Book Reviews
Since the 1920s, an enormous literature on academic radicalism has been penned. In much of this literature, radical academics have been subjected to withering criticism, sometimes at the hands of unsympathetic opponents, but more often than not at the hands of those who consider themselves radical academics. Perhaps this was to be expected. As the “independent” social critic became increasingly rare, the social role of the intellectual was attached to the identity of the professorate. At the same time, the academic disciplines were crystallizing around a professional ideal that did not always complement the tasks of social critique. The result, at least for radicals in the academy, has been an ongoing, collective gnashing of teeth, much of it carried out in print. At the heart of the matter is a fairly simple question that (if measured by reams of paper) has anything but a simple answer: Can one be a political radical and a respected academic at the same time?
Like so many works in this genre over the decades, Russell Jacoby’s End of Utopia and the essays in Iain MacKenzie and Shane O’Neill’s Reconstituting Social Criticism survey the radical academic scene and find it badly wanting. Here, as in most of his other works, Jacoby seems to have found among radical academics little more than the sociological equivalent of a murder of crows; the left-liberal professoriate appears, on page after page, as a flock of noisemakers who do little more than distract themselves with theoretical trinkets, useless flights of fancy, and the production of intellectual guano. (If my language seems a bit excessive here, it pales in comparison to Jacoby’s.) The contributors to the MacKenzie and O’Neill volume more closely follow the etiquette and decorum of academic critique, but they are for the most part no less sparing than Jacoby in their critical intentions.
Embodying what has become a familiar analytical formula, both books assume the essential truth of Marx’s dictum in the Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach, that the philosophers should change the world, not just interpret it. From this point it is simply a matter of figuring out why radical academics have failed to live up to their responsibilities. Thus, both books claim to be addressing an apparent crisis in “philosophically grounded social criticism” (MacKenzie and O’Neill, 1) and the collapse of “intellectual visions and ambitions” (Jacoby, xii) among intellectuals (read: academics) committed to a progressive political agenda. And both—as the subtitles suggest—find the clearest expression of this crisis in the “apathy” and “skepticism” with which social criticism today is advanced and received.
Beyond these broad-stroke similarities, the two works share very little, and each falls into one of the two distinctive patterns of argument that have come to characterize the radical academic autocritique. Jacoby subscribes to, and is without any doubt the best contemporary practitioner of, what might be called the dismissive argument. (This might also be called the Golden Past argument.) On this account, living academic radicals can never be radical enough; only dead intellectuals are real radicals. Doomed by professional aspirations that presuppose self-promotion as the coin of academic respectability, radical academics produce a theoretical discourse that sounds impressive and politically dangerous, but is in the last analysis innocuous and politically placid. These themes were more or less fully developed in two of Jacoby’s earlier works on academic intellectuals, The Last Intellectuals (Basic Books, 1987) and Dogmatic Wisdom (Doubleday, 1994). In The End of Utopia, Jacoby polishes up his criticisms by linking the failures of academic radicalism to the utter exhaustion of any capacity for utopian thought that transcends the rigid constructs of a victorious and complacent post-communist liberalism.
Within this large indictment, Jacoby ranges quite freely. Where so many radical academics have resigned themselves to—when they haven’t enthusiastically embraced—the market, Jacoby argues that such endorsements constitute nothing less than an abdication to consumer culture. Where radical academics rush to define the contours of multiculturalism, Jacoby sees little more than “academic blather and political clap-trap” (66). For careerist and self-promoting academics he holds no brief, in the dizzying cyclone of cultural and material products he finds a vapid emptiness, and in the willingness to make all truth relative he says intellectuals are complicit in the maintenance of the status quo. Political intentions and theoretical subtleties notwithstanding, Jacoby is quick to dismiss most of what currently passes as academic radicalism.
Reconstituting Social Criticism is a fairly typical example of what might be called the disconnect argument. On this account, the cause of political skepticism is located in the failures of radical intellectuals to articulate a discourse that can readily connect with the hopes and aspirations of marginalized populations. This raises the theoretical ante to a very high level. These essays all assume that the post-modern condition is in fact the point from which contemporary social criticism must proceed, and the analyses are earnest in their efforts to come to grips with the implications of that condition for the tasks of social critique. They are uniformly subtle and rigorous but also dense and difficult pieces, addressing in turn many of the now-familiar themes of contemporary academic radicalism, including problems of normative justification, difference and problems of exclusion, the relationship between theory and practice, and the political confusions engendered by a radical politics that is attentive to pluralism.
Readers who are concerned about the current state of social criticism among Western academics may find it very useful to read both of these books, or perhaps any two books from the different analytical modes they represent. From Jacoby and other dismissive arguments, one can learn to appreciate the severe self-flagellation that the drive for a radical intellectualism may require of aspiring academics. From disconnect arguments like those in Reconstituting Social Criticism, one can learn to appreciate the tortuous conceptual gymnastics that academic respectability may require of aspiring intellectuals.
By reading both kinds of work together, readers can also learn to appreciate the curious stamina of academic radicalism. The fact of the matter is that one cannot be the sort of radical intellectual that Jacoby wants without excelling at the game of academic respectability. Without academic respectability, no one knows who you are, and you are not in a position to effect the sort of world-historical change Jacoby and his ilk expect. At the same time, the realization of academic respectability leaves little time or energy for undertaking an effective radical politics. The demands of learning the subtleties and nuances of radical discourse are very taxing. For these reasons, academic radicalism persists precisely because it cannot be realized without significant sacrifices on either side of the conceptual couplet. And the literature by and about academic radicalism is likely to continue enjoying some popularity (at least among radical academics) if only because nothing generates more effort from radical academics than trying to resolve an apparently intractable contradiction.
One can, of course, always refuse to carry the simultaneous burdens of academic respectability and responsibility for changing the world. But among the readers of these books (and this review), these individuals probably constitute an empty set. The rest of us will have to live with our failures, of which The End of Utopia and Reconstructing Social Criticism—like all of the similar works that have appeared before, and those that are likely to appear well into the future—provide ample documentation. Knowing how you are wrong does not always guarantee that you will get it right, but it may well help you to become more familiar with the kind of grief you can expect to receive when you fail again.
