Public Intellectuals and Their Discontents: From Europe to Iran 9783030565879

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Public Intellectuals and Their Discontents From Europe to Iran Yadullah Shahibzadeh

Public Intellectuals and Their Discontents

Yadullah Shahibzadeh

Public Intellectuals and Their Discontents From Europe to Iran

Yadullah Shahibzadeh Oslo, Norway

ISBN 978-3-030-56587-9 ISBN 978-3-030-56588-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56588-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To Roya and Omid

Preface

In response to Marx’s statement that “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force,”1 Foucault claimed that ideas do not rule the world. They rather prevent the world from being “passively ruled by its rulers or by those who want to teach them [the ruled] what to think once and for all.”2 This is because, as the Egyptian filmmaker Youssef Chahine tells us at the end of his Destiny (1997), “ideas have wings, no one can stop their flight.” None of these statements imply that speaking truth to power is the task of the intellectuals in general or “true intellectuals” in particular. Usually, the phrase is uttered by the intellectuals who exercise a certain degree of power and well connected to the people who exercise a higher degree of power. Since the 1960s, the intellectuals have been telling us that power is not concentrated in the state alone. They have reminded us that we cannot find power in the office of the heads of the states or their institutions because power is everywhere, in the state and public institutions, as well as in the public and academic discourses. The question is, who can perpetuate these discourses that rationalize and maintain various social relations of power other than the intellectuals? Here is the paradox; the 1 Karl Marx, Fredrick Engels, German Ideology, Part One, (New York: International Publishers 2004), p. 64. 2 Davis Macey, The lives of Michel Foucault, (London: Vintage 1994), p. 406.

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intellectuals who constitute power are supposed to speak truth to power, whereas power is their raison d’etre. The indivisibility of the intellectual and power makes any critique of power a history of the intellectual and any intellectual history a critique of power provided that it interrogates the intellectuals’ monopoly on ideas, knowledge, and truth. Such an intellectual history questions the power relationships nationally and internationally and reveals how interconnected racism and imperialism are in theory and practice because it reveals the process through which the intellectuals privatize the national and international public space and institutions. I hope that the students, scholars, and general readers find this book a contribution to such critiques. This book project could not come to fruition without the unconditional support of my wife, Giti Nassouri, to whom I am eternally grateful. I should express my immense gratitude to the Palgrave Macmillan editor Alina Yurova for her encouragement and patience. I am grateful, as well, to Naveen Dass and his colleagues at Springer Nature for their copy editing and proofreading of the book manuscript and putting it into print. Oslo, Norway

Yadullah Shahibzadeh

Contents

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1

Introduction

2

Formation of the Intellectual

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3

True and False Universality

47

4

From the Universal to the Specific Intellectual

81

5

Renovations of the Intellectual

105

6

Toward the American New Century

131

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The Intellectuals and the Last Revolution

155

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A Perfect Democracy and Its Intellectuals

183

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The Decay of the Intellectual

215

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Conclusion

249

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CONTENTS

Bibliography

261

Index

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

More than a century ago, Charles Péguy stated that historians preoccupy themselves with limitless historical detail because it exempts them from writing a history that makes them a part of the boundless historical detail of the historical order.1 The same can be said about the intellectuals in general who write about historical trends, situations, and events but very rarely about their own relations to those phenomena. The intellectuals who write about historical situations and events but never explain their own relations to the situations and events are like the historians who never write their own history. This book is an attempt to shed some light on the history of the concept of the intellectual. It studies its development from its emergence, in the early eighteenth century, to its disappearance, in the early 1990s. The French historian, Jean-Francois Sirinelli, who knows that past events, trends, and facts are the objects of historiography, argued in 1990 that the time was ripe to write the history of the intellectual in France because the French intellectuals were no longer an ideological force, they belonged to the past.2 A few years earlier, Russel Jacoby wrote a history of the American intellectuals for the same reason.3 Since the early 1990s, numerous intellectual historians have written their 1 Pierre Bourdieu, Homo Academnicus (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988), p. 1. 2 Jean-Francois Sirinelli, Intellectuelles et Passions Francaises (Paris: Fayard, 1990), p. 10. 3 Russel Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe (New

York: Basic Books, 2000).

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intellectual histories for the same reason; since the intellectual is a relic of the past, it can be a subject of historiography. Sunil Khilnani wrote Arguing Revolution as a history of the intellectual left in postwar France for the same reason.4 The same can be said about Shlomo Sand’ The End of the French Intellectual.5 By offering different accounts of the emergence and the demise of the intellectuals, these historians conceptualize the intellectual differently. Sirinelli considers intellectual history as an integral part of the history of politics because the intellectuals are known through their manifestos and petitions, which are concrete political responses to socio-political contexts. “Car l’histoire du politique est bien tout à la fois une histoire des comportements et des sensibilités, des cultures et des idées.”6 However, the intellectuals who intervene politically in the existing socio-political context constitute a new context that includes the social networks of the involved intellectuals in the event, their generational peculiarities, and the transformations they undergo in the new context. The new generations of intellectuals appeared at the time of crises to resolve the crises in the critical moments of their nations.7 The term intellectual became, since its emergence, a subject of dispute on whether it designated a profession or a vocation. Some historians understand the intellectual as an exclusively French passion since it presented itself to the French public in 1898 when the French Captain Alfred Dreyfus was found guilty of spying for Germany. In his defense, three thousand members of the French intelligentsia added their names to Émile Zola’s open letter to the French President Felix Faure, published on the first page of the daily newspaper L’Aurore littéraire, artistique, sociale, which Georges Clemenceau, the newspaper editor, entitled J’accuse.8 Intellectuels is the term that Clemenceau uses to describe those French thinkers, scientists, and writers who had endorsed Zola’s letter. The anti-Dreyfusard, Maurice Barrès describes this group of thinkers and writers as the “so-called intellectuals” consisted of protestants, Jews, 4 Sunil Khilnani, Arguing Revolution: The Intellectual Left in Postwar France (Yale University Press, 1993). 5 Shlomo Sand, The End of the French Intellectual: From Zola to Houellebecq (New York: Verso, 2018). 6 Sirinelli, Intellectuelles et Passions Francaises, pp. 12–13. 7 Ibid., pp. 15–16. 8 Pascal Ory and Jean-François Sirinelli, Les intellectuels en France, de l’affaire Dreyfus a` nos jours (Paris: Armand Colin, 1986), p. 5.

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simpletons, foreigners, and a handful of Frenchmen.9 The Dreyfus Affair made the intellectual a complicated concept to define since the term included people from different social statuses and ideological orientations with different political functions who took a public stance on an issue of public concern. By taking an ethical choice between self-interests or selfpreservation and the common good, the intellectual transcends his or her social status, profession, and sociological condition.10 From the Dreyfus Affair to the 1960s, the French intellectuals distinguished themselves from other professionals by siding with their working-class and international communism represented by the Soviet Union. In the 1960s, the defense of the national liberation movements in the third world became a new commitment, not only for the French intellectuals but for the intellectuals throughout the world. By defining the third world nations as the proletarian nations and making them the new agents of history through their anti-colonial struggles, the intellectual constructed the third wordlist ideology.11 Whereas Fanon and Sartre theorized Cuban and the Algerian revolutions, Althusser, and others turned to Mao’s cultural revolution. However, since the integration of the French intellectuals into their national identity had been so all-pervading, their decline could mean the decline of the French identity. The French intellectuals’ successful effort to universalize French politics, since the French Revolution, underpinned the identity of the nation. Thanks to this universalization, the intellectuals throughout the world opposed French colonialism but considered its intellectuals as the strategic allies in the anti-colonial struggles. The intellectual has always been accompanied by the anti-intellectual. The latter questioned the former’s moral stance and blamed him for butchering social causes and destroying national unity. The history of the intellectual cannot be separated from the anti-intellectual tendencies that the intellectuals encounter throughout their journeys, sociability, friendships, and rivalries.12 Both gradual and sudden changes in the sociopolitical context can have irreversible consequences for the intellectuals. For instance, the French Socialists and Communists introduced their Common Program in 1972. A few years later, the majority of the French

9 Ibid., p. 6. 10 Ibid., pp. 8–10. 11 Ibid., p. 211. 12 Ibid., pp. 236–240.

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intellectuals rejected radical changes, revolution, and Marxism as the sources of totalitarianism.13 The French intellectuals who rejected revolution and Marxism as a totalitarian ideology included a group of former young revolutionaries who declared themselves as the New Philosophers. These New Philosophers became celebrated media intellectuals because they had a radical political record. In France, one could be considered as an intellectual if he had participated in the resistance in World War II, had supported the liberation movements in the colonized world, or was an active participant in the radical leftist organizations which emerged after May 1968, or took a stance against the Soviet totalitarianism.14 But the history of the intellectual in France is much older than these events. It can be traced back to the public debates on the nature of the French Republic from 1870 to 1940 that divided the old French right and left. Both old right and left rejected the French Republic but for opposite reasons. The Action Français, Royalists, and Catholic which represented the French right blamed the French Revolution for undermining the unity of France. They argued that the moment the French revolution destroyed the hierarchical organization of the ancient regime, the French unity vanished. In contrast, the old French left celebrated the French Revolution for granting to the French nation a civilizing mission while rejecting the Republic. The Left rejected the Republic because in order to protect the bourgeois order the Republic divided the society into opposite classes in constant social conflicts. The French leftist intellectuals’ argument that the Russian Revolution was the continuation of the historical process that began with the French Revolution demonstrates their relentless effort to universalize French politics and history.15 Since the French intellectuals considered the Russian Revolution and the Soviet Union as the extension of the French Revolution and France’s civilizing mission, they saw the Soviet Union as their ally in the fight against the French bourgeois. Before World War II, France witnessed two competing nationalisms. Whereas the right nationalism advocated by Action Français aimed to purify France from foreign elements, the left nationalism considered itself as the continuation of Jacobine patriotism and assumed a universal emancipatory mission for France. As the right nationalism collaborated with

13 Khilnani, Arguing Revolution, p. 4. 14 Ibid., p. 13. 15 Ibid., pp. 25–27.

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Fascism and the Vichy regime, the left nationalism consisted of Gaullists and Communists that constituted the resistance during the War, laid claim to postwar French nationalism.16 That is why the anti-Colonial stance of Paul Nizan and Simone Weil represented an anomaly among the French intellectuals.17 As by the end of the 1970s, the State succeeded in turning the intellectuals into technocrats and a new state nobility, the intellectuals deserted the public sphere and the democratic struggle. Bourdieu argued that only the return of the intellectuals to the public sphere could instigate a new democratic struggle. He assumed that the intellectuals could lead the new democratic struggle because the new state nobility had been exercising their power through their knowledge. The former intellectuals employed their knowledge to establish themselves as a new state nobility. But the intellectuals who are supposed to return to the public sphere are neither the Sartrean universal intellectuals nor the Foucauldian specific intellectuals. Bourdieu’s new intellectuals will revive the maxim of the eighteenth-century philosophes who authored Encyclopédie as the frame of reference of all educated people. Since the new intellectuals are not interested in replacing the power of the new nobility with their own power, they produce moments of counter-power to challenge the established power.18 By the end of the 1970s, the transformation of the intellectuals into the new state nobility was completed. The institutions of higher education as the main pillar of this new nobility had recruited a huge number of former radical and leftist students as teachers and researchers in the humanities and social sciences. The transformation of the radical students and intellectuals to a new state nobility could be called a cultural revolution, the main consequence of which was the disappearance of the intellectuals from the public sphere. As the academic intellectual became too technical, complicated and “scientific” in order to receive academic recognition and promotion, their work became impenetrable for the generally educated readers.19 As the academic language replicated the Latin of scholasticism, it produced strategic positions of power in the academia that selected and promoted scholars who were

16 Ibid., pp. 28–32. 17 Simon Weil, Simone Weil on Colonialism: An Ethic of the Other (New York: Rowman

& Little Field, 2003), pp. 29–30. 18 Sand, The End of the French Intellectual, p. 98. 19 Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals, pp. 155–158.

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subservient to the power structure.20 Whereas by tracing the history of the intellectual to the Dreyfus Affair, the dominant historical narrative makes the intellectual exclusively French, Russel Jacoby emphasizes on the emergence and disappearance of the urban bohemia as the main factor behind the emergence and disappearance of the American intellectuals or as he calls them public intellectuals. Jacoby relies on the idea discussed by Richard Hofstadter that the American intellectuals invented their Bohemia as the source of their intellectual life.21 Sand argues that in the same way that the intellectual was a product of a Judofobic socio-political context in the late 1890s, its demise is caused by the Islamophobic context that has dominated France and the rest of Europa.22 During the Dreyfus Affair, the Dreyfusard intellectuals described themselves as men of letters who use their intellectual ability and prestige to advocate truth and justice against the authority and order that undermine truth and justice.23 Against the nationalism of anti-Dreyfusards, which depended on making Germany an external threat, and the republicans, freemasonry, and the Jews as the internal threats to French existence and unity, the Dreyfusards relied on the republican nationalism and Jacobin patriotism. For anti-Dreyfusard such as Maurice Barrès, French citizens who lacked a long line of French descent could never become a part of the French people.24 According to Barrès’ logic, Dreyfus became a traitor because he was a Jew who did not belong to the French people. The Dreyfus Affair enabled Maurras to find Action française that remained until 1944 the most influential far-right organization. Maurras aimed to liberate France from the Jews whom he believed had invaded France and caused the French Revolution, which he blamed for generating cosmopolitanism, disorder and corruption in France.25 Whereas the Dreyfus Affair is known for being the cause of the emergence of the French intellectual, it also transformed some of the

20 Ibid., pp. 235–237. 21 Richard Hofstadter, Anti-intellectualism in American Life (New York: Alfred A.

Knopf, 1963), pp. 425–426. 22 Sand, The End of the French Intellectual, p. 35. 23 David Drake, French Intellectuals from the Dreyfus Affair to the Occupation (New

York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 23. 24 Ibid., pp. 26–27. 25 Ibid., pp. 30–33.

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Dreyfuard intellectuals such as George Sorel and Paul Lafargue into antiintellectuals . These Marxist intellectuals enjoyed the Dreyfusards because they believed that the Dreyfus Affair revealed a deep political and ideological crisis within democracy and were hoping that the Affair could provoke a socialist revolution. However, they realized during the Affair that the socialist bloc was exploiting their Dreyfuard credentials to gain a share of political power and secure positions in the state institutions. Sorel realized that the political battle between the socialist and bourgeois members of parliament during the Dreyfus Affair would not benefit the working class. He saw how socialists such as Jean Juares became Dreyfuards after losing their seats in parliament election in May 1898. As he saw the socialists’ exploitation of the Dreyfus Affair, Sorel relinquished his Dreyfusard position and reminded Juare of his previous political stance: “Let the bourgeois writers and politicians split over the guilt or innocence of an army captain… or to tear themselves apart in the name of the patrie, law, justice, and other words that are devoid of meaning as long as capitalism exists. The workers have no part to play in this battle that is not theirs.”26 For Charles Peguy, remaining a Dreyfusard meant remaining true to the spirit of the young Bernard Lazare, the first Dreyfusard who died in poverty, alone and forgotten but never traded his “integrity and commitment to truth and justice” with power or fame.27 Lazare and Sorel’s reflections on the Dreyfus Affair, call into question the myth that the Dreyfusard intellectuals constituted a unified bloc that committed itself to truth and justice beyond their political and self-interests. To what extent the personal success or failure of the intellectuals determines their political stance and fluctuations. Was it the academic failure and experience of defeat in the educational system that led some French intellectuals to hate the Third Republic and collaborate with Nazism? Did these frustrated intellectuals see the victory of Nazism as an opportunity for taking revenge on the system that denied them access to the public? Can these frustrations and ambitions explain why some marginalized French writers became active collaborators with the Nazi regime that occupied their country?28 But what about those frustrated intellectuals such as Paul Nizan who resisted and fought against Nazism? What about

26 Ibid., p. 41. 27 Ibid., p. 50. 28 Sand, The End of the French Intellectual, pp. 164–165.

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the seemingly frustrated Frantz Fanon, who published his White Masks Black Skins in 1952 to call into question the French intellectual’s claim of universality.29 Against the search and dedication of the French leftist intellectuals to political universality, Raymond Aron published the Opium of the Intellectuals in the mid-1950s. Still, throughout the 1960s, the politics of the universality of the French intellectuals survived through Fanon and Jean-Paul Sartre.30 Sartre defined neither the professional possessors of knowledge nor the social actors who bring specific knowledge into a wider audience as intellectuals. Hence, intellectuals are social actors who enable people to think more intelligently and act more ethically regarding the challenges their nations and the international community face. For Sartre, whereas the technicians of practical knowledge maintain the existing capitalist, racist, and imperialist order when they function as experts, the intellectuals reveal how their own expertise maintains the existing order. In the 1980s, the leftist intellectuals who turned against their earlier convictions described the intellectuals who called the existing socio-political order into question the agents of totalitarianism.31 Hence, the British intellectuals were presented as a model that the new intellectuals should imitate because they have always remained experts who kept their relevance to the state power. Because of their service to the state power, John Stuart Mill demanded that educated people should have double votes in elections. That is why, until 1950, the graduates from the prestigious English universities could elect additional members of parliament.32 It seems that before any other European states, it was the British State that succeeded in integrating its entire intellectual body into the State institutions both at home and through the colonial administration. Hegel was among the first who theorized that the modern State needed the intellectuals to subsume the particular under the universal. In addition to its legislative power formulating the universal, the modern State needed the executive power built upon the principle of bureaucracy to integrate the particular affairs of the civil society into the

29 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (London: Pluto Press, 2008). 30 Frans Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 2004) and Jean-Paul

Sartre, Between Existentialism and Marxism (New York: Verso, 2008). 31 Sand, The End of the French Intellectual, pp. 31–33. 32 Ibid., p. 29.

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universality of the State. Hegel considered the intellectuals as the operators of the state bureaucracy.33 Unlike aristocracy, the principle of bureaucracy assumes, according to Hegel, that citizens are not destined by birth to hold an office but by using their knowledge. Knowledge as the principle of bureaucracy makes all citizens equally eligible to the universal State.34 However, anti-Semitism in Germany and nationalism in France demonstrated that the Jews had never had the equal opportunity to participate in the State as the symbol of the universal. The Dreyfus Affair signified the absence of universality in the State since the State was taking sides with the interests of particular social groups. Henceforth, the emergence of the intellectual in the peak of Affair was a response to the State’s inability to reflect the universal. The French intellectuals from Lafarrgue and Sorel to Fanon and Sartre had debated, since the Dreyfus Affair, the extent to which the intellectuals remained faithful to the universal; first through fidelity to the struggles of the European proletariat, then through the fidelity to the anti-colonial liberation movements. Marx argued, against Hegel’s conception of bureaucracy as the unifier of the universal and the particular, that only a true democracy could unite the universal and the particular. Later, he replaced democracy with communism. He conceptualizes democracy, in the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, and Communism, in the Communist Manifesto, as the negations of bureaucracy. Whereas his critical method led him toward democracy, his dialectical or historical materialist method as the unity of theory and practice convinced him of the necessity of communism as the withering away of the State and bureaucracy. For Marx, bureaucracy was the embodiment of the belief in authority as the principle of knowledge and passive obedience as the principle of ethics. By exposing the dominant ideology’s false universality, a communist intellectual uncovers the real function of democracy beneath its formal structure. The communist intellectual assumes that he or she should reveal the true nature of the dominant ideology because the function of the dominant ideology is to conceal the exploitative and repressive nature of the capitalist order.35 According to this assumption, uncovering of the dominant ideology 33 G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 308. 34 Ibid., p. 332. 35 Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right’, in selected writings Edited by

David McLellan (London: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 37–38.

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results in the collapse of the capitalist order. The European communist intellectual told the proletariat of their countries that their liberation from the existing system depends on the liberation of the entire humanity through revolution. Marx theorized his true democracy, communism, and social revolution to get rid of Hegel’s principle of bureaucracy. However, what he disregarded was the fact that the modern State and democracy based on bureaucracy never recognized all citizens as equal citizens. Realization of this fact led the Jewish intellectuals such as Lazare to argue that since the Jewish people were not automatically the subjects of formal rights in a formal democracy, they would never discover the emptiness of their formal rights as Marx predicted. Thus, the Jews would never be able to take a revolutionary position in the way other citizens do.36 He concluded that the revolutionary position of the Jews is not a result of their experience but a result of their theoretical investigation. Lazare was among the first Jewish intellectuals who defended Captain Dreyfus while Judeophobia was on the rise. Sand argues that whereas the early stage of the Dreyfus Affair generated a new and robust wave of Judeophobia and thus political Zionism, the second stage marked the emergence of the French intellectual. The division of the Dreyfus Affair into two stages was first initiated and discussed by Sorel. According to Sand, after the event, the socialists found it politically useful to reconstruct the Affair as a united and heroic demonstration of the republican values. This socialist effort undermined the historical fact that the early stage of the Affair contributed to the formation of political Zionism. Theodor Herzel wrote Der Judestaat (the Jewish State) in Paris in 1895 while Paris was under the spell of the extreme Judeophobia. Political Zionism based its main argument on Barrès’ racist views that regardless of their social position and background in France or any European country, the Jewish citizens remain Jews.37 Veteran socialists such as George Clemenceau defended the Dreyfus cause and assisted the figure of the intellectual in receiving public recognition for two reasons. The first reason was the de-clericalization of the public sphere, and the second reason was the nationalization of the masses as the exceptional means

36 Bernard Lazare, Antisemitism: Its History and Causes (London: University of Nebraska, 1995). 37 Sand, The End of the French Intellectual, pp. 40–42.

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of winning and exercising political power.38 This figure of the universal intellectual lasted until the late 1960s and the early 1970s, and then it was smashed by the Foucauldian conception of the specific intellectual . By the late 1970s, some former leftist students became specific intellectuals and began to function as the theorist-activists of the politics of identity. Others reinvented the universal intellectual but deprived it of its previous substances to advocate liberal democracy and human rights against totalitarianism. Edward Said tried to negotiate between the specific and the new universal intellectual by arguing that the intellectuals are the voice of the voiceless and speak truth to power locally and globally. However, this concept of the intellectual cannot stand Paul Freire and Jacques Rancière’s critique of the intellectual. Since the 1970s, Freire and Rancière have demonstrated that the intellectuals’ approach toward the masses, the oppressed, and ordinary people are stultifying and repressive because their claim of leadership prevents the intellectual, social, and political emancipation of the ordinary people. Rancière’s work, since the 1980s, is a farewell to the intellectual. Since the early 1990s, we have been witnessing the emergence of a state founded universal intellectual that combined Aron’s critique of universalism with Arendt’s critique of totalitarianism to promote democracy and human rights in countries the West considers as unfriendly. As the state-funded discourse of the universal intellectual included inclusive-racism at home in the name of integration of the newcomers into society aspire to establish a hierarchical society and new-imperialism abroad, it produced public intellectuals whose only concerns are democracy and human rights aboard, and freedom of speech and the emancipation of the Muslim women at home. Against this dominant discourse, there has emerged a counter-discourse of exclusive racism with a nostalgic view of the old imperialism, colonialism and classic capitalism. As a history of the formation, renovations, and decay of the concept of the intellectual, this book traces the transformation of the concept from being a reference to an enlightening and emancipatory social actor to the most stultifying and repressive figure in modern society, from the nineteenth-century to the contemporary world. Chapter 2 is an account of the formation of the concept from the early nineteenth century to the 1920s. Chapter 3 is a discussion of the question of true and false

38 Ibid., p. 65.

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universal intellectual from Paul Nizan to Frantz Fanon. Chapter 4 investigates the transformation from the universal to the specific intellectual from Sartre to Foucault. Chapter 5 deals with the disappearance of the working class and the oppressed to which the intellectual has traditionally appealed and the attempt to renovate the intellectual in a multicultural society from Andre Gorz to Edward Said. Chapter 6 is about the rise and fall of the American intellectual. Chapter 7 is an investigation of the intellectual underpinning of the Iranian Revolution as the last great revolution of the modern time, which made revolution something of the past and inaugurated the intellectual debates on the dystopic future. Chapter 8 explores the transformation of the intellectual life in Norway as a perfect democracy, from putting forward radical and revolutionary propositions in the 1960s to their recuperation in the 1990s, within an academic and public discourse that rationalizes racism at home in the name of intellectual freedom and imperialism abroad in the name of democracy and human rights. Finally, Chapter 9 discusses the return to the method of equality or universal method in education as a means of intellectual, social and political emancipation of humanity vis-à-vis the final stage of the process of the integration of the intellectuals into the state and their monopolization of the state through their pedagogization of humanity.

CHAPTER 2

Formation of the Intellectual

The Intellectual as Bureaucrat Henri de Saint-Simon wrote in his Du Système Industriel (1821) that to achieve human prosperity and affluence, the industrialists need philosophical and scientific concepts, to influence the politics of the State in their favor and philosophers and scientists who develop such concepts. Furthermore, by relying on the philosophers and scientists, the industrialists could become the sole political and economic decision-makers of France’s new industrial order.1 To make this alliance effective, the industrialists should not only finance the philosophers and scientists but force the State to protect their efforts in constructing the philosophical and scientific foundation of the new industrial order. Until the philosophers and scientists accomplish their tasks, they must rely on the significant industrialists and agriculturists who try to elevate themselves to the rank of the State. Saint-Simon reminds the industrialists that if they want to establish a successful industrial order, they have to rely on the philosophers and scientists instead of jurists and metaphysicians because the latter could only ensure their political rights but unable to build a new society.2 Unlike the jurists and metaphysicians, the philosophers have 1 Henri Saint-Simon, Du Système Industriel (Paris: Antoine-Augustin Renouard, 1821), p. 150. 2 Ibid., pp. 150–151.

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the intellectual capacity to make the dominant prejudices disappear or at least diminish so that the industrial society grows without barriers. SaintSimon uses the term intellectuals for the philosophers and scientists and encourages the industrialists to make sure that the scientific works of the intellectuals are available to the public. Finally, gentlemen, I have a double proposition. On the one hand, I invite the positive intellectuals to unite themselves and combine their forces to wage an all-compassing and decisive attack on prejudices as the starting point of the organization of the industrial system. On the other hand, I demand that the wealthy and powerful industrialists come together and provide the means that the intellectuals need to publicize their scientific work.3

Saint-Simon assumed that the successful corporation between the French intellectuals and industrialists in the establishment and consolidation of the industrial system would inspire other European countries to organize the industrial societies of their own.4 A year before the publication of Saint-Simon’s book, Hegel published his Philosophy of Right, in which he gave a significant role to the intellectuals to reconstruct and modernize the State. For Hegel, people with intellectual capacity could translate the universal character of the State into the particular. Similar to SaintSimon, Hegel believed that philosophy has a “public existence [Existenz]” that must be in the service of the State.5 However, unlike Saint-Simon, Hegel considers the State as “an inherently rational entity” that modern philosophy should comprehend because modern philosophy is the reflection of the modern State; every philosophy “is its own time comprehended in thoughts.”6 Considering the philosophical idea as a unity of form and content, in which form deals with the conceptual cognition and content with the essence of ethical actuality, modern philosophy represents the conceptual cognition of the modern State’s ethical actuality.7 What philosophy should do is to conceptualize the rights of the State 3 Ibid., p. 152. 4 Ibid., pp. 152–153. 5 G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 17. 6 Ibid., p. 21. 7 Ibid., p. 25.

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and civil society “as universally valid,” so that they take the form of unchangeable laws.8 The difference between the content of right in itself and law is that when the law becomes universally known, it gets a binding force.9 That is why the law becomes justice demonstrated in public.10 Following Rousseau, Hegel understood the State as a union of the individuals through a contract. All those who formed the agreement have to obey the consequences of their commitment.11 The contract’s primary consequence is that right necessitates duty, while both depend on the principle of personal freedom. The slaves do not have any duties because they have no rights.12 This same contract divides the State into the legislative power representing the universality of laws and the executive power with the task of subsuming the particular under the universal to resolve specific cases, demands, and conflicts of interests.13 The task of the executive power is to recruit individuals whose intellectual qualities enable them to translate the particular affairs of civil society into the universal interest of the State.14 Hegel assumes that since knowledge is the only required qualification for the individuals to hold an office in the executive power, all citizens have a chance of becoming state officials or bureaucrats. In exchange for the opportunity that the individuals get to work as bureaucrats and civil servants, they sacrifice their private goals and interests. In return, as the legal representative of the “consciousness of the mass of the people,” the bureaucrat’s yearning for spiritual existence is fulfilled. Unlike the aristocracy that used the state offices for its benefits, the bureaucracy cannot use state offices as an arbitrary means of domination because whereas the sovereign acts upon the executive power from above, the corporations of the civil society act upon it from below.15 Hegel discards the idea that all individual citizens should participate “in deliberations and decisions on the universal concerns of

8 Ibid., pp. 240–241. 9 Ibid., pp. 243–246. 10 Ibid., p. 254. 11 Ibid., p. 277. 12 Ibid., p. 284. 13 Ibid., p. 308. 14 Ibid., p. 329. 15 Ibid., pp. 332–335.

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the state” because the State considers each citizen as a member of a particular corporation and community through which it can influence public opinion and the State. The citizens can participate in the universal by electing deputies who do not subordinate the universal interests to the particular interests of their communities or corporations.16 Hegel assumes that being independent of public opinion is the “first formal condition of achieving anything great or rational, either in actuality or in science.” The reason is that the same public opinion that guarantees the success of great achievements in science and public life is transformed into prejudice after recognizing and adopting those achievements.17

The Intellectual as Democrat and Communist In his critique of the Saint-Simonian conception of the industrial society and Hegel’s conceptualization of the modern State, Marx claims that the bourgeoisie has transformed the previously reverent social actors such as physicians, lawyers, priests, poets, scientists, and philosophers into paid wage-laborers.18 The result is an ideology that reproduces the existing relations of domination.19 Marx includes Hegel’s conceptualization of the State based on bureaucracy as the peak of the ideological expression of the capitalist relations of production: “The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.” Marx was hoping that the struggle for the expansion of the voting system and universal suffrage would achieve true democracy in which the State and bureaucracy become superfluous.20 Marx argues that in the same way that the civil society experiences its spirituality in private property, the State finds its spirituality in bureaucracy, an imaginary state besides the actual State. Marx’s conceptualization of bureaucracy and private property as the spiritual doubles of the modern State and civil society springs from the assumption that in modern society, “every object has a dual meaning, a real one and a

16 Ibid., p. 348. 17 Ibid., p. 355. 18 Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto, Collected works (Vol. 6) (Lawrence & Wishart Electric Book, 2010), p. 487. 19 Ibid., p. 499. 20 Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right’, in Selected writings Edited by

David McLellan (London: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 35.

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bureaucratic one.” Bureaucracy also has its own spirit, but this spirit takes a material form in the hierarchy and closed corporations protected by secrecy and mystery. Contrary to what Hegel says, Bureaucracy relies on authority and has made authority the principle of knowledge and obedience as the principle of ethics against any form of public or political mentality. Accordingly, bureaucracy’s spiritualism generates the “materialism of passive obedience,” faith in authority, promotion of fixed and formal behavior, and reliance on traditions. This vulgar materialism leads the individual bureaucrats toward subordination and passive obedience to the extent they are unable to distinguish between their existence and the existence of the bureaucratic system. As the bureaucrats realize that material life is the only real and meaningful life, they find careerism and competition for higher posts as the most meaningful aims in life.21

The Limits of Democracy After revealing the real limits of bourgeois democracy, Marx discarded the idea that religious and political emancipation could lead to real human emancipation.22 Marx saw the modern State as the real hinder for man’s real freedom because the State recognizes his right to freedom as long as he is separated from other men and considers them as “the limitation of his own freedom.” He argued that the State recognizes citizens’ rights to the extent that these rights express their “right to selfishness,” such as the right to private property.23 Whereas man’s selfishness makes him an unpolitical creature who thinks that all his relations to other men have to be regulated by law, a man who recognizes himself as a species-being considers political action as a “self-conscious activity.” As a species-being, men discover their force as a portion of a higher social power capable of standing against the political forces which prevent their complete emancipation.24 Marx considers human beings as species-beings because of their ability to make their “life activity” an object of their will

21 Ibid., pp. 37–38. 22 Karl Marx, On the Jewish Question, in selected writings Edited by David McLellan

(London: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 51–52. 23 Ibid., p. 60. 24 Ibid., pp. 63–64.

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and consciousness and then transform it collectively.25 This ability has its origin in man’s universality that is his ability for “seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, thinking, contemplating, willing, acting, loving.” What prevents humans from actualizing their universal abilities is the dominance of private property in their material life, which considers only exchangeable objects in the market as useful and valuable possessions. Hence, it is only through the “supersession of private property” that man can regain his other senses and qualities.26 Since capital is a form of social power and every capitalist exercise a degree of social power, the transformation of capital to common property means that society attains the capitalists’ ability to exercise social power.27 However, it is the proletariat that, because of its position in the capitalist production and because of its ability to attain the communist consciousness, can become the agent of a social revolution that transforms different forms of capital into collective property.28 Marx argues that as the proletarian struggle against the bourgeoisie reaches its climax, the socialists and communists will act as the representatives of the proletariat.29 At this stage of the class struggle, the physicians, lawyers, priests, poets, and scientists whom the capitalist production had reduced to the wage-laborer, begin to use their intellectual capacity for the emancipation of the proletariat.30 What the communist intellectuals can tell the proletariat is that regardless of their nations, they have common interests and goals.31 Marx claims that because of their theoretical advantage, the communist intellectuals understand the general conditions of the proletarian movement

25 Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (New York: International Publishers, 1964), p. 67. 26 Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, in selected writings Edited by David McLellan (London: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 100. 27 Marx, The Communist Manifesto, in selected writings Edited by David McLellan (London: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 255–257. 28 Karl Marx, The German Ideology, in selected writings Edited by David McLellan (London: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 200. 29 Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, in selected writings Edited by David McLellan (London: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 229. 30 Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto, p. 248. 31 Ibid., pp. 253–255.

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and its outcomes.32 The proletarian movements will create the communist society in which “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”33 However, nineteenth-century Europe produced less internationalist communist intellectuals than the intellectuals inclined toward nationalism and anti-Semitism. Instead of taking sides with the proletariat as Marx predicted, the politicized intellectuals became nationalists who were looking for external and internal enemies. Tocqueville, who had a different perception of the politicization of the intellectuals, argues that since the middle of the eighteenth-century, Men of Letters became interested in politics because it could elevate their social status. They used the French Revolution to turn themselves into the political elite.34 Tocqueville argues that the French Men of Letters, have never reached consensus on a particular political system and never offered a unified theory of government.35 According to Tocqueville, although the French State represents the most literate nation in Europe, its inability to offer its intellectuals privileged social positions made France an extremely politicized nation. Hence, the lack of social distinction leads the French intellectuals to think of rebuilding their society radically.36 However, since they do not play any role in their government, their participation in the affairs of government remains theoretical. In England, political writers and political actors were mixed, one set working to adapt new ideas to practice, the other circumscribing theory by existing facts; whereas in France, the political world was divided into separate provinces without intercourse with each other. One administrated the government, the other enunciated the principles on which government ought to rest. The former adopted measures according to precedents and routine, the latter evolved general laws, without ever thinking how they could be applied. The one conducted business, the other directed minds.37

32 Ibid., p. 256. 33 Ibid., pp. 261–262. 34 Sand, The End of the French Intellectual, pp. 79–81. 35 Alexix de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the Revolution (New York: Harper &

Brothers Publishers, 1856), p. 171. 36 Ibid., p. 172. 37 Ibid., p. 178.

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Nationalism and the Intellectual In the late nineteenth century, Bernard Lazare offered a different perspective on the intellectuals. As one of the first socialist intellectuals who saw the danger of the European ethnolinguistic nationalism, Lazare argued that the concept of nation-state based on the people who speak the same language and belong to the same race is incoherent because it excluded the Jewish citizens from the nation. The proponents of ethnolinguistic nationalism saw the inclusion of the Jews as destructive to the nationsate.38 Against the ethnolinguistic nationalism, the so-called moderate nationalists divided the Semitic people into the superior and the inferior, productive, and unproductive Jews. Whereas the superior Jews could be assimilated in the nation, the inferior Jews had to be excluded from the nation. Against these nationalist arguments, Lazare argued that if a nation-state is incapable of including its heterogeneous elements, the various parts of the nation will deal with each other through violence. According to Lazare, the reaction to the exclusion from the nation and anti-Semitic nationalism came from the Jewish citizens; they refused to adopt the character propagated by the nationalist ideologues as the national characters and emphasized their distinct characters. The emphasis of the Jewish people on their ethnic and religious distinction indicated a deviation from the Jewish history of adaption and cosmopolitanism. Lazare argues that the Jews had a fatherland in the distant past called Zion, but the character of this fatherland has changed throughout history. It has become a spiritual fatherland whose character explains why the Jews have become indifferent to every land, and do not divide countries into good or bad. Since every land is equally good or bad, the Jews have become internationalists by instinct. As the Jewish indifference applies to traditions and existing orders, and these traditions and orders become contingent and temporary, the Jews take a revolutionary approach to the existing situation. What anti-Semites do not like about the Jews is their internationalism and their passion for revolution.39 Referring to Spinoza’s politics, Lazare claims that the Jews recognize political meanings in all religious dogmas. For the Jews, whereas piety explains one’s commitment to justice, impiety explains one’s inclination toward injustice and crime. Hence, instead of saints, the Jews praise the just man, 38 Bernard Lazar, Antisemitism: Its History and Causes, p. 93. 39 Ibid., pp. 113–115.

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and instead of charity, they search for justice. Similarly, the Jewish concept of equality and its tendency toward anarchy have prevented the Jews from accepting their governments willingly. Consequently, these characteristics convinced the guardians of the existing order to consider the Jews as the source of disorder and national decline.40 Lazare argues that when the anti-Semites blame the Jews for destroying the State, they mean the Christian State. This claim implies that by emancipating the Jews politically and allowing them to enter into society as citizens, the modern State destroyed the Christian State.41 Lazare published his book on antiSemitism in Belgium in 1894, a few months after the arrest of Captain Dreyfus and four years before Emil Zola’s J’accuse, and while Judophobia was growing in Paris.42 George Sorel was one of the few Marxists who became a Dreyfusard. He followed Lazare’s anarchism in the early 1900s when he became convinced that Marxism had entered a process of decomposition. Contrary to Karl Kautsky, who argued in 1895 that the intellectual is the principal agent of change and revolution, the decomposition of Marxism convinces Sorel that the intellectual is not an agent of change and revolution. In his Die Intelligenz und die Sozialdemokratie the French translation of which appeared at the same time, Kautsky used the term Intelligenz for intellectual while neither the French nor the Germanspeaking readers were quite familiar with the meaning of the term in noun form.43 Kautsky’s article reflected on the question posed by the socialist student associations that described themselves as intellectual proletariat . By the end of the nineteenth century, with the expansion of the European universities, the socialist student associations became the voice of the radical students as a social group while participating in the socialist parties individually. The term intellectual proletariat had for the students a double meaning; it indicated both their belonging to a cultural elite and the workers’ movement. Kautsky rejected the Marxist prediction that the intermediate social groups were going to disappear in the process of capitalist development. He argued that besides the bourgeoisie and the

40 Ibid., pp. 127–130. 41 Ibid., p. 133. 42 Bernard Lazare, L’Affaire Dreyfus: Une Erreur Judiciaire (Paris: P.-V. Stock Éditeur, 1897). 43 Sand, The End of the French Intellectual, p. 105.

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proletariat, the intellectuals would constitute a distinct social class in the bourgeois society. For Kautsky, the intellectual as an educated individual conceives himself superior to the proletariat whose low level of intellectual development prevents him from becoming an equal fellow fighter for socialism. Since the intellectual does not see in the worker a comrade but a pupil, he considers himself as the head, which through the proletariat’s body can raise society to higher levels. Hence, as an advocate of science, the intellectuals come to the workers’ aid as an external force. The Marxist intellectual resembles Ibsen’s Doctor Stockmann in An Enemy of the People who remains an intellectual because he insists on distinguishing himself from the proletariat and masses and thus comes into conflict with them. The fact that intellectuals such as Stockmann do not respect the popular movements and compete with the majority indicate that they cannot play any role in the proletarian movement as a democratic movement.44 More importantly, since the intellectuals consider the failure of their colleagues as their own success, they compete with each other constantly.45 The competitive nature of the intellectuals led Sorel to write in 1898, at the same time that the Dreyfusard intellectuals published their petition that a change that spoils the prestige of the intellectuals is taking place. He argues that capitalism justifies the division of manual and intellectual labor through the “theory of ability.” As this theory caused shallow respect among the population for learning, it produced a new social class that by acquiring the slightest education could get a diploma and receive “fat pensions.” Against this shallow respect for education, which has produced a social class of administrators and managers, Sorel argues that these educated people do not demonstrate any exceptional qualities in leadership than can match the manual workers who learn about leadership through experience.46 Yet, the intellectuals insist that the workers’ acceptance of the hierarchy of ability and their subordination to the will of the intellectuals are the only means of serving their own interests.47 Sorel reminds the workers that if they accept this hierarchy, which is the principle of the bourgeoise society, they will remain

44 Karl Kautsky, The Intellectuals and the Workers, https://www.marxists.org/archive/ kautsky/1903/xx/int-work.htm. 45 Sand, The End of the French Intellectual, pp. 106–109. 46 George Sorel, The Socialist Future of the Syndicates, pp. 76–77. 47 Ibid., p. 79.

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in their subordinated and exploited situation but governed by a new class that is identical with the existing ruling class. Sorel warned the workers that if they accepted the command and authority of the people outside their organizations, they would remain incapable of governing themselves. Sorel argued that as soon as the intellectuals discovered that the socialist movements were the only means of seizing the State as the primary source of power, wealth, and privilege, they involved themselves in these movements. Hence, the socialist parties represent a particular section of the intellectuals who fight against other intellectuals for seizing the state power. Whereas the intellectuals outside power claim that they will resolve all crises of the modern societies if they replace the intellectuals in power, the political battles of the intellectuals have only strengthened the State. Since the intellectuals depend on the continuity of the State and political parties to secure their privileged social positions, they consider a real proletarian revolution a threat to their interests.48 As the intellectuals invade the proletarian organizations, they work against the emancipation of the proletariat because they prevent the proletarian selforganization. The consequence will be the inability of the proletariat to lead the industry after the revolution. Sorel argues that Marx’s account of the general tendency of capitalism toward revolution has taken the form of a social myth with the intellectuals as the theorists of revolutionary hope.49 However, in contrast to this social myth, syndicalism creates the space for the workers to invent organizations that carry out the revolution and engender the future society without the aid of the intellectuals.50

The Dreyfusian Revolution Sorel divides what he calls the Dreyfusian Revolution into two periods. Whereas the first period in every revolution is about overthrowing the old regime, the second period is about cruel legislation to make sure that the old regime does not come back. Hence, the latter period is full of bloody battles between opposing revolutionary factions to determine who is the

48 George Sorel, La décomposition du marxisme (Paris: Librairie des Sciences Politiques & Sociales, 1910), pp. 53–54. 49 Ibid., pp. 56–58. 50 Ibid., p. 64.

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sovereign power.51 Whereas the wishes for revolutionary changes govern the first period, the objective of the revolutionaries, in the second period, is the institutionalization of the revolutionary regime.52 The Dreyfusian revolution, which took place amid the economic prosperity that began in 1852, follows the same revolutionary stages. It was this socio-economic context that made the “so-called liberal economy” the ideology of the Dreyfusian Revolution, and it was this ideology that pushed for social legislation to transform poor people from a formidable threat into an asset for the government. The result was the emergence of a new philosophy of solidarity, which Sorel describes as a philosophy of hypocritical cowardice, to theorize and justify the ongoing social transformation and legislations that allowed and encouraged the rich to use the government to redistribute some of its benefits to the poor.53 The symptoms of the second period were recognizable in the first period when Anatole France, an advocate of the existing order, turns Drefusard and opposes the current hierarchical order. From now on, he forgets his previous criticism of Zola’s literary work and begins to express his admiration for him and his work. Dreyfusianism has entirely changed Anatole France’s assessment of Zola. He discovered noble moral éléments in the same books [by Zula] that he loathed in the past. Hence, on the tomb of Zola, he expressed his regret for being unfair to him and praised his significant contribution, through his work and actions, to the fatherland and the world. So, the phrase “je acuuse” changed the values and meanings of Zola’s writing… However, nothing could offend and ridicule Anatol France’s readers than him becoming a Dreyfusard.54

Sorel claims that since not a single element of Zola’s J’accuse can be found in his entire oeuvre and since he never called into question the constituting aspects of the current reality, his involvement in the Dreyfusian revolution was not sincere.55 The foremost achievement of the Dreyfusian revolution was, according to Sorel, the institutionalization of

51 Georges Sorel, La Révolution Dreyfusienne (Paris: Librairie des Sciences Politiques & Sociales, 1909), p. 11. 52 Ibid., p. 14. 53 Ibid., p. 15. 54 Ibid., p. 23. 55 Ibid., p. 30.

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modern liberalism and an intellectual aristocracy whose power increases in proportion to the increase of the number of government employees.56 Sorel considers the Dreyfusian revolution as the cause of the disappearance of the Republican bureaucracy or aristocracy. “The disappearance of the republican aristocracy explains why the republican regime has become a total fiction in France.”57 To distance himself from the intellectuals, Sorel says in Reflections on Violence: I am neither a professor, a popularizer of knowledge nor a candidate for party leadership; I am a self-taught man exhibiting to other people the notebooks which have served for my own instruction. This is why the rules of the art of writing have never interested me very much.58

Sorel is a self-taught individual whose reflections on the writings of others not only helps him to arrange his thoughts but prevents him from becoming his own disciple in the way the great philosophers have become. Sorel argues that under the influence of his disciples, Marx became his own disciple and stopped producing more useful work. Sorel holds the view that within every individual, there is a metaphysical fire hidden beneath the ashes. Whereas every ready-made doctrine extinguishes a degree of this metaphysical fire, an awakener “stirs the ashes and makes the flames fly up.”59 The problem of the ready-made doctrines is, according to Sorel, the political optimism they generate because political optimism prevents people from seeing the difficulties that their projects will face. The problem with political optimism is its destructive nature that turns the revolutionaries, with the greatest sympathy for human misery and who sincerely desire to bring universal happiness to humanity, into the representatives of cruelty as it happened during the Reign of Terror.60 The Dreyfusard politicians’ approach to the law and authority was a clear expression of political optimism of those who remained silent about law and authority in general but described the laws and authority in the hands of their rivals as a violation of justice. The fact that revolutionaries have no 56 Ibid., p. 57. 57 Ibid., p. 64. 58 Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 5. 59 Ibid., pp. 5–7. 60 Ibid., p. 10.

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desire to suppress authority and law in general but utilize them for their own purpose explains why the nineteenth-century revolutionary disruptions strengthened the State. For Sorel, only the proletarian violence can suppress the State because the proletariat is the only social class that stands outside the state ideology advocated by the intellectuals and the parliamentary system.61 The parliamentarian system says that it tries to impose “the necessary sacrifices upon people who possess a fortune” to improve the condition of living of the poor.62 The working class takes this parliamentarian deception seriously because they trust their leaders in the established political parties who tell them that they have a social duty to support their bosses.63 Sorel detects the anti-Marxist tendency of the contemporary socialists in their reliance on “the rich Intellectuals” who embraced socialism during “the Dreyfusard movement” and have ever since financed the party’s newspapers in return for protection against the unexpected results of the class struggle.64 What these new socialists were searching for “was not the administration of justice but the welfare of the State.”65 The new socialists preferred the welfare of the State because the administration of justice, since the French Revolution, reproduced legislations that endorsed the “tradition of the ancien régime” and the Inquisition.” The post-revolutionary legislations deemed “any kind of document, material, moral, verbal or written” as the necessary proof to convict the enemies of the people. Whereas at some point, the Inquisition and the monarchy, doubted the value of their exceptional methods, the Revolution made these methods the State’s practices. Whereas before the eighteenth century, the State played an economic function by helping maritime expeditions and encouraging industry, the eighteenth-century State became a democratic despotism thanks to the physiocrats. While representing everybody, the State that was supervised by “an enlightened public opinion” began to play a greater political role. The State received its peak as a strong state during the Dreyfusian revolution.66 From now on, regardless of who controls governments and regardless of 61 Ibid., pp. 17–18. 62 Ibid., p. 52. 63 Ibid., p. 58. 64 Ibid., p. 70. 65 Ibid., p. 97. 66 Ibid., pp. 98–101.

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how violent or peaceful government transitions might be, every government transition makes the State more powerful because it can use justice as a weapon against its enemies.67 Sorel argues that proletarian violence can end state violence because it lacks hatred and revenge. During the proletarian violence, “the vanquished are not killed; non-combatants are not made to bear the consequences of the disappointments which the armies may have experienced on the field of battle….”68 For Sorel, only the workers can emancipate themselves because the proletarian actions have no intention of reforming the State; they want to destroy it.69 Hence, the sociologists who advocate social reforms or the intellectuals who have made “thinking for the proletariat ” a profession cannot involve themselves in syndicalism because syndicalism is the expression of the proletarian action.70 Sorel puts forward the general strike, which aims to destroy the State against the political strike that aims to reform the State for two reasons. First, the general strike keeps worker movement independent from the interference of the intellectuals and politicians. Second, it discards the “faith in the magical force of the State” generated by the intellectuals and politicians.71 Sorel claims that a proletarian revolution cannot be achieved by an elite who assumes that they think for the thoughtless masses, and expect the proletariat to feed them. According to Sorel, the intellectuals “have adopted the profession of thinking,” and succeeded in establishing their profession as a noble profession for which they receive an aristocratic salary. Sorel argues that the post-revolutionary State generated a new social class which, while standing outside the material production, its ability to speak eloquently about evolution and reform, has changed the relationship between opposing social classes.72 Now the problem is; if the coming revolutions do not succeed in destroying the contemporary State that is dominated by this new class, the State will be the machine that produces the future masters. Hence, there will always be a new administrative staff that will replace the authority of the old system

67 Ibid., p. 103. 68 Ibid., p. 106. 69 Ibid., pp. 107–111. 70 Ibid., pp. 127–129. 71 Ibid., p. 153. 72 Ibid., pp. 155–157.

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because there will always be an artificial State that considers itself as legitimate vis-à-vis the existing legal State.73 The former revolutionary socialist activists who call for a political strike, imagine themselves as the future masters because they are well aware that a political strike neither changes the situation of the masses nor damages the State but transmits power from one privileged class to another.74 Sorel describes electoral democracy as a Stock Exchange with politicians as shareholders.75 In the same vein, modern intellectuals and politicians treat the proletariat in the same way that the ancient Greek masters treated their slaves as mere working instruments that do not need to think. Hence, the problem with the intellectuals is that they can only imagine a society in which producers feed the thinkers.76 Édouard Berth, a disciple of Sorel, quotes in his Les Méfaits des Intellectuells (1914) a letter by Gustav Flaubert to George Sand in which he says “Tout le rêve de ladémocratie est d’élever le prolétaire au niveau de bêtise du bourgeois. Le rêve est en partie accompli. Il lit les mêmes journaux et a les mêmes passions.” Flaubert considers the press as the school of stupidity because it exempts people from thinking.77 While the press exempts the proletariat from thinking, the sate allocates the intellectuals a privileged place and the intellectuals do what they have been doing since the Roman empire that is making political regimes corrupt. Berth claims that the French Republic as the embodiment of the domination of the intellectual, is the realization of Auguste Comte’s dream that made the domination of the State by the intellectuals a reality and turned the French Republic into an intellectual theocracy that is no more than clericalism in reverse. What distinguishes an intellectual or clerical regime from other political regimes is its anti-juridical character because it allows the intelligence to take precedence over law and arbitrary absolutism to undermine the rule of law. That is why the existing liberal democracies as intellectual aristocracies have nothing but contempt for the masses. Berth

73 Ibid., pp. 163–164. 74 Ibid., p. 171. 75 Ibid., p. 222. 76 Ibid., pp. 237–238. 77 Éduoard Berth, Les Méfaits des Intellectuells (Paris: Librairie des Sciences Politiques et Sociales Marcel Rivière et Cie, 1914), p. xxv.

