The slow death of the academic generalist, and why that should bother people outside academia.

By Eleanor Marsh

Category: Academic Commentary

Tags: academic generalist, specialization, history of ideas, knowledge burden, public intellectuals, interdisciplinary research, academic incentives, university reform, isaiah berlin, intellectual history

Isaiah Berlin died in November 1997. The BBC devoted two full television programmes to his life and thought on consecutive evenings. Radio 3 broadcast a two-and-a-half-hour tribute. His death was reported on the front page of the New York Times, and memorial services were held in three countries. Berlin had been a fellow of All Souls, a professor at Oxford, a historian of ideas, a political philosopher, a biographer of Russian thinkers, a theorist of liberty, and a man who could speak with genuine authority on the relationship between Romanticism and nationalism, the sources of totalitarian thought, and the particular differences between Herder and Herzen. That width of engagement, that refusal to be only one thing — was not incidental to his reputation. It was inseparable from it.

Nearly two decades later, the Oxford philosopher Derek Parfit died. His work on personal identity and the ethics of future generations was of the first importance; many would place him among the finest analytic philosophers of his generation. His death was noted in the obituary columns of the broadsheets. Not the front pages. Not memorial services in three countries.

Something changed between those two deaths. The question is what.

The simplest explanation is the one offered by Benjamin Jones of Northwestern's Kellogg School, whose 2009 paper in the Review of Economic Studies bore a title that was unusually direct for its genre: "The Burden of Knowledge and the 'Death of the Renaissance Man': Is Innovation Getting Harder?" Jones's argument was structural. As the accumulated stock of human knowledge expands, successive generations of researchers must spend longer reaching the frontier of any given field before they can begin contributing to it. Doctorates lengthen. Specialisation deepens. Teams form to distribute a burden that no individual can now carry alone. None of this, Jones showed, reflects a failure of intelligence or ambition. It is a consequence of success, of knowledge accumulating faster than any one person can absorb.

The evidence is hard to dispute. Age at first invention rose consistently across the twentieth century. Doctoral programmes have grown longer. Single authorship has given way to collaboration across most scientific fields. The story Jones tells is not one of laziness or intellectual timidity but of genuine cognitive constraint: the frontier has moved so far out that the journey to it now consumes most of a working life.

And yet. The knowledge burden cannot explain everything. It cannot explain, for instance, why academic incentive structures so actively punish the attempt to think across fields. It cannot explain why a paper in a genuinely interdisciplinary venue tends to count for less in a tenure review than a paper in the leading specialist journal of one's subfield. It cannot explain why the scholar who publishes across history, sociology, and philosophy is described, in hiring committees, as not knowing what she is. The knowledge burden is a constraint on individuals. The institutional culture that treats breadth as a defect is something the university built itself.

In 2023, a team of researchers published the results of a study tracking the publication records of 2.3 million scholars across a full century. They classified researchers as either "hedgehogs" — specialists whose work concentrates in a single field — or "foxes" — generalists who contribute across multiple areas, borrowing Isaiah Berlin's own famous distinction, which Berlin himself had taken from the Greek poet Archilochus. The fox, Berlin wrote, knows many things; the hedgehog knows one big thing. What the study found was that fox-like researchers have declined dramatically over the century — from a majority style in early-twentieth-century science to a clear minority today.

The more surprising finding - the one that should appear in the opening paragraph of every conversation about academic hiring and research strategy — is this: teams of generalists consistently outperform teams of specialists in generating new ideas and new directions. Not in all measures. Specialists accumulate citations in established territory efficiently enough, which is partly why the system rewards them. But at the frontier, where genuinely new questions get formulated, generalist teams produce more original work.

The discipline has spent a century narrowing its practitioners, and in doing so has made itself, in measurable ways, less generative. That is not a comfortable thing to report.

History provides what data alone cannot: a sense of what the generalist academic actually did, and why it mattered that someone did it.

Keynes was an economist, but he was also a moral philosopher of sorts, a visual aesthete, a patron of the arts, the bursar of a Cambridge college, and a serious theorist of probability - and these were not separate activities conducted in leisure hours away from the real work. They were inside the economics. The famous uncertainty he placed at the centre of economic life was not merely a technical claim about market behaviour; it was a philosophical position, developed through sustained engagement with domains that academic economics has since walled off from itself. Berlin's liberalism came from his encounter with Russian intellectual history, which came from his biographical work on Tolstoy and Turgenev, which came from philosophy. Pull one thread and you lose what the weaving was for.

I should be careful not to romanticise this. Generalists could be shallow; the nineteenth century produced its share of polymaths whose range was inversely proportional to their depth. What I am describing is something more precise: the scholar who achieves genuine expertise in at least one domain but refuses to treat the boundaries of that domain as the outer limit of permissible inquiry. That figure has not disappeared entirely. But she has become structurally much harder to sustain.

The consequences are felt most acutely outside the university, which is part of why this argument belongs in a publication addressed to people who may never have set foot in a faculty meeting.

When societies confront problems that refuse to observe disciplinary lines — climate change, artificial intelligence, pandemic preparedness, financial contagion — they need thinkers who can speak across the relevant bodies of knowledge. Not popularisers. Not generalists in the weak journalistic sense of people who summarise what experts have found. But scholars who have genuinely inhabited more than one intellectual tradition and can bring them into productive contact. What we have, instead, is a proliferation of very deep wells. The water in each may be plentiful. But we have been producing fewer and fewer people who understand how the water table connects them.

Russell Jacoby, writing in 1987, attributed the disappearance of the public intellectual to the retreat of American scholars into academic life — away from the magazines and newspapers where earlier generations had written for general audiences. He was right that a retreat had occurred. But I think the cause runs deeper than the choice of venue. The conditions of academic employment — the metrics, the specialisation demanded by peer review, the assessment of "fit" in hiring committees — had made generalism professionally costly long before any individual chose to stop writing for the common reader. The venue changed because the career changed first.

Richard Posner, a federal judge who thought extensively about intellectual life, made a related observation: that academics had become marginalised as public figures not because the public had abandoned them but because academic specialisation had made them increasingly incapable of engaging with questions broad enough to interest a general audience. This may be too harsh. But it is not entirely wrong.

I should acknowledge what this argument does not cover. The problem I am describing is sharpest in the humanities and qualitative social sciences, where the case for breadth feels most intuitive. Whether it maps with equal clarity onto the formal sciences and quantitative disciplines, where the knowledge burden is most acute and the subdivision of labour most advanced, I am genuinely less certain. There are structural differences I have not resolved here.

What I am confident about is this: the question of who is permitted to think across fields is not a neutral or merely technical question about the organisation of research. It is a question about what kinds of problems get formulated, and who holds the conceptual tools to ask whether a formulation is any good.

The academic generalist did not only ask questions within a field. She asked questions about fields — about why certain things were being studied and others were not, about what was being systematically ignored in the gap between disciplines, about whether the frame was the right one. Those questions are not being asked with sufficient regularity now. Not because no one is capable of asking them. But because the institutional conditions that once made asking them a viable intellectual life have been, over the course of roughly a century, quietly, thoroughly, and almost entirely dismantled.