Thinking outside the tank

Social scientists are stereotyped as boring. That’s because we are. A Beautiful Mind and Numb3rs have been successful in making equally-boring economists and mathematicians hot, I have yet to see the media legitimise the possibility of an attractive social scientist. In fact, there are real-life social scientists who can match even the on-screen identity of John Nash (Russell Crowe) Amita Ramanujan (Navi Rawat). Think Philippe Legrain and Noreena Hertz. I remember one of my co-interns in AEI proposing to have a TV series set in a think tank. Obviously, this is far from happening because Americans do not even know what a think tank is (A Georgetowner asked me in the Metro – How can you think in a tank?).

But from the books I’ve read recently, it appears to me that social scientists, or at least their publishers, try to convert the authors’ intellectual capital to cultural capital. This is manifested by the labels given to social scientists. If you look at the back cover of more recent books, comments such as “A crucial contribution. A new proposal for change that is valid for the whole world” do not suffice anymore. What I’ve noticed are remarks that seemingly want make rock stars out of academics:

“An intellectual superstar.” - Salon.com on Jean Baudrillard’s Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact

“Thank heavens for Alain de Botton …” – The Seattle Post-Intelligencer on Alain de Botton’s The Consolations of Philosophy

“The Elvis of cultural theory” – The Chronicle of Higher Education on Slavoj Zizek

"A metrosexual superpower" - Parag Khanna's moniker for the European Union in Foreign Affairs July/August issue

“I want to be a sexy public intellectual.” – Mark Lim

This makes me wonder, do I want such remarks on the beautifully matte printed back cover of my book? The closest quip I had thus far is “She explains complicated concepts clearly and wears nice skirts” and I wasn’t too happy about it.