Academics write in peculiar language for specialist peers; think-tanks are slaves to corporate funding. So will politics now remain an ideas-free zone? By Richard Reeves

''Both the Conservatives and Labour have lost confidence in the political creeds which they nominally profess, while neither side appears to have made any progress in providing itself with a better. Yet such a better doctrine must be possible; not by splitting the difference between the two, but something wider than either."

This summary of the political scene (I have changed one word, substituting Labour for Liberals) came from John Stuart Mill in 1861. It seems shockingly contemporary in 2003. Both big parties are looking for a new story; for a set of core ideas to animate their programmes. For - dare one suggest it? - an ideology.

For the past decade, what Mill disparages as "splitting the difference" - otherwise known as the Third Way - has served Labour well at the polls. Now it needs something more, a "wider doctrine" that can guide decision-making and connect with a bemused and confused electorate.

Here Labour finds itself at a loss. Who can create a clear but robust architecture for the centre-left? Who can combine blue-chip scholarship with political nous? The short answer is no one. There is a character missing from the cast of public life - the public intellectual. Between the slow scholars in their ivory towers, with little time for grubby politics, and the furiously peddling politicians, with little time for pedantic theory, there is an ocean of muddied waters. And nowhere is the gap wider than in politics and political philosophy. Adam Swift, an Oxford philosopher who does stick his head above the public parapet, says: "The politicians think that the philosophers are only interested in talking to each other in arcane journals, which is mostly true. And the philosophers think that the politicians have no interest in real philosophical concepts, which is also mostly true."

In between, we have plenty of people sounding off in studios and on op-ed pages. But these people, often drawn from think-tanks or serious journalism, frequently have limited knowledge and expertise in the areas they pronounce upon. As they themselves realise, they often skate on very thin intellectual ice. (And yes, mea culpa.) Debate is dominated by the quick and the clever, rather than the thoughtful or the learned: what the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu calls "le Fast Talker" rules the airwaves.

Meanwhile, the academic who has devoted his or her life to a particular subject lies undisturbed and invisible, writing in one of the peculiar languages of scholarship to an audience of peers, with no inclination, incentive or often ability to participate in the rough-and-tumble of public debate. So we have plenty of intellectuals and plenty of public commentators - what Plato might have called rhetoricians - but little overlap between the two.

Geoff Mulgan, head of the government's strategy unit and founder of Demos, believes that there is a "theory gap" in the UK. "There are areas of strength, such as science, the environment and foreign relations. And we are good on pragmatism and empiricism in the social sciences and especially economics. The gap is in social and political theory, as well as political philosophy. What we are missing is good social and political theory."

This absence would not be so keenly felt if ideology or history really had come to an end. As it is - post-cold war, post-new right, post-Iraq - we need public intellectuals more than ever. Yet political discussions have become narrower and shallower. We don't think - really, really think - before we speak.

This is not a necessary state of affairs. The UK is not short of world-class intellectuals - it is just that many of them find a more attentive audience elsewhere. Tony Atkinson, our best economist on income inequality, is received warmly by the French government but is not to be seen in Downing Street. Ray Pahl, one of our most thoughtful sociologists, advises the Dutch government. Amartya Sen, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, has hugely influenced the UN. Even Bernard Williams, whose death leaves a void in our public and philosophical scene, was more known than read: when his last book was published, the three-storey Waterstone's at the end of Whitehall ordered just a single copy.

Phil Collins, director of the Social Market Foundation, says the chasm is the fault of both sides: "We have a dearth of academics who can express themselves in ways which can connect with the political classes, but it is also true that we have very few politicians who will meet them halfway."

Although there are intellectual politicians - David Miliband or Tony Wright for Labour, Oliver Letwin or David Willetts for the Conservatives, Steven Webb for the Lib Dems - the structure of political life gives them little scope to apply their wider skills. Tony Crosland once told Roy Jenkins that he needed three days of thought before he could hold forth on an issue as Jenkins could almost instantaneously; nowadays a politician is expected to master a new ministerial brief in that time.

