals have continually struggled to reconcile their commitments to popular democracy with the implicit elitism of academic culture and the life of the mind. In the wake of the Trump presidency, amid a global resurgence of authoritarian populism, their efforts to align discursive ideals with democratic experience remain no less troubled than they were many decades ago.