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blames Julien Benda for his defense of the intellectuals’ aristocratic position in contemporary democracy because aristocracy has always relied on tradition, blood, and race.78 The difference between the old aristocracy and the new aristocracy is that the former did not feel contempt for the people, and the ruler and the ruled had a mutual understanding. For Berth, the intellectuals were the parvenus of intelligence, who could not claim to any superiority by birth or wealth but assumed their spiritual superiority. While the intellectuals used the egalitarian and democratic arguments against the nobility to climb the social ladder, they started to argue about the inequality of talents among different people as the reason for their rise to political power. Berth considers Sorbonne as an aristocratic institution in disguise that in the name of intellectualist democracy harms and destroys both production and the fatherland.79 Following Lafargue, Berth claims that the problem of the French university lies in the State’s reliance on the merchants and the intellectuals.80 The result is the combination of the political idealism of the intellectuals and the practical materialism of the merchants as the two pillars of the modern democratic State. Whereas the intellectuals created the State as a concept and a metaphysical entity, the merchants found modern democracy a useful instrument for their material interests. However, since the intellectuals have always looked down on the merchants, their marriage could not last forever. Hence, in the name of social democracy, the intellectuals wanted to extend political democracy to the economy.81

Socialism and the Intellectuals Paul Lafargue, who remained faithful to Marxism throughout his life, called into question the assumption of the modern intellectuals that they “stand alone in knowing and understanding” and claimed that the intellectuals use every available means to protect their privileged positions. However, the intellectuals’ assumption did not prevent capitalism from reducing knowledge of the intellectuals to an exchangeable commodity whose value is determined by the market. Since the market determines

78 Ibid., pp. 36–41. 79 Ibid., pp. 42–44. 80 Ibid., p. 132. 81 Ibid., pp. 137–139.

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the value of knowledge, its wider distribution reduces its price. Lafargue argued that unlike the revolutionary men of letters of the eighteenthcentury, the nineteenth-century intellectuals are the loyal servants of the State whose competence creates the condition of their dependence. Hence, since science can both emancipate and enslave, Lafargue rejected Durkheim’s argument that the intellectuals and scientists could decipher the political reality better than the rest of the people.82 Lafargue traces the history of modern intellectuals to the ill-treatment of the intellectuals by the bourgeoisie after the Revolution. Bourgeoisie had promised the intellectuals that it would honor them and use their intelligence, wisdom, and virtue to make liberty, equality, and fraternity the foundations of the new society. As the electoral system divided citizens into active and inactive citizens, the intellectuals realized the extent of the bourgeois deception. The active citizens included those capable of paying taxes with the right to vote. The inactive citizens, who were unable to pay taxes, were excluded from voting. For Lafargue, the absurdity of the deceptive bourgeois promises about right and equality was revealed by the fact that even Jean Jacques Rousseau, whose Social Contract had become the bible of the Revolution, could not vote in the post-revolutionary electoral system since he would fail to pay the required taxes.83 Lafargue argues that since their intellectual capacities are transformed into merchandise, the intellectuals are condemned to suffer in the same way as manual laborers because the shortage and abundance of the intellectuals determine the price of the intellectual labor. The overproduction of the intellectual merchandise in 1900, made the intellectual labor cheaper than the wage of the manual worker. To describe the rage that the intellectuals experience when they sell their intellectual labor, Lafargue refers to Cicero saying that “The free man who sells his work, lowers himself to the rank of the slaves.” Whereas the French clergy of 1789 considered “the proposition to pay a salary for worship,” a mortal insult, contemporary intellectuals are used to such insults to the extent that socialist intellectuals are eager to know how the socialistic society rewards their intellectual work.84 Lafargue claims that the political history

82 Sand, The End of the French Intellectual, pp. 118–120. 83 Paul Lafargue, Socialism and the Intellectuals, in The Right to Be Lazy and Other

Studies (Chicago: Charles H-Kerr & Company, 1907), pp. 65–66. 84 Ibid., pp. 77–79.

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of post-revolutionary France demonstrates that the intellectuals, scientists, university professors, and highly respected writers would offer their services to the State regardless of who was in power. Whereas kings and emperors would take pride in speaking with the intellectuals on equal terms in the past, contemporary intellectuals are in fierce competition with each other because they want to sell their services to the State for a higher price. The rivalries between the intellectuals became evident when, during the Dreyfus Affair, a professor of chemistry in the Polytechnic school was discharged; he had publicly expressed his opinion on the Affair without receiving any support from his colleagues. Lafargue compares this lack of solidarity among the intellectuals with the solidarity among the workers. When a worker is dismissed, his colleagues stop working until he returns to work. In the case of the dismissed professor, not a single Dreyfusard raised his voice to defend the rights of a fellow intellectual. According to Lafargue, the eighteenth-century bourgeoisie supported scientists’ critique of Christianity because Christianity was the ideological foundations of the aristocratic society that it aimed to overthrow. But after reaching its triumphant position and realizing that Christianity could be a useful ideological base for its power, the bourgeoisie invited the scientists and intellectuals to restore religion.85 The same fate was waiting for Darwin’s Origin of Species. For instance, the earlier objections of the French scientists and intellectuals against the book was motivated by the assumption that it was an endorsement of the class struggle. However, the book received full support when Herbert Spencer used it to justify the division “of individuals into rich and poor, idlers and laborers, capitalists and wage-earners” as the laws of nature. Then, bourgeois Darwinists employed natural selection to explain that the organs of the human body were differentiated and distributed in such a way to protects the well-functioning of the social body. As “natural selection assigns to each one his place in society,” those who have lost their logical spirit are doomed to servility.86 Lafargue argues that science worked in the past as a means for human emancipation because it allowed the scientist to free himself from manual labor to develop his faculties of mind and body and tame the powers of nature. But, by becoming the slave of capital, science has only intensified the exploitation of the working class

85 Ibid., pp. 81–83. 86 Ibid., pp. 84–85.

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to increase the capitalists’ wealth. Although the capitalist is well aware of the failure of science, he instructs his domestic scientists and intellectuals to persuade the working class that with the development of science, their share of wealth will improve.87 According to Lafargue, the capitalists do not work, neither with their hands nor with their intellects. They do not even run for office because they can buy politicians and deputies, which is cheaper than buying voters. Since the capitalists are preoccupied with the stock exchange, they leave the supervision and management of the industrial and commercial enterprises to the intellectuals. Lafargue calls these intellectuals of industry and politics, “the privileged portion of the wage class” whose interests correspond to those of the capitalist class. Certainly, these privileged intellectuals will never embrace socialism, but most of the underprivileged and unemployed intellectuals will enjoy the socialist movement.88 Instead of helping them to deal with the miseries of capitalism, education makes the intellectuals believe that higher education can elevate them to privileged positions in society. As they begin to think that their poverty is temporary and education will be their “lucky number in the social lottery,” the educated people distance themselves from socialism. What the educated people do not understand is that labor, regardless of its form, manual or intellectual, will be exploited. Hence, instead of offering them privileged social positions, capitalist development will decapacitate the educated people and include them into the growing army of the intellectual proletariat.89 Relying on his own experience after the Paris Commune, Lafargue tells his unsuccessful efforts to recruit the educated people in the intellectual centers of Paris into the socialist movement. He searches for socialist intellectuals in Latin Quarter, Rue de la Pitie, Rue Monge, and Boulevard de Port-Royal: “Our ideas attracted them one day, but the next day the wind blew from another quarter and turned their heads.”90 Lafargue warned the intellectuals that they would not become a distinguished class in the capitalist society as Auguste Comte and others promised them. The problem with the contemporary intellectuals is, according to Lafargue, that they are unaware of the fact that

87 Ibid., pp. 85–87. 88 Ibid., pp. 90–91. 89 Ibid., p. 92. 90 Ibid., pp. 93–94.

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intellectuals could become a distinguished class in the past because they stood outside and above production. Their task was limited to education, religious worship, and political administration. By combining manual and intellectual labor, capitalism made manual workers the servants of the machine and the intellectuals the supervisors of the process of production. According to Lafargue, the intellectuals’ inclination toward socialism is not a result of their feeling pity for the working class, but because they want to protect their interests. Still, they are unable to understand where to look for their real interests.91 They can reach such understanding by learning from Marx’s depiction of the workingmen of the future who paint, sing, dance, write, play music, and do philosophical and scientific activities to satisfy their artistic and scientific passion. The intellectuals can learn from Kepler for whom “The elector of Saxony with all his wealth cannot equal the pleasure I have felt in composing the Mysterium Cosmographicum.”92 Lafargue concludes that to emancipate science and art from capitalism and “liberate thought from the slavery of commercialism,” the intellectuals must become socialists because their real interest is different from their immediate and material interest.93

The Right to Be Lazy For Lafargue, the hatred for manual labor was behind the blossoming of the Greek culture. In Greek culture, whereas the slave did manual labor, the free man was doing physical exercise and playing with his intellect. Hence, the ancient poets venerated laziness and philosophers defined work as a derogation of the free man. However, deceived by capitalism, the proletariat began to consider work as his true historical calling.94 In the eighteenth century, philanthropists and moralists aimed to eradicate laziness. They established workhouses that confined the poor and forced them to work twelve hours a day. With the development of the workhouses into the “modern workshops” as the “houses of correction” in the nineteenth century, they became the place of confinement for the

91 Ibid., pp. 100–101. 92 Ibid., pp. 103–104. 93 Ibid., p. 104. 94 Paul Lafargue, The Right to Be Lazy, Being a Refutation of the “Right to Work” of

1848 (Paris: Terre Haute, Id. Standard Publishing Co., 1904), pp. 7–8.

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toiling men, women, and children who did more than twelve hours of compulsory labor. With the eradication of laziness, the individual lost the sense of independence and became easily controlled. Lafargue rejects the 1848 workers’ proclamation on “the right to work as a revolutionary principle.” For him, this demand indicated that the French proletariat understood themselves as slaves who were willing to hand “their wives and children over to the factory barons.” Accordingly, the proletariat had to witness how their right to work would result in their pregnant women being tortured in the workplace and “the life and the vitality of their children” destroyed.95 Whereas the workers expected that the development of the machines and technology would emancipate them, they saw how technological development made them more enslaved and miserable.96 They realized that the machine helps the capitalists to produce cheaper and adulterated products that are easy for sale.97 Lafargue interprets the “Rights of Man” as the rights of capitalist exploitation and the “Right to Work” as the worker’s right to misery. He encourages the proletariat to demand a law that forbids working more than three hours a day as the only means of generating a new world. Lafargue argues that such a law will help the proletariat to understand that laziness is the means of emancipation and the “mother of the arts and the noble virtues.”98 That is why, in Athens, it was considered as a great offense against their noble sole if the outstanding citizens performed manual work. Plato justified the denying of the shoemaker and smith of the political rights in his Republic on the ground that manual labor degrades man. Xenophon said that people who do manual labor should never be promoted to higher positions because the problem with manual labor is that it “requires the whole time.” For Cicero, those who sell their labor are low and vulgar because their position in society is indistinguishable from the slaves. Lafargue wants the proletariat to learn from the ancient philosophers who, unlike the “Christian hypocrisy and capitalist utilitarianism” that preach what they do not practice, expressed what they believed and practiced.99

95 Ibid., pp. 10–11. 96 Ibid., p. 23. 97 Ibid., p. 31. 98 Ibid., pp. 40–41. 99 Ibid., pp. 43–44.

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Incorporation of Human and Social Sciences into the Modern State In the early 1900s, Pierre Lasserre tried to investigate the politics of higher education in post-revolutionary France. He argues that it began with Voltaire’s Philosophical Letters mocking Catholicism and the system of government in France.100 The main message of Voltair’s book was the law of correlation between literature and life according to which the literature of a country influences other countries either through its intellectual and artistic superiority or through its military and political domination.101 The law of correlation paved the way for the use of the historical method in social sciences. However, it turned social scientists into pseudo-historians whose only distinction from the historians was that they allowed their students and readers to know the process of their intellectual operations during their research activity. For instance, sociology states the obvious when it says that specific conditions generate a particular social phenomenon, and become dependent on the state when it tells the scientist to go to the police to collect accurate information about their subject of study. For Lasserre, social sciences have reduced science into the supremacy of details and the decomposition of thought.102 Hence, the correlation between life and literature led professional historians to reduce the historiography of post-revolutionary France to the history of their political party and backgrounds. Furthermore, it opened the path for the mediocre historians who are only interested in subjects that touch them personally. Lasserre refers to Political History of the Revolution by Victor Alphonse Aulard, and Political History of Contemporary Europe and the Political Evolution of France in the Nineteenth Century by Charles Seignobos as works of history that rather than reflecting the truth of particular historical events, reflect the political orientations of their authors. The politicization of historical writing, Lasserre argues, indicates the marriage of intelligence and power to protect the existing social order.103 Lassere criticizes the school of realism because formalism 100 Pierre Lasserre, La Doctrine officielle de l’Université: Critique du Haute Aseignement de l’Etat Défense et Théorie des Humanités Classiques (Paris: Mergvre de France, 1913), pp. 280–281. 101 Ibid., pp. 297–298. 102 Ibid., pp. 347–349. 103 Ibid., pp. 370–373.

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has always facilitated the human mind with the means to understand the imprint of common sense.104 However, the school of realism allowed the state to incorporate the modern university into the state and take total control of the education system. Before the collapse of the ancient regime, the state interfered in the education system, once in a while. But it recognized the autonomy of the education system because the system had been a product of its negotiations with the church. Hence, the old system of education was in no way similar to the contemporary system that is under the total control of the state. As the revolutionary government destroyed the classical and primary education, it dispersed, banished, and put in prison the religious scholars and priests who were functioning as the teaching staff. From 1790 to 1797, public education completely disappeared in France. The new educational system began to replace the old system from 1797 on. Secondary education was introduced in the first years of the Empire when the former staff returned. Under Louis-Philippe (1830–1848), Francois Guizot restored primary education. While dreaming of new public education, the Revolutionaries were destroying the old public education and classical training and thus interrupting the French intellectual culture.105 After the destructive impacts of the Revolution, the influence of the German philosophy in the French system of education deprived it of its intellectual freedom. For Lasserre, intellectual freedom means the submission of intelligence to the object of investigation, and this cannot happen if passion determines the movements of intelligence and decides what questions are rational and legitimate when an object of knowledge and science is investigated.106 Since the state in France decided to take sides with the philosophers against the Church, philosophy has presented itself as “a new spiritual power.”107 But since the state administration was unable to make this spiritual power effective, it allowed the Jewish and Protestant elements to dominate the university in the name of democracy. The large share of the Jews and Protestants in the state administration and higher education allowed them to claim that they represent the intellectual elite of France. For Lasserre, however, the Jews and Protestants have brought mediocrity

104 Ibid., p. 394. 105 Ibid., pp. 416–420. 106 Ibid., pp. 440–441. 107 Ibid., pp. 466–467.

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to higher education; whereas the Jewish oligarchy has seized sociology, the Protestant oligarchy has dominated history and philosophy. Lasserre doubts that the Jews and the Protestants have a genuine love for science and truth in the way Catholics have. He claims that while the Catholic education prepares the students to think in defiance of their own interests, the Protestants and the Jews are unable to distinguish between pure truth and their desire to demonstrate their superiority.108 Lasserre claims that as a response to the consequences of the Revolution that destroyed education and intellectual culture in France by allowing the state to interfere in these affairs, a radical political change can put the state back on its natural and legitimate place. A radical political change will force the state to separate its functions from intellectual activities. Whereas Lasserre made the question of the relationship between the state and university a political question, Julien Benda formulated it as an intellectual question which he addressed in La Trahison des Clercs in 1927. Benda tells a Tolstoy story, according to which an officer tells another officer beating a soldier, that he should be ashamed because the way he has treated a human being is against the words of the Gospel. He wondered if the officer has ever read the Gospel. The insulting officer responded by asking the officer who had reproached him whether he had read the army regulations. The point that Benda would like to make is that the administration of worldly affairs in the modern world does not go through the path of justice and charity. However, in the absence of the people who seek justice and charity, humanity will not survive. Benda’s book was a response to the French intellectuals who, in the 1920s, had made political passions of nation, race, and class as their main preoccupation.109 For Benda, whereas the national passion is about making the nation prosperous, secure with powerful allies generates xenophobia, other political passions can lead to anti-Semitism and authoritarianism. Benada argues that the political passions of the intellectuals have polarized the French nation into opposing factions, and the political polarization had led many people with no political commitment to ally themselves with particular political passions to protect their professions and material interests.110 Benda was predicting that the unhappy consequences of the organization of political hatred would be collective desires for territory, material goods, and political power. He was

108 Ibid., pp. 489–491. 109 Julien Benda, La Trahison Des Clercs (Paris: Editions Grasset, 2003), pp. 86–88. 110 Ibid., pp. 107–108.

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witnessing how contemporary nationalism and socialism were successfully uniting interests and pride.111 Benda saw the redemption in redefining the intellectuals or the clerks, as individuals whose intellectual activities went beyond practical ends. The intellectuals take pleasure in art, science, and metaphysical speculations because they are not temporal affairs. Furthermore, the ability of the intellectuals to distinguish between truth and falseness, and good and evil, in the past, allowed humanity to praise the good while doing evil. It was this intellectual ability to demonstrate the contradiction between truth and falseness, and the good in theory and evil in practice that has pushed humanity forward.112 However, as political passions became the preoccupation of the modern intellectuals, they began to worship action and hate to distinguish between good and evil, and truth and false, in theory. Benda argues that the political passions of the intellectuals are more dangerous than the political passions of ordinary people because the political passions of artists or thinkers become more effective than the political passion of the ordinary people when mixed with their sensibilities or persuasive skills. The same is true of the people with moral prestige who propagate a particular political passion.113 The problem of modern intellectuals is that they are preoccupied with the utility of truth and the circumstantial validity of justice. Unlike the ancient man, who believed that his city was under divine protection, yet he knew that it would not last forever, the modern nationalist believes that his nation will last forever; he has reduced truth to utility and justice to circumstances.114 Benda puts humanism against the politics of passion because humanism means refraining from taking pride in everything, which makes one’s people or nation different from other people and nations, or their language art and literature.115 According to Benda, whereas the truth is the expression of the universal, political passion is the expression of the particular because it makes truth French, German, proletarian, or bourgeois truth.116

111 Ibid., pp. 110–114. 112 Ibid., pp. 121–122. 113 Ibid., pp. 124–125. 114 Ibid., pp. 135–137. 115 Ibid., pp. 157–159. 116 Ibid., p. 170.

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In his effort to educate the working class, Sorels tells them that they should not think according to the mental habits of their class while his disciple such as Johannet, says the same to the capitalists. We might see the distinct consequences of this way of argument in the emphasis of the modern intellectuals that every class is entirely distinct from other classes.117

By changing their political proclivities, modern intellectuals change their view of truth and justice. Hence, those who fight for a just state try to make a stable and strong state to win the comings wars. The contemporary intellectuals have lost their ability to make the Machiavellian distinction between politics and morality, according to which, the realist prince must always be ready to do good, but he must do evil if it serves his politics. According to the Machiavellian distinction between politics and morality, the prince does not say that evil actions are no longer evil after committing an evil action. However, modern intellectuals from Hegel to Barèss, consider the strength of the state a moral imperative and argue that an evil that is in the service of their politics stops being evil. The evil that strengthens the state becomes good.118 Whereas Plato argued that morality determines politics, Machiavelli distinguished between morality and politics as two separate issues. In contrast to both, contemporary intellectuals who believe in political realism, argue that politics decides morality.119 Whereas for two millennia, disinterestedness was the principle of moral actions, contemporary intellectuals argue that the morality of an act is determined by whether it serves a particular purpose or not.120 That is why man-at-arms has personified moral beauty, while the demand for justice has been labeled as slave morality.121 The approach of the contemporary intellectuals to justice and morality implies, according to Benda, a religion of practical activity and success. According to this religion of practical activity, propagated by Sorel and Barrès, who reject the values of knowledge, what is realized has a moral value, and actions that fail

117 Ibid., p. 171. 118 Ibid., pp. 177–178. 119 Ibid., p. 180. 120 Ibid., pp. 195–197. 121 Ibid., p. 198.

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are contemptuous.122 The philosophy that once elevated man to understand his existence as a thinking being who declared “I think; therefore I am” now expects the student to say “I act; therefore I am” or “I think; therefore I am not.123 Benda argues that contemporary French literature, represented by Barrès and Bourget that endorses the supremacy of actions over thought, and the primacy of instinct, unconsciousness, and intuition over intelligence, has given birth to a new morality. Since the ancient Greek culture until the dawn of the modern age, it was not the practical results of intellectual activity, but the satisfaction that it generated was important for the men of intellect. The satisfaction with their intellectual activities made the intellectuals and scientists indifferent toward the practical consequences of their operations. However, the contemporary intellectual’s preoccupation with the practical results of his work indicates that the nature of intellectual activity has radically changed.124 Unlike Thomas Aquinas, or Galilee, who were not interested in the practical results of their intellectual activities, Voltaire, Diderot, Hugo, and Barrès were more interested in the practical results of their work. Benda claims that since the professional success of many earlier modern authors depended on their political passion, the new authors who came after learned from the politically committed authors of the past that they should dedicate themselves to a political cause and make their political stance a means of promoting their career. As contemporary writers began to play a political role, the Bohemian men of letters became fewer and fewer and now on the verge of extinction.125 The attitude of the intellectuals toward success at the end of the nineteenth-century led European writers to reflect on the doctrines of authority, discipline, and tradition because these subjects were more appealing to the ordinary people than liberalism and humanism.126 Benda argues that the Bergsonian distinction between the intellectual and artistic sensibilities and the primacy of the latter over the former made the question of truth or falsehood of secondary importance. Hence, an

122 Ibid., pp. 212–216. 123 Ibid., p. 217. 124 Ibid., pp. 217–219. 125 Ibid., pp. 228–232. 126 Ibid., pp. 232–233.

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authoritarian regime that aims to achieve a supreme purpose can undermine justice and democracy because they are the sources of social disorder that delay the achievement of the supreme purpose.127 Benda considers the realism of the modern intellectuals as a reactionary response to the unfulfilled promises of the 1848 revolution. According to those promises, justice and love would soon unite humanity.128 The realist intellectuals reject those who demand justice because the demand comes from the fact that they are subjected to suffering and victimhood, but as soon as they obtain the means which enable them to impose justice, they will stop searching for justice. These realist intellectuals relate the question of justice to the question of misfortune.129 The danger of modern realism, according to Benda, is the emergence of a new Middle Age that is more barbaric than the previous one. The fact that the Renaissance came after the Middle Age indicates that unlike modern realists, the Middle Age never showed any pride in realism. Benda claims that there were many disinterested intellectuals in the early nineteenth century who, unlike the contemporary intellectuals, never advocated war, because they were well aware that those who encourage war will never be involved in the actual battles.130 That is why Hugo and Michelet advocated the humanitarian institution of the ambulance during the Second French Empire, whereas Nietzsche, Barrès, and Sorel have never intended anything which can be described as humanitarian.131 “As I mentioned above the logical consequence of this perfect realism professed by humanity today will be the slautering [of people who belong to the adversarial] nations and classes.”132 In the preface to the 1946 edition of his book, Benda claims that freedom must always be the ideal of the intellectuals, but he or she must be aware that freedom and democracy generate disorder and social conflicts, but it cannot survive in a state with perfect order because such a state does not want to be just. The state of the order has to be strong because it tries to keep people in their fixed social positions. The disorder

127 Ibid., p. 235. 128 Ibid., pp. 240–241. 129 Ibid., p. 248. 130 Ibid., pp. 252–253. 131 Ibid., p. 258. 132 Ibid., p. 259.

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will reign when people from below are allowed to go up.133 Responding to Péguy’s opinion in Notre Jeunesse that doctrines are beautiful in their mysticism but ugly in their politics, Benda compares democracy’s moral higher grand and its impoverished practice to the beauty of democracy in its mysticism and its ugliness in its politics. However, he believes that the doctrine of order is ugly both in its mysticism and in its politics. Benda points to the difference between the contemporary doctrine of order and the Hellenistic philosophers’ conception of order. Whereas the latter introduced order as intelligibility and intellectual serenity in opposition to passion, the former is an expression of passion for action.134 The contemporary advocates of order oppose democracy because they reject the maxim that all citizens are equal before the law. Some advocates of socialism claim that “all men are born free but unequal, thus the goal of socialism is to maintain this inequality and make the best of it.”135 Benda argues that the idea of natural inequality that some members of the society are entitled to higher ranks does not correspond to democracy because democracy is the rejection of both history and nature. No example in nature or history demonstrates that the rights of the weak are respected. To achieve justice and democracy, man must challenge both nature and history.136 Although democracy does not serve art, it allows freedom of artistic creativity and activity. Democracy has justice and reason as its ideals, and these ideals are enough to defend democracy. According to Benda, the intellectuals betray their function whenever they advocate totalitarian states such as fascist Italy and Nazi Germany; neither of them recognized the right of man or citizens.137 Furthermore, the intellectual betray their function whenever they elevate the fatherland at the expense of the individual. Finally, the intellectuals betray their function whenever they favor the Fascist and Nazi model of corporatism that denies the rights of the workers to exercise their freedom and reasoning. Benda blames Hegel in particular because he argued that only corporations should have political suffrage. Benda criticizes the French intellectuals who, in the name of progress and civilization, applauded the 133 Ibid., pp. 7–8. 134 Ibid., pp. 13–15. 135 Ibid., p. 16. 136 Ibid., pp. 17–19. 137 Ibid., pp. 22–26.

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crushing of the weak people by the stronger one, during the Ethiopian war and justified the treatment of the indigenous people as slaves and animals. However, when the Nazi regime occupied France, those same intellectuals said that Germany wanted to enslave France. They did not say that Germany wanted to civilize and Germanize France.138 Benda claims that whereas the treacherous intellectuals disappear in their political passion, authentic intellectuals remain true to the universal values of truth and justice. The communist ideology leads the intellectuals to betray their function because ideology makes a virtue of contradictory statements. He refers to the lack of coherence in the statements made by Lenin, Stalin, and Mussolini as men of action indicates that they did not have any desire to know the truth. Hence, in the name of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the communist ideology is suppressing individual liberty.139 Since practical values cannot be the concern of the intellectuals, they betray their function when they approve a political system that pursues practical goals. Benda considers democracy to be the only political system that allows the intellectuals to remain true to their vocation because individual liberty, justice, and truth are not practical values in a democracy.140 He compares Sartre’s view of the intellectual to that of the minister of education in the Vichy government, who said that education could not be neutral because life is not neutral.141 Hence, the intellectuals who declare war on the state or defend the state must be ready to pay the consequences; otherwise, they betray their intellectual function. The fact that Socrates did not even defend himself against the accusations of the established order indicates his willingness to accept the consequences of his actions.142 For Benda, the moment the intellectuals who accepted the fascist victory as a fact despite its unjust nature or because they understood it as the will of history, they betrayed their function. What the intellectual had forgotten when fascism was marching, was that when the whole world kneels before the unjust, the intellectual must represent

138 Ibid., pp. 26–28. 139 Ibid., pp. 57–58. 140 Ibid., pp. 60–61. 141 Ibid., pp. 62–65. 142 Ibid., pp. 69–70.

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human conscience by standing up and opposing it in the way Cato stood up against Cesar.143 Only by sticking to the truth, justice and reason can the intellectual confront the constant submission to the changing circumstances.144 Hence, the moral value of science is not in the results it produces, but in its method as the exercise of reason in defiance of all practical interests. Thus, the function of the intellectual is not to change the world but to remain faithful to an ideal that is necessary to the morality of human species.145 Benda’s book addressed politically fluctuated French intellectuals such as Hubert Lagardelle, who was one of the first Dreyfusards and a staunch advocate of the revolutionary syndicalism. In his lecture in 1900 for Groupe des étudiants collectivistes, Legardelle reviews Kautsky, Sorel, and Lafargue’s conceptualization of the intellectual and argues that everyone who does not do manual labor and is engaged in the liberal professions are intellectuals. In his view, since the intellectuals have their origin from different social classes, they assume that they represent the general interest of society as a whole. As politics became a profession and the professional of politics took care of “public power,” the intellectuals were promoted to the ranks of the political elites and began to govern on behalf of other classes. Lagardelle argues that as the intellectuals were witnessing the growing electoral weight of the workingclass, they were inclined toward the left. Whereas the socialist intellectuals who are technicians and engineers by profession bring class-consciousness into the working-class, the unemployed university graduates are engaged in the socialist movement to promote their careers. There are intellectuals whose search for justice and social equality leads them to enjoy the working-class movement, and there are educated people who change their political stance according to intellectual fashion. Finally, there are the scholars whose scientific knowledge enables them to discover the direction of history and embark on the socialist politics to bring the future society closer. For the unorthodox Marxists such as Sorel and Lagardelle, Marx’s designation of socialism as the rational consequence of the struggle of the revolutionary proletariat was a myth, although a meaningful and valuable one. However, as soon as the intellectuals use

143 Ibid., pp. 71–73. 144 Ibid., pp. 75–76. 145 Ibid., pp. 81–84.

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the myth to promote their ambitions for hegemony, it loses its effect. Both Sorel and Lagardelle believed that without the socialist myth, as a mobilizing ideological force, the working-class struggle would disappear. Sorel and Lagardelle’s dissatisfaction with the role of the intellectuals and their theories led them to leave the socialist movement and dissociate themselves from Marxism.146 In the early 1930s, Lagardelle became inclined toward Italian fascism. While serving the Vichy government as a French diplomat in the Fascist Italy Antonio, Lagardelle had probably heard about the news that Antonio Gramsci was in the prison of the Fascist regime.

146 Sand, The End of the French Intellectual, pp. 121–125.

CHAPTER 3

True and False Universality

Investigating the role of the intellectuals in the coming socialist revolutions, Gramsci argues that every social class generates its own intellectuals. Thanks to its intellectuals, the bourgeoisie imposed its cultural hegemony on the masses and achieved a successful revolution. According to this logic, any proletarian revolution requires that the proletariat generate its intellectuals to impose its cultural hegemony on the masses. Bourgeoisie succeeded in imposing its cultural hegemony because while its technicians and economists were developing industry and commerce and its jurists shaping the new legal system, its scientists, writers, and artists were generating a bourgeois culture.1 Gramsci assumed that being an intellectual is not about one’s intellectual capacity but about whether one has the time to educate himself or herself and develop his or her skills and then perform an intellectual function in society. He considered all men as intellectuals because there is an intellectual element in all human activities; “homo faber cannot be separated from homo sapiens.”2 Even after the bourgeoisie seized political power and became the ruling class, its intellectuals continued to secure the hegemony of bourgeois politics and culture in civil society. The ruling class always needs the consent of

1 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Prison Notebooks, Edited and translated by Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (London: Elek-Book, 1999, Transcribed from the edition published by Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1971), pp. 134–135. 2 Ibid., p. 140.

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the population to the state institutions. It prefers to secure its domination by peaceful means because it enables it to use its coercive power against groups who do not consent and when popular consent enters into a crisis.3 Hence, the intellectuals who expose the real function of the bourgeois intellectuals become the revolutionary and organic intellectuals of the proletariat.4 The organic intellectuals of the proletariat integrate the passion of the masses into their own logic as the ideological condition in which the people express their “collective will.” Gramsci criticized Sorel’s idea of the general strike because it disregards the interaction between passion and logic and because it is a passionate activity that is not forward-looking.5 Gramsci saw the triumph of Fascism in Italy as a result of the failure of the revolutionary Marxism to investigate the significance of cultural hegemony in politics and the ambiguous position of the intellectuals in socialist politics.6 He argued that the existing order would be keeping its hegemony as long as it succeeds to convince the dominated that the current order serves their interests better than any other order.7 Contrary to Sorel, Gramsci gives priority to the party rather than the spontaneity of the masses. Furthermore, he wants the communist intellectuals to dominate the party.8

Intellectuals as Watchdogs A few years after the publication of Benda’s La Trahison des clercs and while Gramsci was developing his ideas on the intellectual, Paul Nizan, a close friend of the young Sartre, published his Les chiens de garde (1932). Nizan argued that the authentic intellectuals depicted by Benda were nothing but watchdogs of the modern state and capital.9 Challenging Benda’s conception of the intellectual betrayal, Nizan says that betrayal is what the intellectual should do; they should betray their class and ally

3 Ibid., p. 145. 4 Ibid., pp. 150–151. 5 Ibid., pp. 316–319. 6 Sand, The End of the French Intellectual, p. 126. 7 Ibid., pp. 127–128. 8 Ibid., pp. 130–131. 9 Sand, The End of the French Intellectual, pp. 85–86.

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themselves with the working class.10 He is too honest to claim that he entered Ecole Normale because of his love for truth and justice. He entered the university because he did not master any trade and because the state would feed and pay him as long as he stayed there, and he stayed there because he was lazy and ignorant.11 Nizan describes his contemporary world as a world betrayed by philosophy because the concern of philosophy is not the concrete man who must eat and work while in the chain.12 For Nizan, a chemist who invents an explosive device will keep his fidelity to his profession, even after he advocates the use of his invented device against a defenseless people. But by remaining true to his profession, he betrays human beings.13 According to Nizan, philosophy has never dealt with the real events that determine the fate of the real man, but since it cannot escape reality, it uses concepts and rational reasoning to justify particular truths that serve the interests of particular people.14 Nizan argues that contemporary bourgeois intellectuals are well aware that the promise of emancipation and happiness, made by people such as Voltaire and Saint-Simon, is not realized because it contradicts the existing social order. Criticizing Benda, Nizan claims that the bourgeois intellectuals do not fear social revolts because of their dangerous consequences for freedom of thought, but because social revolts may put their income and the wealth they will leave for their children in danger.15 These intellectuals present their way of reasoning and morality as universal human reasoning and morality because, through their way of reasoning and morality, they can afford a comfortable life. That is why instead of explaining why the workers revolt against the existing order, bourgeois thinkers such as Brunschvicg claim that Marx betrayed reason.16 Nizan saw the French academic philosophy, the system of justice, and the police as the elements of the state apparatus. Philosophy helps the state to appear robust without using police and military supported by the judges and

10 Ibid., p. 87. 11 Paul Nizan, Aden Arabie (1931), pp. 5–6, https://www.ebooksgratuits.com/pdf/

nizan_aden_arabie.pdf. 12 Nizan, Les Chiens de Garde (Paris: Francois Maspero, 1965), pp. 33–35. 13 Ibid., p. 38. 14 Ibid., p. 48. 15 Ibid., pp. 58–60. 16 Ibid., p. 62.

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bureaucracy to impose naked violence. As a refined and effective means of domination, academic philosophy makes the use of force unnecessary. Whereas, the ancient regime used the spiritual power of the church as a means of persuasion, the French Republic, has created schools and universities to exercise the same spiritual power.17 Nizan claims that an intellectual can decide to protect the existing order and betray humanity in the name of fidelity to the spirit of the intellectual, or betray the bourgeois order and defend the human beings who refuse to remain slaves. For Nizan, every philosophy offers a human model. Whereas the wise man was the human model of the ancient philosophy, the citizen is the human model of modern philosophy. But since the future philosophy is humblers than previous philosophies, it will not offer Benda’s definition of the intellectual as its human model because it is the last invention of the bourgeois philosophy. The future philosophy will offer Lenin’s professional revolutionary because it can abstract from within the practice of the proletariat the principles and concepts to develop new techniques of human emancipation.18 Nizan believes that the contemporary situation does not allow the intellectual to be impartial. The intellectual sides either with the bourgeoisie or the proletariat and when they betray the bourgeoisie, they declare their betrayal publicly. “Le temps de la ruse est passé… Si nous trahissons la bourgeoisie pour les homes, ne rougissons pas d’avouer que nous sommes des traîtres.”19 Nizan believed that the cause of wars in the modern world is man’s division from within, which leads him to invest his hope in philosophy to find the means through which he can overcome his divided self and be united with others.20 Nizan saw the silence of the European intellectuals as an encouragement of the colonial regimes to turn both the masses of the colonized and European societies into servitude. After witnessing the misery of the colonized people, Nizan returns to France to challenge his real enemies and declares: “I will no longer be afraid to hate. I will no longer be ashamed to be fanatic. I owe them the worst.” As he refuses to hide his experience of misery and alienation and rejects the existing

17 Ibid., pp. 102–104. 18 Ibid., pp. 132–136. 19 Ibid., p. 137. 20 John-Paul Sartre, Forward to Paul Nizan’s Aden, Arabie (New York: Columbia

University Press, 1987), pp. 26–27.

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social order, he took shelter in the French Communist Party.21 However, as he sees the French intellectuals defending the occupation of Ethiopia by fascist Italy, as “the civilizing conquest of one of the most backward countries in the world,” he loses all his hope in the French intellectuals. Rejecting legal universalism of the League of Nations, the French intellectuals condemned its failure to favor the civilized Italians over the barbarian Ethiopians.22 What Nizan could not accept was that the French intellectuals had never seen colonialism as anything but a civilizing mission because they never sincerely believed in the equality between various peoples and nations.23

Sartre and the Universal Intellectuals After Liberation in 1945, the individuals who symbolized the French resistance became celebrated intellectuals. In the same vein, the political traitors were banned from the political community and “denied the right to publish.”24 As the right to publish became the exclusive rights of the intellectuals who defended the nation against those who betrayed it, Galimard’s editor, Jean Paulhan, wrote about the conceptual fluidity of patriotism and nationalism.25 He argued that a democratic nation that depends on open and sincere debates must include different ideological positions.26 In response to the blacklisting of the Nazi collaborators, he referred to Arthur Rimbaud and Romain Rolland, who took the seemingly unpatriotic stance during the Franco-Prussian war (1870–1871) and the First World War but remained the heroes of the same writers who wanted to blacklist their colleagues.27 Paulhan refers to the French intellectuals such as Claude Morgan who said in 1940 that “a communist doesn’t have a homeland” and described France in 1935 as “the vermin 21 Ibid., pp. 42–44. 22 Jeremy Jennings, Revolution and Republic: A History of Political Thought in France

Since the Eighteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 472. 23 Shlomo Sand, The End of the French Intellectual, p. 147. 24 Sunil Khilnani, Arguing Revolution, p. 33. 25 Ibid., p. 39. 26 Amanda Rae Harrigan, Patriotism and Treason in the Life and Thought of Jean

Paulhan, p. 66, https://harvest.usask.ca/bitstream/handle/10388/etd-05182009-120 422/AmandaHarriganThesis.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y. 27 Ibid., p. 70.

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of the world” or said that they “would have regarded collaboration…as a gift from the gods, had Germany only supplied a regime superior to our own.” Paulhan saw no difference between those who collaborated with the Nazi regime and those collaborating with the Soviet Union.28 Paulhan tried to explain the unstable and fluid nature of French patriotism and nationalism, caused by the universalism of its intellectuals. The post-War French intellectuals integrated Marxism into their universalist language.29 Sartre, who exposed the repressive effect of this universal language, made a distinction between the technicians of practical knowledge and critical intellectual. Sartre assumed that scientists are technicians of practical knowledge who perform an activity with a universal character because they are looking for truth. But the universal character of the truth-searching has the potential of transforming scientists into critical intellectuals if they apply scientific principles to study their social environments. Writing in the late 1950s, Sartre assumed that the technicians of practical knowledge would become revolutionary intellectuals if they liberated themselves from the chains of both the Communist Party and the state.30 In the early 1940s, Sartre considered the French Communist Party, an obstacle against the intellectuals who wanted to reach the working class. At this early stage, Sartre was seeking a socialist Europe independent of the United States and Soviet Union as a third way against both the bourgeoisie state and the Communist Party. But as his organization Rassemblement Démocratique Révolutionnair (RDR) became more and more pro-American and anti-Soviet by the late 1940s, Sartre left the organization. Although the failure of the third way convinced Sartre of the significance of the Communist Party as the most genuine representative of the proletariat, he held the idea that the intellectuals who were outside the Party were in a better position to demonstrate that the Party was the true representative of the revolutionary proletariat.31 Thus, Sartre began to argue that as the political representatives of the oppressed people against the oppressors, the intellectuals are the mediators between the working class and the Communist Party.

28 Ibid., p. 71. 29 Khilnani, Arguing Revolution, p. 40. 30 Ibid., pp. 49–50. 31 Ibid., pp. 59–62.

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Sartre changed his view on the relationship between the intellectuals and the Party again, after the news of the horrors during the Stalin era, the Soviet Union’s military campaign against the Hungarian socialist government, and the position of the French Communist Party against the Algerian struggle for independence. By the late 1950s, however, Sartre began to see the success of the anti-colonial liberation struggles as the precondition of overthrowing the European bourgeoisie because the European bourgeoise had used the wealth extracted from the colonized territories to consolidate its domination in Europe. Hence, the end of colonialism meant the end of the capitalist system. During the 1960s, Sartre moved toward the New Left and Maoism.32 In his Critique of Dialectical Reason and A Plea for Intellectuals, Sartre conceptualized the intellectual “as the authentic and exclusive custodian of revolutionary politics” and international solidarity. Against this Sartrean notion of the intellectual, Merleau-Ponty argued that Sartre’s misunderstanding of the relation between politics and the intellectual leads him to reproduce and intensify the division that exists between the intellectual and political labor. Politics and culture are reunited, not because they are completely congruent or because they both adhere to the event, but because the symbols of each order have echoes, correspondences, and effects of induction in the other. To recognize literature and politics as distinct activities is perhaps finally the only way to be as faithful to action as to literature; and, on the contrary, to propose unity of action to a party when one is a writer is perhaps to testify that one remains in the writer’s world: for unity of action has a meaning between parties, each one bringing its own weight and thus maintaining the balance of the common action.33

Sartre failed, according to Merleau-Ponty, to demonstrate that the intellectual was both independent and an agent of change at the same time. Sartre’s intellectual would not be anything but a “fellow traveler, a spectator booing or applauding the decisive actions of others.”34 Relying on Alexander Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel’s dialectic of the master 32 Ibid., p. 68. 33 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Adventures of the Dialectic (Evanston: Northwestern Univer-

sity Press, 1973), p. 201. 34 Sunil Khilnani, Arguing Revolution, p. 70.

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and slave, Sartre interpreted the history of the relationship between social classes and the relationship between the French bourgeoisie and the proletariat as a history of class-racism. Sartre claimed that only revolutionary intellectuals equipped with dialectical reason could understand the meaning of this racism because they stood outside this immediate conflict. Nevertheless, equipped with true universality, the revolutionary intellectual could actualize the potential universality of the working class.35 As Althusser’s conceptualization of the intellectual undermined Saertr’e conception in the late 1960s, Sartre claimed after May 1968, that the intellectual could never produce a totalizing knowledge or generate independent politics.36 As he became associated with the young Maoist intellectuals from 1968 to 1972, he concluded that the intellectual did not have any revolutionary potential. By then, the only hope he had was the politics of the masses as the only means of human redemption.37 Sartre’s new anti-intellectual posture seemed a return to George Sorrel’s conception of the intellectuals. In his A Plea for Intellectuals, Sartre refers to the French Enlightenment philosophers from Montesquieu to Helvetius as men of practical knowledge who created an intellectual universe that justified “the actions and demands of the bourgeoisie.”38 When the Enlightenment philosophes demanded liberty and freedom of inquiry, these demands were the requirements for independent practical research. The demand for freedom of inquiry, combined with the demand of the bourgeois class for equality before the law for all citizens, made this class capable of mobilizing the entire society against the nobility. The bourgeoisie defended the philosophes’ rights to freedom of inquiry when they were under attack by the aristocracy and accused of meddling in affairs that were not theirs. But this concrete demand for freedom was transformed into the bourgeois ideology of freedom after the bourgeoisie achieved its political goal and integrated the intellectuals as the heirs of the philosophes into the bourgeois state. By rejecting the principles of authority, the Enlightenment philosophes invigorated the spirit of contestation and embraced

35 Ibid., pp. 74–77. 36 Ibid., p. 51. 37 Ibid., p. 78. 38 Jean-Paul Sartre, Between Existentialism and Marxism (New York: Verso, 2008),

p. 234.

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the universality of scientific laws and man as the foundations of bourgeois humanism.39 The same happened to the technicians of practical knowledge who turned into the intellectuals during the Dreyfus Affair. The Dreyfusard intellectuals who were meddling in the affairs that were not theirs were modern technicians of practical knowledge whose social positions were defined by the ruling class as teachers, doctors, and professors.40 Through education and ideology, the ruling class equips the technicians of practical knowledge with the necessary skills to perform their social functions properly. In return for transmitting the received values of the ruling class against “the ideas and values of all other classes,” the technicians of practical knowledge are granted a degree of power. As the transmitters of the received values, the technicians of practical knowledge become the agents of ideological particularism and the theoreticians of an aggressive nationalism such as Nazism or liberal humanism with a claim on universality. The aggressive nationalism and liberalism share the idea that non-Westerners and especially Africans are inferior races. They used to say: “all men are equal except colonials who are merely shadows of men.”41 According to Sartre, the French technicians of practical knowledge neither have a working-class origin since the workingclass children cannot get higher education nor have any contacts with the real workers. The technicians of practical knowledge are convinced of the inferiority of the working-class since they depend economically on the surplus value extracted from the exploitation of the working class. Sartre argues that the small percentage of the technicians of practical knowledge with working-class backgrounds demonstrates the true meaning of the bourgeois humanist egalitarianism in France. Despite their claim of universality, the contemporary technicians of practical knowledge do not apply their universal methods to examine the relationship that exists between the ruling class and the dominant ideology because it would expose their role in perfecting this ideology.42 The technicians of practical knowledge are capable of revealing the true nature of the bourgeois universalism as particularism in disguise. But because of their internalization of the authoritarian principles of this ideology, they function as the

39 Ibid., pp. 235–236. 40 Ibid., p. 237. 41 Ibid., p. 238. 42 Ibid., pp. 239–240.

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agents of the bourgeois hegemony. For Sartre, every technician of knowledge is a potential intellectual since he is the bearer of the contradiction between his universalist method of inquiry and the dominant ideology.43 Sartre describes the intellectuals as monsters not only because they are products of a “monstrous society” but because neither the State nor the masses recognize their independent existence.44 In their search for universality, the intellectuals realize that universality does not exist, it must be created.45 For Sartre, the dominant ideology is not “a set of clearly defined propositions” but actualized in events. Hence, the Dreyfus affair and different forms of racist violence justified by the mass media, legal persecutions, and lynching are the manifestations of the ideology of racism.46 What Nizan called the watch-dog of the bourgeoise society, Sartre calls the false intellectual who, in the name of moderation and universality, protects the established order. Contrary to the false intellectuals, the true intellectuals are aware of their own monstrous character and consider universality as something that belongs to the future.47 The true intellectual investigates the contradiction between his search for the truth and the universal knowledge and the particular interests his knowledge is serving. In his research, he discovers that his contradiction is an expression of existing social contradictions. As he decides to participate in the struggles against these contradictions, he adopts the point of view of the oppressed classes whose universality will be achieved at the advent of the classless society in the future. The intellectuals produce the knowledge that the exploited classes need to change the world. But this knowledge that is in the form of working-class consciousness is a result of the interplay between the intellectual’s situated knowledge and the experience of the situated exploited classes.48 The intellectual can produce this class consciousness because their use of the dialectical method enables them to discover the particular in search of the universal and the movement of a singularity toward universalization. Therefore, the intellectual

43 Ibid., p. 244. 44 Ibid., pp. 247–248. 45 Ibid., p. 249. 46 Ibid., pp. 251–252. 47 Ibid., pp. 252–253. 48 Ibid., pp. 255–260.

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is “a man who has achieved consciousness of his own constituent contradiction” and use this acquired consciousness to “help the proletariat to achieve its own self-consciousness.”49 But the intellectual is not the “the guardian of the universal,” because universalism is not given. The belief that the universal is completed “excludes the effort of various particularities towards universalization,” and this exclusion generates racism, nationalism, and imperialism. For Sartre, the attitude of the French left during the Algerian war was the expression of this given universalism and completed universal. The true intellectual neither judges an action before it has begun nor tries to manage its development but engages in the action in its earlier stage and participate in it to the extent that he is capable of deciphering “its nature and illuminate its meaning and possibilities.”50 This conception of universality suggests that the technicians of practical knowledge can become intellectuals if they choose “to join the movement of the under-privileged classes toward universalization.”51 Sartre considers the rights of the oppressed toward universalization as the true meaning of democracy against the abstract rights of the bourgeois democracy.52 Similar to Merleau-Ponty, Sartre argues that although the world constitutes man in his situation, it allows him to experience the “being-in-the-world or become the singular universal .”53 As soon as a technician of practical knowledge discovers the contradiction between the universality of his work and the particular interests that it serves, he reaches the Hegelian unhappy consciousness and becomes an intellectual. It is the same story with the revolutionary students who did not want to become technicians of practical knowledge because they wanted to use their knowledge for the benefit of everyone.54 The established technicians of practical knowledge who supported the student revolt and the strikers, retreated from this position as soon as they realized that the students were “contesting them in their capacity as intellectuals .”55 As the established “intellectuals” realized that they were no longer in the position of 49 Ibid., p. 260. 50 Ibid., pp. 260–261. 51 Ibid., p. 264. 52 Ibid., p. 267. 53 Ibid., p. 275. 54 Ibid., pp. 287–288. 55 Ibid., p. 289.

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producing a theory that can lead the masses, they opposed their struggles. This new understanding led Sartre, in the early 1970s, to argues that an author may not defend his material interest, but he defends his ideological interests, which cannot be measured in money but takes the form of protecting the contents or messages of the books he has written. Since these books are the author’s objectification, he will continue to defend his objectification even though he may renounce the work wholly or partially. This ideological interest lies in the fact that the author’s objectification makes him different from the people who do manual labor in their entire life.56

The Opium of the Intellectuals Against the Sartrean universalism, Raymond Aron wrote The Opium of the Intellectuals. Continuing the Tocquevillian argument, Raymond Aron, who considered himself as a committed spectator, describes the public sphere in France as the meeting place of “the political ambitions of successful French novelists” and “the literary ambitions of French statemen.” Whereas the former dreams of becoming Ministers’, the latter dreams of writing novels. Aron argues that whenever the intellectual is cut off from decision making, he speaks in the name of humanity and takes a stance against every crime committed on earth in the same way that the Catholic Church did when it had spiritual power. Aron claims that, after the Russian Revolution, the French intellectuals were attracted to communism because it aimed to destroy all those capitalists, bankers, and elected representatives who could prevent them from ascending to power.57 Similar to Tocqueville, Aron prefers the British intellectuals who are searching for “the politics of the possible.”58 Writing in the 1950s, Aron reminds us of the changes that the French left has undergone, from advocating a constitutional government to supporting the Soviet-style Democracies.59 In the past, whereas the right advocated family, authority, religion, tradition, privilege, and order, the left

56 Ibid., pp. 292–294. 57 Sand, The End of the French Intellectual, pp. 91–92. 58 Ibid., p. 93. 59 Raymond Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals (New York: The Norton Library, 1962), pp. 3–4.