An irony is that while politically minded intellectuals are wafer-thin on the ground, other areas of intellectual endeavour, notably science and history, have gone public in a significant way recently. The profiles of Simon Schama, Antony Beevor, Colin Tudge and Robert Winston appear to contradict the claim of a shallow pool of public intellectuals.

But most of these people are not public intellectuals in the true sense of the term. In Public Intellectuals, Richard Posner's definition is someone who "writes for the general public, or at least for a broader than merely academic or specialist audience, on 'public affairs' - on political matters in the broadest sense of that word, a sense that may include cultural matters when they are viewed under the aspect of ideology, ethics or politics". To paraphrase Marx, the point is not just to describe the world, but to change it. A public intellectual is not merely someone who does intellectual work in public. He or she does intellectual work in public on public issues, and of this breed there are precious few.

Think-tanks by and large fail in the attempt. Strapped for cash, they are forced to chase corporate funding; they have their agendas set by others and measure success in column inches. They cannot escape the orbit of the media and remain too close to the politicians whom they seek to influence. "Think-tanks are a big disappointment," says Frank Furedi, whose Thinking in Public will be published next year. "You would think a place like IPPR [Institute for Public Policy Research] - which has lots of bright people in it - would be able to employ people to not say a word for two years but just to think."

But few if any British think-tanks have financial endowments that allow them the luxury of thinking space. One of the most important roles of a public intellectual is the capacity to see above and beyond existing debates, to get off the tramlines of discussion - to rock the boat. All of this requires a level of independence that think-tanks cannot currently provide.

Small wonder that we have to import our public intellectuals from across the Atlantic: Robert Putnam, Amitai Etzioni, Sylvia Ann Hewlett, Malcolm Gladwell, Robert Reich, Susan Sontag, to name just a few. Although Posner and Russell Jacoby, in The Last Intellectuals, have written of the decline of the US public intellectual, this lament is possible only because there is a measurable group of them in the first place. This reliance on the US can be a problem for the quality of debate here: witness the wholesale swallowing of Putnam's thesis in his bestseller Bowling Alone, which even if true for the US (and this is seriously disputed) certainly cannot be transplanted to the UK.

Two things put the US higher in the public intellectual league table. First, money. American think-tanks are large and lavishly funded. And foundations fund people to do research on important topics. To take just one example, the MacArthur Founda-tion provides "a 'no strings attached' award in support of people, not projects", worth $500,000. More than 600 people have received a MacArthur fellowship in the past two decades: a $300m investment in public intellectual production by a single institution. There are simply no equivalent spaces to think in the UK.

The US media also offer a better platform to intellectuals. While the serious end of the US media market is small - the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post have a combined circulation of about five million - this elitist positioning allows outlets to hire heavyweight academics such as Robert Barro or Paul Krugman, currently writing brilliantly for the Times, as columnists. The equivalent is close to unthinkable here.

The UK media must shoulder a share of the blame. The desire for a "strong line", controversy and easily understood standpoints, even in the serious media, militates against thoughtful discussion. "There is a real fear of being distorted," says Swift. "So sometimes you just don't bother." The pressure to strike a pose is almost irresistible. "I have often said things that I later regretted, simply in response to pressure to simplify," admits Furedi.

The media want polemics, postures and soundbites. The culture of academia, based on slowly produced, carefully peer-reviewed journals, is going in the opposite direction, with most discussions becoming opaque to all but the initiated few. The expansion of higher education and the creation of thousands of academic jobs have simultaneously increased the quantity of intellectual work and sealed it off from public view. The ever-finer division of intellectual labour has made it harder to break out of a particular ghetto. The research assessment, which links funding to publication in academic journals, and heavier teaching loads, further reduce the incentive to think further afield.

Theodore Zeldin, the Oxford historian, had to leave the academy to become an intellectual. He is one of Le Monde's top 100 thinkers, but less influential on this side of the Channel. In his first "non-academic" book, Happiness, which is shortly to be re-issued, he parodies vividly what has happened: "To remain sane, scholars had to become willing prisoners in a tiny cell, because here at least they could lay down the law about some tiny fragment of truth, like the habits of the earwig or the foreign policy of medieval Zanzibar. A few ambitious ones might grow dissatisfied with being master, or mistress, of only a small domain, and they might build up . . . grand theories . . . applicable to other domains; and their imperialism kept the academic world simmering in permanent nervous conflict."

