Lost in thought

Philosophy: In the field of cultural history, you can rely on a few venerable truths. Whatever the era, the bourgeoisie is always on the rise, individualism is forever overcoming community and new technologies are upending all order yet again.

When it comes to the present, a comparable cliché might be: the age of the intellectual is always at an end. All those grand synthesisers of "the best that has been thought", all the great radicals whose lives' work was to transmute rarefied reflection into practical action: their time is past, we're told, and in their place are only hacks, pedants, ideologues and obfuscators.

The apotheosis of this nonsense is the complaint that "we" have no Zola/Sartre/Orwell: as if those names were warmly and universally embraced in their own time. Steve Fuller, encouragingly, has no time for such nostalgia; he is actually quite optimistic about the potential for intellectuals to intervene in our mediatised world, and has had himself blurbed on the back of his book as "a trainee multimedia public intellectual". The Intellectual announces itself as an argument for the autonomy of thought; it sets out to separate its subject from a gaggle of related figures: among them journalists, lawyers, academics and scientists. Which is a plausible enough distinction; independence of mind is insisted upon by the likes of Plato, Descartes and Kant.

Sadly, however, that is about the fullest extent of Fuller's argument: the rest of this slim volume is flung together out of such flimsy tatters of thought that it hardly amounts to a book at all, more a spot of senior-common-room japery. Take a central tenet of Fuller's vision of the independent thinker: that there is no longer room for such free-ranging minds in the modern university. Academics, he claims, are addicted to obscurity; their involuted language "amuses one's colleagues but goes over the head of its putative target". The intellectual, by contrast, can speak across institutional and disciplinary boundaries. Unconstrained by the limits of specialist knowledge, he or she is able to turn complex ideas into compelling public discourse.

It all sounds ideal, and a democratic alternative to academic elitism, until you stop to remind yourself that the academics Fuller most readily disparages for their "scholasticism" - the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj iek and the American critic Judith Butler - are precisely those who've been writing incisively and accessibly in public (notably on the "war on terror") for years. And the book is full of such moments, Fuller consistently dispensing with actual evidence or analysis in favour of alarmingly glib precis. (At one point, the Hungarian critic György Lukács, whose complex and conflicted career included a highly ambiguous accommodation to the mid-century Soviet regime, is calumnied as "Stalin's house intellectual".) Fuller would no doubt counter that The Intellectual is, after all, a light-hearted volume, a sort of fleet-footed Voltairean jeux d'esprit designed to set us pondering, impudently and independently, the place of thought in contemporary society. He certainly manages to keep things light, if not always as amusing as he imagines. There ought really to be a ban on jocose philosophical dialogues ("modelled" on Machiavelli, apparently; Fuller also compares himself favourably with Erasmus and Galileo). The "Frequently Asked Questions About Intellectuals" - are there different types? do they have distinctive speech patterns? - read like some archaic guide to suspect foreigners or sexual perverts. Given Fuller's apparent sincerity elsewhere, however, the jokes soon pall.

Along the way, Fuller can't help but stumble on some serious conclusions, chief among them his robust defence of the nimble, curious and generous mind that can come from a commitment to intellectual generalism. He mines here a rich seam of thought that goes back to Schiller's Aesthetic Education. "Truly inquiring minds", Fuller writes, "might not find the cultivation of specialist knowledge sufficient for a satisfying intellectual life." It's simply a shame that The Intellectual is a rather sorry advertisement for the alternative.

Brian Dillon is a writer and critic based in Canterbury. His first book, In the Dark Room, will be published by Penguin Ireland later this year

The Intellectual By Steve Fuller Icon Books, 184 pp. £10