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defended equality, reason, liberty, science, and progress. A century after the collapse of the ancient regime, these opposing values prevented the right and the left to reach an agreement on who should govern.60 The same factionalism was reproduced regarding the question of democracy, and interpretation of the Revolution. As the Third Republic reconciled democracy and parliamentarian politics with the people as the source of all authority, its “constitutional and popular” characters were expressed in the universal suffrage and protection of individual and political liberties by the end of the nineteenth century. This reconciliation prevented liberals, egalitarians, moderates, and extremists from exterminating one another. Right after the outbreak of the War in 1914, the new “anticapitalist Left” replaced the former “anti-monarchist Left.”61 The new left borrowed the counter-revolutionary argument that implied that the new regime did not eliminate the old social inequalities but established the bourgeoisie’s monopoly of wealth and political power and produced new forms of social inequality. Thus, the Revolution replaced the old privileged minority by a new one.62 As the critique of the bourgeoise society was combined with the new philosophies of history that promised the mastery of man over nature and reconciliation of humankind at the end of history, the French left began to look for a new revolution.63 According to Aron, the main problem of the French left is that it cannot imagine the survival of capitalist Europe after the end of colonial domination. The reason for this misconception is that the French left sees capitalism and imperialism as identical. But the case of Holland losing Indonesia has demonstrated that the capitalist system does not need to possess territories. Even though more than 15% of the Dutch national income came from Indonesia, Holland remains as prosperous as before Indonesia’s independence. It is the same story with the British working class, which has reached a higher standard of living after India’s independence.64 Aron makes a distinction between the non-manual workers who constitute the intelligentsia, which includes the growing number of

60 Ibid., pp. 5–7. 61 Ibid., pp. 8–9. 62 Ibid., p. 18. 63 Ibid., p. 150. 64 Ibid., pp. 179–180.

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the state bureaucrats and technicians in the industrial section, and the intellectual as someone who has an interest in culture. Aron refers to the fact that before World War II, almost none of the university-educated people in Europe came from the working class or peasant families. As a result the children of the lower classes with a university education had never been included in the ruling class. Although the university-educated children of the working class and peasants are members of the intelligentsia, they do not defend the existing system of government and may demand radical social changes. Aron hopes that in the future, the university-educated children of the working-class replace the intellectuals who until now compared the “present realities with theoretical ideals rather than with other realities.” He expects the university-educated children of the working class and the future intellectuals of France to compare France of today with the France of yesterday. He considers the contemporary French intellectuals who compare the existing institutions with their ideals as the main problem of French society.65 Aron finds the roots of French radicalism in the French universities with the left dominating Ecole Normale Supérieure and the conservatives controlling Institut d’Etudes Politiques. As these institutions make their politics the principle of their recruitment policies, the Normaliens students became attached to Marxist or Existentialist philosophy, the students of political science focused on how different régimes function. Aron wants the French intellectuals to learn from the British intelligentsia who, by making the factual experience the object of their political criticism, establish constructive relations with their politicians. Hence, neither the British politicians treat their intellectuals with hostility, nor the intellectuals feel any inferiority toward their politicians. Since the close relationship between the British intelligentsia and those who control wealth and power made the intellectuals a part of the élite, they never dream of a revolution to take down those in power.66 Aron reveals the fact that despite their claim of universalism, the French intellectuals have never been concerned with the resentment of the Arab university graduates who have taken their educations from the French universities. These educated Arabs remain unemployed or lack job promotion because Frenchmen monopolize jobs in countries such as Tunisia and Morocco. Aron predicts that the highly educated but unemployed Arabs will sooner or later adopt the idea of revolution to change

65 Ibid., p. 210. 66 Ibid., pp. 211–215.

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their situation.67 However, the French intellectuals’ claim to universalism enabled them to “occupy a position equal or superior to that of the [French] statesman,” a position American, British, and German intellectuals have never attained.68 Aron admires the well-functioning communication between the state bureaucracy and the intellectuals in the US, Britain, and Germany. In France, on the contrary, “civil servants are totally indifferent to the advice of scholars and journalists.”69 Aron argues that the French intellectuals’ sympathetic approach toward the Soviet Union and their disregard for it dissidents who are treated harshly, deprives them of any moral authority to demand justice whenever the United States is involved.70 Aron claims that it is not the sense of justice that leads the European intellectuals to reject the United States. The problem of the European intellectuals, who have never shown any interest in the standard of living of the working class, with the American culture is, according to Aron, that they defend the “aristocratic values” against the invasion of mass culture. The European intellectuals reject the United States because they resent the fact that American prosperity and power are achieved through private initiative, without the state intervention and without relying on any philosophy of history. Aron argues that European intellectuals ignore the fact that eighteenth-century optimism is still working in the United States, and the Americans still believe in progress, distrusts power, are hostile toward authority, and dislike those who pretend to know better than the common man. Consequently, whereas the Soviet Union represses its intellectuals, nobody in the United States takes the intellectual seriously. That is why, in the early 1950s, Americans described their intellectuals as the eggheads. Hence, rather than the men of culture, they trust their technicians.71 As McCarthyism’s demanded conformism from the American intellectuals, the leftist intellectuals were reduced from eggheads to traitors and false liberals. The American intellectuals responded by rejecting both Communism and McCarthy conformism. Aron argues that the French intellectuals want to make the

67 Ibid., p. 218. 68 Ibid., pp. 219–220. 69 Ibid., p. 221. 70 Ibid., pp. 224–225. 71 Ibid., pp. 227–229.

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entire humanity French through their internationalism. However, despite the communist intellectuals’ assumption that they are thinking on behalf of the entire humanity, they lack the courage to participate in real public debates with their non-Communist colleagues.72 Aron even tells the Asian and African intellectuals, who oppose the exploitation of their countries by colonial powers, that they are contaminated by the French intellectual disease of criticizing democratic principles and the spirit of free inquiry. To demonstrates his claim, Aron refers to the fact that the leaders of the revolutionary movements in the newly independent states were the graduates from European universities.73 Aron reminds the anti-colonial Asian and African intellectuals that it was not universal suffrage or democratic institutions that generated contemporary in Europe. He reminds the Asian, African as well as European intellectuals that it was freedom of criticism, the limitation of the state authority, and the autonomy of the universities that underpinned all democratic changes in Europe.74 Aron argues that a government of the people by the people has ever existed anywhere in Europe since different forms of government appeared during the industrialization. There were autocratic regimes that combined universal suffrage and the absolute power of a single man, and there were parliamentary regimes, with restricted suffrage, ruled by the aristocratic forces and monarchies, that gradually were transformed into constitutional regimes. The problem of the communist intellectuals is, according to Aron, that they understand these processes only through Marxism and the philosophy of immanence.75 Communism as the political expression of the modern philosophy of immanence promises the suffering proletariat that soon it will inherit the earth: “Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth,” and what follows is the classless society and withering away of the state. As the forces of history fail to accomplish the revolutionary hope, violence becomes a necessary means of establishing the new order.76 That is why wherever a violent socialist revolution takes place, a new hierarchical order emerges. What makes the question of

72 Ibid., pp. 245–248. 73 Ibid., p. 249. 74 Ibid., pp. 258–259. 75 Ibid., p. 266. 76 Ibid., p. 269.

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communism more complicated is, as Aron understands it, the confluence of militants who are ready for self-sacrifice for their ideals and the fellowtravelers promoting their careers.77 Aron compares the contemporary fellow-travelers to the intellectuals who condemned the Catholic Church in the name of reason, but as they became the friends of power realized that knowledge could not be impartial. The difference that Aron sees between the French philosophers of the eighteenth century and contemporary intellectuals is that when the former were expressing their opinions in opposition to the Catholic Church and monarchy, they were independent and “earned their incomes from their pens.”78 Aron considers the idea of the communist revolution as a continuation of the idea of civil religion formulated by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the Social Contract . Both aim to shape the future of humanity by subordinating the individual to the party and the state. However, the disaster emerged when the communist revolution made the party and the state indistinguishable from one another and turned Marxist ideology into dogma. Whereas the Christian faith was transformed into a totalitarian system after rejecting the autonomy of profane activities, the Communist faith turned totalitarian at the moment it took political power since it imposed official truths on society and began to control all activities which were autonomous by nature.79 For Aron, the reason the bourgeois intellectuals have become the ideologists of the proletariat is that unlike the bourgeoisie which presented its own conception against the world of the Catholic church and envisioned a new political order that was in opposition to the ancient régime, the proletariat has never offered a conception of the world to challenge the world view of the bourgeoisie. The facts that, while a small section of the population were industrial workers, the bourgeois intellectual formulated the proletarian ideology and organized the proletarian party to seize power in Russia or China when the peasant populations were much larger than the working class, indicate that the twentiethcentury revolutions have been both theorized and performed by the intellectuals.80 Aron claims that the Europeans are right when they claim that their political institutions have reached the entire world just like their

77 Ibid., p. 276. 78 Ibid., p. 277. 79 Ibid., pp. 279–286. 80 Ibid., pp. 310–312.

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industrial products, but they are “wrong to ascribe a universal significance to the ideologies which glorify these institutions.”81 Aron expects the French intellectuals to relinquish their claim of universality and learn from communist China about genuine commonality and help Frenchmen, or rather French Colonizers, to come to terms with the North African Muslims, assist France to overcomes its economic backwardness and help Western Europe to become independent from the United States. But this new approach requires a new political universality that promotes freedom of inquiry, criticism, and implementation of the representative democracy.82 For Aron, the advantage of the West compared with the rest of the world is that it recognizes plurality, division, discord in the body politic, keeps the state impartial, and respect “the autonomy of the human mind.”83 It took the French and other European intellectuals three decades to implement Aron’s advice. As Aron was hoping, the university-educated children of the working-class origin have replaced the past intellectuals who compared their present realities with their theoretical ideals. Now, the new European intellectuals compare their present reality realities with contemporary African and Middle Eastern realities as well as with their past realities.

Intellectuals and the Wretched of the Earth Frantz Fanon was arguably the most original thinker who challenged the European intellectuals’ claim of universality, but from an opposite perspective to Aron. Sartre wrote that Fanon demonstrates that Western claims of humanism and universality cannot be separated from Western colonialism and racism.84 What is refreshing about Fanon is, according to Sartre, that he does not want to impress the colonial West; he talks about the West but never to the West. As a representative of a new generation of non-Europeans intellectuals who are no longer interested in using French to gain prestigious awards but to speak to the colonized alone, Fanon proclaims: “Natives of all the underdeveloped countries unite!”85 81 Ibid., p. 315. 82 Ibid., pp. 316–319. 83 Ibid., p. 322. 84 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 2004), p. XLIV. 85 Ibid., p. XLV.

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By making the colonizer the object of his discourse and by revealing the colonialist tactics of divide and rule from the metropolitan centers, Fanon teaches his brothers and sisters how to outwit the Europeans.86 Sartre believes that one can find a glimpse of what Fanon demonstrates on the streets of Paris. After taking a short walk in the night you will see strangers gathered around a fire, get closer and listen. They are discussing the fate reserved for your trading posts and for the mercenaries defending them. They might see you, but they will go on talking among themselves without even lowering their voices. Their indifference strikes home: their fathers, creatures living in the shadows, your creatures, were dead souls; you afforded them light, you were their sole interlocutor, you did not take the trouble to answer the zombies. The sons ignore you. The fire that warms and enlightens them is not yours. You, standing at a respectful distance, you now feel eclipsed, nocturnal, and numbed. It’s your turn now. In the darkness that will down into another day, you have turned into the zombie.87

Sartre tells the French intellectuals that their critique and even condemnation of their colonist government and capitalists when they become too brutal and too greedy toward the colonized people cannot wash away their involvement in colonialism. The fact that the French intellectuals gain from the wealth stolen from the colonized world, makes their attempt to distance themselves from the massacres committed in their name ridiculous. Fanon reveals this the hypocrisy of the French intellectuals by demonstrating how well connected the French intellectuals are to their colonial agents and how often they show their solidarity with them when they are in trouble. Sartre hopes that Fanon’s book makes the French Marxist intellectuals to feel ashamed for their complicity with the colonizers. After all, it was Marx who said that shame is a revolutionary feeling.88 Similar to Fanon, Satrte believes that the European intellectuals reveal their racism when they claim that their support to the anti-colonial struggle will stop if they appeal to violence but keep silent when the colonialists use large scale violence against the people who

86 Ibid., p. XLVI. 87 Ibid., p. XLVIII. 88 Ibid., pp. XLVIII–XLIX.

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wage a peaceful revolution.89 Sartre reiterates Fanon that if the Europeans intend to become subjects of history again, they must “join the ranks of those who are making it” in the anti-colonial struggles.90 Fanon argues that the confidence of the colonists that they can keep the colonial system intact comes from the belief that they know the colonized people because they have fabricated them.91 Their knowledge of the colonized people has convinced them that the colonized subjects are full of lust and envy; they dream of possessing everything that the colonizers have. They even dream of: “sitting at the colonist’s table and sleeping on his bed, preferably with his wife.” Hence, the colonized people “want to take our place.”92 The colonist cannot trust or even tolerate the colonized subjects because, as they claim, the natives do not have any ethical capacity. That is why they destroy everything within their reach.93 As the colonized begin to revolt against their situation, the colonial system begins to discover the values of the colonized elite to remind them of the ignorance of the colonized masses. Fanon claims that when the colonized people were killed, beaten, and starved, the European moralists remained silent. Now, they separate the colonists from the violence they have been exercising and preach the values of non-violence protest to the colonized people who appeal to revolution. Whereas the European intellectuals as the moralists of our time and the colonized intellectuals who have adopted the abstract universality of the colonizers, preach peace between the colonists and the colonized, the latter tries to kick the colonizers from their country because they take the maxim that all men are equal seriously. What these colonized intellectuals do not realize is that “the colonist is no longer interested in staying” when the colonial context disappears.94 Fanon argues that contrary to the colonized intellectual who replicates the colonist’s search for the abstract truth, the starving colonized peasants are the expression of “the truth in their very being.”95 Fanon calls into question the colonist’s claim that he knows 89 Ibid., pp. LIV–LVII. 90 Ibid., pp. LX–LXII. 91 Ibid., p. 2. 92 Ibid., p. 5. 93 Ibid., p. 6. 94 Ibid., p. 9. 95 Ibid., p. 13.

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history because he makes it. He argues that the history that the colonist is referring to is the history of his state, but since he understands the colonized territories as the extension of his own state, he extends his historical subjectivity into the colonial territories. Fanon predicts that after the colonized people put an end to the history of colonization and bring to life the history of their nation as “the history of decolonization,” this misinterpretation will disappear.96 The writing of the history of decolonization begins with the colonial subjects’ refusal to remain in their place because they have realized that by remaining in their place, they would turn against their own people, which makes social tension in their nation permanent. When the colonized subjects refuse to remain in their place, they are accused of being envious toward the colonist’s world and blamed for dreaming of taking the colonist’s place.97 But this very dream indicates that the colonialized people are dominated but not domesticated because they have become fully aware that despite the colonist’s effort to make them feel inferior, they failed to convince them of their inferiority. This awareness is expressed in being ready to punish the colonists for all the cruelty they have done. The colonized subjects dream of becoming a persecutor because they are persecuted in real life. Whereas the colonists use the police force, military parades, and “the flag flying aloft” to remind the colonized subjects that they must stay where they are, these symbols remind the colonized people that they cannot postpone their struggle against the arrogant colonists to emancipate themselves from the colonial subjugation.98 By discovering the reality of their situation, the colonized subjects change the direction of their violent outrage from their people to the colonists because they have realized that this new form of violence brings liberation. Fanon considers the colonized intellectuals who talk about a better life, improved wages and electoral representation, freedom of the press and association, and even the proletarian revolution under the colonial system as intellectuals whose interests depend on the continuity of the colonial situation. These colonized intellectuals distance themselves from the violence against the colonist because their interests lie in reconciling the rebels and the colonists.99 After the decolonization,

96 Ibid., p. 15. 97 Ibid., pp. 15–16. 98 Ibid., pp. 16–17. 99 Ibid., pp. 21–24.

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the colonized elite realize that the metropolitan financiers and industrialists have no intention of devastating the colonized population. They do not seek domination for domination’s sake; they seek profit and protect what they call their “legitimate interests” through economic agreements. Hence, the imperialist financiers and industrialists are ready to push their government to transform their military occupation of the colonized world into the economic dependency of the colonized territories. In case they are dissatisfied with a nationalist government, they overthrow it, as have done it to Mossadegh. Sometimes they take full control as it is the case with Guinea, or make plans to eliminate heads of governments as it is the case with Castro.100 Against this universalized colonial strategy, the colonized people have achieved their own universalization. They make the “victory of the Vietnamese people at Dien Bien Phu” as the victory of all colonized people because they have learned from the event that all colonized nations can create their Dien Bien Phu. Dien Bien Phu reminded the colonized nations that they could restore their sovereignty if they determined to achieve it.101 When Fanon exposes General de Gaulle’s hypocrisy who, while declaring his support for the oppressed Muslims in the “communist dictatorships,” his government accuses the outside forces of masterminding the national liberation movements in Algeria, he exposes the French false universality.102 Fanon argues that the colonist who underestimates the colonized consciousness cannot understand why “instead of buying a dress for their wife, the colonized buy a transistor radio.” Whereas the colonist considers a transistor radio as a luxury product that the colonized people cannot afford, the colonized people consider the transistor radio a means to understand the difference between “Phouma and Phoumi, Lumumba and Tschombe, Ahidjo and Moumie, Kenyatta and those who are the colonizers’ candidates for replacing him.” Thanks to the transistor radio, the colonized people can unmask the social and political forces behind these men, and transform themselves from the underdeveloped men into “political creature[s] in the most global sense of the term.”103 The colonized people became political creatures because they learned from the

100 Ibid., pp. 26–27. 101 Ibid., pp. 30–31. 102 Ibid., p. 39. 103 Ibid., p. 40.

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colonizer’s representation of them as people who only understand the language of force. Now they use the same argument against the colonizers. The colonized adopted the colonist’s argument; “by an ironic twist of fate, it is now the colonized who state that it is the colonizer who only understands the language of force.”104 When the colonized says that all colonists are the same, he uses the colonizer’s logic that all natives are the same; the Manicheanism of the colonist has produced the Manicheanism of the colonized, and the theory of the absolute evil of the colonist is a response to the absolute evil of the native.105 However, the difference between the colonialists and the colonized violence is that whereas the former encourages separatism and regionalism, the later has a unifying character. Whereas colonialist violence reinforces the differences between tribes and fosters chieftainships, the colonized violence is “totalizing and national” because it eliminates regionalism, tribalism, and rejects traditional chiefs. The armed struggle has a symbolic role in the struggle against colonialism because it makes liberation the achievement of each and every one and because it prevents anybody from coming forward as a liberator.106 Fanon was hoping that the national liberation movements would deprive Western industries of their overseas channels and result in factory closures, downsizings of the workforce, which could force the European proletariat and intellectuals into an open struggle with the capitalist regimes.107 Fanon detects the symptoms of the defeat of the liberation movements in the fact that the leaders of the national liberation movements turn the colonial experts to train and supervise their national army and even to police and terrorize their people. Fanon argues that only through the destruction, disfiguration, and degradation of the history of the colonized people, colonialism succeeded in presenting itself as the agent of enlightenment and emancipation from darkness, barbarism, and bestiality. As the colonized people accepted the colonial representation of themselves as true representations, they became culturally alienated and allowed colonialism to play the role of a mother who is “protecting the child from itself, from its ego, its physiology, its

104 Ibid., p. 42. 105 Ibid., pp. 47–50. 106 Ibid., p. 51. 107 Ibid., pp. 60–61.

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biology, and its ontological misfortune.”108 Disarmed by cultural alienation, the colonized intellectual either assimilate the colonizer’s culture to promote himself and his work or gives up all his ambitions. Hence, the colonized writers who are looking for success discovers in the early stage of their career that they must adopt the views of their metropolitan counterparts point by point. Whereas the colonized writers become Symbolists or Surrealists to get the recognition of their European counterparts, they remain outsiders among their own people. However, the culturally alienated colonized intellectual will not remain the same forever. They will discover that a true cultural event happens when the colonized intellectual unites himself with his people and that real culture is a result of the people’s struggle for liberation. The Algerian national culture took shape during the fight to destroy the French military positions and while the militants were facing prison and the guillotine.109 Fanon argues that the colonialists’ interest in the indigenous traditions aims to disrupt the consciousness of the colonized people and their national liberation movements because the revolt of the colonized subjects begins with the things which stimulate their sensibility against resignation. When they express new meaning in their artistic works, in their dance, music, literature, and even in their oral epic, they search for nationhood because they are aware that it is the nation that provides culture and creates the conditions and frameworks of cultural expressions and the principles of their credibility and validity. Instead of restoring former values and configurations, liberation struggles introduce new relations between men and women.110 That is why national consciousness is the condition of the possibility of international consciousness.111 Fanon saw how colonization employed the psychiatric practice to treat and domesticate the mentally healthy colonized subjects, in the same way, the mentally ill people are treated in psychiatric hospitals. As colonialism has negated every human attribute of the colonized people, they were tamed, domesticated and exploited without any objection.112 Hence, the torturer of the colonized people could ask a psychiatrist to help him get rid of his guilty conscience after 108 Ibid., p. 149. 109 Ibid., p. 168. 110 Ibid., pp. 176–178. 111 Ibid., p. 180. 112 Ibid., pp. 181–182.

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torturing the revolutionary Algerians.113 Fanon describes the colonized intellectuals who discredit the national consciousness of their people and preach about the futility of the anti-colonial struggle as informers. While explaining the achievements of the colonial powers and the “merits of colonization,” the intellectual who function as the native informers helps the colonial political advisors, psychologists, and sociologists to “demonstrate” that Algeria has never been a nation and it will never become a nation because there is no such thing as the Algerian people. They argue that without France, Algeria will return to its Dark Ages.114 As these experts represent the Algerians and North Africans as habitual savage and senseless killers, some anti-colonial intellectuals repeat in all sincerity that the North Africans go to the extreme in their love and hate and argue that because their violent nature does not allow them to discipline their instincts, adapt moderation or make sense of the Cartesians method.115 That is why, according to Antoine Porot, the Algerian who is suffering from melancholia does not commit suicide, he kills others. According to the Algiers School of Psychiatry, killing oneself assumes that the person has inner feelings because his action is a result of self-examination, but the Algerian or the North African who does not have an inner life, kills others. An Algerian cannot experience “genuine melancholia” because melancholia is defined as “a disorder of the moral conscience.” The Algerian, whose conscience is unreliable and his moral sense in fluctuation, experiences “pseudo-melancholia.”116 Since their incapacity is not a result of their upbringings but a result of the organization of their nervous system, the Algerians have “permanent criminal tendencies.” Thus, the colonizer’s distrust of the native is not a result of their racist attitudes but because they respect the scientific assessment of the colonized’s limited biological possibilities.117 This “scientific truth” implies that “Nature must be tamed, not talked into reason.” This is what the colonialists do when they occupy new territories; they discipline, tame, subdue, and pacify the natives.118 113 Ibid., p. 199. 114 Ibid., pp. 214–216. 115 Ibid., pp. 222–223. 116 Ibid., pp. 223–224. 117 Ibid., p. 226. 118 Ibid., p. 228.

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With the inception of the national struggle, the Algerians began to understand that there are more important things that should be the target of their rage than their neighbor’s inappropriate attitude toward their wife, sister, or daughter. As they began to nationalize their affection and emotion, their explosive rage against their neighbors started to disappear. The “French magistrates and lawyers” were among the first who understood the danger of the nationalization of the Algerian rage and affection.119 Fanon concludes that it was not the obsession of the Algerian intellectuals about the dignity of man and catching up with Europe that can liberate Algeria but the actual national liberation. For Fanon, the national struggles for liberation were more than the imitation of the European states and institutions, but an attempt to bring humanity one step forward.120 What Fanon did in this regard was to represent the way the Algerian revolutionaries tried to universalize their national struggle. In his Black Skin, White Masks, published in the early 1950s, Fanon argues that the essence of the struggle between black and white is the white’s claim of intellectual superiority and the black’s effort to demonstrate his intellectual equality.121 The Negro from the Antilles tries to demonstrate his intellectual equality with Frenchman through his mastery of the French language and cultural standards because these are the means that can elevate his social status to the level of Frenchman. Hence, by serving as interpreters and by conveying “the master’s orders to their fellows,” the black officers in the French colonial army get “a certain position of honor.”122 That is why the Antilles Negroes become annoyed whenever they were mistaken to be Senegalese because they think that their closer ties with the white man make them more “civilized.”123 Fanon argues that the black man who tries to prove that he is as intelligent as the white man discovers the futility of his attempt when he encounters a white physician, policeman, or civil servant who addresses him like an adult talking with a child because he discovers that the white man is not interested in communicating with him in a civilized manner.124 119 Ibid., pp. 230–232. 120 Ibid., pp. 236–239. 121 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (London: Pluto Press, 2008), p. 3. 122 Ibid., pp. 8–9. 123 Ibid., p. 15. 124 Ibid., pp. 19–20.

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The only way that a black man or an Arab can disrupt this racist relationship is to tell a doctor who calls him “boy” that “I am in no sense your boy, Monsieur.” This expression indicates that the Black or Arab knows very well that the way the doctor talks demonstrates that he wants him to remain in his assigned place.125 That is why the white man and the colonized cannot stand the black men who quote Montesquieu and talk of Marx because these talks are the starting point for something new. The colonized and white man believe that talking of Montesquieu and Marx signifies the Negro’s ingratitude toward his benefactors who have made them what they are now.126 Fanon describes André Breton’s remark on Césaire when he says, “Here is a black man who handles the French language as no white man today can” a racist remark.127 Such racist remarks are parts of the racist discourse that justify and rationalize the colonized literature about the people who do every imaginable thing to be accepted as French.128 It is this racist discourse that convinces the girls from Martinique to come to France in search of a white man because they believe the white man has better qualities than blacks.129 Fanon argues that it is the structure of any given society that determines whether the society is racist or not. Hence it is not the economic failure of the South African whites poor, petty officials, and small traders that makes these social groups racists but the racist structure of their country.130 Furthermore, racism has nothing to do with the question of minority-majority because similar to South Africa it is the European racist structure that convinces two hundred whites in Martinique to “consider themselves superior to 300,000 people of color. It has “never occurred to a single black to consider himself superior to a member of the white minority.”131 Inferiority exists because the racist creates his inferior in the same way that the anti-Semite creates their Jew. Fanon criticizes Octave Mannoni’s theory that the Malagasy has an “inferiority complex” because he is either dependent or suffers from the inferiority complex. Mannoni 125 Ibid., p. 21. 126 Ibid., pp. 22–23. 127 Ibid., pp. 25–26. 128 Ibid., p. 29. 129 Ibid., p. 33. 130 Ibid., pp. 64–67. 131 Ibid., p. 68.

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claims that when the Malagasy is accustomed and enjoys his dependence, he becomes able to moderate his inferiority because he ignores it as a source of trouble. But he experiences a crisis if he fails to accustom himself to the dependence on his colonialist master.132 Fanon argues that when Mannoni assumes that the native’s dream is to be white, he ignores the fact that it was the white man who made him a colonized native in order to rob him of all human worth and individuality so that he accepts his position of servitude and dependency. When the native tries to make himself white, he is trying to compel the white man to acknowledge his humanity, but Mannoni interprets this as an indication of the native’s dependency complex and claims that the colonized is dependent because he seeks dependency. In Manoni’s view, the Europeans were able to establish colonies because the natives were waiting for superior people.133 When the Negro insists on recognition of his cultural refinement to prove his equality, the white intellectual tells him that he should wait because certain people who hold color prejudice are against his equality, but assures him that such views will disappear very soon. So he must wait but until that happens.134 That is why the young Antillean Negro who is internalizing the white man’s aggression toward the so-called savages people cannot believe that it is not the Senegalese alone who are defined as the savage men. He soon realizes that the white man has made sure that he and his compatriots have a place inside the category of savage men. It takes time for an Antillean to realizes that he is as black as the Negro who lives in Africa. The paradox of the Antillean is that he cannot understand that the same white man who made the Negro inferior claims that the Negro made himself inferior.135 Hence, the young Antillean who looks for the universal is shocked when visiting France for the first time, discovers that a Parisian hotel refuses to rent rooms to him because the Anglo-Saxon customers might move out. The problem of the Antillean is that he has shared the European values since he was a schoolboy.136 While writing Black Skin White Masks, Fanon invested his hope in the Indo-Chines who were revolting against the European norms and values 132 Ibid., p. 69. 133 Ibid., p. 74. 134 Ibid., p. 89. 135 Ibid., pp. 114–115. 136 Ibid., pp. 144–147.

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by focusing on changing their present situation to control and shape their future.137 Following the Indo-Chinese example, the Algerians realized that by a depreciated image of their people, colonialism had kept them in subjugation. The Algerians understood that by creating their own image of themselves, they could change their situation.138 But the French administration used sociologists, ethnologists, and specialists in native affairs to implement a strategy of social disintegration in Algeria. It aimed to win over the Algerian women because its experts assumed that if they could tame the Algerian women, the rest would follow; their specialists had told them that Algeria had a matrilineal structure beneath its patrilineal pattern. The strategy of the social disintegration in Algeria began in the name of the emancipation of the Algerian women. In doing so, the colonial administration made the Algerian family life the site of public and scientific discourse to entrap the Algerian people as a whole within “a circle of guilt.” The project gave birth to French associations that promoted solidarity with Algerian women in their struggle for liberation. These associations tried to make the Algerian ashamed of what they were doing to their women. While their social workers were using the impoverished women in need of food and medicine as their object of education on women’s emancipation from the veil, the colonial administration called upon the Algerian women to say no to the centuries of subjugation.139 Further, the colonist women supported the Algerian woman in her “historic mission of shaking up the Algerian man,” so that he becomes an uncomplicated object of the colonial domestication. The colonial administration assumed the more unveiled women under its protection would generate more domesticated men.140 The unveiled women indicated, according to the colonial administration, the degree of the inclination of the Algerian society “to change its habits under the occupier’s direction and patronage.”141 But as the struggle for national liberation changed the relations between men and women and included the unveiled woman in the struggle, the colonial administration stopped 137 Ibid., pp. 176–177. 138 Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism (New York: Grove Press, 1965), p. 30. 139 Ibid., pp. 37–38. 140 Ibid., p. 39. 141 Ibid., pp. 42–43.

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the strategy of the woman emancipation based on unveiling. The reason was that the colonial administration realized that women who had never left the house without the company of their mother or husband were traveling to cities which they had never visited and met men and women they had never known because they were on the revolutionary missions. Now, the husband of the revolutionary woman would tell his wife returning from the revolutionary missions: “You see, everything has gone well in your absence.”142 Against the colonialist Radio-Alger, which had belittled and humiliated their resistance, the revolutionary Algerians broadcasted their own Radio.143 The Algerian listening to the Voice of Fighting Algeria did not care whether or not they could hear clearly amid the incessant jamming, which forced them to change wavelengths several times in the course of the broadcast. The issue at stake was how “the whole nation would snatch fragments of sentences in the course of a broadcast and attach to them a decisive meaning.”144 For Fanon, colonialism as the intervention of a foreign nation in another nation to bring what it considers as “order into the original anarchy” of that nation automatically elevates the language of the foreign nation to the status of Logos. To challenge this Logos, the Algerians used French to make their voice heard through this same Logos.145 They called their radio the Voice of Fighting Algeria to interrupt the colonialist monologue on the colonial situation and to allow the Algerians to discover other voices. The Voice of Algeria did not offer only a new “means of perception,” it reconfigured the world of perception and invented a new status for the nation and its citizens.146 Whereas before the revolution, an Algerian girl at the age of sixteen should have found a husband, the national liberation struggle changed her fate and personality because her liberation became identical to the liberation of the Algerian people. The Algerian girl was no longer “the woman-for-marriage” but “the woman-for-action.” Hence, as the young girl became the militant and the woman the sister, they demonstrated “unexpected virtues of calm, composure and firmness.”147 As the 142 Ibid., pp. 58–60. 143 Ibid., p. 73. 144 Ibid., p. 86. 145 Ibid., pp. 90–93. 146 Ibid., pp. 95–96. 147 Ibid., pp. 107–108.

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Algerian woman “forged a new place for herself by her sheer strength,” the militant daughter who meets her father after days of absence in a revolutionary mission, sits in front of him without being embarrassed. The father looks at his daughter with pride and enjoys “her new personality radiating through the house.” The father, who knows that his daughter is redefining their nation, is no longer concerned whether she behaved properly during the revolutionary mission or not.148 Fanon argues that there is a reason why doctors and professors of medicine have become leaders of the colonialist movements because they enjoy a higher standard of living compared with their colleagues in France. These colonizing doctors have reduced medical practice to “systematized piracy” since they force their patients to pay for medicine they do not need for high prices, and billed for medicine they do not receive.149 Fanon came to declare that he did not belong to the French nation but to the “people who suffered and died every day in the djebels and the torture chambers.”150 He realized that the French language and culture were not enough to make him belong to the French people; he belonged to a nation with whom he shared common experiences and common aims. All these made him an Algerian.151

Rationalizing Racism Fanon distinguished between refined and crude racism. Whereas the crude racism talks about the emotional instability of the individual Negro and the natural culpability of the Jew, the new racism is cultural, and its objects are nations and communities.152 When colonizers pretend that they respect the tradition and culture of the native people, they try to hide their racism in the daily objectification, confinement, and imprisonment of these people. This new racism is expressed in racist phrases such as “I know them, that’s the way they are.” Furthermore, the new racism is revealed in the belief that the native people are an object that

148 Ibid., p. 109. 149 Ibid., pp. 133–134. 150 Ibid., p. 175. 151 Ibid., p. 104. 152 Frantz Fannon, Toward the African Revolution: Political Essays (New York: Grove Press, 1988), p. 32.

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the racist or colonizer can break up and form anew. Whereas vulgar racism appeared to justify “crude exploitation of man’s arms and legs,” the new racism is focused on exploiting their minds so that arms and legs follow automatically.153 Whereas the old racism explained colonialism with references to the “mental quirk” and “psychological flaw” of the natives, the new and complex racism is a response to the national liberations and the waves of emigration to Europe. As the natives discarded the old racism that constructed the inferior and superior races based on “scientific arguments” and demonstrated that the so-called superior and inferior races share the same ability for reasoning and cultural maturity, the new racism tried to impose new ways of seeing the natives. The new ways of seeing convinced the native intellectuals to admit that their inferiority and misfortunes are a result of their cultural characteristics. To overcome their misfortune, the oppressed people had to reject their cultural style and adopt new cultural patterns.154 Hence, the oppressed had not only to abandon their way of sitting down, laughing, and enjoying themselves but discarding their language. However, as the native discovers that despite all his efforts, he still is the object of racism and begins to protest against racism, the response he gets is that there are still racist individuals whose actions should not be used as a pretext to blame an entire nation. He is told that a few hopeless racists do not represent the entire population in a “country where there is the least amount of race prejudice.”155 As the oppressed discovers that the racists are unable to offer any sound arguments about their racism, he defines racism as a passion that prevents social injustice. But the mistake that the oppressed makes is that rather than being the cause of injustice, racism is a consequence of injustice. By naming racism as the cause of injustice, the oppressed are made to believe that their appeals to humanity and supreme human values such as love and respect can overcome racism.156 This colonialist “anti-racist” vision is in agreement with the new racism that blames fanaticism and racial prejudice as the causes of racism and encourages dialogue between all cultures. But what is forbidden to be discussed in these dialogues and cultural

153 Ibid., p. 35. 154 Ibid., pp. 36–39. 155 Ibid., p. 38. 156 Ibid., p. 40.

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exchanges is the colonial system itself.157 The colonial system in Algeria cannot be separated from racism because it has used cultural dialogue and psychiatry, which are supposed to prevent man from being a stranger to his environment” to make the Arab an alien in his own country. That is why Algeria has become the state of “systematized de-humanization.”158 Instead of supporting the Algerian people who fight this systematic dehumanization, some of the French intellectuals who believe that France has a mission to fight barbarism in Algeria, condemn the Algerian actions because they cause French casualties. These intellectuals tell the Algerian people that they will give them their friendly support if they condemn such barbaric actions. As the popular struggle gained its first victories in 1956, the French intellectuals began to support the Algerian struggle for independence, but when they did it, they revealed their “ill-repressed desire to guide” the liberation movement. What the French intellectual did not know about colonialism was the fact that the “colonial situation is, first of all, a military conquest” whose protection and strength depend on police and civil administration. That is why the entire colonial system in Algeria considers the native as a constant threat to the system. Whereas the Algerians demand self-determination, the French intellectuals try to convince them that less racism and more liberal behavior of the colonialists are the solutions. These French intellectuals refuse to see colonialism as the conquest of the national territory and the oppression of the native people.159 Whereas colonialism is the domination of a nation through military conquest, the war of liberation is about a people who are reclaiming their sovereignty.160 Whereas the old colonialists claimed, “France cannot live without Algeria,” the neo-colonialists claim that “Algeria cannot live without France.” Hence, the French intellectuals who demand special links between Algeria and France express their desire to sustain the colonial structures.161 Fanon argues that while metropolitan workers have forgotten to express their solidarity with the colonized people, the struggles against colonialism are the manifestations of the colonized peoples’ solidarity with the metropolitan workers. 157 Ibid., p. 44. 158 Fanon, Toward the African Revolution: Political Essays, p. 53. 159 Ibid., pp. 79–81. 160 Ibid., pp. 83–84. 161 Ibid., p. 88.

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What the colonized people have discovered through their struggle is that their poverty, illiteracy, stultification, and moral suffocation are not the results of the oppressor’s racism, hatred, and contempt but the results of colonialism.162

162 Ibid., p. 145.

CHAPTER 4

From the Universal to the Specific Intellectual

In the Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Hannah Arendt refers to the role that the European intellectuals played in the transformation of their nation-states into imperialist states. In the 1970s, as Marxism was defeated ideologically and communism was reduced to totalitarianism, Arendt’s book became a handbook on communist totalitarianism. With the rise of the European Islamophobia since the 1990s, Arendt’s theory of totalitarianism became a frame of reference in the academic and public debates on the totalitarian aspects of the Islamic culture and political Islam. However, Arendt’s conceptualization of totalitarianism rests mostly on her analysis of colonialism, anti-Semitism, and racism that transformed the nineteenth-century European nation-states into the imperialist states. Whereas the nation-state promised its citizens equal rights, the imperialist state emphasized the ethnic, cultural, and religious homogeneity of the state. The imperialist states erased the gap that existed between the state and society as the foundation of their interactions. One of the factors that contributed to the demise of the nation-state was the emergence of modern anti-Semitism. Before their political emancipation, the state protected the life and property of the European Jews. But since their political emancipation did not bring about safety to them, the Jews continued even as citizens to rely on the state for protection. As the Jews continued to rely on the state for their safety, they became the targets of the social groups that came into conflict with the state, to the

© The Author(s) 2021 Y. Shahibzadeh, Public Intellectuals and Their Discontents, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56588-6_4

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extent that anti-Semitist outrages were indistinguishable from the antistate campaigns.1 There were two types of anti-Semitism in France and Germany. Whereas one type of anti-Semitism favored individual Jews who had distinguished themselves from the Jewish masses to become more German or French, the other type of anti-Semitism preferred the Jews in general and disdained them as individuals. Wilhelm Von Humboldt would say, “I love the Jews really only en masse; en detail I rather avoid them.”2 But favoring the individual Jews while despising the Jewish people became the dominant approach of the French and German Anti-Semitism.3 After the Congress of Vienna (1814–1815), German and French intelligentsia divided the Jews into the desirable and undesirable Jews. Whereas the Jewish bankers and businesspeople became the desirable Jews, the Jewish intelligentsia were considered as the non-desirable Jews and became the victims of open discrimination. Whenever the government needed the professional competence of the individual Jews, it hired them. Otherwise, the governments did not have any moral responsibility toward them as citizens. As the usefulness of the Jews determined the fates of the individual members of the Jewish population, the Jewish intelligentsia was gradually excluded from the state institutions. The exclusion of the intelligentsia from the state institutions allowed the powerful Jews to exercise their control over the Jewish masses and justify the segregation of the Jews from the non-Jewish society. As the liberal and radical intellectuals made the question of the desirable and undesirable Jews the center of their politics,4 there emerged anti-Semitic political parties intending to destroy both the Jews and the nation-states.5 Although the nature of antiSemitism varied in different countries, there emerged anti-Semitic parties that saw the Jewish question as an inter-European problem. Hence, whereas anti-Semitism remained an ideological force in Austria, it became a political movement in France.6 The French political anti-Semitism had its origin in the Enlightenment’s thinkers who loathed the Jews for their

1 Hana Arendt, The Origin of Totalitarianism, p. 25. 2 Ibid., p. 30. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid., pp. 32–34. 5 Ibid., p. 39. 6 Ibid., p. 42.

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seeming affinity with “the patriarchal form of government.” But as anticlericalism became a fashion in France, anti-Semitism was incorporated into anti-clericalism. The French anti-Semitism became exacerbated by the East European immigrant Jews who became known as second-class Jews.7 French anti-Semitist forces, similar to their Germany counterparts, saw the Jewish intelligentsia as a threat to the nation-state. Whereas the Jewish intelligentsia saw the Jewish emancipation as a basic requirement for justice, they realized, after the emancipation, that the promises of emancipation had resulted in the special forms of discrimination.8 Whenever the members of the Jewish intelligentsia reached a position within the state, they were reminded that they received special favor. The combination of discrimination and special favor generated a Jewish type known as the “exceptional Jews.” As the exceptional Jew acquired a special social status, every Jew had to reach this status to fulfill his or her professional aspirations. But the legitimacy of the status of the exceptional Jew required the recognition of the social majority. Social recognition of the Jews was supposed to happen after the disappearance of intolerance and bigotry against them. Furthermore, the disappearance of intolerance and bigotry against the Jews required that the Jew and non-Jews learn about one another through a long-lasting education. The mistake of the Jewish people was, according to Arendt, that they believed that this education would gradually lessen intolerance and bigotries against the Jews to the point of its disappearance. Soon, the Jews realized that they were the ones who had to educate themselves about the other and humanize themselves in the way Herder wanted to humanize them to demonstrate humanity as a universal principle. To humanize themselves, experience a “purely humanized” way of life, and participate in the development of science and culture, the Jews had to emancipate themselves from their Jewishness through education.9 Goethe, who shared Herder’s view on the humanization of the Jews, contrasted good literature to ordinary Jewish mediocrity.10 According to this principle of humanization, members of the Jewish intelligentsia could humanize themselves by

7 Ibid., pp. 46–48. 8 Ibid., p. 54. 9 Ibid., pp. 56–58. 10 Samuel Feiner, The Origins of Jewish Secularization in Eighteenth-Century Europe

(University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), p. 129.

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reaching the status of the exceptional Jews, and by distinguishing themselves from ways of being, seeing, thinking, and doing that constitute Jewishness. As Jewishness was considered as the main obstacle toward the humanization of the Jews and their universality and liberation, the Jewish question lost its political character and became the personal problem of every individual Jew. The result was the emergence of the Jewish parvenu and pariah. As the educated Jews reached the status of the exceptional Jews, they were described as the members of the Jewish parvenu, as the ones who betray their people by giving up the demand for equal rights of all citizens in return for the privileged position they have received.11 Those educated Jews, who for whatever reason, did not receive recognition, and could not become exceptional Jews, were labeled as pariah Jews. Another aspect of the definition of Jewishness was the perverted tolerance toward the Jews that erased the distinction between crime and vice. This perverted tolerance propagated by men of high culture assumed that the propensity to commit crimes was a racial and Jewish characteristic. Because of their seeming tolerance of the Jewish propensity toward criminality and treason, these men of high culture considered themselves as broad-minded. As the perverted tolerance made the none-Jews consider Jewishness as an interesting vice, the Jews began to consider this supposed inherent vice as an innate virtue.12 This perverted tolerance during the Dreyfus Affair opened the society’s door to the Jews in a way that they had never experienced before. But as soon as Dreyfus was declared innocent, the Jews were excluded from society. Arendt argues that by transforming the historical “crime” of Judaism into the “vice” of Jewishness, the perverted tolerance rationalized and paved the way for the extermination of the Jews. Whereas through conversion, the Jews could escape from the historical crime of Judaism, they could not escape from the vice of Jewishness. Whereas a crime can be punished, the only way to get rid of vice is its extermination.13 In the past, those opposing the state hated the Jews because the state protected them. Now, there is a mob that hates both the state and society because they protect the Jews and tolerate Jewishness.14 According to Arendt, this racial hate was one of the

11 Arendt, The Origin of Totalitarianism, pp. 66–67. 12 Ibid., pp. 81–83. 13 Ibid., p. 87. 14 Ibid., p. 108.

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reasons that the European states were unable to reconcile the nation-state with the colonial expansion. Unlike the Roman Republic that sought to integrate the subjugated people through common law, the nation-state was built upon a population’s active consent to its government while its colonial and imperialist expansion had only an economic character. The imperialist expansion made the industry grow and extended the market for the increased production of goods. After realizing the limits of the economic expansion within their borders and the dependence of further economic growth on the imperialist expansion, the European bourgeoisie forced their governments to make gaining new territories the main goals of their foreign policy. But the fact that the conquered people could apply the logic of the nation-state to defend their sovereignty forced, for instance, the French government to incorporate Algeria as a province of France, without making the Algerian population French citizens or imposing French laws upon them. Instead of laws, it imposed its cultural norms on the population so that they learn how to govern themselves in the future.15 The British, however, imposed neither their laws nor their culture upon the colonized people because they believed that the subject people would never be “capable of governing themselves without supervision.”16 The imperialist states were well aware that if they imposed their system of government on the subject people, they could not serve the glory of their nations.17 In the first place, it was not the European governments that supported the colonial expansion but a large section of the educated class or the intelligentsia. As the European governments realized that they could export the dissatisfied educated class, the unemployed, and the criminal elements who were threatening the entire political order at home, they began their colonial expansion. European governments considered their imperialist policies as a stabilizing force against the threats of the disintegration of their body politics from within.18 They realized that the survival of the capitalist system depended upon the supply and demands of non-capitalist countries.

15 Ibid., pp. 125–127. 16 Ibid., p. 130. 17 Ibid., p. 134. 18 Ibid., p. 147.

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As nineteenth-century European countries realized that the superfluous capital and superfluous labor-power could cause social and political trouble and unrest within their borders, they decided to invest both the surplus capital and labor-power abroad. The investments in foreign lands took an imperialist form when the governments protected the investments.19 As the European working class realized that their future job security and prosperity depended on such investments because it would protect the position of their industry in the world, they supported the imperialist adventures. In Germany, both the liberals and socialist parties supported the imperialist project. Whereas imperialism divided humankind into master and slave races abroad, it transformed the nation-state nationalism into tribal nationalism and racism at home. As tribal nationalism became the expression of the alliance between the imperialists and the mob, the imperialist state succeeded to transcend factional disputes at home and represent the interests of the nation as a whole. Tribal nationalism saw the national institutions and political parties as obstacles to the glory of the nation.20 While substituting the general population with the mob, tribal nationalism accused civil servants of corruption because while controlling all national institutions, they depended economically on the property class. Hence the advocates of tribal nationalism demanded the disintegration of the national institutions. While attacking the state administration, the mob depicted the “hard-working” colonial administration as the only hope for the glory of the nation and the race. British nationalists believed that the state institutions at home should either follow the colonial administration’s work ethic or be destroyed. Tribal nationalism enabled the imperialists to argue that the destiny of the nation does not lie in body politics at home but in the way it dealt with the subject races abroad. As a result, the English and French citizens who would show loyalty to their social classes at home would become Englishmen or Frenchmen who served their colonial administrations for the glory of their nations.21 The alliance between the imperialist capital and the mob led colonial powers such as Britain and France to recruit the impoverished sections of their societies to serve in the colonized land so that they are transformed into exemplary

19 Ibid., pp. 148–150. 20 Ibid., pp. 150–153. 21 Ibid., p. 154.

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British and French nationalists. As Germany and Austria failed to execute a successful imperialist project abroad, the alliance between surplus capital and the mob was expressed in the pan-movements to gain new territories in Europe. During the alliance of imperialism and European mob, the Russians were seen as “Slavs,” Englishmen as “White men,” and Germen as “Aryans.”22 The political emergence of the mob transformed racism from a simple opinion into ideology as a system of ideas and arguments that shows the direction of history and ends all human suffering. Of the two surviving ideologies in the early twentieth century, one interpreted history as a struggle between social classes, and the other interpreted it as a struggle between races.23 In France, racism was an ideology based on the struggle between races, but races were not understood in terms of their color but with regard to their civilized and uncivilized social positions, or whether they belonged to the master or subject people. The French race-thinking that can be traced back to the historian of the French state in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century, Henri de Boulainvilliers, who divided French people into master and subject people. Whereas the master people were Frenchmen by right, the subject people were inhabitants of France with no rights. According to Boulainvilliers, the master or noble people of one country had more in common with the master people of other countries than with their subject people. However, the German race-thinking, aimed at uniting the people against foreign domination and tried to make German people conscious of their common origin. Whereas the French race-thinking inspired the idea of class struggle in France, the German race-thinking was transformed into German nationalism of the nineteenth century. As Germany became unified in 1870, the German race-thinking and German nationalism ended in racism and imperialism.24 The German intelligentsia, in its competition with the nobility for social status, became the catalyst of the transformation from nationalism into racism and imperialism. While arguing in favor of the “innate personality” as the expression of the common German origin, the German intelligentsia excluded the Jewish intelligentsia from Germanness. The cause of their exclusion was their

22 Ibid., pp. 155–157. 23 Ibid., p. 159. 24 Ibid., pp. 162–165.

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Jewishness.25 In addition to the racist ideology, imperialism needed a bureaucracy for mapping, conquesting, controlling, and subjugating territories and people in the great game of competition for expansion. The degree of the interaction between passion and rationality or racism and bureaucracy determined the success or failure of the imperialist expansion.26 Joseph Conrad describes, in Heart of Darkness, these aspects of the imperialist expansion in the behavior of the colonial settlers who are “hollow to the core… reckless without hardihood, greedy without audacity and cruel without courage.” These qualities made the colonial settlers to believe in nothing but got themselves in believing in anything. Arendt argues that as the former members of the mob and the subject race at home, the colonial settlers did not want to remain in their “pariahs” status. To make themselves included in the realm of the “master race,” the settlers had to learn that the “unforgivable sin” that a murderer can commit in the colonized areas is “to lose his temper.”27 With the disappearance of the distinction between vice and crime in the European high society, the criminal acts committed with civilized coldness, good manners, and gentleness, in the underworld of the European capitals, became acceptable. In their treatment of the native people, the settlers in the colonized countries copied the manner of the European high society in the underworld of Europe. By creating a refined atmosphere around their crimes, the men of the European underworld transformed themselves into the perfect gentlemen because it was not the brutality of the crimes they committed that determined their characters as criminals but the manner of carrying out the crime. Mostly, Europeans equipped with the refined skills of the men of the European underworld settled in the colonized territories. As the European gentlemen of the underworld encountered black Africa, African people reminded them of the people in a mental institution with no accomplishment in their past and no purpose for their future.28 But as the black Africans insisted on their humanity, the “white men” claimed that their stage of humanity was higher than the black men.29 This perception allowed the European mob without 25 Ibid., p. 169. 26 Ibid., p. 186. 27 Ibid., p. 189. 28 Ibid., p. 190. 29 Ibid., p. 195.

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engineering expertise to become supervisors in the gold and diamond industry, while the black Africans were reduced to virtual slavery or cheap labor. The way the former members of the European mob turned into white workers in South Africa demonstrates that a race society allows an underprivileged group to create a class lower than itself through naked violence. The underprivileged group in a race society learns that it does not need a revolution to raise its social statue. It needed only to find allies among the ruling classes against “foreign and backward people.” What, the Nazi elite learned from South African racism was that it is easy to convert ordinary European people to think of themselves in terms of race and of their position as the master race. The ideology of racism turned the European mob into a people with a historic mission and responsibility, the white man’s burden. It is only in this imperialist and racist context that Rudyard Kipling could narrate a story in which the ordinary European people become colonial masters because of their courage, solid characters, moral deeds, and heroic actions.30 Arndt argues that contrary to the legend narrated by Kipling about the “white man’s burden,” it was not the most enlightened and morally responsible Europeans who went to the colonial territories, nor they went there to teach the natives about the Western civilization. Most Europeans who enlisted in the colonial service were the most frustrated Europeans who had failed to realize their ambitions at home. Even though the colonial administrators were trying to convince them that they belonged to a higher civilization with a birthright to hold their positions, they never believed in their superiority.31 The colonial administration taught Europeans that bureaucracy as the government of experts makes an “experienced minority” capable of governing “the inexperienced majority.”32 In India and Africa, the colonial administration taught Europeans that they could commit administrated massacres and get away with it. This perception led the frustrated young Lawrence, who was no more than a secret agent, to claim that he was the emancipator of the Arab people.33

30 Ibid., pp. 204–208. 31 Ibid., pp. 211–212. 32 Ibid., p. 214. 33 Ibid., pp. 218–221.

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Whereas the British and French tribal nationalism resulted in material gains for all social classes, the German tribal nationalism produced an ideology that, while insisting on the uniqueness of the German people, divided the nation into friends and enemies.34 German tribal nationalism reached its logical consequence when its distinction between “Staatsfremde,” aliens of the state, and “Volksfremde,” aliens of the nation, became the source of legislation in Nazi Germany.35 It was the early nineteenth-century progressivism that coined the latter concept and argued that although humans are equal by nature, they differ by history and circumstances. According to this progressivism, unequal people can become equal not by rights protected by the law but through education.36 But as Nazi Germany reduced the Jews to stateless people, they could easily be exterminated as a people outside the law. As people outside the law, the Jews had lost their place in the world that they knew and within which they could make their opinions significant and their actions effective. Whereas the people who belong to a political community are judged according to their actions, people who cannot demonstrate that they belong to the community are judged with regard to what they are. Hence, the people without political rights in a political community, are not the ones whose right to freedom and right to think are denied, but the ones whose right to action and right to have an opinion are denied.37 If a Negro in a White community is considered a Negro and nothing else, he loses with his right to equality and freedom of action which are specifically human. His actions are explained as the “necessary” consequences of his “Negro” qualities.38

Totalitarianism As the German tribal nationalism was transformed into Nazim, it became a totalitarian movement that denied its members to put their idealism to the test of argument and experience.39 By claiming that it has established 34 Ibid., p. 227. 35 Ibid., p. 231. 36 Ibid., p. 234. 37 Ibid., p. 296. 38 Ibid., pp. 300–301. 39 Ibid., p. 308.