In practice, few have popped out of their disciplinary dugouts. The most pre-eminent in today's political sphere is Tony Giddens, a formidable social theorist who became Blair's favourite guru and intellectual of the Third Way. There is no questioning Giddens's depth: he ranks eighth in Posner's list of public intellectuals, ranked by academic citations, nestled between Gary Becker and Stephen Jay Gould. Some of Giddens's work, especially The Transformation of Intimacy and Modernity and Self-Identity, is gold-plated scholarship. And yet his influence on British politics has been fleeting.

In part, this may be because of the difficulty - some would say impossibility - of retaining intellectual rigour while appealing to the short attention spans of the polity and media. True, the point of public debate is to try ideas out for size. But the gap in quality between the work done by Giddens with his scholarly hat on and some of his public intellectual works, most obviously in The Third Way and Where Now for New Labour?, is striking.

At least Giddens is trying to connect hard thinking with real politics. Most academics, even - perhaps especially - the very good ones, are what Jacoby describes as "high-tech intellectuals . . . anonymous souls, who may be competent, and more than competent, but do not enrich public life". The only area of increased connection has been where empirically minded social scientists, especially economists, can work with policy-makers on specific issues: the London School of Economics supplies the likes of Julian Le Grand, David Held and John Hills on this front.

T he academy remains generally unimpressed by op-ed pieces or Radio 4 appearances, while the people writing for the op-ed pages remain equally unimpressed, or at least uninfluenced, by long academic papers.

None the less, journalism has produced some public intellectuals, such as Will Hutton, whose The World We're In followed his bestselling The State We're In. The difficulty for Hutton and other "ink intellectuals" such as Jonathan Freedland or Melanie Phillips is that the structure of their professional lives crowds out sustained independent research. They have to rely on a synthesis, summary and projection of the work of others, often in the form of a muscular polemic. Plenty of serious journalists would give their eye-teeth for a year or two in which to read and think, but the next deadline always looms.

It is important to note the oases of public intellectual work that do exist. The Strategy Unit, which has some immunity from the day-to-day pressures of political life, successfully blends imaginative academics with intellectually oriented policy wonks. The tragedy, however, is that much of the unit's most interesting thinking is never allowed to see the light of day for fear of media frenzy. The FT still carries serious pieces on its editorial pages, Prospect magazine is a kind of Public Intellectual Monthly and John Gray and David Marquand write frequently for the New Statesman.

But there are very few of what Posner calls "free-range intellectuals - the naysayers, heterodox, the intellectual Luftmenschen". Does this matter? It does, for two profound reasons. First, the absence of good public intellectuals means that people who are quick, clever, confident and good at expressing their views on paper, panels and in TV and radio studios can influence debate to a degree that is not necessarily related to the quality of their ideas. And because the media have no memory, there are few quality-control checks in place: a pundit is as good as his or her current piece of punditry. The hyperkinesis of the media cycle has, as Posner puts it, "reduced to a trivial level the penalty for the public intellectual caught selling a defective product". It is possible to be seen as a public intellectual without having published a single article in a peer-reviewed journal.

Second, the rules of public engagement make it harder to buck the trend, to change the intellectual landscape. It is easy to get a piece placed saying why private involvement in health is desirable/disastrous (delete as appropriate); much harder to place one questioning whether the meaning of "health" is changing beyond all recognition anyway. Public debaters run on existing paths. Intellectuals cut new ones, and only public intellectuals stand a chance of getting us from the former to the latter.

A better public conversation requires better conversationalists, which means more and better public intellectuals. Jacoby calls on intellectuals "to reclaim the vernacular and reassert themselves in public life". But as well as the intellectuals getting more public, we need the good self-publicists to get more intellectual.

Although the old ideologies have faded, the need for ideas remains as strong as ever. Mill once complained that people were apt to "like in crowds". In the absence of the horizon-widening provided by serious public intellectual work, the danger is that we will think in crowds, too.

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