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the direct reign of justice on earth, totalitarianism erases, according to Arendt, the discrepancy between legality and justice and assumes that it has bridged the gap between law and justice.40 In a constitutional government, laws indicate boundaries and channels of communication between the citizens who represent the existing order of the community and new citizens who are born into it. “With each new birth, a new beginning is born into the world, a new world has potentially come into being.” Since man’s political existence is related to the boundaries of the laws in the same way that memory is related to his historical existence, law and memory guarantee the existence of a common world.41 By pressing citizens against each other, the totalitarian government “destroys the space between them” and deprives man of the capacity to make a new beginning. The laws in the constitutional governments do not inspire actions but set limits to actions. They never tell what one should do.42 Arendt relates totalitarianism to ideological thinking because it offers a total explanation of the past and predicts the future. Because of its independence of experience, the ideological thinking convinces its followers to relinquish the visible reality to reveal the reality behind the apparent.43 As the ideological thinking loses its contact with reality, people under totalitarian rules lose their contact with their fellow men and lose the capacity for experience and thought. The ideologically convinced members of the totalitarian rule need people who cannot understand the distinction between fact and fiction as the realm of experience and the distinction between true and false as the realm of argument. Whereas in tyranny, man’s productive capacities remain intact, in the totalitarianism system, man is entirely deserted of any companionship and deprived of the ability to speak with the single voice of a distinguishable person.44

40 Ibid., pp. 462–464. 41 Ibid., p. 465. 42 Ibid., p. 467. 43 Ibid., pp. 470–471. 44 Ibid., pp. 474–476.

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Anti-semitism and the Jewish Elite Arendt rejects the scapegoat theory that says anti-Semitism was the reaction of the society in an economic crisis because this theory exempts the German intelligentsia and the Jewish elite of the responsibility for the rise of modern anti-Semitism.45 Years before the Origin of Totalitarianism, Arendt wrote on Heinrich Heine and Bernard Lazar as the nineteenth-century intellectuals whose concern for common humanity made them pariah Jews.46 Heine’s pariah status enabled him to remain faithful to the traditional Jewish passion for justice as the measure of freedom. As the measure of freedom, justice assumes that a man is born free until he sells himself into bondage and loses his freedom.47 Heine ignored the dominant argument in the public sphere that the Jews would be emancipated if they stopped being Jews.48 Following Heine, Lazare argued that in their struggles to liberate themselves from their pariah status, the Jews must advocate the cause of all oppressed people. Hence, Lazare considered the fight against the Jewish parvenu, as a part of the Jewish resistance against oppression because whenever the oppressor seeks to control the oppressed, it “makes a point of using some oppressed elements of the population as his lackeys and henchmen, rewarding them with special privileges,….”49 Arendt reminds us that the most significant injury a society can inflict on a man is “to make him doubt the reality and validity of his own existence.” Kafka tells the story of a stranger, in The Castle, who neither belongs to the common people nor the rulering class. Although superfluous and unwanted, but for some mysterious reason, the stranger is tolerated. The stranger wants what any European Jews wanted, home, family, and citizenship. But since the realization of his goal required that he became “indistinguishable” from his gentile neighbors, he has to behave as if he was utterly alone, separated from people

45 Staudenmaier, Hannah Arendt’s Analysis of Antisemitism…, p. 8, http://www.aca demia.edu/3622432/Hannah_Arendts_Analysis_of_Antisemitism_in_The_Origins_of_T otalitarianism_A_Critical_Appraisal. 46 Hannah Arendt, The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition, Jewish Social Studies, Vol. 6, No. 2 (April 1944), pp. 99–122, Published by: Indiana University Press. 47 Ibid., p. 104. 48 Ibid., p. 107. 49 Ibid., pp. 108–109.

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with whom he has been identified with, only a while ago.50 To become “indistinguishable,” he becomes “interested only in universals, in things which are common to all mankind” because he has no ambitions beyond things that the majority of the people in his society take for granted. But the very fact that he seeks nothing more than these minimum rights, he cannot accept these things as if they are given to him as an act of favor from the Castle.51 As long as Western European Jews were social pariahs, they aspired to become parvenus. But as soon as the members of the Jewish intelligentsia became parvenus, they became insecure in their new positions and considered the price they have paid for becoming parvenus too high because as pariahs, they could at least enjoy their freedom and untouchability.52 In the 1960s at the pinnacle of the struggles for national liberations, a new generation of the French intellectuals called into question the political and ideological legacies of colonialism and the French Communist Party. The new generation of the Frenc intellectuals doubted the Sartrean conception of the intellectual. Louise Althusser aimed to produce French Marxist intellectual whose contribution to the Marxist theory could match Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin, and Gramsci.53 Relying on Lenin and Kautsky’s argument that the “‘spontaneous’ ideology of the workers, if left to itself, could only produce utopian socialism, trade-unionism, anarchism, and anarcho-syndicalism,” Althusser aimed to liberate the French intellectuals from their “theoretical vacuum” and “cultural provincialism.”54 Althusser’s own contribution was that there is no distinction between theory and practice, and argued that the intellectual should become the agents of theoretical practice.55 Althusser argues that the social division of intellectual and practical labor made the university an ideological state apparatus that produces the necessary knowledge for the reproduction of class domination. Althusser’s theoretical intervention happened at a time that the state was going to employ “researchers and intellectuals” for a variety of social projects. Years earlier, Lucien 50 Ibid., pp. 114–116. 51 Ibid., p. 117. 52 Ibid., p. 121. 53 Louis Althusser, For Marx (London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 1969), p. 23. 54 Ibid., pp. 24–26. 55 Khilnani, Arguing Revolution, pp. 94–98.

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Goldmann observed that social sciences in general and sociology and anthropology, in particular, were replacing the ideological position of philosophy in Western Europe.56 The young intellectuals whose effort to make a revolution in Europe, in the early 1970s, had been defeated, returned to the universities, in the mid-1970s, got research grants and began to theorize social movements . Thus, instead of making social revolutions, the new generation of intellectuals succeeded in making revolutions in theory.57 As these revolutionaries of theory became obsessed with totalitarianism, they concluded that the idea of revolution had generated totalitarianism. The preoccupation with totalitarianism and denunciation of the revolution led these new theorists to embrace Raymond Aron, Cornelius Castoriadis, and Claude Lefort and the subversive effect of psychoanalysis. That is why the French government would pay a newly established Department of Psychoanalysis in the 1970s to keep “Marxist troublemakers preoccupied with their unconscious.”58 This description demonstrates the status of intellectual criticism in France since the early 1970s. Also, it tells about the formation of the scholars and intellectuals as the members of a new state nobility. The fact is that many members of this new nobility considered, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, that the welfare state was a temporary class-compromise against the global proletariat, which were doomed to fail. As radical intellectuals, these members of the state nobility assumed, in the 1960s, that in the absence of the welfare state and compromise between capital and labor in the Third World, the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist revolutions would develop into anti-capitalist revolutions with significant ideological and political consequences for capitalism in Europe and the United States.

The Specific Intellectual The European revolutionaries of the late 1960s still believed that the state was the center of power and the main target of the coming revolution. However, a few years later, they adopted Foucault’s view that the state apparatus is not the center of power; power is in every structure and

56 Ibid., pp. 101–103. 57 Ibid., p. 116. 58 Ibid., pp. 137–138.

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level of social life.59 Hence, the radical intellectual should detect how power is invested in different social structures and discourses and defend those who are subjected to these layers of power. Foucault argued that the struggle against the means of domination is not total and universal but partial and local. The intellectual who advocates this partial and local struggle is, according to Foucault, the specific intellectual . The specific intellectual’s politicization happens in the course of his scientific activity through which he discovers specific cruelties and injustices done in the name of the science he or she is practicing. The specific intellectual realizes that his specific scientific practice is a means of exercising a particular form of power. Although the specific intellectual knows that he or she cannot change the way people think or change their consciousness, he or she can tell them how the existing order produces truths and how these truths constitute and exercise particular forms of power. Foucault refers to Robert Oppenheimer as an example of the specific intellectual who made the Atomic bomb and then warned about its devastating consequences and worked to ban it forever. But Oppenheimer’s position cannot be generalized and conceptualized. It remains a singular and exceptional case among the considerable number of scientists who are ready to produce more perfect means of human extermination if they are well-paid.60 In his discussion with Michel Foucault, in 1972, Gilles Deleuze compares the intellectual-power relationship to the theory-practice relationship. In the past, the theory-practice relationship was understood within a process of totalization. The practice was not only considered as the application of theory but the source of its inspiration. Deleuze offers a different perspective on the relationship between theory and practice. For him, the relationship is “fragmentary and partial” because the theory has a local character and is “related to a limited domain.” However, the locality of a theory is never absolute, and it can be applied in distant domains that do not resemble the original domain. When a theory takes hold in its own domain, it meets obstacles and walls, but these same obstacles lead the theory to communicate with another discourse that brings it to a new domain. Following the locality of the theory, Deleuze claims that practice is “a network of relays from one theoretical point to another,”

59 Michel Foucault, Remarks on Marx, Conversation with Duccio Trombadori (New York: Semiotext(e), 1991), pp. 15–16. 60 Sand, The End of the French Intellectual, pp. 172–174.

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theory communicates one practice to another. Whereas the development of theory depends on its encounter with obstacles, the practice assists the theory to renovate itself. Deleuze argues that Foucault’s analysis of imprisonment in the nineteenth-century leads him to discover that the prisoners can speak on their own behalf. Hence, he organizes the Group for Information on Prisons through which the prisoners can raise their voices. The GIP indicates that Foucault does not apply his theories in practice but involves them as a means of communication and interplay between practical bits and pieces. Since the Foucauldian approach does not distinguish between those who speak and those who act, it prevents the intellectual or theorist to constitute himself as the conscious leader of the political struggle. The Foucauldian approach recognizes only actions. Actions can be theoretical or practical, but both serve as transmission, and both create networks.61 Endorsing Deleuze’s view, Foucault argues that the political position of the intellectuals is a result of the interplay between their social position within the system and their attitude toward both the ideology that the system produces and the intellectual discourses which reveal particular truths about this system. Foucault tells us that contemporary intellectuals have realized that the masses have access to knowledge about their situation without their aid. He tells us, as well, that the intellectuals are integrated into a system that invalidates the knowledge of the masses. What the intellectual can do in this situation is to challenge forms of power expressed in the various discourse on knowledge, truth, and consciousness. This challenge can take place in the local struggles against power, where it is least visible. That is why, according to Deleuze, a theory should function as a toolbox. It either works or does not work. If a theory does not work, it must be replaced by a new one. An effective theory is the one that is never used by a theorist because at the moment one uses his or her theory, he or she stops being a theorist. Deleuze’s conception of a theory is similar to the way Proust saw his books. For Proust, his books were like a pair of glasses, which people can change if they do not work. Thus, people must find instruments that they find necessary and useful in their struggle because to stand against power theory can never be totalized but multiplied.62 Foucault concludes

61 Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, Edited by Donald F. Bouchard (New York: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 205–207. 62 Ibid., p. 208.

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that it is not a new discourse on criminality that can challenge power, but the counter-discourse of the prisoners and the so-called criminals. As soon as the prisoners and the so-called criminals begin to speak, they put forward a theory of prison, punishment, and justice. Foucault tries to conceptualize power in the same way that the nineteenth-century theorists conceptualized exploitation.63 The problem that many contemporary intellectuals do not care about is, according to Foucault, that we know more or less “who exploits others, who receives the profit, which people are involved, and we know how these funds are reinvested.” However, we know very little about power, we know that power “is not in the hands of those who govern” because wherever there is resistance, there is someone who exercises power. A prison superintendent, a judge, a union leader, and even the editor-in-chief of a newspaper that tries to quell resistance can represent the focal points of power.64 When one mentions and denounces these focal points of power in a public arena, he or she starts a new struggle because forcing “the institutionalized network of information to listen, to produce names, to point the finger of accusation, to find targets is the first step in the reversal of power and the initiation of new struggles against the existing forms of power.”65 Hence, any challenge to the exclusive rights of those who represent the focal points of power is a political struggle. In his conversation with Pierre Victor (Benny Lévy), the young Maoists of the early 1970s, Foucault reflects on the idea of popular justice.66 The young Maoists did not deduce their idea of popular justice from the “abstract universal idea of justice,” but from the real confrontation between the masses and their enemies. Since the masses rely on their own experience of injustice and oppression, they must decide whether to punish or re-educate somebody whom they perceive as an enemy.67 Foucault’s response to this notion of popular justice is that the modern judicial system has created and maintained the division between the proletariat and the plebs with criminal records. This judicial system gave the

63 Ibid., p. 210. 64 Ibid., pp. 213–214. 65 Ibid., p. 214. 66 Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–

1977 , Edited by Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), p. 2. 67 Ibid., pp. 8–9.

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latter two choices. Either go into prison or join the army. Either go into prison or work in the colonies. Finally, either go into prison or join the police. Consequently, the non-proletarianized plebs were transformed into nationalists and chauvinists when they joined the army. They became racists as they were turned into colonialists. Finally, they became fascists as members of the police force.68 The bourgeois judicial state apparatus has since its emergence intensified the “contradictions…between the proletariat and the non-proletarianized people.” That is why the current judicial system and the ideology that is associated with it must be the main target of any social and political struggle.69 Foucault investigated psychiatry because he found it is easier to detect “the political and ideological implications” of psychiatry. Similar to medicine, psychiatry is an uncertain science with a low epistemological profile, but its practice is linked to several state institutions and entwined in the whole social structures. Foucault claims that Marxist intellectuals described his work as epistemologically vulgar and politically impotent because they were more interested in convincing the university system and the state institutions that they could contribute to the reformulation of the theoretical questions that the academic establishment put forward. Since the Marxist intellectuals were seeking acceptance within the university tradition, they wanted the establishment to know that although they were Marxists, they would provide new solutions for the establishment’s old concerns.70 Foucault argues that before 1968, the conceptualization of the mechanics of power had not become a serious topic because it could not be reduced either to the question of totalitarianism in the Soviet Union or class domination in Western capitalism. However, the post1968 struggles at the grassroots level made power a new field of political analysis because these struggles were understood as the expressions of resistance against power on the local level. Foucault’s analysis of power refrains from the dichotomy between ideology and truth and focuses on the effects of discourses, which are neither true nor false. For Foucault, the elusive aspect of power is that it is a creative force that stimulates pleasure and produces knowledge and discourse.71 Foucault suggests that

68 Ibid., p. 23. 69 Ibid., p. 36. 70 Ibid., pp. 109–110. 71 Ibid., pp. 116–119.

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since the relations of power extend beyond the limits of the State, the analysis of power relations must go beyond the State. Regardless of how omnipotent the stat apparatuses are, they are unable to control all power relations because their own operations depend on the existing power relations that include “the body, sexuality, the family, kinship, knowledge, technology and so forth,….” In short, the state is a superstructure.72 As the state is reduced to a superstructure vis-à-vis the network of the social body, the leftist intellectuals who monopolized the right of speaking the truth, justice, and universal to the state become insecure. Foucault argues that it was Marxism that made the intellectual the historical subject and the bearer of universality whose moral, theoretical, and political capacities would decide the fate of humanity. But, the new generation of the intellectuals can no longer play this supposed historical role because they have started to think about the specific struggles, and the types of awareness these struggles generate, the types of awareness that are different from the proletarian awareness. This reassessment has led the contemporary intellectuals to become specific intellectuals.73 With the emergence of the specific intellectual, the universal intellectual who supposed to represent the “universal consciousness” began to disappear. This transformation made the change from one form of politicization to another possible because it allows the magistrates, psychiatrists, doctors, social workers, technicians, and professors in humanity and social sciences to participate both within their own fields and take part in the process of politicization of the intellectuals on the global level. Whereas Oppenheimer was involved in specific knowledge, his warning about the nuclear threat, had a universal character. Rather than constituting a political threat to the dominant discourse, Oppenheimer reflected on his specific piece of knowledge. Since Oppenheimer’s intervention, the specific intellectual has been a scientific dissident in the West and the Soviet Union. Whereas the universal intellectual in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was talking about law, rights, constitution, justice, and reason, the specific intellectual employs his specific knowledge and competence in the daily political struggles. Whereas the universal intellectual was similar to a jurist since he invoked “the universality of a just law,” the “specific intellectual”

72 Ibid., p. 122. 73 Ibid., p. 126.

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is the expert who is aware of the danger of his expertise and communicates his concerns to the public.74 However, the specific intellectual can be manipulated by the political parties or trade unions that control local struggles and participate in the established regime of truth that constitutes their power within the parties and unions. Truth is a particular discourse that society accepts to function as truth, and the intellectual is someone who establishes a link to the general functioning of the apparatus of truth upon which power is constituted and exercised. The intellectual’s links to the apparatus of truth indicate that intellectual’s intention in his inquiry to distinguish between science and ideology will enhance only the relationship between truth and power. As the intellectual realizes that the regime of truth that created the “condition of the formation and development of capitalism” allows certain modifications within this regime, he or she may introduce a new politics of truth that reveals how the existing regime of the production of truth operates.75 Foucault claims that the Gulag reminds us that we “can never be outside power.” But this does not mean that we will always be trapped in the labyrinths of power because power relations produce and reproduce not only local and global relations of domination but various forms of resistance.76 While Foucault was conceptualizing power, the French Communist Party was putting “progressive intellectuals” in the state institutions that needed experts to counter “the technocratic modernizer and planners” who were corrupting the revolutionary culture of the working class through American consumer culture. Whereas Althusser questioned both the modernizer and progressivist intellectual as the advocates of the humanist ideology and the agents of the bourgeois mystification, the gauchistes rejected the modernizers, the progressivist, and the Althusserian intellectuals. The gauchistes were seeking an alliance between the intellectuals, workers, and the anti-imperialist struggles in the Third World against the capitalist world system. The gauchistes replaced the Soviet Union, the traditional ally of the French revolutionaries with the third world anti-imperialist struggles. They believed that France could learn from China, Cuba, Vietnam and the 1968 political crisis to regain its revolutionary heritage

74 Ibid., pp. 127–128. 75 Ibid., pp. 130–133. 76 Ibid., pp. 141–142.

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and assert its role as the prime mover and vanguard of the global revolution.77 Glucksmann wrote after May 1968: “A socialist revolution in France will unleash the tempest step by step… a people’s revolution in France promises further revolutions of various types, in Eastern Europe and threatens to spread to Russia itself.”78 During their revolutionary adventure that lasted until 1972, the gauchiste tried to remove the division between intellectual and manual labor, and erase the gap between the intellectuals and the masses. This effort led the gauchiste intellectuals to refrain from representing the masses or speaking in their name. They wanted to allow the masses to represent themselves and speak in their own name. They called upon the intellectuals to go to the people, not the academic institutions or political parties, because without the aid of the intellectuals, the people express correct and powerful ideas. In 1970 and 1971, the publications of La Cause de Peuple by the Gauche Peolétarienne, the feminist journal L’Idiot International, and the formation of Grupe d’information sur les prisons initiated by Foucault presented a new intellectual break in France and the rest of Europe. Instead of the state, the intellectuals attacked state institutions such as university and social institutions from the political parties to the family as the expressions of the existing relations of power. From the early 1970s on, Sartre’s conception of the revolutionary and universal intellectual was disappearing because the intellectual in general were understood within the society’s power structures. The universal intellectuals were replaced by the specific intellectuals who theorized and advocated social movements that aimed to achieve specific goals. Sartre, who appeared, in the interim, as the editor of La Cause du Peuple defended and encouraged the people’s right to speak against the state since he had become convinced that the intellectual was no longer the voice of the people but could take part in protecting freedom of speech. Foucault had learned from the 1968 uprising that although the existing system of power prevented the masses from gaining the knowledge they needed and deprived them of the means they needed to express themselves, the people have reached the knowledge they needed without the intellectual’s intervention and have formulated themselves much better than the intellectuals. Sartre realized

77 Khilnani, Arguing Revolution, pp. 139–140. 78 André Glucksmann, Strategy and Revolution, New Left Review, Vol. 52, No. 1

(November–December 1968).

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that because of their dependence on or integration within the social relations of power, the intellectuals had to perpetuate the existing relations of power. As a result, the intellectuals have always functioned as a hinder for the masses.79 The gauchiste intellectuals who were so sure of the revolutionary tendencies among the French students, predicted the revolution to happen in 1972. But as the working class was reluctant to take militant actions, 1972 became the year of the collapse of the idea of revolution. The gauchiste intellectuals realized this truth when a watchman killed Pierre Overney, one of their comrades, at the Renault factory in February 1972. What they learned from the event was that the people or the masses were not interested in their revolutionary politics. Seven years after his advocacy of an immediate revolution in France, Glucksmann published his La Cuisinière et le mangeur d’hommes (1975) to welcome Solzhenitsyn’s L’Archipel du goulag, that had been translated into French in 1974. In this book, Glucksmann defines the intellectual as a dissident who speaks in the name of the pleb. Glucksmann’s intellectual situates himself or herself outside the state and refuses any alliance with the political parties. From 1977 on, intellectuals such as Glucksmann dedicated themselves to the critique of the Soviet totalitarianism and by the late 1970s, they were searching for the specter of this totalitarianism everywhere. They followed Claude Lefort’s stance that only a break with Marxism through a philosophy of “radical democracy” could confront the danger of totalitarianism.80 The critique of totalitarianism created the ideological condition of the emergence of the New Philosophers . Glucksmann, as one of the prominent members of the New Philosophers, had gained his entire intellectual credentials during his political militancy when he posed as a revolutionary leftist in the late 1960s and early 1970s. What followed the critique of totalitarianism was the rise of the revisionist historiography of the French Revolution championed by Furet, who argued in 1978 that Soviet totalitarianism was a direct consequence of Jacobinism of the French Revolution. Furet claimed that Solzhenitsyn exposed that the Gulag was the true essence of the modern revolutionary politics from the French Revolution to the Russian and other contemporary revolutions.81 Furet’s response to the French leftist intellectual who had been

79 Sunil Khilnani, Arguing Revolution, pp. 141–145. 80 Ibid., pp. 146–150. 81 Ibid., pp. 167–168.

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trying to interpret the French Revolutions in light of the Russian Revolution and assumed the contemporary and future socialist revolutions as the continuation of these two revolutions was that contemporary French democracy as a stable regime was a product of the process of institutionalization of revolutionary politics since the French Revolution. Furet’s perspective encouraged several French historians and philosophers such as Pierre Rosanvallon, Luc Ferry, and Claude Lefort, to define the French Revolution as “the birth of democracy,” inscribed in the “the Rights of Man.” Hence, the history of the formation of the French political culture since the Revolution has been a history of “the construction and consolidation of stable democratic structures that could secure such rights.”82 According to these historians and philosophers, the French constitutional and representative democracy was not a temporary political form to be substituted by direct democracy or socialism but the only goal of the French Revolution since its inception in 1789. Furet argued that the sharing of power by a socialist president and a prime minister from the Right in the early 1980s indicated that democratic politics had reached its maturity in France as the foundation of a new political space in Europe.83 What this new political space could offer in the 1990s was the declaration of the victory of liberalism against communist totalitarianism as the expression of the end of history.

82 Ibid., pp. 173–175. 83 Ibid., pp. 176–177.

CHAPTER 5

Renovations of the Intellectual

Farewell to the Working Class Whereas the Keynesian teaching that dominated the public space of postwar Europe was about the right to work, the right to an income, the right to create use-values, as well as the right to have access to the means of creating use-values, Andre Gorz saw, in the early 1980s, the tendency toward the abolition of work in the West.1 As the workers stopped functioning as workers and became reluctant to organize themselves as a class to win political power, they became the expression of the abolition of work. The rejection of work that reduced the workers to non-workers who did not belong to any class, made the ideology of the working class irrelevant.2 This non-class of a neo-proletariat that is underemployed, lacks job security and is excluded from production does not have any class identity. The main characteristic of this neo-proletariat that constitutes the majority of the population in the Western countries is that they are overqualified in their jobs.3 The overqualifications prevent the neo-proletariat from identifying themselves with the job they are performing. Since work has become an “insecure, short-term” means of earning a living, the workers realize that they do not play a role in the production of society. Work is no longer an occupation. Work has lost its 1 Andre Gorz, Farewell to the Working Class, p. 4. 2 Ibid., p. 67. 3 Ibid., pp. 68–69.

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meaning because the neo-proletariat has almost nothing in common with the proletariat that the young Marx saw as a universal force. Whereas society worked to produce in the past, now it produces to provide work. The only function of work in contemporary society is keeping people occupied so that the system of domination is intact.4 Unlike the industrial proletariat that possessed an objective power to transform matter, the neo-proletariat functions without any objective social importance. Since it does not play any role in “the production of society,” it is excluded from society and has become a mere spectator of the “society’s development.” The neo-proletariat neither has any desire to take over the machine as a means of controlling its workplace nor has it any aspiration to organize the society as a whole. What it is looking for is “areas of autonomy outside of, and in opposition to, the logic of society.” The fact that the neo-proletariat does not have any conception of future society, the creation of which was its historical mission, according to Marx, indicates that it expects nothing of the contemporary society and its future. The neo-proletariat is well aware that a rupture in the rationality of productivism creates a space of freedom, but they are also aware that the rapture can never be collective because the material processes never create the realm of freedom. The neo-proletariats have realized that only non-producers are capable of free subjectivity because they represent the classless society. Hence, the members of the neo-proletariat have no desire to seize power and change the world. By disengaging themselves from the rationality of productivism, the members of the neo-proletariat are reclaiming power over their own lives. Since Marx saw individual activity and social production as the two sides of communism, he predicted that the full development of the productive forces would personalize social activities and socialize personal activities.5 But as the socialist movements failed to deal with the political and social pluralism of the post-industrial societies, people began to believe that socialism meant collectivism and totalitarianism, which they considered as the main threats to their way of living. As the fear of these threats has become the foundation of the “political stability” in the post-industrial societies, people who experience “dispossession and growing constraints” at the workplace, believe that they at least can enjoy a “sphere of individual autonomy outside of

4 Ibid., pp. 70–72. 5 Ibid., pp. 73–76.

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work.”6 On the surface, the computerized activities are “enlarging the sphere of individual autonomy,” but since these activities are subordinated to the “criteria of profitability,” they do not reduce the socially necessary labor time. As a result, the computerized activities do not increase the free time during which the individual can fulfill his or her “non-economic activity”. By the end of the 1970s, parallel to these changes, the emancipatory character of the women’s movement was changing. Women whose exclusion from political and military power had been the main reason for their opposition to the military and financial organizations became included in these organizations.7 These days, not only many ministers of defense in Europe are women, but women lead many financial organizations. In this fashion, the women’s movement deserted what its advocates assumed to form, a new moral consciousness. For Gorz, an act of rebellion generates moral consciousness. An individual who refuses to accept something that most people accept in a particular situation constructs a “moral exigency” against objective morality according to which “an individual cannot be the sovereign judge of what should and should not be done.”8 The main characteristic of objective morality is that it exempts individuals from doubting particular practice of their community, party, and the church. Objective morality encourages the individuals that they should continue obeying the order of their authorities because it is the community, the party, and the church that will take responsibility. The advocates of moral consciousness remind us that relations that are informed by morality are the consequences of “a sphere of autonomous activity” in which individuals are the authors of their actions.9 In 1982, a group of historians that included Francois Furet, Pierre Rosanvallon, and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and many journalists, technocrats, and businesspeople established the Foundation Saint-Simonian to revive the Saint-Simonian conception of the positive intellectual . However, contrary to the eighteenth-century Saint-Simon Society, which aimed to fight against prejudices, the new Saint-Simonian society encouraged the existing prejudices. Whereas the old Saint-Simonians saw the

6 Ibid., pp. 79–80. 7 Ibid., pp. 84–85. 8 Ibid., p. 93. 9 Ibid., pp. 93–94.

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declining aristocracy and the Catholic Church as the source of the prejudices against the formation of a unified and egalitarian society of rational and honest producers, the new Saint-Simonians identified Marxism as the source of modern prejudices and totalitarianism threatening democracy in Europe.10 The new Saint-Simonian society did not last long. In 1997, as Marxism and communism seemed to have been defeated theoretically and politically, the new Saint-Simonian Society ceased to exist. Some historians consider the end of the new Saint-Simonian Foundation as the end of the French intellectuals. According to this view, the intellectuals emerged within the public debates in the process of the formation of the nation-state because they could contribute to the formation of a distinct national culture, national language and national consciousness against other nations and states. As long as the class and political conflicts divided the state from society, the intellectuals could use their critical ability to determine the course of the conflicts for a socialist future. But as the automation caused the transfer of different branches of industry to countries with cheap labor since the 1970s, the working-class’s dreams for a socialist future came to an end. As the age of the industrial working class was over the new generation of the young literati and the students of higher education who were going to become writers, scholars, philosophers, journalists, and politicians refrained from intellectual criticism and radical politics to secure their future career. The young educated people who became communication advisers to the statesmen and political parties did not want to become the emancipators of the oppressed classes.11 Some of the communication advisers of the 1980s and 1990s were the radical intellectuals of the 1960s and early 1970s. The intellectual environment after the 1970s is reminiscent of the intellectual environment described by Sorel, in which the Deryfusrads were promoting their political career within the state bureaucracy. The intellectual shift in the late 1970s led the French intellectuals to seek the good aspects of French colonialization; they claimed that without colonialism, the colonized societies could not develop their state institutions, education, and health care and considered all these as the gifts of colonialism to the colonized world. The intellectual shift headed toward a new universalism which relates the values of universal reason and individual liberty in the formerly colonized

10 Sand, The End of the French Intellectual, p. 178. 11 Ibid., pp. 180–184.

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societies as the legacies of colonialism. This revisionist approach toward universalism and colonialism leads Alain Finkielkraut to remind European intellectuals that they should defend the universality of the Western democratic values while these values are under attack by the particularism of the new European citizens of Muslim and African origin.12 Finkielkraut reminds the European and non-European intellectuals of the urgency of recognizing the progressive sides of colonialism because, without colonialism, the colonized people could not have built their modern states or even think about the universal reason and individual liberty.13 Thanks to the media, the former radical intellectuals who had rejected the socialist utopia because of its totalitarian contents, began to celebrate the existing social order. Bernard-Henri Lévy, the most visible media intellectuals, since the early 1980s, claimed that socialist and Marxist politics were the expression of a collective desire for obedience, slavery, and totalitarianism. He said in 1977: “If I were an encyclopedist, I would dream of writing in a dictionary for the year 2000; Socialism, noun, cultural genre, born in Paris in 1848, death in Paris in 1968.”14 It has been said that the function of the media intellectuals has been entertaining and distraction of the people from paying attention to the economic and political forces that are exploiting their labor and ignoring their real needs. Hence, the media intellectuals enable capitalism to protect the system by drowning people “in an ocean of pseudo-events.” These media intellectuals have learned to be entertaining, authoritative, and provocative within the limits of the accepted discourse. Since they are aware of the limits of their freedom of expression, they never challenge the ideological and political consensus.15 As the media intellectuals became the dominant intellectual voice, they produced and promoted a preemptive discourse of fear that calls upon the politicians to administrate the social and political effects of the fear that continuously keeps society in shock. A recent product of the preemptive discourse of fear is Submission by Michel Houllebecq, which is reminiscent of the xenophobic dystopias of Émile Driant in L’Invasion noir (1895) and L’Invasion jaune (1905). The

12 Alain Finkielkraut, La Défaite De La Pensée (Paris: Galimard, 1987), pp. 109–131. 13 Ibid., pp. 66–67. 14 Bernard-Henri Lévy, La Berbarie à Visage Humain (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1977), p. 11. 15 Sand, The End of the French Intellectual, pp. 191–192.

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difference between Driant from Houllebecq is that the former indicated the emergence of the French intellectual, whereas the latter indicates the end of the French intellectual.16 Houellebecq’s book portraits the political takeover of the Muslims in France, a country with millions of Muslim citizens with zero political influence of the believers in Islam. However, instead of being presented as a joke, the media presented the book as a cultural event of great significance. What Submission says about Muslims is nothing but the repetition of Édouard Drumont in La France juive (1886). Contemporary French intellectuals consider Houllebecq’s book in the same way that French people considered Drumont’s book until World War II; a “legitimate, normal and interesting” book. In contemporary Europe. What is surprising is that the same people who criticize the demonization of the Jews before World War II, disregard or even contribute to the systematic demonization of the Muslim population.17 One of the changes in contemporary Europe is the conceptualization of the European culture as the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition, something neither Christians nor the Jews knew anything about at least in the nineteenth century. The popes who referred, until the late 1950s, to the Jews as perfidis Judaeis knew nothing about this tradition. The theoretical flow of the Judeo-Christian tradition has not prevented the new Judeo-Christian atheists from imposing their hegemony on the public sphere in France and the rest of Europe by the end of the twentieth century. What is ironic about this fabricated tradition is that the atheists of yesterday use the Judeo-Christian tradition against the Muslim citizens of Europe.18 Simone Weil and Alain Finkielkraut are both French intellectuals of Jewish origin. But Weil, who died before Finkielkraut was born, had a different approach to her Frenchness. Whereas Fnkielkraut who considers himself an inheritor of the Judo-Christian tradition and expects the people from the formerly colonized lands to ba grateful to France for bringing civilization to them, Wiel who did not consider herself a part of the Judo-Christian tradition, was ashamed of being French whenever she met “an Indochinese, an Algerian or a Moroccan.” Wiel desired to ask them for forgiveness for being unable as a French citizen to stop all the pains, humiliations, and suffering they had experienced. She was aware

16 Ibid., p. 211. 17 Ibid., pp. 217–219. 18 Ibid., pp. 229–232.

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that it was in the name of its citizens that the French state was doing all its atrocities in the colonized territories.19 In the age of the Judeo-Christian tradition, instead of Simone Weil, we have Bernard-Henri Lévy, who, in the 1980s, assists the Mujahedin fanatics in Afghanistan to defeat communism but discovers in the 1990s that Islam is the greatest threat against the West.20 Endorsing Sarkozy, who describes those, who took part in the Youth Riot of 2005 in France, as “gangs of scumbags,” Finkielkraut portrays the riot as an ethnic-religious revolt of Blacks, Arabs, and Muslims against France’s republican values. According to Fnkielkraut, the 2005 revolt was caused by the failure of the educational system to teach the young people coming from the formerly colonized world that colonialism was more than exploitation and pillaging the colonized people. It was also about bringing “civilization to savages.”21 Books such as L’Identité Malheureuse (2013) by Finkielkraut and Le Suicide francais by Éric Zemmour give the impression that thanks to the Muslim population, France is on the verge of cultural and political collapse. These two French authors are sons of parents who immigrated to France when the country was experiencing immense prosperity, and a well-functioning welfare state was ruling the society. Now, as French intellectuals, they depict the young French of Muslim origin, who are experiencing economic deprivation and social exclusion but do not have access to any ideological and political means to express their discontent and rage, as criminals.22 These antiimmigrant voices are loud in contemporary France because mass media chose to present them as public intellectuals and endorse their discourse. Worshiping a France of the past that is the figment of their imagination, these intellectuals consider the French citizens of Muslim and African origin as guests who should respect the French society as their host. When these intellectuals expect the state to protect the nation’s common identity against the immigrants, they repeat Maurice Barrès, who, in 1898, described the Jewish immigrants as the invading “parasite.” Barrès asked the state to protect the nation against the Jewish invasion because, despite

19 Ibid., p. 235. 20 Ibid., pp. 239–240. 21 Ibid., pp. 243–244. 22 Ibid., pp. 248–249.

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their apparent assimilation in society since the Revolution, the “Jews have maintained their distinctive character.”23 Arendt argued that in the nineteenth century Europe, many Jews who considered the price of becoming parvenus too high preferred to remain, pariah, because as pariahs, they could at least enjoy their freedom and untouchability. However, since the late 1970s, many intellectuals preferred being parvenu intellectuals than pariah intellectuals, for the simple reason that the latter would not have any visibility. There emerged celebrated French intellectuals such as Andre Glucksmann, Bernard-Henri Lévy and Alain Finkielkraut, whose celebrity status came after denouncing the revolutionary left as totalitarian. They were aware that as long as there are public debates, there are intellectual because the intellectual is the expression of the right to public debate.24 Levy claims that an intellectual is a man or woman who thinks, speaks, opines, and universalizes his or her opinion since the presence of the intellectual means that there is still hope for the world. Hence, the intellectual is an institution of democracy that is more valuable than the separation of powers; the intellectual guarantees freedom of expression, freedom of critique, and freedom of protest and rebellion.25 In the late 1970s, Benny Lévy, the former revolutionary gauchites interprets Sartre’s reading of Jewish history as the history of dispersion throughout the world and their contemporary reunification in the state of Israel. Whereas the Jewish dispersion indicates the beginning of human history, the Jewish union indicates the end of the history of humanity.26 Benny Lévy interprets Sartre’s conception of hope as an action that is directed toward the realization of a goal in the future. This hope lies at the heart of this history of dispersion and reunion of the Jews.27 But hope is always associated with the figure of the intellectual as a fellow traveler. Unlike a political party that neither possesses nor seeks the truth, the intellectual “tries to think the truth” and hopes that the Party will find it useful. Sartre predicted that with the disappearance of the radical

23 Ibid., pp. 250–255. 24 Bernard-Henri Lévy, Éloge des Intellectuels (Paris: Grasset, 1987), p. 59. 25 Ibid., pp. 60–61. 26 Jean-Paul, Sartre and Benny Lévy, Hope Now: The 1980s Conversation (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 51. 27 Ibid., pp. 56–57.

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leftist parties, the intellectuals as fellow travelers would be replaced by the mass movements with specific goals, in which the concept of the fellow traveler does not make any sense because it was the communist party that created the condition of the emergence of the fellow traveler.28 Hence without the party, there would not be any intellectual. Even in the absence of the party and the intellectual, the left can survive. Any radical politics depends on the existence of some leftist stance. However, if the left wants to survive, it has to initiate a new approach toward democracy. Rather than exploring the distinction between direct and indirect democracy, the left should focus on the fraternal aspects of democracy both as a form of government and a way of life.29 In response on whether Sartre remains true to the conception of violence and its redemptive power that he discusses in his introduction to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, Sartre reminds Benny Lévy that the French settlers were forced to return to France through violence because they never considered a peaceful solution for Algeria. Endorsing his earlier view on the Algerian violence, Sartre argues that the colonized man draws his humanity from violence because he is “the son of violence.” Hence, the Frenchmen who expected Algerians to appeal to non-violence means of struggle while French colonizers were using violence against the colonized people were nothing but the advocates of colonialism.30 Regarding the universality of Jewish messianism and its relation to the human fraternity, Sartre argues that non-Jews could use this universality for revolutionary purposes and the building of a new society in which individuals do not subjugate, exploit, or oppress others. Finally, Sartre is disillusioned with the European political situation of the 1970s, which indicates the ideological and political decline of the left, and the ascendency of right-wing politics.31

28 Ibid., pp. 62–63. 29 Ibid., p. 83. 30 Ibid., pp. 91–95. 31 Ibid., pp. 106–109.

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Orientalism and Cultural Left It is in this political climate of the retreat of the left and the strong dominance of the rightist politics that Edward Said’s Orientalism is published. When Said published his book, he experienced that his Arab and Palestinian origin had made him politically non-existent because he was only allowed to express himself either “as a nuisance or as an Oriental.”32 Said argues that the nineteenth-century colonial expansion created the condition for the European men of culture to represent the non-Western world through a discourse he calls Orientalism as the expression of “a relationship of power” between the Occident and the Orient.33 From the nineteenth century to World War II, Britain and France had been the guardians of Orientalism. In the postwar era, America became the guardian and advocate of Orientalism. Said argues that Orientalism’s main argument is that the Orient is unable to tell her history.34 As the dominant system of production and conservation of knowledge about the Orient since the nineteenth century, Orientalism consolidated the cultural hegemony of the West over the East. Orientalism as a particular system of knowledge production not only convinced the Westerners of their scientific grasp of the Orient but also the Orientals of their own backwardness vis-à-vis the Europeans.35 The hegemonic position of the Orientalist discourse enables even the state-sponsored military research to represent itself as “objective scholarship” and reject every expression of dissent as “political” and unscientific.36 Orientalism enabled British politicians to argue that the Orientals tend toward despotism because of their inability for self-governance. Hence they need colonization to integrate them into the civilized world in which people govern themselves.37 According to Cromer, the governor of Egypt, because of their lack of logical faculty, the Orientals are unable to draw “the most obvious conclusions from any simple premises of which they may admit the truth.”38 Said argues

32 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978), p. 27. 33 Ibid., p. 1. 34 Ibid., pp. 4–6. 35 Ibid., pp. 7–8. 36 Ibid., p. 11. 37 Ibid., pp. 32–35. 38 Ibid., p. 38.

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that Orientalism was not a simple rationalization of the statements made by the colonialists such as Cromer because Orientalism succeeded in presenting itself as a scientific discipline that produces systematic and accurate knowledge about the Orient.39 As Orientalism succeeded in establishing itself as scientific knowledge, it became a means of controlling both the Orient and the Oriental.40 As a result of the success of Orientalism to shape the way of seeing, thinking, and saying about the Oriental, everything Oriental has been described as imitation of an original Western source.41 To keep the validity of Orientalism, the Orientalists reminded their politicians that invasion and possession of the Orient needed genuine knowledge about the Orient and its people. The hegemonic role of Orientalism in the contemporary world leads both imperialists and antiimperialists to rely on the Orientalist knowledge in their arguments.42 According to Said, Orientalism will keep its hegemonic position until “the Oriental silence” is broken, and the Orientals talk back.43 Whereas during the peak of colonialism, Orientalism assumed an unchanging Orient, by the end of World War I, Gibb suggested reconstruction of Orientalism. He wanted Orientalism to become an interdisciplinary scientific field that synthesizes traditional Orientalism with social sciences. But Gibb’s interdisciplinary Orientalism never retreated from the old Orientalists saying that the “Orientals have never understood the meaning of self-government the way we do.”44 Said’s Orientalism was one of many indications of the change from the political left to the cultural left . Instead of the working class and the masses, the cultural left addressed scholars and intellectuals. Said expectation was modest. He hoped that his book on Orientalism would contribute to the mutual understanding between various cultures so that they live in peace and harmony. As the discourse on multiculturalism dominated the public discourse in Europe and the United States in the 1980s and early 1990s, conservative scholars such as Allan Bloom began to argue that the choice was not “between a repressive Western culture 39 Ibid., p. 46. 40 Ibid., p. 60. 41 Ibid., p. 62. 42 Ibid., p. 92. 43 Ibid., pp. 94–95. 44 Ibid., p. 107.

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and a multicultural paradise, but between culture and barbarism.”45 In reality, the academic culturalist left became paper radicals or post-political leftists.46 This paper radicalism led Spivak to assert that “Western intellectual production is, in many ways, complicit with Western international economic interests.”47 Such assertions could not make any impact on politics since such assertions were not a part of a solid argument. Even the authors of such critical assertions were not motivated to demonstrate the assertions because the culturist left in Western universities were without exception members of “a new, transnational, academic class” in the humanities and social sciences who shared identical pedagogical methods and theoretical discourses. In 1979, Alvin Gouldner described this academic trend as the emerging international cultural bourgeoisie that, in alliance with the “bureaucratic power,” monopolizes the tides of general knowledge and the “critical discourse” on the global level to protect “its own interests.” Now, three decades after Gouldner’s observation, public intellectuals are replaced by academics who are connected and promoted through “an international network of universities” and address one another. The current academic situation is the realization of what Bourdieu wanted to create; academic globalization or an international of new “philosophes.” This international of philosophes included a “complex network of international exchanges between holders of dominant academic posts.”48 As the cultural left undermined the critique of capital and bourgeois culture, it became the ideology of the new Western philanthropy and NGOs that promote humanitarian intervention to save the victims of inhumanities around the world.49 Suspecting the nature of the humanitarian intervention promoted by the new-philosophers such as Bernard-Henri Levy, Deleuze argued; “The victims had to be people who think and live in a completely different way, only then could they provide a basis for the actions of those who are now weeping in their name,

45 Francois Gusset, French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze & Co Transformed the Intellectual Life of The United States (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), p. 180. 46 Ibid., p. 190. 47 Ibid., p. 201. 48 Ibid., p. 290. 49 Ibid., p. 314.

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thinking in their name, and handing out lessons in their name.”50 While the “new-philosophers” claimed that they dared to rise against intellectual conformity of the left, Bourdieu said, “true daring belongs to those who have the courage to defy the conformity of the anti-conformity.”51 As the large entertainment corporations and cultural studies in the United States started to focus on the “transgressive talents of rock stars,” the depoliticization of the cultural studies was completed. The result was the emergence of the cultural studies that, in the name of anti-elitism, favored cultural capitalism and defended popular success as the criterion of artistic quality.52 Alongside the new cultural trend, there emerged the new racism.

New Racism Foucault describes the nineteenth-century socialists as the first modern racists whose ideology included the idea of a healthy socialist society freed from the rotten and decadent people at the top. This racism is evident in the nineteenth-century vampire novels that presented aristocracy as the beast to be destroyed by the bourgeois hero who got rid of the vampire with empty hands. As modern anti-Semitism became popular in the socialist movement, it adopted the same line of story with a Jew as the vampire.53 However, Balibar argues that racism is a product of a racist community that divides its members into different communities. The division takes place at the moment one segment of society divides society into different communities and leaves a particular section of the society as the victims of racism. That is why there is no racism without theory.54 Whereas the old racism was a result of the Europeans moving to Asia and Africa, the new racism is a result of the Asians and Africans coming to Europe. What is peculiar with the new racism is that it is “racism without races” because it does not care about biological heredity but is focused on

50 Ibid., p. 314. 51 Ibid., p. 315. 52 Ibid., p. 337. 53 Foucault, Power/Knowledge, p. 223. 54 Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race Nation and Class: Ambiguous

Identities (New York: Verso, 1991), p. 18.

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cultural differences. The new racism does not assume the superiority of one people vis-à-vis other people. It claims that it wants to protect the lifestyle, traditions, and culture of his people.55 Here culture functions as nature because it confines particular members of the community into an immutable but invisible lineage.56 The new differentialist racism advocates the separation of cultures and protection of borders because it assumes that aggression, collective violence, and xenophobia are results of the lack of respect for the existing cultural distances.57 The new French racist divides French citizens into those with foreign origin dominated by a communitarian but particularistic and primitive culture and those with French origin inclined toward individualistic but universalistic and progressive culture.58 There are two types of new racism; the exclusive racism that is the racism of extermination and elimination, and the inclusive racism that is the racism of oppression and exploitation. Whereas the exclusive racism aims to purify the social body of the inferior races, inclusive racism seeks to structure the society hierarchically. Following Fanon, who defined racism as a structure, Balibar considers racism as a social relation which cannot be reduced to the behavior of racist subjects.59 The new racism has its origin in the competition between different colonial nations on their humaneness. Whereas French colonizers assumed their colonization as more humane because of its assimilatory character, the British colonizers were proud of being respectful of other cultures. Hence, each colonizer could present themselves as good whites and blame the other for racism.60 What the old and new racisms have in common is the idea that nonWesterners are incapable of governing themselves. Balibar argues that whereas the nation-states emerged to control the population movements within contested territories in Europe, the new racism wants all European states to control the movements of the non-European population into the European territories.61 Balibar claims that new racism is a result of 55 Ibid., p. 21. 56 Ibid., p. 22. 57 Ibid., pp. 22–23. 58 Ibid., pp. 24–25. 59 Ibid., pp. 38–41. 60 Ibid., p. 43. 61 Ibid., pp. 48–49.

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the failure of the full “nationalization of society” that resulted in labeling the new European proletariat of Arab and African origin as immigrants and presenting them as a threat to the European societies.62 What Balibar calls racial community is similar to what Arendt calls tribal nationalism because both consider the nation as a big family.63 What the state should do to protect the big family is the organization of the archives of filiations and associations. From now on, the community holds together not through common good or law, but the coming social conflict.64 Balibar ascribes a class signification to the new racism because, as a discourse of contempt and practice of discrimination, it legitimizes “the inequality of social classes as inequalities of nature.” Slavery, as the primitive form of racism, allowed the slave owners to represent the potential slaves as inferior races who were incapable of generating a self-governing society.65 But the racism of the bourgeois era made the proletariat the target of its racism because the proletariat represented a “politically threatening population.”66 As a threat to the established social order, the proletariat was not only excluded from politics but was denied citizenship on the ground that they were not fully human. Whenever the dominated classes challenge the dominant classes, the latter tries to divide the dominated and then relocate the indicators of dangerousness from the proletariat to the new dominated groups such as the colonial subjects and immigrants. The contempt for manual labor as the indicators of dangerousness has made a decisive impact on new racism. As many of the second or third generations of immigrants leave the working class, they become the target of new racism because they challenge the racist community that uses every means of domestication to keep them in their place.67 What empowers this new racism is the “self-racialization of the working class,” whose “desire to escape from the condition of exploitation” leads them to “project on to foreigners their fears and resentment,

62 Ibid., pp. 51–54. 63 Ibid., p. 100. 64 Ibid., pp. 69–70. 65 Ibid., pp. 206–207. 66 Ibid., pp. 208–209. 67 Ibid., pp. 210–213.

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despair and defiance.”68 The fact that every social problem such as unemployment, accommodation, social security, schooling, public health, social mores or criminality are presented as something related to the presence of immigrants in the public debates indicates how narrow the public space has become and how perverted intellectual and political debates have become in Europe. There are traces of the new racism in the French worker movement, from the 1950s to 1970s when the worker unions and the Communist Party defended the practice that reserved the skilled and supervisory jobs for French workers and unskilled jobs for immigrant workers.69 However, the object of the new racism is not merely immigrant laborers but exiled intellectuals, whose status Edward Said described in the late 1970s as politically non-existent. Rancière reminds us what the so-called anti-racist intellectuals never call into question are stigmatization, precarization, and exclusion of the immigrants that as the expression of daily discrimination constitutes the new racism in theory and practice. To understand the new racism, we examine the so-called leftist intellectuals’ interpretation and critique of the racism of the state and society because the interplay between the state and the intelligentsia preserves, renews and consolidates new racism as theory and practice. What makes the new racism different from the old racism is that the masses, the crowd, and the mob are unnecessary to implement it, because it is racism from above. When the leftist intellectuals accuse governments and political parties of using the racist and xenophobic sentiment of a large segment of the population for political or electoral gains, they assume that racism is a passion of the ordinary and backward people who have not understood the cosmopolitan nature of the new globalized world. Hence, when political parties push governments to ban Muslim veil in public places and make restrictive immigration laws, the leftist intellectuals denounce governments and parties for exploiting the racist passion of the masses who because of their lack of rational thinking and narrow nationalism blame the immigrants for everything that is wrong with the society. Following the leftist intellectuals’ definition of racism as a popular passion, not only the extreme right but the anti-imperialist leftists have rationalized and humanized the supposed racism of the ordinary people and the working class as the expression of their sincere opposition to the

68 Ibid., p. 214. 69 Ibid., pp. 222–225.

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immigration that provides the means of the cheap labor force for the capitalists and see how the increasing criminality in society is a result of the misconducts of the immigrants. These rightist and leftist friends of the people claim that people may formulate themselves imprecisely, but they are not racists. As the anti-racist left expects the state to counter the people’s irrationality, the state can represent itself as “the face of rationality,” by making new laws and taking new measures to reduce the crimes and various wrongdoings of the immigrants as a means of reducing racism. In addition to restricting the number of immigrants who reach European soil and punishing the immigrants whose criminality and misconducts provoke racism, the state as an institution that creates and controls identities is watchful regarding spontaneous changes within and between the recognized and established identities that may call the logic of identity into question. As the logic of identity faces uncertainty, the actions of the political subjects, and the fate of the state become unpredictable. Since the restrictions against the undocumented immigrants who reach the European states cannot guarantee the security of the state and society, the state and the leftist intellectuals include millions of citizens of Muslim and African origin into the category of immigrants because they lack the qualities that make them truly French, German, British or Norwegian. Whereas the state claims that it recognizes all citizens as equal before the law, it stigmatizes a huge number of citizens whose practice, according to the state, violates the principle of equality that constitutes citizenship. Finally, the state and its intellectuals remind all citizens that their citizenship does not make them equal citizens, and those who forget this fact would pay the consequences. Today’s racism is thus primarily a logic of the state and not a popular passion. And this state logic is primarily supported not by… backward social groups but by a substantial part of the intellectual elite…Discrimination is no longer based on arguments about superior and inferior races. They [the intellectuals] argue in the name of the struggle against “communitarianism,” universality of the law and the equality of all citizens before the law, and the equality of the sexes.70

70 Jacques Rancière, Racism: A Passion from Above, MR Online, September 23, 2010.

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Based on these contradictory criteria, the state keeps its right to award and remove identities. It is not the frustrated white trash that legitimizes the new racism, but state racism and the racism of the intellectuals.71

The Intellectual’s Multicultural Society In the early 1990s, while the new racism as theory and practice was emerging, Said tried to redefine the intellectual as an exiled individual who holds unconventional opinions and cannot be co-opted by governments or corporations because he or she speaks about subjects that the public prefers to forget.72 For Said, the intellectual is neither the spokesperson of a social movement nor a “consensus-builder” but a skeptical consciousness that by exposing the dominant formulas and clichés enables us to make moral judgments about our actions or inactions.73 For Said, the increasing presence of Muslim immigrants in Europe has called into question the homogeneity of European societies. These two facts make the intellectual think about the causes of immigration and the impacts of the immigrants on European culture and politics.74 Said believes that the European intellectuals and the immigrant in Europe have one thing in common, being an outsider. The intellectual knows, unlike the immigrant, that the presence of an outsider unsettles the insiders.75 The unsettling condition of the intellectuals and their acceptance of marginality enable them to reinvent themselves uninterruptedly and think, say, and do things according to their own pattern. The intellectuals’ marginality means that they cannot be domesticated because instead of seeking comfortable positions, they take risks to make changes.76 In his Reith Lectures in 1993, Speaking Truth to Power, Said argues that the intellectual can never compromise freedom of opinion and expression because freedom of expression is the main principle of the

71 Ibid. 72 Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual (New York: First Vintage Books Edition, April 1996), p. 11. 73 Ibid., p. 23. 74 Edward W. Said, Intellectual Exile: Expatriates and Marginals Author(s), Grand

Street, No. 47 (Autumn, 1993), p. 114. 75 Ibid., pp. 116–117. 76 Ibid., pp. 122–124.

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intellectual’s vocation through which the intellectuals can defend justice for nations and individuals.77 As the defender of justice, the intellectual cannot expect to be promoted by the media and receive honorary degrees and big prizes. The only reward that the intellectual who speaks the truth to power receives is loneliness. Nevertheless, he reminds the intellectual that to cause the right changes, speaking truth to power must take place at the right time.78

The Intellectual and Cultural Imperialism In his Culture and Imperialism, Said investigates how power promotes some narratives while blocking others from being shaped and developed.79 For Said, Western intellectuals who repeat Joseph Conrad’s assumption that the natives who rebel against their colonial masters use the same languages and the same thought as their masters because they are the creations of their masters, reveals the relationship between power and narratives.80 That is why even Western intellectuals with antiimperialist claims such as Graham Greene in The Quiet American, to Constantin Costa-Gavras in Missing, repeat Conrad’s belief that the West is the source of all life, meaning, and action. Whereas Conrad expressed his view while there was little resistance against colonialism and imperialism, contemporary Western intellectuals are either active participants or passive advocates of the imperialist policies abroad.81 Said believes that contemporary Western intellectuals take the static notion of identity constituted by imperialism to divide humanity into opposing categories as a fact. But he believes, as well, that his Orientalism inspired new perspectives that, while opposing the orientalist approach, bring the narratives of enlightenment and emancipation a step forward to empower women, minorities, immigrants toward a multiculturalist society at home and abroad. Multiculturalism is, according to Said, the name of the political and cultural struggle of the excluded people who fight for a

77 Edward Said, Reith Lectures 1993: Representations of an Intellectual Lecture 5: Speaking Truth to Power Transmission, 9 August 1993—BBC Radio, p. 5. 78 Ibid., pp. 8–9. 79 Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), p. xiii. 80 Ibid., p. xviii. 81 Ibid., pp. xix–xxiii.

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dignified place in their society. Said assumes that because of their experience of exile and marginalization, Western intellectuals, in particular, understand the significance of multiculturalism for “both sides of the imperial divide.”82 The intellectuals understand that the struggles over ideas and imaginations cannot be separated from the struggle over geography. Said argues that imperialism, as a regime of control and domination of distant societies, receives the same support from the citizens of the imperialist countries as the colonialism received from the citizens of the colonialist countries for two reasons. First, they are convinced that their states, as imperialist states, rule the inferior or less advanced people. Second, they are satisfied with the material profit that the states bring home.83 However, in the aftermath of losing Vietnam and Iran, Western intellectuals and policymakers began to rethink the process of decolonization. They tried to find out why, despite the extraordinary efforts of the West, the colonized societies failed to undergo full modernization. They concluded that the uneducated colonized masses that could not adopt progress and modernization became involved in the struggles for decolonization and interrupted the project of modernization. This revisionist approach to colonization and decolonization argues that Western colonial powers should have been more persistent and should have kept direct control over the colonized people.84 Said considers the contemporary popularity of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as an indication of a new yearning for the return of the past because the imperialist system of representation will be a decisive factor in keeping territories if the West regains the formerly colonized territories.85 Said refers to an ideological shift in the 1970s and 1980s that delegitimized the narratives of emancipation while promoting issues and problems which could be resolved on the local level. Said refers to Foucault’s analysis of power and localization of resistance as a major factor that convinced Western intellectuals to stop supporting revolutions abroad because revolutions would bring new barbaric regimes.86 With the retreat of the intellectuals from their previous political engagements, the essentialization of other 82 Ibid., pp. xxiv–xxvii. 83 Ibid., pp. 7–10. 84 Ibid., pp. 19–22. 85 Ibid., pp. 24–25. 86 Ibid., p. 27.

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cultures became prevalent. Theories of essentialism assumed that African, Iranian, Chinese, Jewish, or German experience is incomprehensible for those who are not parts of these regions or cultures.87 Against this essentialism, there emerged Western academics and public discourses that argue that since knowledge about imperialism did not help the colonized people to overcome their wretched situation, anti-imperialist discourse is useless. As the advocates of these discourses desire the return of the old imperialism and a new era of Western domination, the orientalist scholars such as Bernard Lewis criticizes the students and professors who tried, in 1989, to include the texts of non-Europeans and women authors and scholars in the curriculum. Lewis claimed that such attempts would not only lead to the demise of Western culture and the restoration of slavery, polygamy, and child marriage but terminate the “curiosity about other cultures” as the exclusive characteristic of the West.88 Strangely, Said tries to represent a moderate perspective between two extremes represented by people such as Lewis and Fanon. Whereas the former represents the politics of empire, the latter is the expression of anti-imperialist nationalism.89 Said observes that this moderate perspective that his Orientalism promoted has helped a younger generation of scholars in the West and in the formerly colonized societies to challenge the authority of the so-called “detached Western observer”90 and “to take a fresh look at their collective histories.”91 For Said, there is an intellectual and political convergence between the new perspective he has inspired and the new tendencies in psychoanalysis, linguistics, and Nietzschean philosophy since they all call into question “the authority and the stability of established canons” and have anti-war and anti-imperialist inclinations.92 This new perspective, enable us to understand that a particular style of life in a colonial state is related to its particular economic activities in a particular colonized land.93 Hence, whereas Austin’s Mansfield Park reveals the relationship between domestic tranquility and the exercise of authority on the 87 Ibid., p. 32. 88 Ibid., pp. 35–37. 89 Ibid., p. 39. 90 Ibid., pp. 50–51. 91 Ibid., p. 41. 92 Ibid., p. 61. 93 Ibid., pp. 65–66.

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international space, it is silent about the people who are held in the situation of inferiority and pay the price for the domestic tranquility of the colonizer. According to Said, colonial ambitions began with the assumption that the native was too backward and incompetent to be independent and equal to the colonizer.94 That is why in the educational system designed for India, “students were taught not only English literature but the inherent superiority of the English race.” The ethnographic observations in Africa, Asia, and Australia that generated anthropology and linguistics demonstrated the superiority of the white colonizers and legitimized their domination of these territories.95 For Ruskin, the English youth had two choices; they either become colonists to enforce the power of England throughout the world or witness its disappearance.96 According to the British imperialists such as Kipling, since the natives could distinguish between right and wrong, they would “accept colonial rule so long as it is the right kind.” Hence, finding native subjects who affirmed the European self-image and accepted the European judgment on the backward and degenerated nature of their people and society became the task of a new discipline called anthropology.97 Anthropological studies informed the colonial rulers “on the manners and mores of the native people” and advised them how to deal with them.98 However, regardless of how useful the native anthropologists were to the colonial power, they never ascended to the position of white anthropologists. The native anthropologist might be “Lovable and admirable,” but he will never become an equal partner of the white anthropologists such as Colonel Creighton. The strength of the white anthropologist lies, according to Kipling, in his supposedly disinterested and universal norms, the same norms through which Britain has governed Indians. Kipling claimed that the British Empire, unlike the Roman Empire, based on theft and profit, relied on science and law. That is why, despite his significant role in the Great Game, Creighton does not seek profit seeks but remains true to his call as an anthropologist and tries to understand and

94 Ibid., pp. 80–87. 95 Ibid., p. 101. 96 Ibid., p. 105. 97 Ibid., p. 149. 98 Ibid., p. 152.

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explain the complex aspects of society.99 Comus, who wanted the French empire to last forever, implies the same idea when in the peak of the Algerian struggle for independence, claims that there has never been an Algerian nation.100 Such views led the people who were seeking independence from imperialism to narrate their own history.101 Said detects an ideological transformation in the Middle East Studies Association in the 1980s, which indicates that a new generation of scholars who, while critical of the Orientalist tradition, contribute to the debates on democracy, human rights, and women’s rights in the Arab world. He believes that together with the similar critical and democratic orientations in the African, Indian, Caribbean, and Latin American studies, the new generation of scholars will revisit colonial agents such as T. E. Lawrence and Louis Massignon who while serving the imperial interests of Britain and France presented themselves to the Arab people as the sincere advocates of their causes. The new generation of scholars would investigate how these agents of imperialism gained the trust of the Arab people and then exploited that trust to participate in dividing the Arab world between their own countries.102 Said ascribes certain views to Fanon and presents them as problems that require critical examination, such as Fanon wants to unite the European and the native together in an anti-imperialist struggle to liberate humanity from imperialism or Fanon’s propositions indicate a “return to a pre-imperial period” as cultural resistance to imperialism. Then he describes this resistance as a form of nativism and finds the echo of such nativism in the Occidentosis ( Westoxication): A Plague from the West (1961–1962), by the Iranian author Jalal Ale-Ahmad, as a wholesale condemnation of the West. Whereas Said labels Fanon’s work as nativism, Guha and Chomsky are the balanced critical minds who demystify “the interests at work” in the academic and journalistic literature on nonWestern societies and thus expose the relationship between power and narrative.103

99 Ibid., pp. 153–155. 100 Ibid., p. 179. 101 Ibid., pp. 215–216. 102 Ibid., pp. 261–263. 103 Ibid., pp. 274–276.

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For Said, the universalist claim of many cultural theorists does not prevent them from assuming that there are superior cultures with a historical duty to represent and guide the inferior cultures. These cultural theorists who take the universality of contemporary Western literature for granted, reject the African literature for its lack of universality and tell African writers that they should work hard to reach Western universality in literature and other branches of culture. Said claims that Western critics who assume that they have the authority to determine whether non-Westerners have arrived at universality or not, assume as well that universality is a destination to which Western writers have arrived long ago. In this regard, Said exonerates Fanon of nativism and describes him, together with Foucault, as those who analyzed the problematic of confinement in the “Western system of knowledge and discipline.” Said even prefers Fanon’s approach for his study of the colonized and metropolitan societies as related entities, whereas Foucault disenchantment with the 1960s movements and the Iranian Revolution led him to relinquish the study of the social wholes and politics for the study of the individual and “microphysics of power.” Said claims that despite their claim to universality, European critical theory and Marxism failed anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggles because they never tried to reveal the unity of culture and imperialism in the West. Said believes that his contrapuntal approach to history not only exposes the unity between culture and imperialism but demonstrates the interconnections between Western and non-Western experiences.104 Said believes that his contrapuntal approach reveals how the new Western ideology assumes a “vast gulf between the civilized West, with its traditional commitment to human dignity, liberty, and self-determination, and the barbaric brutality of those who for some reason perhaps defective genes fail to appreciate the depth of this historic commitment.”105 For Said, such arrogant views might be the reason that the Middle Eastern elites have not been interested in knowing America even though they rely on the United States and prefer conspiracy theories that assume the United States determines every major event in the Middle East.106 However, Said is hopeful that against the policy-oriented

104 Ibid., pp. 277–279. 105 Ibid., p. 284. 106 Ibid., p. 294.

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Middle Eastern intellectuals who follow their governments’ dictate,107 there are intellectuals whose critique of the motionless traditions, and political authoritarianism ensures the emergence of critical modernity in the Arab world. Said invested his hope in the intellectual movements that include Arab intellectuals among others that reject the givenness of identity, and argue that all representations are constructed by particular people through particular mechanisms to achieve particular purposes.108 The problem is, according to Said, the professionalism of the scholars who, while distancing themselves from the wider audience, address only experts and sell their expertise to universities and publishers.109 For Said, the recognition of interconnections between center and periphery, mainstream and margin, Westerner and non-Westerner, fundamentalism, and nativism will reduce war and conflicts globally because the state and imperialism get the benefits of such binaries. Said, finds Paul Virilio’s contrapuntal approach attractive because he argues that against the modern state’s occupation or colonization of the public space, there must be a liberating project of decolonization to free hospitals, universities, theaters, factories, churches, and even empty buildings from the state intrusion. However, Virilio ascribes nothing to the intellectuals in his liberation project of decolonization and liberation of the urban spaces from the state. He ascribes the agency, subjectivity to the downtrodden people such as migrant workers, refugees, blacks, immigrants, urban unlawful tenants, and students whose material situations will be affected by the decolonization of the urban space. On the contrary, for Said, liberation is an intellectual mission. Whereas in the past, it was only the established Western intellectuals such as Sartre who expressed their resistance to imperialism, in the present, it is the intellectuals, located between the imperialist and the native domains and languages, criticize and resist both imperialism and nativism.110 Said considers the intellectuals in exile as the new agents of critique and resistance because of their unique position, which includes, according to Theodor Adorno, their unanswerability in the established social and intellectual hierarchy, which makes everyone answerable. Hence, according to Said quoting Adorno,

107 Ibid., p. 303. 108 Ibid., p. 314. 109 Ibid., p. 321. 110 Ibid., p. 332.

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since the intellectual in exile “offers for sale something unique that no one wants to buy, [he] represents, even against his will, freedom from exchange.”111 Said finds the same non-conformity and humanity in Ali Shariati’s conceptualization of man as a constant migration. man, this dialectical phenomenon, is compelled to be always in motion…. Man, then, can never attain a final resting place and take up residence in God…. How disgraceful, then, are all fixed standards. Who can ever fix a standard? Man is a “choice,” a struggle, a constant. becoming. He is an infinite migration, a migration within himself, from clay to God; he is a migrant within his own soul.112

However, whereas Said sees in Shariati’s conceptualization of a “genuine potential for an emergent non-coercive culture,” he reminds us that Shariati speaks of “man” not of “woman,” who is aware of the concrete obstacles and thus takes concrete and precise steps toward a new beginning, which he characterizes as “genuinely radical efforts to start again….”113 While endorsing Shariati’s radical vision of starting again, he regrets that Shariati speaks of men and not women. But Said is wrong. Shariati uses the term Ensan which in the Persian refers to both men and women. Nevertheless, who is Shariati? He is known as the ideologue of the Iranian Revolution and Said never recognized this Revolution as a new beginning for the Iranian men and women.

111 Ibid., p. 333. 112 Ibid., p. 334. 113 Ibid.

CHAPTER 6

Toward the American New Century

One of the early English reflections on the concept of the intellectual was authored by the socialist activist John Spargo who defended the position of the intellectuals in the socialist movement as the continuation of Marx’s legacy.1 Marx, according to Spargo, has demonstrated that throughout the history of class struggles, always a section of the ruling class joins the revolutionary class to undermine the existing order. As the intellectuals distance themselves from the bourgeoisie, they lead the proletariat in the revolutionary struggle.2 Spargo claims that the essence of Marx’s teaching indicates that before changing the social system, workers must become worthy of power.3 The essence of this teaching is that socialist workers should rely on the intellectuals who understand Marx’s idea of revolution correctly.4 Spargo claims that the anti-intellectualism within the Socialist movement deprives the socialist movement of the thinkers and leaders it needs. He expects the proletariat and the socialist movements to embrace the intellectuals and obey their leadership. Otherwise,

1 John Spargo, Sidelights on Contemporary Socialism (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1911), p. 26. 2 Ibid., p. 32. 3 Ibid., pp. 43–44. 4 Ibid., p. 56.

© The Author(s) 2021 Y. Shahibzadeh, Public Intellectuals and Their Discontents, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56588-6_6

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they will be recruited and honored by the ruling class and the capitalists.5 Spargo criticizes those who misinterpret Marx’s saying that “the working class must achieve its own emancipation” because such views can mislead the uneducated segments of the proletariat to distance themselves from their leaders. The main problem of the anti-intellectualist tendencies within the socialist movement is, according to Spargo, that they are not members of the proletarians class but “lawyers without clients, authors without publishers, professors without chairs, ministers without pulpits,…”6 He contrasts Wilhelm “Weitling’s policy of action to Marx’s theoretical contribution,” as an example. Whereas Marx is presented as a bourgeois intellectual who confronts Weitling as a member of the proletariat, the fact that Weitling had stopped being an active worker and became an intellectual who had been making a living through writing long before his dispute with Marx, is fully ignored. Spargo argues that Marx established the International proletarian organization to remind the proletariat that they owed their class-conscious to the intellectuals. But ambitious intellectuals such as Bakunin who tried to replace Marx in the socialist movement and within this proletarian organization used anti-intellectualist jargons to achieve their goals. However, as Marx protested against the anti-intellectualism of his opponents, they called him despot, dictator, and bourgeois intellectual.7 Spargo considers the success of the socialist parties to enter into the legislative assemblies as the only means to improve the situation of the proletariat.8 Referring to Wilhelm Liebknecht’s view that working class includes all those who live “by means of their own labor, and who do not grow rich through the work of others,” Spargo claims that the achievement of socialism requires the unity of manual and intellectual workers.9 As mentioned previously, Spargo believed that if the proletariat does not appreciate the role of the intellectuals in the struggle for socialism, they will be recruited by the bourgeoisie. By becoming anti-communist and a member of the American

5 Ibid., p. 70. 6 Ibid., pp. 72–74. 7 Ibid., pp. 94–96. 8 Ibid., pp. 131–132. 9 Ibid., pp. 153–154.

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Republican Party in the mid-1920s, Spargo demonstrated the validity of his hypothesis.10 The significance of McCarthyism in American intellectual history lies in the fact that it targeted the critical mind for its alleged role in paving the way for communism to infiltrate universities and other public domains. McCarthyism’s anti-intellectual strategy reflected, to a certain extent, the popular sentiment toward the intellectuals as eggheads, a sentiment that was expressed in the 1956 presidential election and resulted in the victory of Dwight D. Eisenhower against Adlai Stevenson, who was known as the representative of the intellectuals. Eisenhower’s victory indicated the American people’s rejection of the intellectuals and revealed the gap between people and the intellectuals. Eisenhower described an intellectual as “a man who takes more words than are necessary to tell more than he knows ” in a speech at a Republican meeting in Los Angeles in 1954, which boosted American anti-intellectualism.11 While the American public was busy making the intellectuals the scapegoat for everything which went wrong in America in the 1950s, the Soviet Union launched the Sputnik. The event reminded the policymakers of the negative consequences of the American anti-intellectualism for their competition with the Communist world. As they became aware of the usefulness of the intellectuals, they included professors and intellectuals to offer their advice to the president.12 Similar to the French anti-intellectualists, the American anti-intellectualists were men of ideas. All intellectuals share moments of anti-intellectualism, but, according to Hofstadter, only “marginal intellectuals, would-be intellectuals, unfrocked or embittered intellectuals” become serious anti-intellectualists. Although democratic sentiments and passion for equality are the seeds of anti-intellectualism, these seeds are cultivated by the intellectuals who, for whatever reason, are not at the center of public attention and despise the intellectuals who get much public attention.13 The fact that there was an American president in the early 1900s, Theodore Roosevelt, who recognized the usefulness of the intellectual in the well-functioning of 10 Markku Routsila, John Spargo and American Socialism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 3. 11 Richard Hofstadter, Anti-intellectualism in American Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963), p. 10. 12 Ibid., pp. 4–5. 13 Ibid., pp. 21–23.

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government, makes the American anti-intellectualism of the 1950s a strange phenomenon. The pro-intellectual sentiment of the early twentieth century among the statesmen that turned the scholar into experts and established the progressive era indicated that the intellectuals and power could become close allies in a democracy. As the intellectuals became the experts who recognized the value of democracy, democracy discovered the value experts for its survival and growth. As the progressive era demonstrated the values of the intellectual as an agent of change, they played their historic role in Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal welfare state. The idea of the usefulness of the scholars had its origin in 1892 when the University of Wisconsin established the new School of Economics, Political Science, and History to respond to the practical needs of the growing industry, administration, and the state. In order to serve the people and the state, the university decided to remain impartial concerning particular class interests. Hence, rather than propaganda and ideologies, the university leaders expected the university to offer information, statistics, advice, skill, and training to both statesmen and citizens.14 But not everyone was happy with the strategy of the usefulness of the university since it could undermine the disinterestedness and autonomy of intellectual activities and learning.15 In 1912, Woodrow Wilson countered, in his presidential campaign, the idea that democracy is a government of experts because the government of experts indicates that people cannot govern themselves, and the people who cannot govern themselves are no longer free. Wilson assumed that ordinary workingmen have a political detector that they have acquired from their daily experience and use it to examine facts of life.16 The implementation of the New Deal (1933–1939) not only provided the intellectuals with jobs as lawyers, economists, civil servants, and researchers in the state agencies and research centers but enabled them to come to terms with the people. As the state institutions recruited unemployed artists, intellectuals, and college students in art and theater projects, and professors became the advisers and ideologists of the state, power, culture, and knowledge became inseparable in America.17

14 Ibid., pp. 198–200. 15 Ibid., p. 204. 16 Ibid., p. 210. 17 Ibid., p. 214.

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Although professors and experts defined the economic and social challenges, they never were in the position of making crucial decisions or running the country. But this did not prevent H. L. Mencken to describe the intellectual experts and professors taking part in the New Deal as the new princes and archbishops.18 Right before World War II, the intellectuals were accused of receiving too many prerogatives from the New Deal. This accusation or description caused a wave of anti-intellectualism in America, but as the War created more demands for expertise and scholarship, the state recruited more classicists and archaeologists. However, as the War ended, the intellectuals became of little use for both the state and the people.19 Hence, the defeat of Stevenson in the presidential election by Eisenhower was interpreted as the defeat of the intellectuals whose “aristocratic overtones” and their “strong leftist Socialistic ideas” with “Communistic loyalties” were frightening the electorates who considered themselves as the loyal advocates of democracy.20 Whereas Eisenhower preferred ordinary people who learn real lessons from their daily experience and were aloof toward the intellectuals and scholars who try to learn from reading and writing, John F. Kennedy, similar to Roosevelt, was convinced of the usefulness of the intellectuals and scholars for the practical needs of the state. Whereas Stevenson’s intellectual posture was indivisible from his “sensitivity and diffidence,” Kennedy combined his authority and confidence with his intellectual posture and succeeded in convincing the intellectuals that collaboration with power was not only a national responsibility but a rewarding bearing. Kennedy realized that the state recognition of the public role of the intellectuals and artists would result in their loyalty to the state. However, according to Hofstadter, the intellectuals’ relation to power is paradoxical because, despite their desire to play a political role, they cannot reconcile themselves with power.21 As the intellectuals were integrated into the state and capital, in the early 1960s, they reached a privileged position in American social life. However, some intellectuals who disliked their privileged position, began to miss their alienated status and the honor of being rejected by the public and politicians. These formerly alienated intellectuals together

18 Ibid., pp. 217–218. 19 Ibid., p. 221. 20 Ibid., pp. 225–226. 21 Ibid., pp. 227–229.

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with the majority of the American intellectuals welcomed the recognition they had received and became closer to their country and culture and more interested in the American way of life. Whereas in the past, the American intellectuals escaped America and took refuge in Europe to experience a complex and valuable culture, the recognition that they received at home, made the majority of the American intellectual’s conservative patriots. Intellectual’s such as Irving Howe, Norman Mailer, C. Wright Mills, and Delmore Schwartz were exceptional cases who wanted to remain dissenters.22 Howe argued in This Age of Conformity (1954) that by finding an honored place for the intellectuals in contemporary society, capitalism had forced the intellectuals “in the direction of cultural adaptation.” After being tamed, the intellectuals accepted their incorporation into the system without resistance. Now, as the integrated part of the system, the intellectuals want to return “to the bosom of the nation.” Howe blamed the development of higher education and cultural industry for the incorporation of the intellectuals into the system because these developments provided the intellectuals a comfortable life in a society that supposed to be in a permanent war with a foreign enemy. As a result of their incorporation into the system of government and society, the intellectuals began to forget that defending the rights to express critical views underpinned their very existence. Howe claims that with the intellectuals’ adaptation of their new role in the system, “the community of Bohemia” as the most important space of cultural creativity in the United States began to disappear. With the disintegration of Bohemia, the American intellectuals whose isolation and loneliness connected them to challenge “the ideology of liberal optimism,” took refuge in the “suburbs, country homes, and college towns.”23 Howe was well aware that as soon as the intellectuals become part of the university life and subordinate their talents to be used by others, they would lose their rebellious qualities. Howe believed that not only total “estrangement from the sources of power and prestige,” but rejection of the contemporary culture as a whole would be a far better alternative than surrendering to this culture. The question was whether an intellectual who sincerely believes in the radical social and cultural changes of the future could reconcile himself with society’s demands and remain at the same time critical of his contemporary

22 Ibid., pp. 393–395. 23 Ibid., p. 396.

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society and culture as a means of creating a radical future. For some intellectuals refraining from social responsibility was the only response a true intellectual could give because social responsibility required a position in the system of power to fulfill that responsibility, whereas this position would deny the intellectual the freedom he or she enjoyed in isolation. The Bohemian intellectual life as a direct result of the end of the system of patronage in the eighteenth century in Europe led the intellectuals to take refuge in Bohemian solidarity against the new bourgeois conditions. Hence, Bohemia became known as the revolt of the individual against society.24 Hofstadter claims that American anti-intellectualism has its roots in the egalitarian sentiments of the American people and their democratic institutions, according to which a privileged intellectual class is a threat to both democracy and their egalitarian ambitions. In fact, until the end of the eighteenth century, most American intellectuals were part of the elite and defended the interests of these elite. However, by the end of the nineteenth century, they began to use progressive and Marxist vocabulary to advocate political and popular causes against special interests.25 The fact that the reactionary McCarthyism followed the progressivism of the New Deal indicates that whenever the public fails to reconcile itself with the intellectuals, the intellectuals are ready to repudiate their social commitments. At first, the intellectuals took refuge in the mass culture, but as their hope for socialism and reconciliation with the people disappeared, they distanced themselves from the people. However, the mass culture allowed the intellectuals to express not only their dissatisfaction with the democratic society but enabled them to define the mass culture in contrast to high culture. As one faction of the intellectuals began to represent the mass culture, the development of the state bureaucracy, universities, libraries, publishing houses, and magazines after World War II, integrated the professional intellectuals as administrators, lawyers, judges, scientists, scholars, and writers into the state.26 Whereas in the 1920s, American intellectuals went to Paris, they returned home after the Depression and the takeover of fascism in Europe. From the 1930s on, it was the European intellectuals, artists, and scholars who

24 Ibid., pp. 397–398. 25 Ibid., p. 407. 26 Ibid., pp. 408–409.

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took refuge in the United States. As the tide of the intellectual refugees from Europe made the United States the new intellectual capital of the Western world, the contrast between America and Europe lost its relevance. Now the Western man and Western society were the cultural terms that both the American and European intellectuals wanted to investigate and explore. Three events made the United States in the eyes of its intellectuals such as Edmund Wilson politically more advanced than Europe and the rest of the world. First, with the rise of fascism, Europe had “lost its political and moral authority.” Secondly, the United States’ participation in World War II to defend Europe against fascism made the United States a World authority. Thirdly, the United States’ Marshall Plan rescued Europe from poverty and chaos after the War. These events convinced the majority of the American intellectuals that they could do social critique, exert a certain degree of influence on the state and live a comfortable and prosperous life as professors, government administrators, publishers, or journalists.27 The fluctuation of the intellectuals between being disappointed when excluded from wealth and success and embarrassed when reaching wealth and success led some intellectuals to distance themselves from power for fear of corruption and angry when disregarded by power. When the American artists discovered that they could sell their works for hundreds of thousands of dollars and critical intellectuals were awarded university positions and their books of social criticism became best-sellers, the American intellectual became part of the established order.28 The comfortable life of the intellectuals led them to realize that “the universal country of Bohemia” cannot be the source of all intellectual creativity because the greatest part of the world’s literature has not been written by men living in the isolation of Bohemias.29 They realized that rather than relying on Bohemia, creative intellectuals face the world alone. Even politically, Bohemia failed because facing the world collectively has a political meaning, but the Bohemian life had never created a political role for its inhabitants.30 What motivated the scholars to prefer working within the state institutions were not only the unbearable costs of living without institutional support but access to libraries

27 Ibid., pp. 412–416. 28 Ibid., pp. 417–418. 29 Ibid., pp. 423–425. 30 Ibid., p. 426.

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and students. Since the institutionalization of the intellectual could not include all the educated people, it produced a new generation of intellectuals, “a frustrated cultural lumpenproletariat.”31 As the actual and potential cultural lumpenproletariat saw the university as the symbol of the relationship between knowledge and power, they became the driving force of the radicalism of the 1960s. The student revolt against the combination of knowledge and power was, in fact, a revolt against the idea held by the philosophers and scholars since antiquity that critical knowledge can civilize power. However, our experience of modernity indicates that it is the power that seeks knowledge because it needs expertise rather than critical knowledge and because power does not recognize disinterestedness as the pilar of true knowledge. According to Hofstadter, when power asks “distinguished sociologists” to initiate and examine a public opinion poll on a controversial issue, it does not hesitate to tell them what they should find. As knowledge becomes an instrument in the service of power, the intellectual is reduced to a mental technician whose performance is determined by the powerful.32 In the past, there were scholar intellectuals who became advisers to politicians, and there were others who dissociated themselves from power. Whereas the former blamed the latter that they would never know state power from within, the latter responded that the intellectuals who stand against the political power know how power is exercised in the public domain and try to make the public aware of how to resist the state power. The way the intellectuals associated with the state power presented the existing power very different from those who dissociated themselves from the state. The former saw the state either as the realization of its ideas or as moving in that direction. Hence, the intellectuals associated with the state power not only refrained from bringing a critical view to the public discussion but blamed the intellectuals who were detached from power for being too absorbed in their point of view. According to Hofstadter, the polarization of the American intellectual community into the technicians of power and the alienated intellectuals obsessed with their own purity prevented the intellectuals from generating, a socially and politically relevant, and effective public discussion.33

31 Ibid., p. 427. 32 Ibid., p. 428. 33 Ibid., pp. 429–430.

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The Responsibility of Intellectuals As the national liberation struggles were achieving great victories in the 1960s, the United States became fully engaged in the War in Vietnam to prevent the advancement of communism in East Asia. The Responsibility of Intellectuals was Noam Chomsky’s response to the American intervention in Vietnam in which he reformulated a question that Dwight Macdonald posed twenty years earlier regarding the responsibility of the people of aggressive nations toward the atrocities committed by their governments.34 Chomsky’s question was about the responsibility of the American intellectuals toward the military intervention of their government in Vietnam. Chomsky argues that intellectuals must take a more significant share of responsibility because compared with the ordinary people, the intellectuals have the analytical capacity to expose the lies of their governments. As a privileged minority that has access to both information and freedom of expression, the responsibility of the intellectuals who want to remain true to their vocation that is the search for truth, is to expose the lies and atrocities of their government. Chomsky does not see truth as “the revelation of that which makes a people certain, clear, and strong,” as Martin Heidegger did, but as the exposure of lies that protect one’s “national interest.” For Chomsky, the academic and intellectual disaster happens when historians such as Arthur Schlesinger present the American policies in Vietnam as humanitarian and receive academic rewards for their conformist views.35 Chomsky reminds the American intellectuals that they should expose the government whenever its propaganda apparatus presents lies as truths to deceive ordinary citizens, who neither have time nor resources to examine these lies. What prevents the American intellectuals from remaining true to their responsibility is, according to Chomsky, their fear for the communist development that would undermine the prospect of democratic governance in the underdeveloped world. Chomsky argues that the concern of the American intellectuals for democracy and the art of good government and the virtues of law and order around the world, since Woodrow Wilson, that have been used to maintain American global supremacy makes the American intellectuals similar to the Christian missionaries who supported 34 Noam Chomsky, The Responsibility of Intellectuals (The New York Review of Books, February 23, 1967). 35 Ibid.

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the opium wars in the 1840s.36 While the United States assumes that democracy in the sense of the elevation and protection of the individual against the state will strengthen American global supremacy, many Asians believe that the Chinese Communist model is “better and faster than democratic methods.”37 But since the dominant ideology in America assumes that the United States has the right to extend its power without limit, it considers any critique of the US foreign policy as communist, irresponsible, and hysterical. This ideology considers as “responsible critic” the views of those scholars who advise the United States to buy surplus Canadian and Australian wheat and destroy them to cause mass starvation in China. These same “irresponsible ideological experts” lecture about the US’s responsibility toward “moral issues and human rights.”38 Chomsky finds the roots of this ideology in the conclusions that Daniel Bell draws in The End of Ideology (1960). According to Bell, before the emergence of the welfare state, Western intellectuals were driven by ideologies that aimed at the radical transformation of the existing form of government and way of life. But with the advancement of the welfare state in the West, Western intellectuals have lost their interests in ideologies and radical transformation of society.39 Consequently, the same intellectuals who advocated the transformation of the existing form of government and way of life have taken prominent roles in the well-functioning of the welfare state. By offering the intellectuals privileged positions within the state and civil society institutions, the welfare state succeeded in pacifying or including the radical intellectuals into the “technology of social tinkering” that is shaping the state politics nationally and internationally. As the intellectuals’ role on the national and international levels corresponded to their rise to the position of power, they deserted the ideological constellations that promised radical changes. Chomsky criticizes the division Bell makes between the Western scholar and experts of the welfare states who represent and advocate democratic institutions and the “third-world ideologists” who are advocating totalitarianism. The division made by Bell leaves only two political alternatives; Western societies based on “democratic institutions” versus totalitarian societies in

36 Ibid. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid.

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Eastern Europe and the third world countries that are under the influence of communism. For Chomsky, the third world countries such as Cuba and China do not have many options to overcome their socioeconomic problems. According to Chomsky, whereas the United States could make positive economic and technological changes in these societies, it has chosen to lecture them on democratic values.40 The problem with the scholar-experts, who support the American exercise of power in Asia, is that they define societies into open and dictatorial societies, but by “open society,” they mean a society that “remains open to American economic penetration or political control.” That is why the United States can commit “genocide in Vietnam” in the name of “freedom and the rights of man.”41 Two decades after the Responsibility of the Intellectuals, Chomsky in collaboration with Edward S. Sherman authors Manufacturing Consent in which they explain in detail how the United States has constructed the media as a propaganda machine to hide its atrocities and represent those atrocities as the decent and courageous fight for freedom and democracy throughout the world. Sherman and Chomsky argue that mass media as a system of propaganda have normalized the relationship between the dominant and the dominated locally and globally but still talk about informative, impartial, and objective journalism in the West and the statecontrolled media in the authoritarian and totalitarians states. According to Chomsky and Sherman, the argument that media are free in the United States because they are privately owned and independent from the state is not valid anymore since their real function is no more than being the instruments of propaganda. The only difference between mass media in democracies and the so-called totalitarian and authoritarian states is that the former is more sophisticated than the latter. The so-called liberal media uses different filters to distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable news concerning their news value. Then comes the perspective that gives the news an aura of objectivity and why the chosen perspective is the only alternative to understand the significance of the news.42 Sherman and Chomsky argue that the ruling elite began to limit the free

40 Ibid. 41 Ibid. 42 Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent : The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York: Pantheon Books, 2002), pp. 1–2.

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media in the early nineteenth century to counter the impact of the radical press on the class consciousness of the working class. Terrified by the working class’ vision of its future, the ruling elite used not only defamation laws and prosecution but demanded security bonds and various taxes as the conditions for publication. As the working class was unable to fulfill the new conditions and could not follow the rule of the market and the principle of profitability of media, they stopped publishing their newspapers. These conditions made the media dependent on bankers and investors and lost their independence and autonomy.43 As contemporary bankers and investors in media, just like the intellectuals, cannot lose the guardianship of the state, they allowed the government to discipline the media. What made the disciplinary measures tolerable was that the media began to establish friendly relations with government officials. As a result, some government officials become directors of the media giants after leaving their positions in the government. The good relations between the mass media with the big business and the government are rewarded by advertising contracts.44 The media’s increased dependence on the sources of the economic and political power forces it to continuously adjust its understanding of the news value of actual news to satisfy the economic and political power. By making the White House, the Pentagon, the State Department, and business corporations the central areas of the news activity, the media has made these institutions the only reliable source of information. In addition to these official sources, think tanks emerged to consolidate the established public consensus.45 As the academic discourse disseminates the supposedly correct ideas to the newspapers, they are debated in a community of prominent experts consisted of think tank researchers, the intellectuals, journalists, and former radicals who have seen the light lately.46 Hence, the far-right research institutes such as Freedom House that was behind Radio Free Europe has recruited former radicals since the 1940s. Whereas Freedom House presented the apartheid regime of Rhodesia as a functioning democracy, it found the victory of the anti-apartheid forces in the 1980 election, under

43 Ibid., pp. 3–8. 44 Ibid., pp. 13–16. 45 Ibid., pp. 19–23. 46 Ibid., pp. 24–25.

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British supervision, as dubious and denounced the reporting on the Elsalvadorean military’s systematic killing of the civilians in the early 1980s as imbalance reporting. The research institutes that provide the analytical guidelines for the mass media propagate the main principles of Western ideology and politics. According to one of these guidelines, compared with communism, fascism is a lesser evil.47 This guideline distinguished between the worthy victims who suffered under the communist regimes and who deserved sympathetic emotions and the unworthy victims who were suffering under fascistic regimes. This guideline made sure that the news about the unworthy victims remained unreported or labeled as out of context when they were reported by independent media.48 The aim of “democratic propaganda” is not the information that the public needs to make an impact on the political process but to instruct them on how they should come to terms with those who dominate the state and society. By selecting topics, distributing concerns, and framing issues, academia, and media keep the public debate within the constraints of the premises of the ruling elite.49 For instance, instead of focusing on the atrocities in East Timor by the Indonesian government, which is a client of the United States, the mass media focused on Cambodia. Since the elite consensus determines the presuppositions and the contents of the public debate, criticism and dissent within these frameworks are not only permitted but encouraged. As the system becomes too powerful, the journalists and scholars with good intentions internalize its intellectual presuppositions.50 What ensures the conformity of the majority of the scholars and journalists are not the direct pressures of any authority upon them, but the fact that their conformity was the reason they could have a career. As a result, American academia and mass media have been functioning as a means of public relations for the ruling elite.51 The socio-political and ideological contexts in which Western academia produced knowledge to serve power and media functions as a system of propaganda is analyzed in Daniel Bell’s The End of Ideology. Bell was among those radicals who saw the light and turned to the right in the 1940s. As a Marxist, 47 Ibid., pp. 27–29. 48 Ibid., p. 35. 49 Ibid., p. 298. 50 Ibid., p. 302. 51 Ibid., pp. 304–307.

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Bell was fascinated by the Polish revolutionary Waclaw Machajski who in his Evolution of Social Democracy (1899) and The Intellectual Worker (1904) argues that “the new messianism of socialism” is about the discontented intellectuals who would rule and exploit the working class in the future socialist society.52 History was for Machajski, a permanent class struggle that would continue even after the socialist revolution toward the abolition of the state as the instrument of class domination. Later he realized that only the equality of income between those engaged in the intellectual and manual labor could create equal educational opportunities for both. In Machajski’s view, the governing position of the intelligentsia depends on the ignorance of the worker.53 As a Marxist who endorsed Kautsky’s theory of the mature capitalist democracy as the precondition for socialism, Bell advocated American intervention in World War II. He believed that American intervention would not only strengthen the working class against fascism but create the political and economic requirements for democratic socialism after the war. Soon, he rejected the “conception of a smooth historical transition from capitalism to socialism” and denounced all utopian predictions of the future. Bell distanced himself from the socialist movement because he was frightened of the consequences of the political passion of masses or mass politics. He was concerned that class affiliations of the participants in a mass movement might be broken, and when that happens, ethnic chauvinism and fascist politics replace class politics. Bell rejects the theory of totalitarianism because he assumed that all states tend toward normalization.54 By adopting Max Weber’s conception of modernity and the modern state as “a process of rationalization and bureaucratization,” which makes politics a form of negotiation and “bargaining between legitimate groups” toward consensus Bell claimed that only in a liberal democracy, in which law and morality are separated, social groups could be engaged in a politics of negotiation and consensus.55 While Bell was writing the End of Ideology, scholars such as Raymond Aron were making the US system a model to which the French intellectual should have looked up. Bell became the

52 Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 355–356. 53 Ibid., p. 357. 54 Ibid., pp. 324–325. 55 Ibid., p. 121.

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role model for the future radicals who turned liberal, conservative, and neoconservatives since the 1960s. For Bell, the end of ideology means the end of Marxism and revolutionary socialism. He argues that the tendency of the labor movement toward better housing, schools, medical care, and the workplace has made the leftist ideology redundant.56 Consequently, the economic prosperity of the proletariat and the gradual establishment of the welfare state terminate the socio-economic condition that generates political radicalism. One of the main indications of the new condition is the managerial economy based on “technical skills and political position, rather than wealth and property.” The gradual disappearance of wealthy families in the ruling positions in the United States or France indicates the domination of managerial systems based on social mobility that has erased the sharp distinction between classes and class conflicts between workers and capitalists. In the meantime, by convincing the working class that they would be better off if they refrained from revolting against the existing society and accept their place within it, the trade unions became capable of improving their share of the national wealth.57 Bell argues that the replacement of the old industrial proletariat by the intellectual workers or salariat skilled workers indicates a radical socio-economic and intellectual change in the United States and other Western countries. What distinguishes the old industrial workers and the new intellectual workers is that whereas the former communicated “the language of labor,” class struggle and class consciousness, the latter speak the language of political consensus generated by the New Deal’s managed economy. By giving the unions the right to bargain collectively, the New Deal legitimized the idea of group rights that enforced the group decisions over the individuals and established the retirement pension, subsidies to the farmers, and legal protections for the minority groups. The result of the ideology of political consensus is the emergence of the “broker state” that mediates between the competing interests of different social groups such as capitalists, workers, and the civil servants, represented by the established unions and political parties to achieve social and political consensus. By including different interest groups within the representative government, the broker state can take control of the social conflicts before they are out of control. As the New Deal guided the social and ideological conflicts

56 Bell, pp. 225–226. 57 Bell, pp. 44–45.

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toward social and political reconciliation, politics became the prerogative of those actors who, while representing specific interest groups, accept the structure and rules of the existing political order. Hence, only allegiance to the system and its basic values can qualify social actors to enter into negotiations toward consensus. The consensual democracies do not need visionaries with radical views but technical experts who can solve the daily problems of the systems so that the systems function properly.58 According to Bell, the main problem of the American radical socialists was that instead of accepting the rules of capitalism and democracy, they distanced themselves from the system. That is why when the consensual democracy and welfare state emerged in the US, American socialists disappeared from politics. As the welfare state convinced the socialists, liberals, and conservatives of the efficiency of Keynesian regulation and governmental planning, it joined political pluralism and declared the end of the ideological age. Henceforth, politicians, capitalists, and workers were able to take a non-ideological position and negotiate their differences while standing together against communism as an external enemy. As the public was always watchful of the external enemy and the public debates were always about how to counter the external enemy, the intellectuals who traditionally opposed liberal democracy embraced the system wholeheartedly and started their reconciliation with the existing political order.59 According to Bell, several reasons convinced the American intellectuals and socialists to relinquish the idea of revolution. The Soviet totalitarianism expressed in the Moscow trials, the 1939 Non-Aggression pact between the Soviet Union and Nazi-Germany, the failure of American socialism to become a mass movement were among the reasons that disappointed American socialism of a bright future. However, the most important factor in the defeat of American socialism was the rise of the welfare state that created job opportunities for the intellectuals who otherwise would become militant socialists. With the emerging Soviet totalitarianism and the Welfare state, the Western intellectuals realized that the real danger to freedom was not liberal democracies but communism. As the former radical intellectuals relinquished their radicalism, they were hired by the universities, welcomed by publishing houses and magazines, and introduced by the media as the representatives of the

58 Bell, pp. 106–109. 59 Bell, pp. 410–412.

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avant-garde culture, as a result of which they gained a privileged position in the American society.60 Bell argues that the new intellectuals have realized that no political cation can change the outcomes of the technological developments and industrializations because the systems of production both in the West and the Soviet Union need efficient management, and management means the end of ideology.61 Bell argues that the post-ideological intellectual debates in the West would become, once in the future, prevalent in Asia and Africa. But it takes time until that happens in these regions because unlike the nineteenth Western ideologies which were universalistic and egalitarian, the third world ideologies are parochial instruments aimed at economic development and industrialization by political means.62 Hence, Asians and Africans who make the Soviet Union and China as their models for political struggles are not so much preoccupied with the communist promise of human equality but are eager for rapid industrialization of their underdeveloped countries. That is why the postcolonial countries have not been emancipated from their stagnated and undeveloped conditions. Bell’s assessment implies that the third world countries cannot generate rational, modernized, and post-ideological welfare state unless they rely completely on the Western experience and political pluralism.

Last Intellectuals In the Last Intellectuals, Russel Jacoby makes a distinction between private intellectuals who are unable to engage the public in their technical discourse and public intellectuals who communicate their message to an educated public. Jacoby argues that since the early 1970s, the increasing employment of the intellectuals as professors by the university system to teach humanities and social sciences has not made public intellectuals a more influential social group in the public sphere. It caused their removal from the public realm. Unlike public intellectuals, university professors and scholars address their colleagues and students in the classrooms, academic conferences, periodicals, and books, which make them

60 Bell, pp. 349–352. 61 Daniel Bell, The Coming of the Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting

(London: Heinemann, 1974), pp. 102–112. 62 Ibid., p. 74.

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distinguished sociologists or historians, but keep them unknown outside their disciplines. Confined within their academic environments and satisfied with their regular audience, scholars have deemed the educated public as insignificant. Hence, the young people who because of their attraction to to the radical leftist ideologies entered the universities in the 1960s to abolish or at least revolutionize the university as an ideological state institution that protected the existing socio-political order, became, since the mid or end of the 1970s, radical sociologists, Marxist historians, and theorists of feminism in the same institutions but they have never become public intellectuals.63 Jacoby refers to the disappearance of the Bohemia in the US as the main reason behind the disappearance of the American public intellectuals because the Bohemian romanticization of poverty could guarantee two things: their intellectual freedom and their hatred for the bourgeoisie.64 As the American suburbia emerged, in the 1950s, the urban Bohemian life began to vanish. Unlike the older generation who were interested in the big cities, the young students who grew up in the suburbs were interested in the college towns and wanted to live far away from the big cities.65 Since the 1960s, young people in the big cities became more attracted to the idea and practice of counter-culture than Bohemian life.66 As the students of the 1960s became professors in the 1970s and 1980s, they were only interested in writing for the students and colleagues within their disciplines because they shared the same academic concerns and used the same idioms and concepts and published their work only in professional journals and monographs. As the former leftist students became confined within the universities, they became ideologically tamed because they realized that people do not enter universities to become dissenters but to find jobs. The new means of controlling academic intellectuals are no longer imprisoning, blacklisting, or secrete police supervision, but professional insecurity. Jacoby claims that what is threatening academic freedom is not external restraints and prohibitions, but the agreement of academic gentlemen that promotes the belief in self-control, discretion, and balanced judgments. Hence, what

63 Russel Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals, pp. 5–8. 64 Ibid., p. 27. 65 Ibid., p. 44. 66 Ibid., p. 39.

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guarantees academic success is not scholarly excellence but conformity and connections with influential people and institutions.67 The fact that the few Marxists and radicals who demonstrate scholarly brilliance need introductions and interpretations of other scholars to make their views understandable to other colleagues and students indicate how redundant academic discourse has become.68 Chomsky seems to be one of the very few intellectuals who understand the meaning of the public intellectual when he encourages people to discuss fields of expertise to which they are outsiders, because the public intellectual must make uneasy those professional experts who do not allow unorthodox views and analyses to disturb the comfort of their fields or disciplines. Jacoby does not see any indication in the contemporary academic environment of the rise of a new generation of public intellectuals because the previous intellectual environment believed in a principle that seems irrelevant in the current academic world. According to this principle, an intellectual could and should remain true to his or her ideological persuasion, but he or she had to take unorthodox positions in defense of the intellectuals and professors whom she or he opposed ideologically. For example, the Conservative H. L. Mencken could defend the radical Scott Nearing, who expelled from his university because of his political views. Mencken said about Nearing: “he was thrown out because he was not safe and sane and orthodox. Had his aberration gone in the other direction, had he defended child labor as ardently, he denounced it… he would have been… secure in his post…”69 Jacoby refers to Richard Sennett in The Fall of Public Man and Authority, and Marshall Berman in All That Is Solid Melts into Air as the representatives of the new generation of the intellectuals who have degraded both academism and journalism. For instance, Sennett neither gives a critical reading of the work he presents on his study nor challenges authorities while writing about the concept of authority because he believes that academics have only one task: empowering intellectual and academic reciprocity. Berman, on the other hand, tries to include any intellectual who has contributed to modernism because he understands modernism as the encounter between Marxian optimism and Nietzschean pessimism. Fortunately, the encounter leads humanity to

67 Ibid., pp. 140–144. 68 Ibid., pp. 167–168. 69 Ibid., p. 209.

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hope for the future. Berman ascribes ideas to Marx that can be said about any nineteenth- or twentieth-century thinker because Berman believes that there is more depth in our modernism than we thought because modernism is convincing us that we and people from other parts of the world have the same roots and are members of the same human community.70 Jacoby concludes that whereas the elegant and excellent New York intellectuals of the past were spartan writers despite being big talkers, their successors such as Sennett and Berman are talkative writers who cannot write sophisticated essays but publish messy books whose only virtues are their fancy titles. Jacoby refers to two significant shifts in the American intellectual environment expressed in the history of the New York Review of Books . The first shift is from left to right, and the second shift is the magazine’s reliance on the Ivy League professors instead of the intellectuals who could write for the educated public.71 In the absence of the public intellectuals, mainstream media promote their journalists as those who put their lives and careers in danger to defend truth and justice. Consequently, these guardians of truth and justice are romanticized in movies.72 The fact that the journalist hero belongs to a multimedia company that possesses in addition to several newspapers and TV stations, a large film company, indicates that there is a short distance between being recruited as a journalist and becoming a brave one, because it does take much time and effort to make someone a “public intellectual.” Jacoby claims that there is no one among the thousands of radical sociologists, critical literary theorists, Marxist economists who can be compared to the intellectuals of the past such as Mills, Wilson, or Sweezy because a public intellectual is not only an independent soul who does not answer to anyone but someone who writes in a public language. Galileo became a public intellectual when he decided to write in a vernacular language against Latin, which had been the idiom of the academic elite. The main crime of Galileo was his attempt to write for a new public, the Italian speaking public. Galileo was told that he could keep this Copernican opinion if he kept it quiet and not sharing it with others, but he rejected the offer. He went outside the universities and addressed the public in the language they were speaking. Jacoby

70 Ibid., pp. 210–214. 71 Ibid., pp. 216–218. 72 Ibid., pp. 220–223.

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concludes that the demise of the public intellectuals is a result of the re-composition of public life caused by the expansion of the suburbs, universities, and television that transformed the general intellectuals into the scholars and experts.73 Borrowing the term public intellectual from Mills, Jacoby considers it as a synonym for the French term intellectuelle that referred to the writers, scientists, and artists who signed the petition J’Accuse in defense of Alfred Dreyfus. Jacoby argues that it is not the absence of brilliance but the lack of public standing in the new generation of the intellectuals, which disqualifies them as public intellectuals. As the universities recruited old and young intellectuals, they could not remain intellectuals with public appeals and impacts. What caused the disappearance of the intellectuals, according to Jacoby, was not the disappearance of the general audience but the professional intellectuals who have injected power into the academic and public discourse. The fact that a new “generation of black intellectuals” created a new public audience indicates that the public intellectual has not disappeared completely. The question is whether the partial revival of the general audience by the new generation of the black intellectuals can make an impact on the narrow-minded bloggers and transform them into public intellectuals who write argumentative and effective essays in online publications or not. The danger of online publications is instant commenting instead of measured reflections. The more dangerous is not the widespread habit of checking and updating tweets minutes by minutes but books that construct seemingly difficult but superfluous conceptualizations which cause the disappearance of the educated readers.74 Jacoby’s critics claim that contemporary “university intellectual” functions in the same way as the intellectual of the past. The difference is that contemporary universities have replaced cafes, little magazines, and Bohemian social life. Some commentators claim that the emergence of women’s studies, African American studies, and other minority studies since the 1970s demonstrates the vitality of the contemporary intellectuals who have not given up public ideas for job security and stable salaries. They refer to the new and more inclusive

73 Ibid., pp. 233–237. 74 Russel Jacoby, After the Last Intellectuals, The Chronicle of Higher Educa-

tion, November 29, 2015, https://futureu.education/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/ The-Last-Intellectuals.pdf.

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online networks and social media that have functioned as a new intellectual Bohemia, which interrupts the taming strategies of the system. As the internet is becoming a political space, people such as Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning become its “organic intellectuals who theorize critical questions about power, human agency, and ethics.” In this new political space, nameless internet agents promote radical visions that transcend the limitations of the current institutions. The internet, similar to the physical Bohemia, has generated what Jacoby calls “surplus intellectuals” who neither have Ph.D.’s nor function as academics. Hence, without job security, the new surplus intellectuals oppose the intellectual establishment that reproduces the neoliberal university. However, as the surplus intellectuals are integrated into the universities, think tanks, or acquire a position in the major publications, in the state or NGOs, the system recuperates their ideas. The radical bloggers who make their blogs highly profitable as soon as they realize that what they offer in their blog have exchange values indicate such recuperations. Another type of recuperation is that the bloggers remain radical in their statements but receive advertisements from big firms that they accept unquestionably; they need income. Whereas the expansion of universities, since the 1960s, has transformed the radical intellectuals into tamed professors and scholars, the internet is taming the online radical intellectuals. To some analysts, the history of the intellectuals replicates the barbarians at the gates who became gatekeepers. They criticize the system when they are outside the system, but as soon as the system recruits them, they defend it wholeheartedly.75 Some analysts claim that the intellectuals are not limited to those who write or philosophize. They refer to playwrights and filmmakers who have shaped both public opinion and the imaginations of contemporary writers and thinkers. What about economists, lawyers, and international-relations theorists, political strategists, and security consultants who influence political decision-makers with the power of making war and peace in the world. It is in this context that Bhaskar Sunkara, a former student of Leo P. Ribuffo, publishes the neo-Marxist magazine Jacobin, which attracts

75 Claire Bond Potter, Is the Internet the Final Bohemia? The Chronicle of Higher Education, November 29, 2015, https://futureu.education/wp-content/uploads/2015/ 12/The-Last-Intellectuals.pdf.

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a significant number of scholars, a convincing sign of the revival of the public intellectuals.76

76 Leo P. Ribuffo, Intellectuals vs. Scholars, The Chronicle of Higher Education, November 29, 2015, https://futureu.education/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/ The-Last-Intellectuals.pdf.

CHAPTER 7

The Intellectuals and the Last Revolution

The 1979 Iranian Revolution occurred at a time the intellectuals in Western democracies had become a disappearing species. Michel Foucault’s critique of the French left-wing intellectuals’ indifference toward the Iranian revolution is, in fact, an indication of the disappearing Western intellectual. According to Foucault, the unfamiliarity of the French intellectuals with the religious character of the Revolution made them indifferent toward this event.1 Said assumed that his critique of Orientalism had instigated a better understanding of the ideological foundations of the Iranian Revolution and its politico-intellectual aftermath in the Middle East. However, he never tried to understand the ideological foundations of this revolution. Furthermore, an overview of the academic literature which has adopted Said’s vocabulary to analyze the Iranian Revolution and the Middle East, since the 1990s, reveals the neoconservative character of this literature. One analyst defines the ideological underpinning of the Iranian Revolution and other Islamic movements from Afghanistan to Egypt as Islamism that is “the political ideologization of Islam on the model of the great political ideologies of the 20th century.”2 Another analyst defines Islamism as a nativist ideology

1 Claire Brièr and Peirre Blamchet, Iran: la revolution au nom de Dieu, Suivi D’un Entretien avec Michel Foucalut (Paris: Éditions Du Seul, 1979), pp. 227–228. 2 Olivier Roy, The Politics of Chaos in the Middle East (London: Hurst Publisher, 2007), p. 57.

© The Author(s) 2021 Y. Shahibzadeh, Public Intellectuals and Their Discontents, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56588-6_7

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constructed by the marginalized Muslim intelligentsia to overcome their marginalization.3 The same analysts remind us that the marginalized Muslim intelligentsia that succeeded in building their government in Iran have marginalized all non-Islamist forces.4 The third analyst declares that the marginalization of other political forces indicates that Islamism in Iran was the expression of an epistemologically, ethically, and politically defective form of nativism.5 As demands for democracy encouraged by a post-Islamist discourse dominated the Iranian public sphere since the early 1990s, the same analysts described post-Islamism as an effort to repair the damages caused by Islamism.6 What these analysts have never explained is how has the epistemologically, ethically, and politically flawed Islamism discourse developed into democratic-oriented and forwardlooking Post-Islamism? The Middle East Studies as a subdivision of the Area Studies in Western universities have, since the late 1980s, dominated the interpretation of Iranian Islamism and Post-Islamism. The history of the formation of the Area Studies cannot be disconnected from the history of the integration of radical intellectuals into the state, by means of the expansion of the university system. The establishment and expansion of Area Studies in Western universities to study the socio-cultural and politico-economic obstacles to democracy and good government in non-Western societies was a direct consequence of the integration of the radical students and intellectuals into the universities and the state. The Area Studies have become since the early 1990s the ideological backbone of the explosive expansion of the so-called nongovernmental organizations that have promoted peace and democracy in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.7 As the scholars of the Area Studies made the lack 3 Asef Bayat, The Coming of a Post-Islamist Society, Critique: Critical Middle East Studies , No. 9 (Fall, 1996), p. 44 and Nathan J. Brown and Emad El-din Shahin (Edited by), The Struggle Over Democracy in the Middle East (London: Routledge, 2010), pp. 63– 64. 4 Asef Bayat, Making Islam Democratic: Social Movements and the Post-Islamist Turn (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), p. 7. 5 Mehrzad Boroujerdi, Iranian Intellectuals and the Wes: The Tormented Triumph of

Nativism (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1996), pp. 18–19. 6 Bayat, The Coming of a Post-Islamist Society, pp. 43–52. 7 Oliver Roy, The Politics of Chaos in The Middle East, pp. 33–36, The Norwegian

academic Terje Tvedt, the first Professor in the Development Studies in Norway, published two books in 2016 and 2017 (Terje Tvedt, Det Norske Tenkemåte, Tekster 2002–2016 [Oslo: Aschehoug & Co] and Det Internasjonale Gjennombruddet, Fra ettpartistat til

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of democracy, human rights, women’s rights, and good government in non-Western societies, the main subjects of teaching and research in their discipline, they theorized humanitarian crises as the consequences of such lacks and humanitarian interventions as a means to respond to those lacks. A quick look at Ph.D. dissertations, books, and periodicals on the Middle East will show that the absolute majority of the scholar in this field assumes that the West can and should guide these countries toward democracy and good government because democracy serves the interests of the United States and its European allies better than the current dictatorships.8 The type of democracy that the West wants for the rest of the world is not a democracy for the nation-states. It is rather a cosmopolitan democracy that must rely on global civil society, operationalized by NGOs whose ideology is formulated by Western academia and think tanks that follow the instructions of Western governments thoroughly.9 The vision of cosmopolitan democracy convinced large groups of highly educated advocates of democracy in the Middle East to ask Western governments not only to support their demands for democratic changes in their countries but initiate democratic movements and changes.10 Surprisingly, many of the scholars who defended cosmopolitan democracy use the same terminology as Said. The arguments that propagate the cosmopolitan democracy imply that non-Western societies have not been unable to generate independent public spheres, critical intellectuals, and political subjects. By delegating the role of the public spheres, critical intellectuals, and autonomous and political subjects in the non-Western world to Western governments, scholars, and NGOs, the advocates of cosmopolitan democracy have tried to convince non-Western societies that they have inherited deficient political cultures that cannot generate democracy and self-government. Consequently, in order to overcome

flerkulturell stat [Oslo: Dreyers Forlag, 2017]) in which he explains in details how totally dependent the university related research centers, thinks-tanks in the Area Studies and NGO’s on government funds are and how they blindly follow the policies of the Norwegian Government’s with the ambition of presenting Norway a Humanitarian Superpower. 8 Roy, The Politics of Chaos, pp. 35–38. 9 Manfered B. Steger, Political Dimensions of Globalization (New York: Sterling

Publishing, 2010), pp. 84–86. 10 Brown and Shahin (Edited by), The Struggle Over Democracy in the Middle East, p. 24.

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their inability to create their democracy and self-government, they should rely on the highly developed political culture of the West. As the Western critics of Orientalism represented Islamism in Iran as the expression of the backwardness of the Iranian political culture and post-Islamism as an improvement of this political culture, they have distorted the history of the Iranian Revolution and the post-Revolutionary development in Iran. We can find the traces of such post-Orientalist views in Ernest Renan’s comparison between Western and Islamic cultures. Renan considered the Islamic world as too underdeveloped and premature to be able to reconcile itself with the changing character of the modern world and its modes of scientific thinking.11 Renan’s view received a response from the Iranian Jamal Ad-Din Al-Afghani, who says that the Islamic civilization can and will adopt modern scientific thinking to deal with the modern world, but would resist as well Western colonial powers that in the name of civilization, have invaded and plundered their countries and continue to interfere in their internal affairs. Al-Afghani considered Islam as more than an enlightening and civilizational drive but the foundation of Muslim unity against European colonization.12 The nineteenth-century Iranian intellectuals such as Al-Afghani underpinned the ideological foundations of the political alliance that led the Iranian Constitutional Revolution (1906–1909) to establish a government based on the popular will of equal citizens that while standing against the colonial intrusions protect political freedom of its citizens. As the Constitutional Revolution failed to fulfill its promises, its ideological foundations generated three competing ideological tendencies and political orientations: nationalism, socialism, and Islamism, which have shaped Iran’s modern political history until the 1979 Revolution.13

11 Ernest Renan, L’Islamisme et la Science (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1883). 12 Nikki Keddie in Pioneers of Islamic Revival, Edited by Ali Rahnama (London: Zed

Books, 1994), p. 23. 13 Nazemoleslam-e Kermani, Tarikh-e Bidariy-e Iranian (Moqadameh va Bakhsh-e Avval) (Tehran: Entesharat-e Bonyad-e Farhag-e Iran, 1978), pp. 82–83.

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Nationalist and Socialist Conception of the Intellectual The Constitutional Revolution divided the Iranian intellectuals into nationalist and socialist factions whose disputes remained unresolved until the 1953 coup that overthrew prime minister Mohammad Mosaddeq. The socialist-nationalist dispute in Iran, cannot be understood without taking into account the consequence of the British intervention in Iranian politics since the discovery and Oil in 1908, a year before the decisive victory of the constitutional revolution. The British interference in Iranian politics prevented the formation of a fully independent and nationalized public sphere in Iran. Hence, whereas Iranian socialist and nationalists could defend the constitutional government, freedom of expression, radical social reforms, the British investment in the conflicts between the socialist and nationalist factions poisoned the Iranian public sphere and deviated the directions of the public discourse whenever it suited the interests of the British Empire. As a result, the state had never been the sole subject of the public political debate in Iran for the simple reason Iranian socialists and nationalists knew that Britain represented a more decisive force than the state. For instance, after the establishment of the Socialist Republic of Gillan in 1920, whereas the communists insisted on building a socialist model to encourage revolution in the rest of Iran, the nationalists aimed to liberate the rest of Iran from the British dominance. For the Iranian nationalists, liberation from the British oppression was the precondition of any democratic changes.14 The Iranian communists who, as social democrats, had witnessed the failure of the Second International to show any signs of solidarity with the Iranian people when they defended their newly established constitutional government against the Russian and British Imperialism, joined the Third International because they found it less Eurocentric than the Second International. More importantly, they joined the Third International because it declared national liberation movements as parts of the international revolutionary movement.15 Long before the so-called Third Wordlist theories, Iranian communists considered the national liberation

14 Yadullah Shahibzadeh, Marxism and Left-Wing Politics in Europe and Iran (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), p. 73. 15 Shahibzadeh, Marxism and Left-Wing Politics in Europe and Iran, pp. 66–67.

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movements as the struggles of the proletarian nations against the imperialist overexploitation.16 However, a few months after the establishment of the Socialist Republic of Gillan, Britain succeeded in establishing a regime of coup d’état led by Reza Khan (later Reza Shah) that not only suppressed the Gillan Republic but terminated the constitutional government and obliterated the Iranian public debates. Mohammad Mosaddeq was one of the Iranian nationalists who suffered the consequences of Reza Shah’s dictatorship.17 As Reza Shah’s regime banned Iran’s Communist Party in 1931 and prosecuted its members, the Party leaders took refuge in the Soviet Union where they were imprisoned, disappeared or executed during the Stalin trials in the 1930s. As the leaders of the Iranian Communist Party were facing their tragic fate in the Soviet Union, a new generation of Iranian leftist intellectuals led by Taqi Arani published the theoretical magazine Doniya to formulate a more socially inclusive theory of revolution. However, in 1938, almost all who had contributed to the Magazine were arrested and imprisoned.18 In 1941, after Britain and the Soviet Union occupied Iran, Reza Shah abdicated, and constitutional government restored, the imprisoned leftist intellectuals were released. A large segment of the leftist intellectuals who had been released from prison established the socialist Tudeh Party as a party of the progressive, anti-imperialist, and anti-capitalist intellectuals and the masses. Shortly after its establishment, the Tudeh Party became an immensely popular political party in Iran.19 However, its popularity diminished when against the Iranian nationalists led by Mosaddeq who were trying to take control of Iranian oil back from Britain, the party backed the Soviet Union’s demands for oil concessions in Iran.20 A prominent member of the party claimed: In the same way that we recognize Britain’s legitimate interests in Iran and do not oppose those interests, we should recognize the legitimate interests 16 Ibid., p. 68. 17 Mashrouhe Mozakerate Majles-e Meli Dorey-e 5, Jalesey-e 211, Ketabkhane, Mouze,

va Markaz Asnade Majles Shouray-e Eslami. 18 Akharin defaiyeh-ye doktor Taqi Arani dar dadgah-e jenayi-e Tehran (Enteshrat-e Hezb Tudeh-ye Iran, 1974), p. 19. 19 Ervand Abrahamian, A History of Modern Iran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 108–109. 20 Shahibzadeh, Marxism and Left-Wing Politics, p. 96.

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of the Soviet Union in our country. … We encourage the government to start as soon as possible its negotiations with the Soviet Union on the concessions of the northern oil resources and with the British and the US regarding southern oil resources.21

As some of the leading members of the Tudeh Party, such as Khalil Maleki and Jalal Al-e Ahmad, realized the party’s dependence on the Soviet Union, left the Party and initiated a new politico-intellectual movement that became known as the third force. The third force rejected Soviet socialism for two main reasons. First, socialism cannot survive without political democracy, but the Soviet Union deprives its citizens of their democratic rights, such as freedom of expression. Secondly, the socialist movement of each country must defend the sovereignty of its state and oppose the interventions of the Soviet Union in its internal affairs. As the third force failed to form a coalition with pro-Mosaddeq political forces against both the political establishment and monarchy supported by Britain and the Tudeh Party, the movement for oil nationalization failed to achieve its goals.22 Maleki’s anti-Soviet stance led him to encourage Mosaddeq’s government to expel all communists from the state institutions and universities.23 As the ideologue of the third force, Maleki believed that, after World War II, communism was no longer a popular movement because the Soviet Union turned from being a socialist state into an expansionist state.24 Until 1952, Maleki was hoping for the emergence of an independent communist movement to challenge Stalinist Communism. However, from 1952 onward, he was hoping that Titoism would initiate an independent European communist movement that in alliance with the European social democracy stand against both capitalism and Soviet socialism toward democratic socialism in Europe and Iran.25

21 Ehsan Tabari, Mardom 1323/November 1944.

baray-e

roshanfekran,

Shomare-ye

12,

19

Aban

22 Khalil Maleki, Nehzat-e melli va edalat-e ejtemayi (Tehran: nashre Markaz, 1998), pp. 6–10. 23 Ibid., pp. 25–30. 24 Ibid., pp. 18–20. 25 Ibid., pp. 25–30.

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Westoxication as the Third Force Following the American-British coup against Mossadeq’s government in 1953, the Iranian public sphere became contracted once again. As a result of the new contraction of the public sphere and the immigration of the leaders of the Tudeh Party to the Soviet bloc, Iranian socialists represented mainly by the party lost their contacts with the political reality in Iran and the intellectual currents that reflected on that reality. As the pro-Mossadeq nationalists lost their pre-coup influence in the 1960s, the third force became the leading intellectual and political framework for the Iranian intellectuals and students through which they could think about their society and imagine its future. As one of the significant representatives of the third force, Jalal Al-e Ahmad continued Maleki’s legacy but with a different tone and with a broader intellectual impact. The originality of Ale-Ahmad lies in the fact that he tried to expose Westoxication as the main principle of the neocolonialist culture and dominant ideology in Iran in the 1960s. Al-e Ahamad’s critique of Westoxication inspired both Marxist radicals such as Bijan Jazani and radical Muslims such as Ali Shariati. Although Maleki rejected Al-e Ahmad’s approach in the Westoxication since he believed that the theory of Westoxication represented the West as a unified whole without class contradictions, Ale Ahmad praised Maleki for outlining the main principles of a third way between the Soviet Communism and Western Imperialism.26 Al-e Ahmad claimed that Maleki’s ideas introduced a new intellectual foundation upon which the new generation of the Iranian intellectuals could formulate their understanding of the history of socialism, communism, colonialism, and neo-colonialism toward and the third way.27 Generated by colonialism and neo-colonialism, Al-e Ahmad defines Westoxication as a cultural condition in which local intellectuals have become consumers of Western cultural and intellectual products without being able to reflect on the cultural and intellectual foundations of the system that is producing such products. Hence, not only Asia but Africa and Latin America are exposed to Westoxication. For Al-e Ahmad, it is not by accident that the Westoxicated societies entrapped in poverty and 26 Amir Pishdad and Homayon Katuzian, Nameh’ha-ye Khalil Maleki (Tehran: Markaz, 2002), p. 9. 27 Jalal Al-e Ahmad, Dar khedmat va khiyanat-e roushanfekran (Tehran: Kharazmi, 1978), pp. 343–344.

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underdevelopment depend on the economically affluent and technologically advanced, and culturally and politically developed West. The former, which Al-e Ahmad calls the Orient, is convinced that it must be dependent on the former for in order to learn to develop itself and bridge the gap between its backwardness and the West.28 Al-e Ahmad’s includes the Soviet bloc in the category of the West for two reasons: it experiences a degree of economic prosperity that is unimaginable in the Orient and, together with the capitalist states exploits and oppresses the nations of the Orient, economically and politically.29 Westoxication is the name of this ideological domination that enables the West to exploit the Orient without resistance. Al-e Ahmad refers to the investment of Ford, Rockefeller, and other Western capitalists in the cultural exchanges as a means of consolidating Westoxication of the non-Western world. Westoxication generates intellectuals who, similar to the colonialists of the nineteenth century, do not believe in anything but can make themselves believe in everything. A Westoxicated intellectual whose moral consciousness functions according to his material gains is neither a believer in religion nor a non-believer. Al-e Ahmad’s conceptualization of the Westoxicated intellectual resembles Arendt’s conceptualization of the members of the European mob who, as colonizers, turned into European gentlemen. Despite his little knowledge, the Westoxicated intellectual speaks about everything, and while he does not have any cosmopolitan tendency, he pretends to be the voice of everyone. That is why, despite his socialized appearance, he does not trust anyone; he suspects everyone because he fears for his career, for not making a name for himself, and for being discovered as an ignorant person. In short, fear is the essence of his character.30 In his research and writing, the Westoxicated intellectual is parroting Western politicians, journalists, and Orientalists. Whenever, Western politicians, journalists, or Orientalists are silent about a subject he is researching and writing about, he concludes that those subjects are of no value. The Westoxicated intellectual believes that only people with Noble Prizes, Pulitzer prize, or Prix Goncourt are qualified to decide the proper methods of research and writing. The Westoxicated intellectual’s belief in the myth of the Western scientific method has led him

28 Jalal Al-e Ahmad, Gharbzadegi (Tehran: Entesharat-e Ferdos, 1993), pp. 19–20. 29 Ibid., pp. 21–23. 30 Ibid., pp. 127–128.

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to believe that the Orient has a reality as long as the Orientalists and imperialists make it the object of their intellectual and material reflections. By ignoring what he is, what he feels, what he sees, and what he experiences, the Westoxicated intellectual knows himself and other Orientals through the eyes of the Orientalists. The appalling consequence of the Westoxication is the Westoxicated’s feeling of worthlessness, which leads the Westoxicated intellectual to doubt his ability to hear and see. Thus, the Westoxicated surrenders his senses to a desperate individual called Orientalist, who, without any academic merits, claims that he can reveal the secrets of the Orient. In reality, the Orientalist does not have any academic training. He is neither linguist nor anthropologist or sociologist but an Orientalist whose field of study has been a parasite that depended on colonialism in the past and now relies on the neocolonialist international organizations.31 Al-e Ahmad describes the Orientalists as overt and covert agents of Western colonial governments. As the Westoxicated intellectuals elevated the Orientalists to the ranks of the undisputed experts of Oriental history and culture, they receive academic recognition in the Orient.32 Alongside their recognition of the scientific values of the Orientalists, the Westoxicated intellectuals provide the ideological justification for political dictatorship and suppression of the constitutional government and freedom of expression in Iran.33 Al-e Ahmad saw a coincidence between the emergence of Westoxication in the Orient and the reemergence of fascism and right-wing extremism in the West, whom he describes as the European gangsters, killers, deportees, and adventurers who returned from the colonized territories. Whereas their departures from Europe to the colonized countries made the European capitals, museums, and theaters safe, their return to Europe would cause social unrest in Europe. Hence, the fear of social unrest and the neocolonialist and neo-imperialist opportunities in the formerly colonized lands convinced the European governments to send the former colonizers back to the newly liberated countries from colonialism as experts and advisors to assist their

31 Ibid., pp. 132–134. 32 Ibid., pp. 135–137. 33 Ibid., pp. 144–145.

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governments in controlling their people who are overexploited and plundered in a new fashion.34 Al-e Ahmad hoped that with the expansion of the education and the intellectual domain, the coming generation of the intellectuals reveals the social, political, and intellectual contradictions of the existing order.35 However, to distract people from their real enemies, Westoxication and dictatorship fabricate internal and external enemies to remind the people that they should be grateful for what they already have. Otherwise, the enemies will destroy them from within and from without.36 Inspired by the Gramscian thesis on the formation of the organic intellectuals to impose the ideological hegemony of the working class on society, Al-e Ahmad proposed an alliance between the secular intellectuals and the clergy to mobilize the masses against the neocolonialist and Westoxicated cultural and political dictatorship.37 While aware of the undemocratic tendencies of the clergy, which he criticized, Ale-Ahmad admired the clergy’s power of popular mobilization and considered Ayatollah Khomeini’s opposition to the Shah as progressive.38 He reminded the Iranian intellectuals of the initial collaborations with the previous generations of the clergy and intellectuals in the Constitutional Revolution and the Movement for Oil Nationalization, their success and their subsequent failure when they turned against one another. While blaming Westoxication for the failure of the previous movements, he tried to initiate a new alliance between the two social groups.39 Al-e Ahmad’s effort to synthesize the Sartrean conception of the intellectual with the Gramscian idea of intellectual hegemony to formulate a politico-cultural strategy for the Iranian intellectuals did not impress the young radical Marxist and Islamist intellectuals.40 Iranian young Marxists accused him of deserting the proletariat and confusing socialism with 34 Ibid., pp. 172–175. 35 Ibid., pp. 189–190. 36 Ibid., p. 193. 37 Jalal Al-e Ahmad, Dar khedmat va khiyanat-e roushanfekran, p. 107; “The Intel-

lectuals,” in Gramsci’s Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 1971), pp. 3–23. 38 Ibid., p. 252. 39 Ibid., p. 431. 40 See Yadullah Shahibzadeh, Marxism and Left-Wing Politics in Europe and Iran (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Islamism and Post-Islamism in Iran: An Intellectual History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).

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liberalism.41 However, as one of the primary founders of the Association of Iranian Writers in 1969, Al-e Ahmad failed to convince the majority in the Association to accept membership of Ayatollah Mahmoud Taleqani, the most progressive Iranian clergy at the time, and Ali Shariati who became the ideologue of the Iranian Revolution.42 Al-e Ahmad argued that the Iranian intellectuals suffered from intellectual infertility caused by Westoxication, which entrapped them in a tragic-comic situation of being repressed by the state and rejected by the masses.43 Al-e Ahmad assumed that the Iranian intellectuals could overcome their tragic-comic situation if they rise against the colonial cultural invasion that protects the existing political order.44 He assumed that any theoretical revolt against the Westoxication would liberate the Oriental intellectuals from their intellectual infertility and political incapacity.45 Al-e Ahmad’s critique of Westoxication made a significant impact on Shariati, the ideologue of the Iranian Revolution, and Bijan Jazani (1938–1975), one of the leading theorists of the Marxist organization Fadiyan. Both assumed the domination of a neocolonialist culture as the ideological underpinning of Iran’s subjugation to imperialism. Inspired by Maleki’s third way and Al-e Ahamad’s Westoxication, the Iranian leftist intellectuals who emerged in the 1960s rejected the Tudeh Party and the Soviet Union as the foundations of socialism and internationalism.46 Consequently, the new leftist tendencies branded Mossadeq a symbol of the global struggles against imperialism and adopted some of the main principles of the nationalist movement.47 Bijan Jazani, as one of the prominent representatives of the Iranian left in this period, compared Ayatollah Khomeini’s anti-imperialist stance to Mosaddeq’s anti-imperialism and predicted Khomeini to become the

41 Amir Parviz Pouyan, Khashmgin az emperialism tarsan az enqelab (Tehran: Unknown publisher, 1969), p. 24. 42 Massoud Noqrehkar, Bakhshi az tarikh-e jonbesh-e roushanfekri-ye Iran: barrasi-ye tarikhi-tahlili-ye Kanun-e Nevisandegan-e Iran, Jeld-e panjom (Spånga, Sweden: Baran, 2002), p. 721. 43 Al-e Ahmad, Dar khedmat va khiyanat-e roushanfekran, pp. 251–252. 44 Ibid., p. 256. 45 Ibid., p. 48. 46 Bizhan Jazani, Tarikh-e si-saleh-ye Iran, Jeld-e Avval (place and date of publication

unknown), pp. 22–25. 47 Ibid., p. 86.

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likely leader of the coming Iranian revolution.48 Jazani’s analysis of the domination of the neocolonialist culture in Iran and the similarities between the Iranian comprador bourgeoisie and the colonial agents in the colonized world led him to understand Khomeini as the representative of the most effective ideological force against the neocolonialist culture in Iran.49 Jazani argues that whereas the national bourgeoisie led by Mosaddeq promoted cultural resistance against imperialism, the comprador bourgeoisie encourages cultural obedience to imperialism. Jazani describes the cultural situation in Iran in the 1960s as a cultural war between the imperialist culture represented by a tiny and lazy social clique that appropriate the most considerable share of the national wealth and the culture of the exploited masses deprived of the urgent necessities for their subsistence.50 However, since instead of allowing this cultural war to be fought through arguments in democratic political debates, the regime of the Shah suppressed any expression of dissent with extreme violence, revolutionary violence became the only solution.51

The Islamist Turn Although Ale-Ahamd’s discourse on Westoxication was not revolutionary, its vision of a new and independent intellectual discourse inspired Shariati to formulate a theory of revolution based on a revolutionary interpretation of Islam with the intellectuals as its principal agents. Unlike Al-e Ahmad, Shariati was not interested in the alliance between the secular intellectuals and the clergy since he considered the clergy as the representative of the dominant ideology and the guardian of the existing order. Shariati synthesized elements from Al-e Ahamd’s Westoxication, Frantz Fanon’s theory of national liberation, the Theist Socialists , who based on Quranic teachings, in the 1940s–1950s, tried to formulate a type of democratic socialism to overcome the shortcomings of the Soviet 48 Bizhan Jazani, Panj Resaleh, Tehran. Sazman-e cherikha-ye fadayi-ye khalq (place of publication unknown, November–December 1976), p. 32. 49 Bizhan Jazani, Tarh-e jameeh-shenasi va mabani-ye estrategike jonbesh-e enqelabiy-e Iran (place of publication unknown: Sazman-e Etehad-e Fadayian-e Khalq-e Iran, 2003), pp. 71–72. 50 Ibid., pp. 71–72. 51 Jazani, Masael-e jonbesh-e zed-e estemari va azadibakhshe-e khalq-e Iran, va omde-

htarin vazayef -e komonistha-ye Iran dar sharayet-e konouni, p. 6.

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socialism. But more importantly, Shariati’s became attached to the French Humanist Marxism during his stay in France from 1959 to 1963.52 The Theist Socialists argued that Muslims understand the struggle for socialism as a spiritual experience and a search for unity or Touhid as the essence of Islam.53 Another source of inspiration for Shariati’s Islamist ideology was the Mojahedin-e Khalq organization that considered Islam as the expression of truth through revelation, whereas described Marxism as the manifestation of truth through the scientific understanding of history, society, and economics. Both Mojahedin and Shariati shared the Marxist construction of the classless society as the final destination of all human revolutions, although they called it the touhidi classless society.54 The Mojahedin shared Shariati’s view that whereas the prophet disseminated emancipatory consciousness to liberate humankind from class exploitation and political repression, the clergy advocates false consciousness to justify the existing order.55 The Mojahedin claimed that their method of reading the Quran was similar to Lenin’s creative reading of Marx. Thus, in the same way, Lenin’s reading of Marx resulted in the building of a revolutionary political party that led the socialist revolution in Russia, the Mojahedin’s reading of the Quran would create a vanguard party that brings about and lead a socialist revolution in Iran.56

Shariati’s Islamist Ideology Some Iranian Islamists consider Al-Afghani as the first Muslim intellectual, who made Islam an anti-colonial ideological force.57 However, Shariati criticized Al-Afghani’s reliance on powerful men and his disregard for the masses and their struggle against local tyrannies that aided

52 Mohammad Nakhshab, Chapakhsh, 2002), p. 341.

Majmueh-ye

asar-e

Mohammad

Nakhshab

(Tehran:

53 Ibid., pp. 303–304. 54 Sadeq Zibakalam, Moqadameh’i bar enqelab-e eslami (Tehran: Ruzaneh, 1996),

p. 242. 55 Ervand Abrahamian, Radical Islam: The Iranian Mujahedin (London: I.B. Tauris, 1989), p. 93. 56 Interview with Seyyed Mahmud Doayi, Ettelaat, 04.04.1359 (25.06.1979). 57 Morteza Motahari, Nehzathay-e Eslami dar Sad Sal-e Akhir (Qom: Nashre Asr,

1978), pp. 15–32.

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colonialism.58 Shariati’s aim was precise; transformation of Islam into a revolutionary ideology and a theory of intellectual, aesthetic, political, and social emancipation.59 He expected the Islamist ideology to become the intellectual and political platform of a revolutionary community that establishes a transitional revolutionary government toward the classless society. Shariati brought the concept of human alienation from Humanist Marxism into his Islamist ideology to demonstrate the necessity of revolution as the main requirement of human emancipation from historical alienation. For Shariati, the Marxist concept of de-alienation was identical to the “perfected man” (Ensan-e Kamel) in Islam.60 Following Al-e Ahmad, Shariati criticized Iranian intellectuals who tried to apply Western ideologies uncritically because, in his view, the imported ideologies were unable to form a new intellectual community that can lead a revolutionary struggle.61 Following Gramsci’s project that was designed to bridge “the gap between the alta cultura of the intellectuals and the cultura populare of the masses,” Shariati tried to establish a common ground between the intellectuals and the masses.62 Unconvinced of the effectivity of the concept of class in analyzing the Iranian situation, Shariati advocated an alliance between the revolutionary intellectual communities with the masses.63 Shariati calls into question what he called vulgar Marxism’s understanding of class-consciousness as the direct result of the class position of the proletariat.64 He argues that in order to involve itself in the revolutionary actions, the working class must transcend its class interests and become a part of a disinterested community that he calls ommat .65 Shariati claims that the history of the struggle is the history of the religious and ideological struggles between the oppressive and oppressed 58 Ali Shariati, Tavalode Dobare-ye Islam dar negahi Sari’ bar Faraz-e yek Qarn (Tehran:

Nashre Elham, 2010), Bakhsh-e 2. 59 Ali Shariati, Ma va eqbal, Collected works (Vol. 5) (Tehran: Entesharat-e Elham, 2011), p. 148. 60 Ali Shariati, Islam’shenasi [Ershad Lectures (1)] (Tehran: Qalam, 2000), p. 73. 61 Ali Shariati, Bazgasht (Tehran: Qalam, 2000), pp. 208–209. 62 Benedetto Fontana, Hegemony & Power, on the Relation Between Gramsci and Machiavelli (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 148. 63 Shariati, Islam’shenasi [Ershad Lectures (2)], p. 190. 64 Ali Shariati, Neveshteh’ha-ye asasi-ye Shariati beh kushesh-e Bijan Abdolkarimi (Tehran:

Naqd-e Farhang, 2014), p. 241. 65 Ali Shariati, Ma va eqbal, p. 131.

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classes.66 Whereas the religion of the ruling class has justified the unjust social order, the religion of the ruled has delegitimized the existing order.67 In its search for social justice, the ruled has always envisioned a classless society (Nazm-e Touhidi) that will be realized in the future.68 Disappointed by the Iranian secular intellectuals’ way of thinking and talking about the masses that had nothing to do with the real experience of the masses, he invited the intellectuals to enter into dialogue with the masses.69 The dialogue would enable the intellectuals to learn from the ways the masses use their religious frames of reference and religious sensibilities to construct concepts that explain their situation and envision their future.70 Shariati encourages the Iranian intellectuals to get rid of the Orientalist attempts to devoid Islam from its political elements so that it serves imperialist powers and try to rediscover its political values.71 Rather than “spiritual Islam” that is devoid of any critical and political potentials, Shariati’s Islam is the expression of people’s consciousness and their revolutionary tendencies toward human emancipation.72 Shariati’s Islam as a revolutionary ideology, does not understand blasphemy as the rejection of the religious dogma but as actions that deny truth and justice.73 The Islamist ideology indicates that true Islam rejects imitation, prejudice, and submission. It promotes actions to the extent they contribute to the realization of truth and justice.74 Hence, “true Islam” is an ally of “true Marxism” because they both propagate social revolutions to reunite man with his true essence.75

66 Shariati, Eslam’shenasi [Ershad Lectures (1)], p. 62. 67 Abrahamian, Radical Islam, p. 111. 68 Ali Shariati, Ommat va emamat (n.d.), p. 193. 69 Ali Shariati, Islam’shenasi [Ershad Lectures (2)], (Tehran: Qalam, 2000), p. 166. 70 Abrahamian, Radical Islam, p. 113. 71 Shariati, Islam shenasi [Ershad Lectures (1)], pp. 195–196. 72 Shariati, Bazgasht, pp. 30–32. 73 Ali Shariati, Jahanbini va ideolozhi (Tehran: Sherkat-e Sahami-ye enteshar, 2000), pp. 170–172. 74 Shariati, Islam shenasi [Ershad Lectures (1)], pp. 70–71. 75 Shariati, Islam’shenasi [Ershad Lectures (2)], p. 156.

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Shariati shares Trotsky’s understanding of the crisis of revolutionary leadership as the manifestation of the historical crisis of humanity.76 As Shariati’s Islamist ideology aims to transform the intellectual into the revolutionary vanguard, it reduces every intellectual and political question to the question of leadership. It ascribes, as well, to the revolutionary intellectuals the exclusive right to establish the revolutionary government to lead the masses toward human perfection.77 Compared with the revolutionary government that Shariati envisioned, the revolutionary government in Iran after the 1979 Revolution has been far more democratic. Shariati depicted a revolutionary community or Omat that follows its leader or Emam, toward the classless society. As long as the leader keeps his revolutionary promises, the Omat as a whole must obey him. However, Shariati is silent on what should the revolutionary community do if their leader has lost his revolutionary qualifications.78 With the outbreak of the Revolution in 1978–1979, Shariati’s intellectual project mobilized hundreds of thousands of educated young people behind the leadership of Ayatollah Khomeini as the embodiment of the revolutionary leader or Emam. But as Merleau-Ponty reminds us “revolutions inevitably pervert in their transformation from negativity to positivity, from critique and destruction to reconstruction; they are ‘true as movements’ but ‘false as regimes.’”79 Shariati is not unaware of the history of the transformations of the progressive movements, concepts, religions, and ideologies into reactionary ones as soon as they were institutionalized. According to Shariati, not only Christianity and Islam, but the French Revolution and Marxism began as progressive revolutionary movements but were transformed into reactionary institutions after they were institutionalized. Hence, Christianity and the heirs of the French Revolution functioned as the most reactionary forces behind colonialism.80 The same happened, according to Shariati’s disciples, to the Islamist revolutionary ideology after the 1979 Revolution since, as a result of its

76 Eugene Gogol, Toward a Dialectic of Philosophy and Organization (Leiden: Brill, 2012), p. 184. 77 Shariati, Bazgasht, p. 290. 78 AliShariati, Majmueh-ye asar 26, p. 342. 79 Nick Crossley, The Politics of Subjectivity: Between Foucault and Merleau-Ponty

(Aldershot: Avebury, 1994), p. 94. 80 Shariati, Islam’shenasi 2, p. 63.

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post-revolutionary transformation and institutionalization, it functioned as the justification of the post-revolutionary existing order.81 During Khomeini’s lifetime, the Islamist ideology remained an enchanting force to which the young revolutionaries succumbed their will. However, after Khomeini died in 1989, the young Islamists intellectuals who, for eight years, had defended the revolutionary state in the Iran-Iraq war had realized that after being institutionalized, the revolution had lost its progressive drive. Hence, equipped with the post-revolutionary experience and intellectual curiosity, which they had acquired from Shariati’s Islamist ideology, the young Islamist intellectuals began to evaluate not only the post-revolutionary social and political practices but the credibility of the Islamist ideology. Accordingly, as the former young revolutionaries began to criticize the ideological foundations and the undemocratic practices of the post-revolutionary state that they had built themselves, they introduced post-Islamism.

Post-Islamism As the former young Islamist revolutionaries of the past, the post-Islamists who had relied on their own political experience realized that the postrevolutionary state could not show any sign of fulfilling the main promise of the Islamist ideology, namely the movement toward the promised classless society. On the contrary, the revolutionary state that was supposed to create a classless society denied the majority of its citizens of equal opportunity to participate in the political processes to discuss the current situation of their society and shape its future. Their experience with the post-revolutionary state combined with the reevaluation of the Islamist ideology taught them that it was not the duty of the state to lead society toward perfection. They realized that the post-revolutionary state failed to protect equal rights and freedom of all citizens. The intellectual transformation of Iranian Islamists into post-Islamists in the late 1980s and early 1990s coincided with the collapse of the Soviet Union, which Fukuyama interpreted as the final triumph of liberal democracy over socialist totalitarianism and the beginning of the end of history. Many post-Islamists intellectuals who were criticizing their own past accepted the idea of the end of history as a fact. However, the end of history implied that the

81 Shariati, Islam’shenasi 1, p. 358.

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West had reached a post-historical time, which includes a privileged epistemological position that the rest of the world may reach in the future if they try hard and do what the champions of democracy and good government in the West tell them to do. This privileged epistemological position assumed the existence of a historical gap between the Western political culture and the rest of the World. To overcome this historical gap, the rest of the world had to follow the guidance of the Western governments and their experts and NGOs. Those who accepted this epistemological position began to consider any critical approach, political movement, and state that lacked the blessing of Western governments, their experts, and NGOs, as nativist, authoritarian and totalitarian approaches, movements, and states. Since the early 1990s, thousands of academic books and articles on the Iranian Revolution and the post-revolutionary intellectual, political and social currents in Iran have appeared in the West. Almost all these academic works assume that there exist intellectual, political, ethical, and aesthetic gaps between the Iranian society and the West, if the Iranians want to build a democratic society, they have to admit the existence of these gaps and begin to overcome them with the Western partners. Abdolkarim Soroush is one of the prominent post-Islamists who adopted such presuppositions. As a staunch critic of the Iranian Marxists who wanted to defend proletarian sciences against bourgeois sciences in the universities, Soroush became a significant figure in the Cultural Revolution led by the Islamists in 1980 to expel the leftist scholars and students from universities.82 In the late 1980s, Soroush, whose idea had little in common with Shariati’s Islamist ideology, became the head of an intellectual movement that targeted the foundation of this ideology, namely the distinction between “true Islam” and “false Islam.” Soroush argued that the distinction has never been between true religion and false religion, but between different interpretations of religious texts that generate different forms of religious knowledge and since there are endless perspectives and interpretations of the canonical religious texts, religion cannot be confined within particular interpretations.83 Soroush claims that man

82 Soroush, Ideolozhi-yeSheytani, p. 25. Soroush might have read Dominique Lecourt, Proletarian Science? The Case of Lysenko (London: NLB, 1977). 83 Shahibzadeh, Islamism and Post-Islamism in Iran, pp. 121–122.

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has no nature but history because theories have constructed our conception of man.84 Since the concept of man has always been unstable, the concepts of his current alienation and de-alienation in the future are theoretical constructs as well. Whereas Shariati rejected liberal democracy as a mask that covers the real social oppression and economic exploitation, Soroush considers liberal democracy as the denunciation of the totalitarian ideologies and political regimes that claim they represent the absolute truth and justice or promise to create a utopian society.85 Soroush claims that what the intellectual and democracy have in common is that both reject authority. Soroush does not consider every educated individual who, while distributing the existing knowledge, opposes the existing political, social, and cultural authorities as intellectual. It is not the intellectuals who challenge the existing authority, but their new ideas, concepts, and theories that call into question the existing arrangement of power. Hence, Heidegger cannot be categorized as an intellectual for the simple reason his ideas, concepts, and theories never challenged the Nazi regime. The intellectuals cannot be an ideologue either because they do not pursue political power.86 However, regardless of how hard the intellectuals try to distance themselves from those who hold and pursue power, they cannot control the instrumentalization of their ideas by the political forces that have ascended to power or pursue power. In such cases, the intellectual must make sure, according to Soroush, that that they do not gain any material prerogatives as a result of the political instrumentalization of their ideas.87 Hence, whereas Marx was an intellectual, Lenin was an operative who consumed and operationalized Marx’s theories.88 A true intellectual does not mistake culture and intellectual activities for politics. Another principle of the true intellectual life is that the intellectuals understand the main contradictions, cleavages, and questions of

84 Abdolkarim Soroush, Qabz va bast-e teorik-e shariat: nazariyeh-ye takamol-e marefat-e dini (Tehran: Sarat, 1995), pp. 94–96. 85 Abdolkarim Soroush, Razdani va roushanfekri va dindari (Tehran: Sarat, 1998), p. 128. 86 Ibid., pp. 7–11. 87 Ibid., p. 19. 88 Ibid., p. 31.

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their societies.89 Hence, being an intellectual is more than criticizing and protesting against the political authorities.90 Mojtahed Shabestari is another post-Islamist who investigates whether a particular religious faith (Iman) relies on existential experience or the philosophical knowledge of the faithful. He argues that whereas Shariati considered faith as an existential experience, others refer to their philosophical knowledge of Islam as the foundation of their faith. These two arguments indicate that there are different ways of being Muslim resulted from different interpretations of religious texts and constructions of religious knowledge.91 Shebestari sees modern spirituality and religious knowledge as a consequence of the modern critiques of religion that began with Feuerbach’s critique of Christianity. Shabestari considers Marx’s description of religion as an element of ideology that masks the domination of one class by another, as a constructive critique that forced the faithful Christians to reconsider the distinction between faith (Iman) and none-faith (Gheir-e Iman).92 Shebestari considers the critique of religion that intends to get rid of religion, an opportunity that the religious people should not miss. He believes that such fundamental critiques lead the faithful to revisit their religion and discover new meanings in their faith.93 For Shabestari, faith is a result of a conversation between a faithful person and God. The conversation makes the faithful person realize that God, as the expression of the absolute, can puts limits on his or her independence, knowledge, and actions. The discovery of these epistemological and practical limits leads the faithful to recognize that regardless of their beliefs, all men and women are equal. However, as soon as the faithful begin to rely on religious knowledge, they build religious institutions to protect their religious knowledge as eternal religious dogma. However, the same dogma prevents their experience of the absoluteness of God. By monopolizing God and making him the object of theology, law, tradition, and customs, the institutionalized religion denies the faithful to experience God’s absoluteness. Furthermore, as the institutionalized

89 Ibid., pp. 26–27. 90 Ibid., p. 37. 91 Mohammad Mojtahed Shabestari, Hermenoutik, ketab va sonnat (Tehran: Tarh-e Nou, 2000), pp. 166–167. 92 Ibid., p. 202. 93 Ibid., p. 196.

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religion makes it easier to use religion to protect the interests of particular social groups, ordinary religious people are educated to consider God as the absence of freedom.94 Shabestari rejects the view that the problem of Islamic societies is the conflict between the Islamic tradition and modernity. Unlike Christianity, neither the continuity of tradition nor “the history of salvation” protects the Muslim faith. In Islam, God “has never appeared in any historical event,” and there has never been a church to communicate the religious tradition and salvation to the new generations of believers.95 Accordingly, being a Muslim does not require preservation of the religious tradition against modernity. Thus, it is not modernity that is a conflictual issue in the Islamic societies, but colonialism and its long-lasting consequences expressed in the contemporary dictatorships supported by the United States and former colonial powers.96 Unlike Soroush, Shabestari does not regard epistemological uncertainty and religious pluralism as the foundations of democracy, because the Sophists who were the first advocates of epistemological uncertainty sentenced Socrates who advocated epistemological certainty to death. For Shebestari, whereas democracy and political pluralism can protect religious pluralism, religious pluralism cannot do the same for democracy.97 For Shabestari, the questions of governance and who has the right to govern is not a religious but a secular and political question.98 His response to the conservative religious authorities who perceive democracy as a threat to Islam and the words of God is that if one day the Iranian people decide to renounce Islam and God, they will surely defy all worldly powers which try to force them to change their mind.99 The more politically engaged Post-Islamist were preoccupied with the inconsistency between the promises of the Islamic Republic inscribed in its constitution and the practices of its institutions since the latter undermined democracy and freedom of expression. As the former young Islamists who had built and defended the Islamic Republic, the post-Islamists believed that

94 Shabestari, Iman va azadi, Tehran: Tarh-e Nou, 1997, p. 29. 95 Ibid., p. 104. 96 Shabestari, Iman va azadi, 1997, p. 122. 97 Mojtahed Shabestari, Naqdi bar qaraat-e rasmi az din, pp. 389–390. 98 Massoud Razavi, Motafakeran-e moaser va andisheh-ye siyasi-ye Eslam (Tehran:

Farzan-e Ruz, 2000), pp. 139–141. 99 Razavi, Motafakeran-e moaser, p. 145.

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they had every right to make the state that they had created the object of criticism and theoretical reflections. They argued that conservative interpretations of the principle of Velayat-e Faqih in the constitution had deprived Iranian citizens of their constitutional and democratic rights.100 They insisted that since all the articles of the Iranian constitution are theoretical constructs, they should be reconstructed according to the democratic demands of the people.101 There is a contrast between the European and Iranian political and intellectual trajectory. By absorbing the former radicals into the state institutions, universities, and research centers, since the early 1970s, the European states made the the intellectuals the allies of the state and the defenders of the existing social order. On the contrary, after the Iranian political institutions excluded the Islamist leftists, the universities and research institutions recruited them to turn them into intellectual and political dissenters who challenged the existing political order. Whereas the European states involved the former leftists and radicals in the process of decision-making, the Iranian states found the presence of the Islamist leftists in the political institutions as an obstacle in the desired processes of decision-making. As the Iranian Islamist leftists took the universities and the research institutions in their hands, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, they universalized their political situation and advocated the democratic rights of the people against the state. They turned to the Iranian constitution, which they defined as a social contract between the citizens and the state and made the discrepancies between the constitutions’ promises and the practices of the state the subjects of academic investigations and public debates.102 As the post-Islamists succeeded in winning the presidency in 1997, they expanded the public space. They encouraged public debates on the democratic rights of the people and the state’s responsibilities toward these rights. These rights included reforming the electoral procedures and the limitation of the power of Iran’s supreme leader and other

100 Mohsen Kadivar, Hokumat-e Velayi (Tehran: Ney, 1998), p. 207. 101 Shahibzadeh, Islamism and Post-Islamism in Iran, pp. 168–170. 102 Saeed Hajjarian, Jomhuriyat, afsunzedayi az qodrat (Tehran: Tarh-e Nou, 2000), p. 21.

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conservative institutions.103 However, conservative institutions such as the Guardian Council of Constitution resisted changes.104 As the postIslamists failed to achieve the democratic changes they promised, they returned to the story of the epistemological and political gap between Iran and the West. They argued that these gaps are too wide or too deep to be fulfilled through sudden political changes. They invited Iranians to learn from European and American intellectual life and politics. The result is the conversion of some post-Islamists’ into neoconservatives who reject the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the post-revolutionary state as irrational and ideological. What the post-Islamist turned neoconservatives forget is that by rejecting the revolution and the post-revolutionary state they have built, they reject their own epistemological and ethical transformation. The post-Islamists turned neoconservatives have forgotten that they cannot deny their history and their contributions to the democratization of the public sphere in Iran. This contribution would have been impossible if Iran had not remained a sovereign state and a sovereign public and political sphere after the 1979 Revolution. Contemporary Iran has not only a far more open public sphere than Iran of the 1970s and 1980s but compared with its neighbors the most open society in the region. While workers strike and street protests have become parts of daily life in contemporary Iran, almost every intellectual debate and political dispute take a public character. Elections are still not free and fair for the simple reason that Iran is not a consensual democracy but a political democracy. Islamism emerged in Iran in the 1960s, at the same time that the European new left was emerging. Both were critical of the Soviet Union for its lack of political democracy. Similarly, post-Islamism coincided with the collapse of the Soviet Union understood as the end of history while American neoconservatives were creating the Project for the New American Century. However, the neoconservative faction within postIslamism refuses to see the logical contradiction between the universality of democratic principles and the particularity of Western interests in the Middle East and the rest of the world. Soroush and Kadivar, as two of the most prominent representatives of this faction, now recruited by American universities, cannot see the toxic nature of this contradiction. Soroush and Kadivar were a part of the ideological constellation of the

103 Ibid., pp. 54–55. 104 Ibid., pp. 80–81.

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post-revolutionary state called the Islamic Republic of Iran. Whereas, as prominent scholars in the Islamic Republic, they opposed US imperialism in the early 1980s, they have become scholars who work in the United States and oppose the Islamic Republic since the early 2000s. This fact has infuriated many Iranian intellectuals and scholars who have always distanced themselves from the existing political system in Iran and paid the price for their political and ethical stance. Javad Tabatabai, a former professor at the University of Tehran, is one of these scholar intellectuals, who despite being to some extent excluded from the university, has contributed immensely to the Iranian academic and public discourse since the early 1990s. However, Tabatabai’s intellectual project is not so different from the neoconservative faction of the post-Islamist tendency. Tabatabaiy’s ambition is the construction of a grand theory of politics and history upon which a political theory, a theory of culture, and higher education to generate genuine social and human sciences in Iran. For instance, he claims that the absence of a philosophy of education in Iran has reduced universities to the places of intellectual laziness to be used by the political elite for their economic and political gains. Tabatabai claims every educational system has an object of reflection and a subject to which the system offers its services. In premodern Europe, the Christian community was both the object of reflections of traditional education and the subject of its services. However, modern universities made the nation-states the object of their reflections and the subject of their services. As the Christian community was transformed into the nation-state, the traditional higher education was converted into modern universities. In Iran, however, although the modern university has replaced the traditional religious schools, it failed to make Iran as a nation-state the object of its reflections and the subject of its services, hence, providing it with national consciousness. As a result, Iranian universities have become the outposts of Western universities that distribute their products between Iranian scholars and students. Tabatabai argues that people such as Soroush, who had never understood the fundamental idea behind the modern university, tried in the name of cultural revolution to Islamize Iranian universities with disastrous results. Islamization of the university in the post-revolutionary Iran deprived it of the ability to generate national consciousness, the lack of which makes the nation unable to find an honorable place among other nations. According to Tabatabai, what has protected the Iranian national identity until now is not its modern university but its old culture and

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poetry.105 Now, the time has come, according to Tabatabai, to make Iran the object of the Iranian university education and the subject of its services by safeguarding its national identity against the efforts to entrap it into endless ethnic divisions. Tabatabai believes that Iran, as the object of the new university would be a broader cultural entity that he calls Iranshahr within which contemporary Iran, as a nation-state, has existed and survived.106 But this educational project is threatened by two parallel projects caused by the cultural revolution in 1980. The first project is the Islamization of social and human sciences, and the second one is the nativization of these sciences. These two projects have changed, according to Tabatabai, the character of higher education from being a mere distribution of knowledge produced in Western universities to being truthful only to the values of the political system and responsible only to the post-revolutionary state ideology. He claims that all the efforts for making Iranian universities genuine institutions failed because the people who wanted to elevate the universities allowed former Islamists and Marxists, who never cared about Iran as a cultural entity and a nation-state, to decide the fate of the social and human sciences in the Iranian universities.107 Tabatabai regrets that whereas in France there were analytically oriented and politically liberal scholars such as Raymond Aron who could moderate Sartre’s conception of the revolutionary intellectual, there were no one who could speak reason to the followers of Al-e Ahmad who were repeating Sartre’s idea of the political responsibility of the intellectual.108 However, for Marxist scholar intellectuals such as Fariborz Ra’isdana, the primary question in modern Iran has always been, how to protect Iran’s national and state sovereignty. He believes that Al-e Ahmad understood the significance of this task more than any other Iranian intellectual.109 However, Ra’isdana’s understanding of Al-e Ahmad is as superficial as Tabatabai since he ascribes ideas to Al-e Ahmad, which he never expressed. He claims that Al-e Ahmad argued that Iranians should adopt engineering and basic sciences but replace modern social

105 Javad Tabatabaiy, Molahezat dar barae-ye daneshgah (Tehran: Entesharat-e Minoy-e Kherad, 2019), pp. 40–48. 106 Ibid., p. 54. 107 Ibid., pp. 59–61. 108 Ibid., p. 15. 109 Fariborz Ra’isdana, Manesh-e roushanfekri (Tehran: Nashre Golazin, 2018), p. 29.

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and human sciences with traditional religious sciences. Ra’isdana blames Ale-e Ahmad for including both rightist and leftist intellectuals as Westoxicated while the latter was fighting against dictatorship and imperialism. According to Ra’isdana, Al-e Ahamad’s ideas were full of contradictions; because while adopting the politics of radical intellectuals such as Aimé Césaire and Sartre, he embraced cultural conservatism and tradition.110 Ra’isdana’s interpretation of Al-e Ahmad reveals how superficial Iranian Marxists read Al-e Ahmad. For Ra’isdana, in contemporary Iran, the intellectuals are either in the service of the political power and work in collaboration with the state technocracy and bureaucracy or oppose the existing socio-political system through cultural and political dissent.111 Whenever there is a political uprising, and people demand their democratic rights in a Middle Eastern country, Iran becomes the target of the collective efforts of Western scholars and media. When the academics, journalists, and NGO activists from consensual democracies promote democracy in the Middle East and receive generous rewards by their governments, they never forget to mention or even “demonstrate” that thanks to the uprising, anti-Iranian sentiments are on the rise. What is the problem with Iran? Well, Iran rejects a democracy that is designed to increase the influence and interventions of Western governments in the region. Iran knows that without protecting its sovereignty and without creating an autonomous public sphere, free from the interventions of the world powers, no nation can achieve anything remotely democratic. Iranians have realized that the public sphere of a country is the site of intellectual debates and political contestations of its citizens. While the so-called Arab Spring could become a significant democratic event in the region, the primary concern of the shareholders of the business of promoting democracy in the Middle East was whether Islamist or secular forces were a better choice to lead the democratic process. One of the main criteria for being a better alternative to lead the democratic process was the extent to which these political tendencies denounced the Iranian government. This Western obsession with Iran was one of the main factors that destroyed all chances of a national dialogue between the Islamist and the secular forces in Egypt in particular. Whereas the leaders of the Egyptian Muslims Brothers visited European capitals to make sure that

110 Ibid., pp. 33–36. 111 Ibid., pp. 94–95.

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European policymakers support their political take over by the democratic means in return for obeying their foreign policy in the region, their secular rivals relied on their army generals who later carried out the 2013 brutal coup d’état against the democratically elected Islamist government. As the United States and its European allies realized that their interests would be served without the Islamists in power, they relinquished the Egyptian Islamists. The Western’s betrayal of the Egyptian Islamists demonstrates that democracy will never be achieved without achieving full state sovereignty. The fact that the Egyptian Islamists relied on a prepolitical and slave-state such as Qatar and the secular segment cheered for a military coup which was financed by the slave-state of Saudi Arabia, indicate that the Egyptian public sphere was as unprotected as the Iranian public sphere was when the military coup took place against Mossadeq in 1953.

CHAPTER 8

A Perfect Democracy and Its Intellectuals

There is a famous quote by Henrik Ibsen that says, “An intellectual pioneer1 can never gather a majority about him” because when ten years later, the majority reaches where Dr. Stockmann, the main protagonist of An Enemy of the People, stood, he is at least ten years ahead. Hence, the masses will never rally behind the intellectual because they cannot catch him. After all, his desire to press forward will always keep the distance between him and the masses. “A crowd now stands where I stood when I wrote my earlier books. But I myself am there no longer. I am somewhere else - far ahead of them - or so I hope.”2 Ibsen (1828–1906) was born and grew up in Norway, a new nation-state with a constitution without full sovereignty. A few weeks after the defeat of France and its only European ally the kingdom of Denmark-Norway by Austria, Britain, Portugal, Prussia, Russia, Spain, and Sweden, a group of Norwegian officials gathered in the small city of Eidsvoll on 17 May 2014 and authored a constitution for the independent state of Norway which proclaimed in the same day. However, the victorious coalition did not recognize Norway’s state sovereignty. They granted the country to Sweden as a reward for its contribution to the War against France. Sweden did not recognize Norway’s independence but allowed it to determine its internal affairs in 1 The Norwegian term means intellectual or spiritual vanguard. 2 Henrik Ibsen, Ibsen Play 2: A Doll’s House, An Enemy of the People, Heda Gabler

(New York: Bloomsbury, 2006), p. 114.

© The Author(s) 2021 Y. Shahibzadeh, Public Intellectuals and Their Discontents, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56588-6_8

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exchange for accepting the king of Sweden as its sovereign and leaving foreign affairs of the country to be decided in Sweden. Norway gained sovereignty over its internal affairs at the same time that the European states were issuing Jewish emancipation laws and decrees, the consequence of which was the distinction between useful Jews and the Jewish masses. However, Norwegian constitutionalists decided through article 2 of the constitution to forbid the Jews from entering their country.3 The Jewish ban in Norway was partly a reaction to a decree by the Danish king, two months earlier, while the Denmark-Norway was still a union, and he was the sovereign of the union. In March 1814, the Danish king awarded civil rights in matters of private law to his Jewish subjects. However, the decree neither included political rights nor the right to occupy positions in the state institutions. Danish Jews gained their partial civil rights a year after the publication of the Danish translation of Mosses und Jesus in 1813, by the German author Friedrich Buchholz, while the anti-jewish sentiment in Denmark was reaching its peak. Thomas Thaarup, a well-known poet who translated the book into Danish, wrote in the introduction that since its emergence, the Jewish nation had been known for its self -interest, cruelty, and laziness . The decree was issued at a time that the influential bishop of the Danish court, Christian Bastholm who authored Den Jødiske Historien/The Jewish History (1772–1782), opposed any changes in the legal status of the Jewish inhabitants of Denmark. Bastholm shared Thaarup’s view of the Jews. That fact the Jews gained partial civil rights at a time the anti-Jewish passion of the masses was reaching its climax created a paradoxical condition for them since they did not know whether to be happy for the rights they had gained or be worried for the public expression of hatred.4 In 1851, two years after Denmark recognized equal political rights of its Jewish citizens, the Jewish ban in Norway was lifted. It took the Norwegian state more than three decades to realize the value of useful Jews for the strength of the state and welfare of the nation. In Norway, the interests of the nation-state and the rationality of the state prevailed over the passion of the masses. Norway’s contemporary historiography interprets the lifting of the ban on the Jews entering the country as the 3 https://www.stortinget.no/no/Stortinget-og-demokratiet/Lover-og-instrukser/Gru nnloven-fra-1814/. 4 Trond Berg Eriksen, Håkon Harket, and Einhart Lorenz, Jødehat: Antisemitismens historie fra antikken til i dag (Oslo: Cappelen Damm 2009), pp. 218–219.

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triumph of the humanist thinking in Norway and primarily the result of the efforts of the Norwegian national poet Henrik Wergeland. According to the Norwegian historiography, the Danish satirical newspaper Corsaren (1940–1946), which had Meir Aron Goldschmidt as its editor, made a significant impact on Wergeland’s view of the inhumanity of the Jewish ban. Goldschmidt authored En Jøde/A Jew (1845) in which he revealed his personal experience of the anti-Jewish climate in Denmark to demonstrate that the partial civil rights given to the Jews could not change the attitude of the society toward them. In 2005, several Norwegian historians published Jødehat/Hatred of the Jews, which could be understood as a historical reminder to the Norwegian intellectuals who either have rationalized, promoted, or denied systematic racism against the Muslim population in Norway. However, the authors are more interested in finding anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism in the Muslim world and among European Muslims as the latest phase of anti-Semitism. Whereas in their demonstration of anti-Semitism in the Muslim world, these Norwegian historians refer to Bernard Lewis, their frame of reference regarding the anti-Semitism of European Muslims is no one but Alain Finkielkraut. Another concern of these historians is the anti-Semitism of the contemporary anti-racist discourse.5 However, their admiration of the way the Danish Jewish author, Maïr Aron Goldschmidt, who in En Jøde published in 1845 reflects on his double identity consisted of Jewishness and Danishness is bizarre. Goldschmidt, who as a Jew experiences nothing but humiliation in public debates, believes that only reflections on the meaning of the universal can make society more humane, and make the Jews emancipated and equal members of the society. For Goldschmidt, what is unbearable is not that a Jew cannot hold a public office, being elected in an association or recruited by the army, but the disregard and animosity of his peers in the public space. What the Norwegian historians find admirable in Goldschmidt’s narrative is his courage to reveal his contradictory feeling of pride and shame since he is aware that his ambitions will never be realized because, as a Jew, he is condemned to remain in his place. However, these historians fail to offer any analysis of the racist disregard and animosity of his Danish peers.6 It seems that Goldschmidt’s book had made some impact in Denmark

5 Ibid., pp. 598–600. 6 Ibid., p. 225.

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because four years after its publication, Denmark’s new constitution gave the Jewish citizens full political rights. During the heated debates on the Jewish ban in Norway, a Danish Jewish convert into Christianity called M. L. Nathanson published a book in which he claimed that Jewish parents raised their children to hate and despise Christians. However, as Corsaren newspaper that had Goldschmidt as its editor rejected and ridiculed Nathansen’s claim, Wergeland who had been an enthusiastic advocate of the rights of the Jews to enter Norway included Corasan’s views in his arguments in favor of a new Jewish law that allows the Jews to enter Norway. Wergeland knew that Norwegian nationalism, with its deep roots in Protestantism, considered God and the fatherland as the two sides of the same coin. The Norwegian nationalists assumed that the right of the Jews to enter Norway was the same as the right of the Jews to enter heaven according to the Christian teachings. Against this Christian view and while no single Jew was present in Norway, Wergeland argued that the Jews were members of a distinct race or ethnicity but could become loyal and decent Norwegians. Norway abolished the Jewish ban in 1851, but the hate toward the Jews remained a dominant force in the public sphere since the widespread belief that the Jews were raised to hate Christians remained as strong as before. Not only the increasing critiques of religion in general and Christianity Judaism in particular, but the growing atheism in the mid-nineteenth century rationalized the hate against the Jews because the atheists were accused of being Jews in disguise. Hence, the religious authorities in Norway claimed that anti-Christianity campaigns had Jewish origin and Jewish sources carried out by people with Jewish backgrounds.7 With the rise of the Nazi ideology in Norway, half of the Jewish population in Norway left the country. After the German invasion in 1940 and Vidkun Quisling’s take over, those who remained in Norway were sent to the concentration camps. After the War, only half of the Norwegian Jews who sent to the German concentration camps returned to Norway. The fact that there is no single history of the Norwegian citizens saving their Jewish countrymen during World War II tells much about the status of the Jewish people in Norway before World War II. Maybe as a result of this experience, the Norwegian state and its intelligentsia have tried to make Norway a “humanitarian superpower” that

7 Ibid., pp. 230–232.

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spreads human rights, democracy, good government, freedom of expression, and advocates women emancipation, and the rights of ethnic minorities throughout the world. Being a humanitarian superpower presupposes that Norway has liberated itself from the social and political contradictions that divide other societies into the oppressors and the oppressed, and the dominants and the dominated. Being a humanitarian superpower means that the Norwegian society is no longer a political community driven by its socio-political contradictions but an ethical community with global responsibility. At home, the responsibility of the ethical community is to integrate the immigrants into the community. Hence the Norwegian intelligentsia tells the Norwegian citizens of Muslim and African origin that only their integration into the community will make them equal members of the community. However, there are requirements for the integration of newcomers into the community. Learning and internalizing the unspoken rules and codes of the community are the essential requirements of this integration. Being a humanitarian superpower and an ethical community means that there is no gap between state and society, and law and morality in Norway. The idea of Norway as an ethical community and a humanitarian superpower assumes that Norway, as an emancipated community, has a mission to emancipate both newcomers to Norway and societies and countries abroad. These qualities make Norway a perfect social and political model that other societies should replicate. Whereas contemporary Norwegian intellectuals have been teaching Muslims abroad and at home about the critique of religion as the legacy of the Enlightenment and the value of women liberation, the Norwegian dramatist, essayist, novelist, and poet, Jens Bjorneboe argued in the 1960s that colonization succeeded because the ideology of racism could reduce the colonized people to animals who should be domesticated and exploited without limitation. Echoing Arendt and Fanon, Bjørneboe considered Nazism as the interiorization of what the white man had experimented outside Europe. With the experience of Nazism, Europeans had the opportunity, according to Bjorneboe, to learn something about their colonial racism, but they missed the opportunity.8 Bjørneboe is well aware of how Norway has benefited from the crises of the never-ending war in the Middle East and elsewhere. He claims that since the onset of colonization, Norway’s industry and trade had flourished mostly during

8 Jens Bjørneboe, Stillheten (Oslo: Gyldendal, 2006), p. 37.

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the wars and crises in various regions of the world. He knows that the Norwegian livelihood depends on such crises and remembers that during the Arab–Israeli war of 1967, “Just a few years ago, shipping reached a degree of profitability that surpassed the boom it experienced during World War I.”9 Bjørneboe wrote in Silence (1973) as the last part of his trilogy of The History of Bestiality that the Eurocentrism of the European intellectuals has prevented them from seeing that reality does not exist only in Europe and Nord America but in the ongoing struggles in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. He was hoping that these struggles would shape the future of humanity.10 Bjorneboe traces the origin of this eurocentrism to the same ideology of racism that allowed King Leopold of Belgia to use every inhuman method of exploitation to increase the production of rubber, the result of which was the extermination of millions of Congolese. Writing in the 1960s, Bjørneboe understands the colonial racist ideology as an externalization of the deep-rooted racism within the European societies that divided people into noble people who feel extreme pain at the time of misery and poor people who do not feel pain when they are subject to misery. It is the same logic that leads American intellectuals to oppose the War in Vietnam not because it brings death and destruction to the Vietnamese but because there is no profit for the United States in this war. According to Biorneboe, the American critics of the war in Vietnam do not know that the profits of the US’ investment in Vietnam will appear in the future.11 Bjørneboe is well aware that the Western elite and intellectuals are ready to endorse and justify every inhumanity that their governments cause around the world if their economic interests are protected. He reminds us that the Western intellectuals who are preoccupied with the suppression of freedom of expression in the socialist countries never tell us that only a tiny minority in the West is concerned with democracy and freedom of expression. Against the claim that Western societies have institutionalized freedom of expression, he refers to Germany as a society in which people never criticize their government because they consider the state as the embodiment of the nation. Bjørneboe claims that those few intellectuals in the West who are concerned with freedom of expression in the Soviet Union

9 Ibid., p. 44. 10 Ibid., p. 91. 11 Jens Bjørneboe, Samlede Essays, Politkk (Oslo: Pax Forlag, 1996), pp. 57–60.

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never tell us that the absolute majority of the western intelligentsia who does not care about freedom of expression. That is why nobody makes a noise when Western governments criticize socialist countries for the lack of freedom of expression but support authoritarian and oppressive governments around the world.12 The fact that the dominant ideology in the West associates freedom of expression with pornography indicates the degree of respect for freedom of expression in this part of the world. For Bjorneboe, freedom of expression means active use of it. Otherwise, it does not exist. Hence, when used actively, freedom of expression is not a civil right but the founding principle of democracy.13 He refers to the double standard of the Western intellectuals who criticize the Soviet Union for suppressing freedom of expression of a few intellectuals and protest against the relatively peaceful coup in Czechoslovakia but remain silent about the brutal coup in Greece. In 1969, Bjorneboe criticized both Norway’s government for its total obedience to NATO and its intellectuals’ uncritical stance toward the United States. He criticizes, as well, the Norwegian leftist intellectuals who never offer a critical and informative argument that shed light on the US’s abuse of its power throughout the world in the same way that some American intellectuals are doing. Referring to Stephen Rousseas’ The Death of Democracy: Greece and the American Conscience, in which he discusses the involvement of CIA and NATO in the coup in Greece, Bjørneboe blames the Norwegian intellectuals for remaining silent on Norway’s role in this event. He reminds them that as a member of NATO, Norway has the same responsibility regarding the coup as any other member. Bjorneboe claims that whereas the Norwegian government criticizes the Greek Junta for its harsh treatment of political prisoners, it does not say a word regarding NATO’s role in bringing the Greek Junta to power. Whereas Rousseas’ effort to reveal the truth about NATO’s role in the coup in Greece indicates that he is using his freedom of expression actively, the Norwegian intellectuals’ silence about the role of their government in the coup indicates that freedom of expression does not exist in Norway. Instead, there emerge Norwegian human rights activists who defend democracy and human rights in Greece in abstract terms but remain silent about Norway’s role

12 Ibid., pp. 61–65. 13 Jens Bjørneboe, Samlede Essays, Politkk, p. 66.

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in the coup that brought the Military Junta, as the main source of all violence in Greece.14 For Bjørneboe, the occupation of Czechoslovakia by Russian revealed the rightist nature of Western democracies, which he hoped that the student movements would change before being domesticated. He saw the rejection of violence in the student movement as a sign of the coming intellectual revolution that would liberate them from becoming the highly paid slaves of the industrial and military complex. He assumes that the changes will begin when the students refuse to be integrated into the academic community because they know very well that this community forbids any critical approach to the existing order. According to Bjorneboe, the existing order has an explicit criterion for measuring the integrity of the academic community, that is the degree of its success to provide the system with the experts its needs. Bjorneboe assumes that the future mathematicians, physicians, chemists, doctors, sociologists, historians, and even priests will neither obey Western imperialism nor Stalinism because they have experienced the student protests.15 Bjorneboe belonged to a generation of European intellectuals in the 1960s who believed that the success of the revolutionary movements in Asia, Africa, and Latin America would activate revolutionary movements in Europe. His death in 1976 did not allow him to see that the same students would become neoconservative ideologues and neoliberal experts who would theorize racism at home and imperialism abroad. In 2016, four decades after Bjøeneboe’s death, a center-left Norwegian think tank published numerous directives called Ten Commandments to facilitate the integration of the Norwegian citizens of Muslim and African origin into the Norwegian society. The term used to call the people who are supposed to be integrated is utlendinnger. The term utlending , which means foreigner calls into question the legal status of these citizens. The commandments assume that whereas the state has the responsibility to provide citizens with equal opportunities , the immigrants should use the offered opportunities to integrate themselves into society. The ten commandments claim that immigrants are not integrated because they are unemployed, and they are unemployed because they are not integrated. However, the increasing unemployment among foreigner-citizens and the

14 Ibid., pp. 73–75. 15 Ibid., pp. 77–81.

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growing social inequality indicates that the foreigner-citizens failed to integrate themselves into society. As a result of the failure of the integration, the mutual trust between citizens and the state disappears. Since the mutual trust between the state and citizens is the source of legitimacy of the welfare state, the welfare system will collapse in the absence of such trust. The failure of the integration of the foreigner-citizens into society generates two contradictory results: radicalization of young Muslims and popularization of anti-immigrant right-wing parties and extremist groups. In order to prevent radicalism of every kind, the ten commandments ask all citizens to obey the law and respect the society’s fundamental values.16 The commandments maintain that loyalty to the Norwegian constitution is not enough to integrate foreigner-citizens into Norwegian society. They should try to be accepted within the fabric of society by demonstrating that they have internalized society’s values and have established a relationship of mutual trust with the Norwegian people. The demonstration of the internalization of Norwegian conventions and cultural codes takes place on a two-level dialogue with the Norwegian society.17 Whereas one dialogue takes place between the religious communities and the state authorities, the other dialogue takes place in the public debates on the values of freedom of expression, critique of religion, the rights to express blasphemous ideas, relinquishing one’s religion and converting to another religion and on the women and gay rights. The commandments suggest that the Norwegian children of foreign origin learn, from kindergarten and through primary and secondary education, how to value democracy, equality, freedom of expression, scientific thinking, and solidarity. The commandments expect the state to liberate Muslim women and girls from the social control practiced in the Muslim communities in Norway and making sure that they participate in social life without limitation.18 The commandments warn about the dangerous consequences of the systematic exclusion of the Norwegians of foreign origin from different aspects of life. Still, the warning has no substance because these same commandments, which are built on the assumption that Norwegians of foreign origin are less Norwegian than white Norwegians, perpetuate

16 http://www.tankesmienagenda.no/wp-content/uploads/Perspektivnotat-Ti-bud-forbedre-integrering-1.pdf, pp. 4–6. 17 Ibid., pp. 21–22. 18 Ibid., pp. 23–28.

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the naked racist practice.19 The very idea of successful integration is a recipe for racism. The Norwegian intellectuals give the impression that they feel ashamed that their country did not allow the Jews to enter their country until 1851 or that their Nazi government sent all their remaining Jewish population to the concentration camps in the early 1940s. But these same intellectuals have reinvented their Muslim compatriots as their new Jews and while exploring their inherent Muslimness and “discovering” exceptional Muslims who have emancipated themselves from their Muslimness. Using the same method as their predecessors to construct the concepts of Jewishness and exceptional Jews , these intellectuals use their new “love for the Jews” as a license to make Muslims the object of hate in the public sphere. Not surprisingly, in the same way that the so-called exceptional Jews were reminded of their parvenu status, the exceptional Norwegian Muslims are frequently reminded of their parvenu status. They remind these parvenu Muslims that they should never forget that they are nothing without their white benefactors and that their fortune will last as long as their patrons in the state, in the party, and in the particular intellectual milieus endorse them. Hedja Tajik, a former minister of culture in the Norwegian government, complained once that because of her lifestyle that is similar to any other Norwegian woman, she is called light Muslim. She considers terms such as light Muslims as harmful to the liberation of Muslim women because it has total contempt for the emancipated Muslim women who stand against Muslim fundamentalism in order to liberate other Muslim women. Tajik declares his exceptionality by claiming that unlike many other Muslims who hide their Muslim identity until they become successful, she has never hidden her Muslim identity in her political career. What Tajik ignores is that she could not have become an exceptional, light, or emancipated Muslim if she stopped saying that she was a Muslim that wanted to become a Norwegian woman.20 It was Tajik’s Muslimness that allowed her to present herself as an exceptional or light Muslim to be used by her Norwegian promoters as a role model to other Muslim women with the ambition of liberating themselves from their Muslimness. Those who insist on calling Tajik a light Muslim remind

19 Ibid., pp. 34–37. 20 Vårt Land Newspaper, 14, May 2014, Je ger ikke Muslim-Light, http://www.verdid

ebatt.no/debatt/cat12/subcat15/thread11484422/.

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her that her present social position is due to her usefulness and that she should never mistake what she is with what she pretends to be. Tajik may or may not understand that her position as a useful Muslim rationalizes and justifies a wide range of social discriminations against the people from whom she is singled out as exceptional. Tajik’s encounter with the people who called her light Muslim could have reminded her that being an exceptional Muslim may help her climbing the social ladder and becoming a minister, but it will never help her to have an opinion of her own. Whereas her social and political functions are useful, her opinion, if formed independently, can harm those who allocated her current social and political status. Tajik is one of the numerous exceptional Muslims throughout Europe whose public presence not only perpetuates racist practices in European societies but prevents any substantial critique of the racist discourse that rationalizes those racist practices. For many years, the Swiss Muslim scholar, Tariq Ramadan, has been treated as an exceptional Muslim. In 2010, he came to Norway to promote a translation of his book a Philosophy of Pluralism. Trond Berg Eriksen, a well-known historian of ideas in Norway, who is not shy to claims that he does not like pretentious exceptional Muslims, reviews Ramadan’s book.21 Eriksen asserts that the book is a shallow text that neither offers new knowledge of the past to its readers nor can help them take an ethical stance in the present situation. However, instead of demonstrating the inadequacy of Ramadan’s arguments and the ethical implications of those weak or unverified arguments, Eriksen questions the personal integrity of the author and accuses him of speaking with two tongues. Ramadan uses one tongue to speak with a particular Western audience to gain their sympathy while using the other tongue to communicate with the Islamist fundamentalists. Further, Eriksen blames Ramadan for not condemning violations of human rights in Islamic societies and for defending the Islamic laws and its harsh punishments. Another objection that Eriksen has against Ramadan is that he demonizes the French intellectuals of Jewish origin who defend Israel’s right to existence. Eriksen believes that Western governments and intellectuals should ignore attention-seekers such as Ramadan. Eriksen ridicules Ramadan’s attempt to encourage the European Muslims to engage in the politics of the countries of their residence as a part of the integration

21 Trond Berg Eriksen, Morgenbladet, 5, February 2010.

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process into their societies. Eriksen agrees with Ramadan that politics is the means that can transcend cultural particularities because politics is about justice. However, he reminds Ramadan that instead of encouraging European Muslims to take part in the politics of their countries of residence, he should admit the fact that the Islamic civilization lags behind the West and take his politics to where he comes from because it is not the West but Muslim societies that need politics. Eriksen’s argument implies that Norway is no longer a political community but an ethical community that does not need politics. That is why he encourages Ramadan to bring his politics into Muslim Societies so that they can overcome both the deep-seated injustice in their societies and make narrower the historical gap between Western and Muslim civilizations. What Eriksen does not understand is that Ramadan does not talk politics in the real sense as the expression of democracy. Ramadan tells Muslim citizens in Europe that if they want to be accepted in their societies, they should play the games of the established political parties and NGOs of their countries. Eriksen claims that he respects and trusts “the bitter but faithful Muslim” who has no problem displaying his real outrage, but he distrusts the modernized Muslims, such as Ramadan, who hold European passports.22 It seems that Eriksen does not know the essential functions of people like Ramadan or Tajik and their role in calming down the European citizens who are subject to daily injustice and discrimination. The fact is that Ramadan addresses those European scholars and public intellectuals who, since the late 1960s onward, have been integrated into the texture of power in every European country. This particular audience accepts Ramadan because he has never called into question the Western intellectual complicity with imperialism abroad and racism at home. Eriksen’s problem with Ramadan is not that he propagates a discourse that he does not dislike. Eriksen’s problem is that he cannot stand a European citizen of Muslim background who justifiably or unjustifiably occupies a social or intellectual position similar to his own. Because of his primitive and exclusive racism, Eriksen cannot stand an individual with a Muslim background who uses the same vocabulary and claims to possess the same knowledge as his. Eriksen prefers the faithful Muslims whom European journalists can easily provoke by targeting their religious sentiments, but never forget their assigned place in society and

22 Trond Berg Eriksen, Morgenbladet, 5, February 2010.

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never imagines changing it. Two hundred years before Eriksen, Wilhelm Von Humboldt declared, “I love the Jews really only en masse; en detail I rather avoid them.” Humboldt’s statement “stood, of course, in open opposition to the prevailing fashion, which favored individual Jews and despised the Jewish people.”23 People say that history happens twice, first as a tragedy, then as a farce. But there is no farcical moment in the case of Humboldt and Eriksen. Whereas Humboldt’s anti-Jewishness develops into Nazism, Eriksen’s anti-Muslim stance makes him a source of inspiration for Peder Nostvold Jensen, known as Fjordman, who inspired the Norwegian terrorist, Anders Behring Breivik who massacred tens of innocent young people in Oslo in 2011. Not surprisingly, Eriksen defends the scholarship given by the Norwegian Fritt Ord to Fjordman for writing the “trauma” he had experienced after his name became associated with Breivik. Eriksen says that he endorses the scholarship to Fjordman because writing is better than killing and that Fjordman as a writer is not responsible for people who use his words to commit crimes.24 Eriksen is one of many Norwegian intellectuals whose explicit or implicit anti-Muslims stance have contributed to the inclusive and exclusive racism in Norway by turning Muslim citizens into their new Jews.

Construing Muslim as the Enemy The history of anthropology may demonstrate or discard Said’s claim that the formation and development of this discipline had been interconnected with colonialism. However, it is hard to deny that, since the 1990s, contemporary anthropologists have contributed to the academic and public discourses that justify new imperialism abroad and new racism at home. Whereas following his Humboldtian position, the historian Trond Berg Eriksen despised the exceptional Muslims, Thomas Hylland Eriksen, a well-known Norwegian anthropologist, was looking for exceptional Muslims. Hylland Eriksen publishes What Is Anthropology? in 2004 in which he does not mention colonialism at all.25 Almost a decades earlier, inspired by Said’s Culture and Imperialism, Hyland Eriksen, publishes Construing the New Enemy (Det Nye Fiendebildet ) as a critique of the

23 Hanna Arendt, The Origin of Totalitarianism, p. 30. 24 Trond Berg Eriksen, Morgenbladet Weekly, Juni 21, 2013. 25 Thomas Hylland Eriksen, What Is Anthropology? (London: Pluto Press, 2004).

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representation of Islam and Muslims in the West and Norway. Following Said, H. Eriksen calls for a comprehensive religious, political, intellectual, and aesthetic endeavor to overcome the misconceptions of the West and Muslims about each other. He claims that in the absence of such efforts, Muslim and Western political opportunists could use the existing misconceptions about the two cultures for their political gains. H. Eriksen refers to the American politicians and the “Iranian regime” as the opportunists who would misuse the existing misconceptions. However, his main concern is the “Iranian regime” that is trying to use the misconceptions about the West to divert the attention of its people from their economic deprivations and violation of their basic human rights. H. Eriksen believes that in order to settle down the conflict between the West and Muslims, Muslim and Western intellectuals should offer balanced representations of Islam and the West. Whereas Western intellectuals should educate their people about Islam and Muslims, Muslim intellectuals should educate their people about the value of democracy and human rights.26 H. Eriksen assumes that Muslim and Western intellectuals’ understanding of each other’s history and culture is a prerequisite for understanding their current challenges and conflicts and finding solutions to overcome these challenges and conflicts. Whereas Western intellectuals should deconstruct the colonial and Eurocentric narratives about Islam and Muslims, Muslim intellectuals must educate themselves and their people about democracy and human rights. However, as H. Eriksen does not find Muslim interlocutors in Norway, he delegates the mission of the Muslim intellectuals to the Western academics and intellectuals like himself.27 In order to educate himself about Islam and Muslims, he repeats Bernard Lewis, who says that sometime around the 1500s, Western and Muslim civilizations took two opposing paths. While the Christian West has been advancing economically, culturally, and politically, the Islamic world began to experience economic decay and cultural stagnation. As the Muslim world realized the huge gap between themselves and the West, they produced political Islam to take revenge on the prosperous and democratic West. As political Islam demonized the West, the West designated Islam and Muslims as the new enemy.28 At the same time, H. Eriksen assumes

26 Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Det Nye Fiendebildet (Oslo: Brennpunkt, 1995), pp. 17–19. 27 Ibid., p. 29. 28 Ibid., p. 36.

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that if the Norwegians showed the same tolerance toward the Muslims’ conservative lifestyle as they show toward their conservative Christians, there would not be any conflicts. Whereas this claim implies that the conflicts have never been about cultures and civilizations, he returns to the dialogue between Muslims and Western people as the foundation of a multicultural society. H. Eriksen claims that since discrimination against the other is the natural propensity of all human beings and a consequence of their herd mentality and family-based loyalty, only a functioning multicultural society can overcome discrimination and injustice against the Muslim population in the West.29 Hence, we must hope that with the gradual emergence of Norway as a multicultural society, discriminations against the Muslim population will gradually disappear.30 H. Eriksen blames European far-right for its conspiracy theory that Muslims have immigrated to Europe to take over the continent.31 However, he expects the Muslim societies and Muslim citizens in Europe to take responsibility for the emergence of this European conspiracy theory because they failed to adopt modern values such as democracy and human rights. As a result of the inability of Muslim societies to adopt modernity, the frustrated Muslims appeal to Islamism to take their vengeance on the West. H. Eriksen defines Islamism as an attempt to clean the symbolic dirt of modernity and revive the pre-colonialist social structure and culture values. Based on this superficial conception of Islamism, H. Eriksen tries to explain why Islamists consider their secular compatriots as Western enablers.32 Regarding the position of Islamism in Europe, Eriksen argues that because of the lack of equal rights and opportunities for the immigrants and discrimination against them, the young European Muslims return to their communities to cultivate Islamism as a means of combating the entire democratic system as a system of discrimination. For H. Eriksen, the average Muslims consider the West as an “active, energetic, scientifically-oriented and democratic” force that subjugates the passive and unenlightened Orient. However, these same average Muslims depict the West as cynical, materialistic, insensitive, and arrogant that seduces Muslim women and believers to divert their attention from the right path

29 Ibid., pp. 43–47. 30 Ibid., p. 50. 31 Ibid., p. 57. 32 Ibid., pp. 65–68.

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from God. He concludes that the disaster breaks out when Islam takes political power as it happened in Iran. With the political Islam in power, the religious and political establishment has made Islam the only universe for knowledge that does not allow any critical approach that can bring about future social and political changes in Iran. Hence, because of the domination of religious thinking, no change will take place in Iran.33 H. Eriksen blames the European left for its support of the Iranian revolution and the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan. But it seems that the left he is talking about is not the same left that Michel Foucault criticized, in 1979, for its lack of sympathy toward the Iranian Revolution. The support of the European Maoists or anti-Soviet left to Afghan Mujahedin was the result of their integration into their states that opposed the Soviet Union’s presence in Afghanistan. The leftist university scholars, think tank experts, and NGO activists who focused on the question of integration of the new citizens at home and bringing democracy and human rights abroad, particularly to the people who lived under unfriendly governments, were the result of the ideological convergence between the European left and their states. H. Eriksen’s scholarship can be considered as one of the first products of the ideological convergence between the radical left and the European states. As H. Eriksen’s model of scholarship deemed useful, the small center for the study of East European and Oriental Languages at the University of Oslo, with less than 30 scientific and administrative staff in the early 1990s, has grown to the Institute for Cultural Studies and Oriental Languages that currently has over 130 scientific and administrative employees. Since the early 1990s, the financial support of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has been the determinant factor for this Institute and the numerous Norwegian think tanks that tried to generate and guide the pro-Western opposition forces in both friendly and unfriendly governments from Egypt to China and Iran. H. Eriksen endorsed Muslim intellectuals such as the Syrian philosopher Sadik Al-Azm because he accepted the assumption of cultural and political gaps between Europe and Muslim societies and advised Muslim intellectuals to take a critical stance toward their own culture and political systems as a means of overcoming this gap.34 H. Eriksen assumes

33 Ibid., pp. 73–78. 34 Ibid., pp. 80–81.

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that there is nothing in the Chinese social organization or in its political culture that can teach the Chinese people about democracy. Hence, in order to educate the Chinese people about democracy, Western intellectuals must know Chinese culture. The same is true, according to H. Eriksen, for Muslim societies with no history of democratic processes in which it is not the individual but family that is the foundation of the community with the father as the head and decision-maker of the family. H. Eriksen claims that since the Chinese and Muslims have not experienced anything that is remotely democratic in their cultures, they cannot understand the nature of democracy as the government of the people through electoral procedures based on the individual votes. Hence, democratic changes will not happen in China or the Muslim world as long as the individual does not exist in these societies.35 H. Eriksen reminds the Norwegian intellectuals that if they want Norway to preserve its democracy, they have to be equipped with verifiable knowledge about people and cultures they discuss publicly. This epistemological qualification will be achieved, according to H. Eriksen, through the method of cultural relativism, which assumes that in the same way reading Mein Kampf does not make one a Nazi, reading Islamic texts does not make one a Muslim.36 A decade later, Eriksen argues that in the process of globalization, only cosmopolitan identity can protect democracy against narrow nationalism because it offers a common language through which people from different parts of the world can understand each other.37 H. Eriksen considers his cosmopolitan identity as a midway solution that disarms both the politics of identity represented by the European intellectuals such as Oriana Fallaci and the Islamist fundamentalism.38 The success of this midway solution requires the European intellectuals’ rejection of the Islamophobic nationalism, and the Muslim intellectuals’ denunciation of Islamism combined with a fundamental critique of the undemocratic aspects of the Islamic tradition. The excellent reception of a book entitled Islamophobia (2010) written by a Swedish historian, Mattias Gardel in Norway, indicates that the strength of this cosmopolitan discourse that H. Eriksen has been propagating.

35 Ibid., pp. 92–93. 36 Ibid., p. 106. 37 Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Føtter og Røtter (Oslo: Ashehoug, 2004), p. 83. 38 Ibid., pp. 214–221.

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According to Gordel, Islamophobia is a hate discourse against Muslims in Europe and the United States. However, it is not the same as antiSemitism because Islamophobia is a result of the fear that Muslims are infiltrating Western societies in order to take political power and abolish freedom and democracy. For Gordel, the entire practice of exclusion of and discriminations against the Muslim population in Western societies is a result of this conspiracy theory. Gordel reductionism leads him to claim that in order to fight exclusion and discrimination, which are the consequences of Islamophobia, Muslims have a responsibility to demonstrate their willingness to adopt freedom and democracy.39 Gordel expected the European Muslims to adopt freedom and democracy in order to overcome Islamophobia and ease their integration in European society. Another critic of Islamophobia claims that if appropriately guided, Muslims can demonstrate their capacities to practice freedom, democracy, and human rights. A Norwegian critic of Islamophobia and a believer in the capacity of the Muslims to create their own democracies if guided correctly, published in the heydays of Arab Spring , a book entitled Islamisme. Islamisme argues that Muslims dedicated to political Islam possess the ethical capacities that qualify them as trusted partners and real allies of the West. Islamisme claims that rather than a “totalitarian ideology” threatening European democracy and human rights, Islamism is the voice of modernity and change in the Muslim countries of the Middle East. As a balanced book, according to the author, Islamisme addresses both democratic and undemocratic aspects of Islamism. Against the French scholars Gilles Kepel who rejects Islamism in its totality because he considers it as the new totalitarianism, Islamisme advocates the views of another French scholar, Francois Burgat, who describes Islamism as a political and cultural movement with endless progressive potentials.40 While the first perspective presents Islamism and, by extension, Islam as a threat to Western democracies, the latter perspective presents Islamism as the continuation of the anti-colonial emancipatory movements that have adopted Western democracy and human rights as the main principles of governance. While the anti-colonial nationalist movements fought for political and economic independence of their societies, Islamists are fighting against Western cultural and

39 Mattias Gardell, Islamophobia (Oslo: Spartacus Forlag as, 2010), pp. 14–17. 40 Bjørn Olav Utvik, islamisme (Oslo: Unipub, 2011), pp. 130–133.

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intellectual hegemony. The author of Islamisme is convinced that with the proper political education, Muslim intellectuals would be able to bring the idea of democracy and human rights to the Middle East and challenge the undemocratic aspects of their political culture and social practices. Hence, he finds disturbing the effort of the Danish Department of Defense that had hired since 2008, a political scientist, “the Iranian Mozafari from the University of Aarhus” to lead a new research center on radical Islam and Jihadism. The reason that the Danish government hired this particular scholar was that he was the only one in the Danish academia who described Islamism as a new totalitarian ideology and the fascism of our time. The author of Islamisme claims that Mozafari’s case demonstrates the interference of the state institutions in academic research.41 However, to ensure the usefulness of his own research for the Norwegian authorities, the author of Islamisme claims that although he defends the progressive, modernizing, and democratic aspects of Islamism, he rejects aspects of Islamism that advocate moral conservatism, political authoritarianism, and resist Western powers in the Middle East.42 The author of islamisime made a great effort to convince the Norwegian government to support the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s ascendence to power during the Arab Spring. During this period, the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood visited Oslo several times to explain themselves to the Norwegian politicians and scholars. However, after the election of Mohammad Morsi as Egypt’s president in 2012, not all scholars of the Middle East found it wise to support the elected government of the Muslim Brotherhood. That is why they found the coup against Morsi as a democratic coup.43

The Imprudent Racist In 2011, in the peak of the Arab Spring, a terrorist massacre took place in Oslo. The massacre was directly related to the Norwegian public discourse on Islam, Islamism, and Muslims at home and abroad. The terrorist who committed the massacre refers to Peder Are Nøstvold Jensen or Fjordman as his main ideologue. In the early 2000s, Fjordman was a 41 Ibid., pp. 31–36. 42 Ibid., pp. 359–360. 43 The daily Aftenposten, 04.07.2013. Interview with Henrik Thune, Director of the Program for Middle Eastern Politics at NUPI (Norwegian Institute of International Affairs), https://www.aftenposten.no/verden/i/700Ov/--Avsettelsen-ikke-et-militarkupp.

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student of the Middle East Studies, and it seems that he developed his deep contempt and hate toward the Muslim people during his study of the Middle East. His disciple, Breivik killed tens of innocent young people because he believed that their politics facilitated the immigration of Muslim people to Norway. What Fjordman learned during his study of the Middle East was that Muslim people were either deceptive and corrupt oppressors or ignorant victims of deception and oppression. Whereas the first group must be exposed and relentlessly fought against, the second group must be emancipated. Whereas the Western scholars expose the deceptive oppressors, the NGOs guide and help the victims to fight against the oppressor. Fjordman learned in his studies that his emancipatory mission is in harmony with the economic and political interests of his country. Naturally, he expected to become an expert of the Middle East, an adviser to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, or occupy a leading position in the numerous NGOs that were operating in the region. But after he fails to achieve the minimum academic qualifications for such positions, Fjordman turns against the very discourse of emancipation of the Muslims and their Western emancipators. He begins to describe Islamism as a desperate effort of the Muslims who “like Don Quixote tilting at windmills in a world they no longer understand.”44 As his poor academic results and lack of powerful mentors who could support him in his career, he starts the blog called Fjordman to combat Islamic totalitarianism that was threatening the Western way of life. In reality, Fjordman only reproduced what he had learned from the Norwegians academic and public discourse on Islamism, Islam, and Muslims. A Norwegian journalist who shares Fjorman’s concern about Muslim emigrants in Europe finds it very refreshing that despite his anti-Muslim stance, he opposes anti-Semitism. Fjordman’s response to the journalist’s amazement is that anti-Semite white supremacists have the same level of intelligence and moral standard as an average Yemeni Muslim.45 Fjordman’s racism might be a result of his experience in Egypt while studying Arabic at the American University of Cairo. In Cairo, he becomes frustrated to see that while Egyptian male students were getting Western girls to whom they would never marry, Western male students could not even think of getting an

44 Fjordman.blogspot.no, What Are Islam’s Weak Points? Tuesday, December 20, 2005. 45 Simon Sætre, Fjordman, Portrett av en antiislamist (Oslo: Cappelen Damm, 2013),

pp. 21–22.

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Egyptian girlfriend.46 Whereas Breivik’s massacre inspired by Fjordman received overwhelming public condemnation, not a single Norwegian intellectual raised his or her voice to condemn Norway’s military intervention in Libya, which was taking place before and after the Oslo massacre. The unanimous condemnation of the terrorist attack in Oslo and the total silence of the Norwegian intellectuals on the Norwegian bombing of Libya reveals the political and ethical position of the Norwegian intellectuals nationally and globally. This same intellectual climate had shaped the views of Åsne Seierstad, the author of The Bookseller in Kabul (2002), whose strong belief in the cultural, ethical, and political superiority of the West convinced her that Western governments had the responsibility to liberate Afghan women from their subjugation within a culturally, ethically and politically premature society.47 Seierstand describes her main protagonist, who represents the educated and cultured Afghan men, as a pathological liar and a tyrant who talks about progress and freedom but exploits and terrorizes his families and friends. The book’s general argument is that democracy cannot take roots in Afghanistan because the socalled progressive intellectuals in Afghanistan preach Western values, but their deeds contradict those same values. She reminds Western governments that while bringing democracy to Afghanistan and other Muslim countries, they should beware of these so-called Muslim intellectuals. A British reviewer describes the book as a “bedroom version of Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations.”48 An American reviewer expects the Norwegian court to force the publisher to at least compensate the Afghan family for “whatever hurt it may have caused” them.49 But as the book became an international success and translated into many languages, the Norwegian intellectuals neither cared about the ideological consequences of the book nor about the damages it caused the Afghan family. The insensitivity of Seierstad toward the Afghan people in general and the Afghan family that she used as her protagonists,50 indicates that the 46 Ibid., pp. 87–88. 47 Åsne Seierstad, Bokhandleren I Kabul, Et Familiedrama (Oslo: Cappelen, 2002),

p. 83. 48 Tim Judah, The Guardian, Sunday, August 31, 2003, http://www.theguardian.com/ books/2003/aug/31/travel.features. 49 Richard McGill Murphy, New York Times, December 21, 2003. 50 VG, 27.08.2010, http://www.vg.no/rampelys/bok/bevegelser/aasne-seierstad-kan-

ikke-leve-livet-baklengs/a/10018142/.

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nineteenth-century colonialists and the neo-imperialists of the twenty-first century share the same features; they are “reckless without hardihood, greedy without audacity and cruel without courage,” as people who believe in nothing but can get themselves in believing in anything.51

The Making of the Consensual Society In 2006, the Norwegian intellectuals told a small group of Muslims who protested against a Danish newspaper which had published caricatures of Islam’s prophet that, in a democracy, everything is a potential object of criticism and nothing is holy. Whereas these intellectuals were describing the peaceful demonstration of a few Norwegian Muslims as the signs of Muslim intolerance, the experts of the Middle explained the historical and cultural roots of this “intolerance.” In this public euphoria for freedom of expression, nobody questioned the ideological posture behind the publication of the caricatures. It did not take a long time that some of the Norwegian intellectuals who advocated freedom of expression regarding caricatures and had criticized political Islam began to defend the Islamists’ armed rebellion against the Syrian government.52 As the rebellion against the Syrian government resulted in the flaw of the Syrian refugees to Europe and Norway, anti-immigrant voices became louder. Writers such as Karl Ove Knausgård claimed that in order to fight extreme right-populism, European governments should restrict the movement of refugees to Europe. He praised the anti-immigration stance of the Norwegian Progressive Party because it generates public debate on such important issues. Knausgård’s admiration for a political party that demonizes Norwegian citizens of Muslim origin speaks volumes about the condition of the Norwegian intellectuals. He claims that the Progressive Party’s anti-immigration posture forces other social actors to engage in public debates with well-thought arguments on the issue. Knausgård is worried that the new waves of refugees would deepen the existing social gaps and cultural discrepancies in Norway and the rest of Europe. He believes that since the immigrants become a subclass beneath the working class and experience a wretched existence in the ghettos, they will be the primary victims of the social and cultural gaps in Europe.

51 Arendt, The Origin of Totalitarianism, p. 189. 52 Lars Gule, Jeg ble en Ekstremist, Nettavisen, 28.02.14 12:19.

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Knausgård claims that a new wave of refugees to Europe will intensify the ghettoization of society. He claims that ghettoization, as the expression of sub-cultures within the dominant culture, indicates that society has been divided into the socially and culturally privileged and underprivileged social groups. The problem with the emerging social and cultural divisions is, according to Knausgård, that they will undermine democracy, and this is something the white middle-class elite does not care about because its members do not live in the same neighborhood as the immigrants and the working class. Knausgård invites the Norwegian people to engage themselves more in the public debates on immigration because the immigration flow can destroy the existing egalitarian structure of the Norwegian society based on the value consensus and turn it into a hierarchical social structure full of social and cultural conflicts.53 Knausgård’s reliance on value consensus as the fundamental principle of the Norwegian identity excludes not only the egalitarian demands of the Norwegian citizens of foreign origin but their voice from the public debate. The editor of Klassekampen, the only leftist newspaper in Norway, wants Norway to become a nation based on citizenship, whose state considers all its citizens as equal, regardless of their origins, beliefs, and political persuasions and protect their rights to express their opinion and the right to fight for what they believe by peaceful means.54 However, the Norwegian public debates during the past three decades indicate that the absolute majority of the Norwegian intellectuals disagree with the idea of the Norwegian nation based on citizenship. Understanding what the Norwegian intellectuals say and mean in the public debate will remain incomplete unless we take a look at Norway’s role on the global level.

Norway a Humanitarian Superpower Terje Tvedt, the first professor of development studies in Norway, published three books from 2002 to 2017 on the intellectual foundations of a political project that aimed to make Norway the sole humanitarian superpower in the world. To contextualize this political project, Tvedt divides Norway’s history into a national breakthrough

53 Interview with Karl Ove Knausgård, Vi må tørre å snakke om de problematiske sidene ved innvandring, Aftenposten, 28, October 2015. 54 Bjørgulv Braanen, Hva er Norge? Klassekampen Onsdag 7, September 2016.

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accomplished from the nineteenth century to the early 1960s, and an international breakthrough started from the 1990s to the present.55 Tevdt claims that whereas the Norwegian intelligentsia was preoccupied during the national breakthrough with the establishment of a constitutional and democratic state based on the representative governance and electoral processes, Norway’s international breakthrough is preoccupied with the intellectual and political debates on the refugees, immigrants, Islam, humanitarian aid and humanitarian intervention. Whereas the result of the first breakthrough was social democracy, the result of the second breakthrough is the formation of a humanitarian-political complex consisted of the state and research institutions and NGOs. Tvedt claims that the ideology of this humanitarian-political complex is what he calls the national goodness-regime that determines the principles of morality in Norwegian society. This goodness-regime becomes a goodness-tyranny when it undermines every attempt to initiate a rational debate on politics and ethics in the public sphere.56 In the early 1990s, the Norwegian political leadership decided to formulate a grand strategy to attain a privileged position for Norway in the process of globalization. This grand strategy, sponsored by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, aimed to establish a close connection between humanitarian organizations and research institutions. This strategy defined two interconnected aims: promoting the Norwegian Model and making Norway a humanitarian superpower. Based on the assumption that Norway neither has a colonial past nor enemies on the international arena at present, the Norwegian elite was convinced that it could, with the help of oil revenues, make Oslo the world’s center for conflict resolutions. However, the ambition of making Norway the sole humanitarian superpower and the land of peacemaking and conflict resolution did not prevent it from becoming of the biggest exporters of military equipment. By the end of the 1990s, this strategy succeeded in involving the entire Norwegian business community in humanitarian organizations such as the Norwegian Refugee Council , Norwegian People’s 55 Terje Tvedt, Verdensbilder og Selvbilder, En humanitær stormakts historie (Oslo: Oslo Universitetsforlaget, 2002); Terje Tvedt, Det Norske Tenkemåte, Tekster 2002–2016 (Oslo: Aschehoug & Co., 2016); and Terje Tvedt, Det Internasjonale Gjennombruddet, Fra ettpartistat til flerkulturell stat (Oslo: Dreyers Forlag, 2017). 56 Terje Tvedt, Det Norske Tenkemåte, Tekster 2002–2016 (Oslo: Aschehoug & Co., 2016), pp. 10–14.

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Aid, Plan International Norway, Norwegian Church Aid and many other organizations. As a result, the president of an arms trade company could become the chairman of the Norwegian Church Aid. As the interests of the Norwegian business community and the humanitarian-political complex became interconnected, they intensified their support for the international aid system, asylum seekers, and integration of the immigrants into the Norwegian society. As the humanitarian-political complex imposed its control over the state organizations and nongovernmental organizations, it controlled the elite circulation from the research institutions to the media, and from media to the state organizations and vice versa. The organizational interconnections among the Norwegian elite generated a unified world view and a homogenous vocabulary through which the members of the elite understand and explain the world and Norway’s place in it.57 As the state institutions and civil society organizations shared the same world view and defined identical goals, the difference between the state and civil society has disappeared.58 Tvedt argues that whereas until the late 1980s, Norway, had been one of many developed nations that contributed to development and modernization in the underdeveloped countries, it decided in the late 1980s to become a humanitarian superpower. As the Norwegian humanitarianpolitical complex reached its final shape in the early 1990s, the state began to recruit researchers to discover unoccupied spaces for humanitarian aid and encouraged the nation to assist in developing projects around the world. As Norway began to consider itself a humanitarian superpower, the Norwegian elites began to market itself as the most efficient developers in the world. In reality, Norway’s humanitarian superpower status was only the figment of the imagination of the Norwegian elite to cover their dysfunctional role in the global domain.59 As this elite succeeded in eliminating news and analyses that call into question the image of Norway as a humanitarian superpower in the public sphere, the Lutheran Church took the leading role in the humanitarian aid to Ethiopia and played a significant role in the Eritrean session from Ethiopia. No scholar dares to discuss such issues publicly because the research institutions working on the non-European countries depend on the money that the Ministry

57 Terje Tvedt, Det Internasjonale Gjennombruddet, pp. 256–260. 58 Ibid., p. 267. 59 Terje Tvedt, Det Norske Tenkemåte, pp. 14–19.

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of Foreign Affairs allocates to the humanitarian and developmental aid. Also, the Norwegian public does not have access to the truth about the nature of Norway’s humanitarian superpower, because the Ministry of Foreign Affairs pays the travel costs of the Norwegian journalists so that they inform the Norwegian public about the global position of their country as a humanitarian superpower. Tvedt refers to the fact that Norway’s oil revenue in the same underdeveloped countries that it officially offers humanitarian aid is much higher than the entire aid given by Norway. Tvedt claims that in the name of development, the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs is financing Norwegian Christian missionaries and their related NGOs in the underdeveloped countries. But the problem is that these missionaries interpret the Bible in the same way that Islamic fundamentalists interpret Qoran. These facts indicate that Norway does not bring technology, business, welfare state model, human rights, or god government to the underdeveloped world of Africa, Asia, and Latin America but Christian fundamentalism. Similar to Saudi Arabia that funds Islamic fundamentalism around the world, Norway uses its petrodollars to finance Christian fundamentalism in different parts of the world.60 Tvedt reveals how Norway was campaigning from 2002 to 2007 to fabricates an image of itself as a humanitarian superpower for domestic consumptions. It began when Norway’s state TV broadcasted the news that millions of people in the south of the African continent were going to die if they did not receive immediate help. As a response, Norway’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced that in addition to the allocation of a few million dollars, the Ministry of Defense would give 200 hundred trucks to the cause. It became known later that the mentioned trucks were old military trucks that Norway had received, in the early1960s, from the United States as a part of the Marshal Plan. The trucks had been out of operation since the early 1990s, and the Norwegian military wanted to get rid of them.61 After Norway transported these trucks to the field, the UN official found them unsustainable and even unethical to put into operation because it would be three times more expensive than hiring local trucks. However, these hard facts did not prevent the Norwegian politicians from telling the Norwegian public that their mission was an unprecedented

60 Ibid., pp. 58–62. 61 Ibid., pp. 103–107.

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success.62 The truth has never been discovered because the research institutions whose researchers are supposed to shed light on scandalous facts such as this have close ties with the state and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It seems, at first glance, that Tvedt is revealing these facts to demonstrate how Norway’s deceptive humanitarianism hides its selfinterest and its swindling attempts in the developing countries. However, Tvedt thinks in the opposite direction. He advises Norway to follow France’s example and respect its intellectuals in the way France does. He mentions how France appreciates and supports his eminent philosophers, such as Bernard-Henry Lévy to initiate and encourage public debates on the international issues of national importance.63 Interestingly, Lévy is the same intellectual who encouraged Sarkuzy’s government to bomb Libya while Tvedt criticizes Norway’s active participation in the bombing of Lybia. Tvedt is one of many Norwegian intellectuals who has seen the light after a period of radicalism. To demonstrate that he was a leftist radical in the past, he refers to his defense of the Iranian Revolution and the anti-Soviet forces in Afghanistan. However, he discovers, as he tells us, the futility of the third world liberation struggles that he had defended after the brutal regime of the Taliban seized power in 1996. He informs the reader that he became attached to the liberation struggles under the influence of Fanon and Sartre. This belated discovery that takes place after the Taliban ascendency to power in 1996 leads Tvedt to another discovery in the early 2000s, which indicates that Islamist fundamentalism is not a reaction to Western imperialism and racism in Europe. It is a natural consequence of Islam as both religion and culture. He realizes that rather than a resistance to imperialism, the Iranian Revolution was an expression of collective resistance to modernity, democracy, and human rights. This realization convinces Tvedt that Western intellectuals should stop imposing principles of human rights and democracy on Muslim societies because these societies produce religious scholars who define democracy and human rights as the expressions of blasphemy.64 Tvedt tries to convince the Norwegian intellectuals that Muslim societies will never adopt democratic values because, unlike Christianity, Islam

62 Ibid., pp. 108–111. 63 Ibid., pp. 30–33. 64 Ibid., pp. 40–44.

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cannot reform itself. In the same vein, he argues that the intellectuals who advocate democratization of the Muslim world and the integration of Muslim citizens into Western democracies have the illusion that democracy and human rights are universal values. Tvedt reminds the Norwegian intellectuals that democracy and human rights are not universal values but Western values. Tvedt demonstrates this claim by referring to Winston Churchill’s description of the UN Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 as the victory of Western values.65 Now, the question is, how has the Norwegian ideology constructed Norway as a humanitarian superpower? According to Tvedt, since the mid-1980s, almost all doctoral programs related to Norway’s foreign policies, including the research programs on the third world countries, have been financed and controlled by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. While deprived of academic independence, the research institutions financed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs have produced researchers who believe that they are playing “a secret role in forming the state’s foreign policies” and are very proud of what they are doing. The main task of these research institutions is to organize seminars and produce papers, articles, and books to demonstrate that the world needs Norway to remain the sole humanitarian superpower. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs can impose its full control on the research institutions because they depend on its financial support, and to get funds, they have to recruit researchers who are useful for Norway’s foreign policy. Despite his three-decade involvement in what he calls the Norwegian political and humanitarian complex, Tvedt is surprised by how strong the monopoly of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is in financing research projects, and how far some research communities can go in giving up the very ideas that research is different from politics and policymaking. However, many “research institutions understand themselves as the extension of the state” since they play a part in the elite circulation between research institutions and political offices.66 Since the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as the leading player of the political-humanitarian complex, supervises and controls the networking of the individuals and institutions, it can decide who should be taken seriously and funded. This supervision and control include all Norwegian

65 Ibid., pp. 46–53. 66 Ibid., p. 122.

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universities and research institutions since they all receive huge state funds from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The fact that organizations that have nothing to do with humanitarian work are getting state funds in the name of humanitarian aid, development work, and human rights reveals how involved the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is in shaping the Norwegian public opinion. Norwegian organizations as various as Peasant Association, Social Worker Association, Bar Association, Football Association, Nonfiction Writers Association, Blind-Association, Teacher Organization, Sports Association, and many other organizations receive funds to participate in the humanitarian work abroad. At the same time, hundreds of journalists get their share of money from the Ministry to report on the humanitarian work and human rights issues.67 After exposing the Norwegian political-humanitarian complex, which Tvedt had been a member for many years, he tries to reclaim his academic independence and intellectual freedom because he believes that academic independence and intellectual freedom are the basic requirements of open debates in a modern democracy. However, Tvedt derives a bizarre conclusion after reclaiming his academic independence and intellectual freedom, and that is his discovery of the virtues of colonialism and old imperialism. He discovers that Britain’s genuine belief in its civilizing mission convinced it to use its economic and technological superiority to generate enormous economic progress in the Neil region.68 Comparing the efficiency of British imperialism with the incompetence of the contemporary Norwegian political-humanitarian complex, he concludes that the former benefited the ordinary people, whereas the latter serves the interests of an elite. According to Tvedt, despite its inefficiency abroad, the Norwegian political-humanitarian complex has succeeded at home. It succeeded in remodeling the nation according to its needs, including the overflow of immigration to Norway. The disaster happened, according to Tvedt, when, as a consequence of immigration, Norway has radically changed, from a homogenous cultural and political community into a society full of socio-cultural conflicts with an uncertain future.69 He claims that compared with the administrative elite of the nineteenth century who had built the nation-state and the leaders of the labor movement that built the

67 Terje Tvedt, Det Internasjonale Gjennombruddet, pp. 254–255. 68 Tvedt, Det Norske Tenkemåte, pp. 123–124. 69 Tvedt, Det Internasjonale Gjennombruddet, pp. 15–17.

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welfare state by the early 1960s, the Norwegian political-humanitarian complex achieved almost nothing. On the contrary, the new elite that constitutes the political-humanitarian complex has tried to use the accomplishments of the welfare state to develop the underdeveloped world while it has rebuilt the Norwegian state according to its own needs. Whereas the Labor Party’s elite legitimized its power in the building of the welfare state, the new elite has legitimized its power by convincing the nation that it has transformed Norway into a humanitarian superpower. Whereas the old social-democratic elite exercised its power directly, the new elite is invisible and exercise its power indirectly.70 Tvedt argues that we can find the roots of the Norwegian humanitarian-political complex in the American aid projects, which tried to prevent the influence of communism in the underdeveloped world. As an extension of the Marshal plan (1948–1952), the United States encouraged NATO countries to give some of their surplus wealth to the developing countries. Norway, as one of the recipients of the Marshal Plan, was not among the first donor countries but became a member of the international aid system in 1963. According to Tvedt, the developing countries used the aid system to generate concepts and vocabularies that could explain their own economic and political development as the universal path of development and encouraged the underdeveloped countries to follow their path.71 But all these theories became flawed as they could not explain the emergence of Islamist fundamentalism and the inability of Muslim immigrants to integrate themselves into Western societies. Tvedt considers the protests of a small group of the Norwegian Muslims against the publications of the caricatures of Prophet as an indication of the inability of the Muslim immigrant to integrate themselves into Western societies. Otherwise, it is a symptom of the clash of civilizations.72 He rejects the claim that racism and discrimination are the reasons behind the young Norwegian Muslims’ inclination toward Islamist radicalism. In his view, such explanations not only distort the fact of the ongoing clash of civilizations in Norway but aim to rationalize and normalize Islamism in this country.73 Tvedt claims that the agents of the Norwegian humanitarian-political complex are well

70 Ibid., pp. 18–19. 71 Ibid., pp. 26–27. 72 Terje Tvedt, Det Internasjonale Gjennombruddet, pp. 180–181. 73 Ibid., p. 211.

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aware that multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism, universalism, and globalization only harm the Norwegian national unity, but cannot retreat from such policies because it serves their interests.74 Tvedt regrets the decline of the Norwegian ethnocultural nationalism, which was radical and revolutionary in its methods but peaceful and democratic in its purposes. Tvedt’s ethnonationalism is similar to the social-nationalism of Quisling 1933–1945 that transported the entire Norwegian Jews who remained in Norway to concentration camps.75 Tvedt claims that Norway’s ambition to become a humanitarian superpower turned it into a failed multiethnic and multicultural state in which instead of the nation, the state institutions serve the political-humanitarian complex.76 Tvedt talks about the nation, but he never makes clear what does he mean by the nation. Does he include the Norwegians of Muslim and African origin as equal members in this nation? Tvedt blames Hedje Tajik for her inability as the minister of culture to define the Norwegian culture. He explains that she cannot define the Norwegian culture because, as a member of the new Labor Party, she has never learned about Norwegian values.77 Tvedt defines Norwegian values, which represent the Norwegian culture as those principles that endorse or reject the socially relevant actions in a particular situation. Hence, when the Norwegian people accepted hundreds of thousands of foreigners in their country, they reflected on the Norwegian values, whereas the Norwegian humanitarian-political complex describes these values as universal.78 Why? Because the Norwegian humanitarian-political complex is part of an international politicalhumanitarian system that has, since the early 1990s, turned several countries into NGO-Republics or NGO-invaded countries.79 Tvedt’s evidence and arguments indicate that the priority of Norway’s political, humanitarian complex is not humanitarian work or human rights but Norway’s economic and political interests in a new imperialist system that he calls the international political-humanitarian system. However, Tvedt reduces the beneficiaries of the Norwegian political-humanitarian to a small group 74 Ibid., pp. 218–220. 75 Ibid., pp. 222–223. 76 Ibid., pp. 238–239. 77 Ibid., p. 241. 78 Ibid., pp. 244–245. 79 Ibid., p. 263.

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of Norwegian opportunists whose personal interests undermine Norway’s national interests. He claims that instead of knowing the world as it is in order to promote Norway’s interests and values at home and abroad, the Norwegian political-humanitarian complex relies on the principles that serve their interests. What Tvedt does not explain is how he differentiates between Norway’s national interests and the common interests of its elite.80 He encourages the Norwegian elite to make the humanitarian aid the subject of public and political debates and promote national values on the international level. But since the Norwegian political-humanitarian complex does not listen to Tvedt, he concludes that it bans any public discussion on such subjects.81 But this so-called ban does not prevent Tvedt’s book from becoming bestsellers, being invited to the countless conference, public speeches to present his books. He shares his ideas throughout Norway while keeping his distinguished professor status in his university. The fact is that a large segment of the Norwegian intellectual and the academic establishment is among Tvedt’s audience. The members of this group are mostly former leftist activists who acquired privileged social positions after being incorporated into the state in the 1970s and 1980s and recruited by the state institutions, media, and entertainment branches that received state subsidies. Tvedt represents a segment of the Norwegian intellectuals that believe that their share of social power and wealth compared with their rivals, which they label globalists, has diminished. Both the people whom Tvedt describes as the agents of the political-humanitarian complex and their opponents are mostly the former comrades and friends. While the former promotes new imperialism and cold or inclusive racism in the name of democracy and human rights, the latter is “anti-imperialist” or like Tvedt is nostalgic toward colonialism and promotes exclusive or crude racism.

80 Ibid., pp. 264–268. 81 Ibid., pp. 169–173.

CHAPTER 9

The Decay of the Intellectual

The translation of Daniel Bell’s The End of Ideology into French in 1997, almost four decades after its publication, coincided with the publication of a of number books of intellectual history that argued that the intellectual, as a particular segment of the French men of letters who had defended truth and justice since the Dreyfus Affairs, had reached its end. The intellectual appeared, according to Bell, because Western societies needed intellectuals to build liberal democracy and the welfare state; without the integration of the intellectuals into the state, the liberal democracy, and welfare state could not be consolidated. The integration of the intellectuals into the state as the absolute requirement of all well-functioning Western liberal democracies and welfare states resulted in their disappearance from the Western public sphere. Bell assumed that as a result of the internationalization of the economy, the third world would experience the same process. According to Bell, all societies would experience the integration of the revolutionary intellectuals into the state and their subsequent disappearance.1 It seemed, for a while, from the late 1960s to the early 1970s, that contrary to Bell’s prediction, Western intellectuals were not going to disappear, but more radicalized. However, it became clearer soon that the nature of the radicalism of the new generation of the intellectuals is quite different from the previous generations. The new generation of Western intellectuals fluctuated between 1 Sand, The End of the French Intellectual, p. 169.

© The Author(s) 2021 Y. Shahibzadeh, Public Intellectuals and Their Discontents, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56588-6_9

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Sartre’s conception of the universal intellectual and Foucault’s definition of the specific or local intellectual. Sartre renounced his own conception of the universal intellectual in the early 1970s, after his involvement with La Cause du Peuple and Gauche Proletariénne and began to see the intellectual as someone whose capacity was no more than conceptualizing workers’ experiences by listening to them.2 According to Sartre’s new conception of the intellectual, the intellectuals cannot bring knowledge and consciousness into the working class from the outside, as Lenin and Kautsky believed. As early as the 1820s, Saint Simon understood the significance of the collaboration between the intellectuals, the bourgeoisie, and the state in a new system of education to guide the working people toward the new industrial society. Saint Simon believed that education could shape humans’ general attitudes and develop their farsightedness because it enables them to apply the principles they have learned in different situations. Education was not only about acquiring knowledge but about lasting relationships between the members of society.3 Comparing the French proletariat and Russian peasants, Saint Simon claimed that, whereas, the former receives an education, the latter gets instruction. Whereas, the Russian peasants can read and write as the results of their instruction, the French proletariat possesses a higher degree of civilization without knowing how to read or write. Although compared with the Russian peasant, the members of the French proletariat are illiterate; they are more useful to their society than the Russian peasants. Saint Simon considers the French lawmaking that has made all French people equal members of the society as the manifestation of French education. Saint Simon claims that the French proletariat and artisans who are skilled in the management of a property or a domain of culture have not acquired their education from any school but were educated by their parents. The Russians lack French skills because, despite their exceptional ability for reading and writing, they are unable to think independently. The French education is a good education, according to Saint Simone, because if one entrusts the administration of his properties to the Russians who can read and write, the value of their properties and the conditions of

2 Sartre, Between Existentialism and Marxism, pp. 292–294. 3 Saint Simon, Oeuvre Choisies (Bruxelles et Laipzig: Emile Flatau Angienne Maison

Mayer et Flatau, 1839), p. 171.

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those properties will decline. However, in the hands of French citizens, the same properties will become well-preserved and more valuable.4 For Saint Simon, education was not about emancipation. It was about the management of economic and social affairs.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed For Joseph Jacotot, one of Saint Simone’s contemporaries, education was not about the management of things but the emancipation of humans. Jacotot argues that humans could emancipate themselves through education because they have equal intelligence. “Thous les hommes ont une intelligence égale.”5 According to Jacotot, the presupposition that all humans have equal intelligence does not mean that they pay equal attention to the process of learning, whereas attention as the determining factor in education and learning is a result of the individual’s will.6 A century and a half after Jacotot’s theory of education, Paolo Freire, the Brazilian educator, argued that education is not about the management of properties or domestication of time but about liberation from the world views that perpetuate the existing order. Freire discards both the capitalist and dogmatic left’s conception of education because both are preoccupied with the domestication of time. The former tries to domesticate time through the conceptualization of the future as the reproduction of the existing order, and the latter tries to domesticate time through the theorization of a preordained future because it believes that revolution is in the corner. Since the capitalist approach to time considers the future as the continuation of the present and the dogmatic left’s approach is based on the belief that it is an already known condition, they generate a notion of truth that does not correspond to “the truth of men and women who struggle to build the future.” Similar to the future, truth is, according to Freire, not given but created by the people who learn to build their future.7 Freire assumes that building the future and creating the truth are different aspects or names of the process of human

4 Ibid., p. 173. 5 J. Jacotot, Enseignement Universel (Paris: La Librairie Spéciale de L’Enseignement

Universel [Méthode Jacotot], 1834), p. iv. 6 Ibid., pp. 44–45. 7 Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Continuum 2000), pp. 38–39.

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liberation with the oppressed people as the agents of these processes. The oppressed instigate the process of human liberation when they realize that the existing unjust social system allows the oppressors’ generosity to perpetuate the present injustice. That is why the advocates of generosity always fight back whenever the oppressed reveal the source of social injustice.8 Freire argues that the oppressed cannot realize their freedom by replacing the oppressor because freedom is not a place to be reached but the expression of the struggle of the oppressed to overcome their situation. The oppressed begin to experience freedom when in changing their situation through their own actions, they transform the world. Freedom means for the oppressed liberation from the illusion of action as “acting through the action of the oppressors” Such illusions of action perpetuate the existing order in which the oppressed cannot exercise its freedom. An oppressor who discovers that he or she is an oppressor will never express genuine solidarity with the oppressed but tries “paternalistic treatment of the oppressed” to make sure that the oppressed remain in their situation of dependence. The first requirement of solidarity is that one who offers his or her solidarity is ready to experience the same situation as those with whom she or he is in solidarity. Hence, true solidarity means that one is fighting with the oppressed who are transforming the condition of their oppression.9 Freire argues that oppressors will remain oppressors because they depend on the exercise of violence to keep the situation of oppression stable.10 The oppressors try to convince the oppressed that they lack possession because they are unable to think, and because of their inability to think they cannot change their situation.11 Freire’s pedagogy of the oppressed assumes that the students are not the manifestation of absolute ignorance and expects the educator to narrow his or her distance with the students because an emancipatory education requires a reciprocal relationship between the teacher and student through which they teach one another. The oppressive ideology aims to convince the oppressed that if they want to be integrated into society, they must reform their mentality, and the primary requirement for this reform is that they admit their incompetence and laziness. However, as they try to integrate

8 Ibid., p. 44. 9 Ibid., pp. 47–49. 10 Ibid., p. 55. 11 Ibid., pp. 59–62.

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themselves into society, the oppressed people realize that their integration will maintain the existing “structure of oppression” that has never recognized their humanity and in which they will never be able to express their humanity. It is the same story with the students who want to be recognized as fully human, but they will recognize their own humanity only when they are engaged in the struggle for liberation.12 They realize their humanity when they use words to name their relationships in new ways and learn that by naming the things in the world differently, they can change the world. Since all humans have access to the word, all can change the world. The struggles between those who want to name the world and those who deny them the right to name the world are ideological and class struggles. The intellectuals who name the world on behalf of the oppressed believe that they are the only owners of knowledge and truth. As a result, they cannot enter into a dialogue with others because they believe that the contribution of others to the conversation reveals their weakness. But dialogue is, according to Freire, the expression of the encounter between people with no place for absolute ignorance or absolute truth. Dialogue is a means by which people learn from one another more than they already know.13 Every revolutionary action is actin upon a concrete historical reality, but a true revolution is the thinking and acting together of the people and their leaders who do not treat them as mere objects. The oppressor class cannot think with the people because it cannot accept that people can think for themselves. Hence, the revolutionary leaders who cannot think with the people but think about them will be the new oppressors.14 Only those revolutionary leaders who “live and work with the oppressed and the wretched of the earth,” can think with the people.15 Freire builds his revolutionary dialogue on Gramsci’s ideal of the organic intellectual who synthesizes his critical knowledge with the people’s empirical knowledge of reality. Radical intellectuals who assume a privileged position of knowledge for themselves believe that their words are of more value because they indicate seriousness, sincerity, and superiority. These intellectuals believe that since the words of the

12 Ibid., pp. 72–75. 13 Ibid., pp. 88–90. 14 Ibid., pp. 129–132. 15 Ibid., p. 133.

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oppressed people express laziness, dishonesty, and inferiority, they are of no contribution to their emancipatory cause.16

Divide and Rule Freire argues that the oppressors cannot impose their hegemony on the oppressed unless they divide the oppressed society into different communities. After dividing the oppressed society into different communities, the oppressors select some members of the divided communities as the leaders of their communities to advocate and realize the interests of their respective communities. As the community leaders realize that they cannot defend the interests of their communities, they either enhance their private interests or are alienated from their communities. The ruling class prefers the community leaders who promote their fortune rather than the interests of their communities because they know that by keeping their communities in their assigned places, they will receive their rewards. The ruling class needs the alienated leaders as well because they delay the emergence of critical thinking, the unity of the oppressed people, and the radical intervention in the reality of oppression. Friere claims that by favoring specific individuals from the oppressed communities and classes and punishing others who do not follow its prescriptions, the ruling class creates not only divisions within the oppressed classes and communities but deprives them of capable leaders who could educate and organize them. The strategy of divide and rule works because the oppressed people have learned from experience that “the price of not accepting an invitation offered with the purpose of preventing their unity as a class” is too high. They will be losing their jobs and being blacklisted.17 Cultural invasion is another means through which the oppressors impose their view of the world upon the oppressed to control their thoughts and actions. By restricting its ability to naming the world, cultural invasion allows the invader to deter the creativity of the invaded. Since the invaders make all choices for the invaded, the invaded have little freedom to act. The invaded people are allowed to act if they prolong the actions of the invaders.18 Cultural revolution is the only antidote against

16 Ibid., pp. 134–140. 17 Ibid., pp. 141–144. 18 Ibid., p. 152.

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such illusions of acting because it is the continuation of “the dialogical cultural action.” Whereas modernization results in the cultural invasion, a cultural revolution will achieve development. Whereas modernization, measured through per capita income or gross income, makes the oppressed society dependent on the outside powers and benefits only the metropolitan society, a society on the path of development is measured with regard to the extent of being for itself .19 Freire argues that cultures encounter each other either through cultural invasion or cultural synthesis . Whereas through cultural invasion, the invaders impose their values and ideology on the invaded people to make them the objects of their actions, cultural synthesis results in conversations between cultures and world views on how to transform the existing reality and liberate men and women from their alienated situation. Whereas cultural synthesis allows questions and investigations as the foundation of creativity, cultural invasion kills the curiosity and creativity of the invaded. Whereas cultural invaders impose their prescribed models on the invaded cultures, cultural synthesizers do not have any prescribed model because they emerge through critical analyses of reality and radical interventions in that reality. In the same vein, cultural synthesis does not deny the differences between the world views of the intellectuals and the people but engages them in dialogues to resolve their differences and contradiction and enrich both.20 In 1987, almost twenty years after the publication of Freire’s book, a public debate broke out in France. The debate was about the education of children of French citizens of Arab, Muslim, and African origin. The debate was about how to make these children responsible citizens and equipped with republican values. Jacques Rancière published his Ignorant School Master as a contribution to this debate. Relying on the ideas of Joseph Jacotot (1870–1840), the revolutionary philosopher and advocate of the Republican values, Rancière tried to revive education as a means of intellectual emancipation. Jacotot’s educational philosophy begins with the presupposition that since all humans have equal intelligence, they can understand the words and actions of one another. Jacotot did not consider education as a gradual transmission of knowledge, whether simple or

19 Ibid., pp. 159–162. 20 Ibid., pp. 180–181.

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complex, from the master to the students.21 Jacotot believed that a child could read and understands a book directly without the explanation of a master. He claimed that if the child is not intelligent enough to understand the book’s reasoning, no master can help him understand the reasoning of the book. If the reasonings of the master is necessary because of its difference compared with the book’s reasoning, then new reasoning will be necessary to explain the differences between the book’s and the master’s reasoning.22 According to Ranciére, the myth of pedagogy is based on the presupposition that humans cannot understand things and events by themselves. Hence, there is a need for masters to explain things and events to the ignorant, immature, and stupid people. Ranciére argues that pedagogy has survived because it divides the human world into the knowing and the ignorant worlds, and people with inferior intelligence and superior intelligence. Whereas the inferior intelligence acquires knowledge by chance and interprets his or her knowledge according to his or her “habit and need,” the superior intelligence gains knowledge through methodical reasoning, from simple reasoning to the complex one. The pedagogical myth assumes that students will reach superior intelligence in the future after they become masters. Until that happens, the master must make his knowledge adaptable to the students’ intellectual capacities. The students learn from the beginning that they can understand things and events only after they are explained to them. They learn to understand the “hierarchical world of intelligence,” in which the master decides whether or not the students have become masters because it is the master who appoints the student as a new master, the new explicator in charge.23 In contrast to the method of explication, Jacotot introduces the method of equality. According to this method, one can learn without the mediation of a master explicator; learning depends on the will of the learner. Whereas the explicative method assumes a relationship between the teacher’s intelligence and the student’s intelligence, the concern of the method of equality is the relationship between the will of the teacher and the will of the student. In this relation of two wills, the will of the students must obey the will of the teacher. Although the will

21 Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 1991), p. 3. 22 Ibid., p. 4. 23 Ibid., pp. 6–8.

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that rules the student’s intelligence obeys another will, his intelligence obeys itself.24 The method of equality is the method of emancipation because it assumes that the ignorant person can learn about things that the master does not know anything about if the master “obliges him to realize his capacity.”25 Jacotot calls his method of equality the universal teaching because people always learn new things without a master explicator, but no one dares to recognize it as a method of teaching. Why? Because it calls for an “intellectual revolution” that unseats the masters whose function is the protection of the existing social order. Unlike Saint Simon, Jacotot did not aim to instruct people to understand the orders of those who governed. He considered education as a means of human emancipation because every human being must protect his human dignity, measure his own “intellectual capacity, and decide how to use it.” Jacotot claims that since all men have equal intelligence, poor and uneducated parents can educate their children without any master explicator. What they can say to their children is that they learn something and relate it to all they already know.26 For Jacotot, since education is a journey in the land of knowledge, it does not matter whether one learns quickly or slowly. The point is that they learn and learn. Ranciére compares the explicators to the Socratic method that the master teaches his students through interrogations that they can recognize the truth within themselves. But this method of learning cannot lead to emancipation because it requires a master to lead the conversation. The Socratic method is a method of stultification because it assumes, for instance, that slaves are destined to remain in their place in society.27 Unlike the explicatory method, the method of equality and emancipation is not about how much knowledge one can accumulate but about “what an intelligence can do when it considers itself equal to any other and consider any other equal to itself.” It is the belief in the inferiority of their intelligence that makes the common people remain in their stultified situation.28 When the socalled superior minds try to prove their superiority to the so-called inferior

24 Ibid., pp. 12–13. 25 Ibid., p. 15. 26 Ibid., pp. 16–18. 27 Ibid., pp. 27–29. 28 Ibid., p. 39.

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minds, they enter into a paradoxical situation because they need the inferior minds to recognize their superiority.29 When ordinary people develop the intelligence that they need, they pay attention to their specific situation because intelligence is the same as attention since it investigates the relationship or conflict between the idea and thing. Whenever intelligence makes mistakes, it is because of the lack of will. Will always has power over understanding.30 The foundation of universal teaching is that man who considers himself equal to everyone else, considers everyone else as equal to himself. A man who undergoes different experiences feels a particular pleasure or pain in different situations. As he discovers that other people may experience the same pain and pleasure if they are in the same situation, he begins to communicate with them to tell them about his pain and pleasure.31 Racine who instinctively applied the method of universal teaching claimed that there “are no men of great thoughts , only men of great expressions .” Hence, poetry was for him nothing but translation and counter-translation.32 Racine knew that his thoughts were not so different from us, and we understand him through our counter-translation because he was well aware that his readers were people just like him and equal with him since they understood him. For Racine, understanding means equality because “only an equal understands an equal.” Hence, [e]quality and intelligence are synonymous terms, exactly like reason and will.33 For Jacotot, the state institutions were unable to emancipate a single person,34 because every institution is “an explication in the social act, a dramatization of inequality.” Jacotot was convinced that universal teaching could not be institutionalized because universal teaching is not about societies but about the individual; ike liberty, education is not about giving but about taking.35 It is the stultifying vision of the world that wants the common people to believe that those who occupy the superior social positions reached those positions because of their superiority. The upper class believes that if the lower classes discover that “this superiority is only a 29 Ibid., pp. 47–48. 30 Ibid., p. 54. 31 Ibid., p. 67. 32 Ibid., p. 69. 33 Ibid., p. 73. 34 Ibid., p. 102. 35 Ibid., pp. 105–107.

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conventional fiction,” the society would be in danger.36 For Rancière, the matrix of all explications is consisted of four terms, good and evil, before and after. Some people say that things were better before because the legislator and tradition protected the social order. These people, called conservative or reactionary, say that we must stay together and preserve what is remained of the past. Others say that happiness is in the future after people take education and reach a social position according to their capacity.37 These views have their roots in the myth of the explicative method as the only means of progress, because a “good method” can help people free themselves from routines and prejudices. In a condition of pedagogized humanity, and as long as we owe our progress to our explicators, the people will never catch up with their enlightened elite or intellectuals.38 Whereas the National Society for Intellectual Emancipation described, in the 1830s, ignorance as a danger to the republican government, it realized that the masses who learn about “their rights through parliamentary debates” will become unmanageable and unfit to be governed. In order to make people manageable, a system of education was established to instruct and prepare them not only for a profession but for making them understand that each class has its rank and each man his place in the society. Consequently, the explicator who was recruited into this system of education became the defenders of social and intellectual inequality because, as explicators, they believe in the intellectual hierarchy.39 Otherwise, they would tell the masses that they are free to educate themselves in everything. What prevents the poor from educating themselves, is according to Jacotot, that every “so-called emancipator has his herd of emancipated people” who repeat whatever he says and do whatever he wants them to do.40 Whereas the republican ideal was “to make an equal society out of unequal men,” the state used its institutions to pedagogize the society and infantilize the individuals in the name of reducing inequality. As the project of infantilization of the individual considered Jacotot’s ideal of equality through the universal method a

36 Ibid., p. 109. 37 Ibid., pp. 117–118. 38 Ibid., p. 120. 39 Ibid., pp. 125–128. 40 Ibid., pp. 129–130.

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danger to the social order, since it reminded the masses of the republican ideal of equality of all men, it was replaced by the idea of social progress through public education to eliminate the idea of emancipation. For Jacotot, equality was not an end to attain, but a point of departure.41 Freire and Rancière criticize the epistemological position that the intellectuals assumed for themselves in their relations to the masses. Freire was writing his critique of this relationship, while the world was in turmoil, and the revolutionary left was expecting the world revolution to happen at any moment. Rancière was writing his critique of the intellectual after the ideological defeat of the left while the Soviet Union was on the verge of collapse and former leftist intellectuals such as Pascal Bruckner claimed that everything that happens to the people of the third world or the formerly colonized peoples happens because they do not take responsibility for their actions and ways of being.42 It was a time Alain Finkielkraut was explaining to the Fench citizens of Muslim and African origin that colonialism was a civilizing mission against the backwardness and barbarism of their ancestors. These intellectuals believed that instead of opening themselves to the reason of others, Europeans must open others to reason in the same way their grandparents used to do during the age of colonialism.43 Finkielkraut reminded the European intellectuals that colonialism brought, among other things, universal reason and individual liberty, modern state to the colonized regions, and encouraged them to defend the universal and democratic values of the Enlightenment against Muslims and Africans whose way of life contradicts these values.44 In Britain, Paul Johnson, the former editor of the New Stateman, attacked leftist intellectuals for their failure to defend democracy and individual freedom and for the discrepancy between their words and their deeds. However, instead of calling their arguments into question, Johnson argues that the intellectual who wanted to change the world never believed in their own words. Johnson believed that the time of the intellectuals as the advocate of social change and indicators of social consciousness was over. Similar to Lafargue and Benda, Johnson considers

41 Ibid., pp. 133–134. 42 Pascal Bruckner, Le Sanglot de l’homme blanc: Tiers-Monde, culpabilité, haine de soi

(Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1983). 43 Alain Finkielkraut, La Défaite de la Pensée (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), pp. 109–131. 44 Ibid., pp. 66–76.

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the modern intellectual as the new clergy. However, unlike the members of the clergy who remained true to the wisdom of the past, the intellectuals trust their own intellect.45 It was the confidence in their intellect that led the intellectuals, since the late eighteenth century, to reject the social order based on private property. For Johnson, Rousseau rejected the emerging capitalism not as a result of a disinterested analysis but a result of his strong desire for recognition.46 For Johnson, Rousseau represents the first modern young and angry intellectual who not only does not hesitate to exploit individuals who suffer from “the guilt of the privileged,” but makes a virtue of his ingratitude because he believes in his exceptionalism.47 Furthermore, Rousseau was the first modern intellectual who reduced all aspects of life to politics and then reduced all politics to authoritarian and totalitarian politics.48 Johnson considers Marx as a follower of Rousseau, whose idea of liberation of humanity was nothing but the expression of his academic failure who, despite his theoretical preoccupation with poverty and exploitation, had never tried to meet real poor and exploited people. Hence, Marx’s disregard for Weitling, who was a real worker and believed that the proletarian struggle did not need theory, demonstrates his contempt for the proletariat.49 According to Johnson, Marx’s bitterness prevented him from having any sympathy for humanity, any tolerance for criticism, or any desire for truth expressed in his quarrelsome attitudes toward friends and benefactors.50 Johnson finds Henrik Ibsen very interesting because, in addition to his similarity to Rousseau and Marx, who loved humans in general but unable to stand real human beings,51 he was the first modern intellectual who persuaded the state to subsidize him while never stopped attacking the state. According to Johnson, Ibsen hated democracy because he despised the masses and believed that democracy was the rule of the ignorant masses who had no right to hold any opinion.52 Johnson introduces Bertolt 45 Paul Johnson, Intellectuals (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1992), p. 1. 46 Ibid., pp. 4–7. 47 Ibid., pp. 11–14. 48 Ibid., pp. 25–26. 49 Ibid., pp. 58–61. 50 Ibid., pp. 69–73. 51 Ibid., pp. 91–93. 52 Ibid., p. 98.

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Brecht as the true heir of Ibsen, who exploited the same state institutions he wanted to destroy. Whereas Ibsen used the theater to change social attitudes, Brecht made the theater a means of political propaganda to manipulate the public.53 The originality of Brecht was not in his work, according to Johnson, but in making theater, the most beneficiary of the artistic activities in the European welfare state copied from the financed theaters of Eastern socialist Europe. What Johnson does not like about the welfare state theater is that unlike the East European theater that depends on and is controlled by the state, the welfare state theater has become a means of political propaganda to destroy Western European democracies. Johnson assumed that contrary to his claims, Brecht had no ideals because he considered Life as a swindle, and if one wants to survive, he or she must be cold-blooded and ruthless and have a strategy for exploiting and tyrannize others.54 Johnson tells the same story about Jean-Paul Sartre, who desired fame as compensation for his ugly appearance.55 Johnson finds it absurd that Sartre could hold a widely advertised and crowded lecture on an October day in 1945, whereas Julien Benda would lecture to an empty hall on the same day. There are many small crimes that Johnson ascribes to Sartre, such as enslaving Simone de Beauvoir,56 and his quarrels with all his friends from Raymond Aron, Arthur Koestler, Merleau Ponty to Albert Camus. However, Sartre’s biggest crime is his involvement with Frantz Fanon, whom Johnson describes as “the founder of modern black African racism” and who defined colonial administrations as “institutionalized violence” and justified “civil wars and mass murders” in Africa since the 1960s.57 Johnson considers Sartre’s being thrown out of Renault by the security guards while he was smuggled there to express his support for a hunger strike in the factory as an indication of the end of the intellectuals’ public role.58 George Orwell is among the very few intellectuals whom Johnson admires because his intellectual ability did not prevent him from realizing that searching for the liberation of the working class required working with actual workers who struggle against their 53 Ibid., pp. 173–175. 54 Ibid., pp. 183–186. 55 Ibid., pp. 227–229. 56 Ibid., pp. 233–236. 57 Ibid., pp. 240–246. 58 Ibid., pp. 248–251.

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oppressors. Hence, when Orwell decided to get involved in the Spanish Civil War, he fought for the most oppressed “section of the Republican Army, the anarchist (POUM) militia” with whom the European and American intellectuals had almost no sympathies. However, witnessing the mass killing, torture, and execution of the anarchists by the Spanish Communist Party, he concluded how inconsistent was the theory of socialism with its practice and that communists were capable of committing the same cruelty as Nazi crimes.59 This experience led Orwell to realize that the utopia that is supposed to replace the existing order would create a society like Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) that in the name of truth and justice a totalitarian regime controls human mind and body. Johnson divides humans into the unfortunate masses governed by their passions, and the intellectuals who use their theoretical ability to manipulate and exploit them. Johnson concludes that the intellectuals will never be able to offer any permanent and effective political solutions to the existing problems because their theoretical constructs will never converge with the political passion of the masses.60 One and a half centuries earlier, Joseph Jacotot, contrary to Johnson, did not divide humans into those governed by intellect and others governed by passion. For him, all humans have equal intelligence and intellectual ability.61 Jacotot assumes that poor people have not been able to emancipate themselves from their situation because those in the governing position have told them that their intelligence does not match the intelligence of those in the superior social positions. For Jacotot, intellectual and social emancipation requires that humans believe in the equality of intelligence of all human beings. The poor and ignorant need to know that nobody brings emancipation to anyone. Emancipation must be taken, and self-education is the universal method of taking emancipation.62 The universal method consists of two main principles; all humans have equal intelligence, and everything is related to everything. The students learn something and relate what they have learned

59 Ibid., pp. 307–309. 60 Ibid., pp. 310–311. 61 Joseph Jacotot, Droit et Philosophie Panécastique (Paris: Chez l’editeur H.V. Jacotot, 1852), p. 13. 62 Ibid., pp. 362–363.

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to things they have seen and heard.63 Jacotot claims that the universal method is based on the panecastic philosophy. Unlike the old philosophy that is preoccupied with the foundations of true knowledge or morality, panecastic philosophy is based on the belief that human beings have the same faculty because they can teach subjects about which they do not know anything.64 Knowing thyself connais-toi toi-même as the foundation of the panecastic philosophy assumes that knowing your intelligence is the first principle of your intellectual emancipation.65 A panecastician person considers all human work as the expression or creation of human intelligence in the same way that the universe is God’s expression or creation.66 The equality of intelligence can be verified if the learner is attentive enough. The fact that humans learn something and relate it to what they already know indicates that all humans have equal intelligence.67 No teacher will accept the efficacy of the universal method because the assumption of this method that all humans have equal intelligence makes institutions of education and teachers superfluous.68 The panecastic teacher who believes in the equality of intelligence of all humans does not have a theory that he wants to demonstrate. The believer in the panecastic philosophy does not dispute anything with anyone about any truth. He lives in peace and embraces solitude. When two panecasticians meet, they never put forward two opposite theses that need to be defended but tell their stories about what they have seen, what they have heard, and what they have felt. In telling their stories as reliable means of educating themselves, the panecasticians demonstrate the principle that all humans have equal intelligence. What the one has seen, heard, and felt might not be of any use to the other but can prove that he or she has educated himself or herself toward intellectual emancipation. As the panecastician person learns that intelligence is a faculty that cannot be divided, he or she discovers it in every intellectual activity. Whenever there is a defect in intellectual performance, the panecastician knows that it can be attributed to the will or the lack of it. The belief in the equality of 63 Ibid., p. 337. 64 Ibid., pp. 348–349. 65 Ibid., pp. 234–235. 66 Ibid., pp. 242–243. 67 Ibid., p. 260. 68 Ibid., p. 277.

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intelligence as a means of intellectual emancipation can help poor parents who cannot afford teachers or master explicators for their children.69 For the same reason, Jacotot encouraged the proletariat to become panecastician citizens and learn about all discourses, including the discourse of their exploiters and oppressors who argue that they exploit them for their own good. C’est cette égalité d’intelligence que le panécasticien doit cherche à reconnâitre. Quelque parti qu’il puisse prendre comme citoyen, dans cette lutte, comme panécasticien il doit admirer l’esprit de ses adversaires. Un prolélaire rejeté hose de la classe des électeurs, et, à plus forte raison, de celle des égligibles, n’est pas obligé de trouver juste ce qu’il regarde comme une usurpation, ni d’aimer les usurpateurs. Mais il doit étudier l’art de ceux lui expliquent comment on le dépouille pou son bien.70

A Short History of the Integration of the Intellectuals into the State As discussed previously, Hegel assumed that the state is a union of free individuals through a contract who obey the consequences of the contract according to which rights necessitate duty. As free individuals, the members of the state know that slaves have neither rights nor duties.71 This same contract divides the state into the legislative power representing the universality of laws and the executive power with the task of subsuming the particular and specific cases, demands, and conflicts of interests under the universality of law. Hence, the executive power recruits’ individuals with intellectual ability as bureaucrats to incorporate the private interests of civil society into the universal interests of the state. Hegel assumed knowledge to be the only qualification through which the individuals could hold an office in the executive power. This assumption gives all citizens a chance to become state officials or bureaucrats. In exchange for being a part of the state, which allows them to satisfy their yearning for spiritual existence, the bureaucrats sacrifice their own goals and interests. Since no one controlled aristocracy, individual aristocrats used the state offices for their own benefits, but bureaucracy is controlled, according 69 Ibid., pp. 279–282. 70 Ibid., pp. 294–295. 71 Ibid., p. 284.

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to Hegel, by the corporations of the civil society from below and by the sovereign from above. The modern capitalist state as the realization of both the Hegelian idea of the state and the Saint Simonian idea of the industrial society has integrated the intellectuals to represent the state and the industrialists in the name of humanity. At first, the industrialists financed the philosophers to lay the intellectual foundation of the industrial order because they had the intellectual capacity to fight against the dominant prejudices whose disappearance or diminution were the preconditions of the growth of the industrial society. The industrialists protected, in return, the intellectuals ’ scientific work and sponsored their public availability. Against the Hegelian conception of the modern state based on bureaucracy, Marx was hoping that the universal expansion of the right to vote would result in the true democracy and the disappearance of the state and its bureaucracy. Marx calls into question Hegel’s assumption that bureaucracy is the site of the spiritual experience of the intellectuals whom the state recruits as bureaucrats. For Marx, if bureaucracy is the site of the spiritual experience in the state, private property must be the site of the spiritual experience in civil society. The fact that the real state has created bureaucracy as an imaginary state to experience spirituality indicates that in modern society, “every object has a dual meaning, a real one and a bureaucratic one.” However, bureaucracy’s reality cannot be detached from hierarchy and closed corporations, which are protected by secrecy. These realities of bureaucracy make authority as the principle of knowledge against any form of public or political mentality. As authority becomes the principle of knowledge for bureaucracy, its spiritualism is reduced to vulgar materialism of passive obedience. As the vulgar materialism prevents bureaucrats from distinguishing between their existence and the existence of the bureaucratic system, they realize that material life is the only meaningful life, and careerism and competition for higher posts the primary purpose of every human being in life.

The Limits of Democracy Marx doubts that bourgeois democracy can achieve human emancipation because the modern state recognizes the citizen’s right to freedom as long as they are separated from one another and consider one another as the limitation of their own freedom. The modern state recognizes the rights to freedom as long as it is under the right to private property,

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which is citizens’ right to selfishness and which makes citizens unpolitical creatures who believe that their relations to other citizens can only be regulated by law. Marx believed that man as a political creature could discover his universal abilities and emancipate himself from the dominance of private property that has reduced him to an exchangeable object. Marx does not consider man in general but the proletariat, produced by the capitalist mode of production, as the agent of social and political emancipation. He reminds us that the proletariat cannot accomplish its historical mission without the aid of the intellectual communists who provide it with the necessary class consciousness that guides its revolutionary actions. However, in the nineteenth century, by representing the Jews as the source of disorder and national decline, the Anti-Semite nationalist tendencies excluded the Jewish population from society so that they never become political creatures. Within this anti-Semitic context, the Dreyfus Affair generated the figure of the intellectual. The political climate generated by the Dreyfus Affairs transformed as well the poor people and the masses from being a significant threat to the state into being an asset for the state. This transformation led by the socialist parliamentarians that nationalized the poor and the masses would be impossible without the help of the wealthy intellectuals who were seeking protection for their wealth against the unexpected results of the class struggle. The fact that after the Dreyfus Affair, the state became stronger than before, indicated that whether peaceful or violent, transitions of political power make the state more powerful. The more the intellectual tried to reform the state, the more they became integrated into the state. The integration of the intellectuals into the state convinced both that they needed each other. Hence, the state was happy to see the influence of the intellectuals who wanted to think for the proletariat in the proletarian movement because it could help both the state and the intellectuals to determine the fate of the proletariat. Sorel focused on general strike as a means of destroying the state because he understood the scale of the collaboration between the state and the intellectuals. Sorel realized that the socialist politicians and intellectuals feared a general strike because they were afraid of being exposed as useless. The masses already knew that the intellectuals’ belief in the inequality of talents contradicted their talk of egalitarian government. The growth of social democracy in Europe was the result of the intellectuals’ effort to extend political democracy to the economy in order to monopolize the state. The modern state became the government of the intellectuals because the state realized that buying

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voters was more expensive than buying politicians and intellectuals. As the intellectuals find out that the state can bestow them the right to experience a privileged, lazy life in return for denying the proletariat to achieve the same right, they take control of both the state and the proletariat. Modern intellectuals are well aware that laziness was the foundation of the Greek culture, according to which free man did intellectual exercise while the slave did manual labor. The fact that capitalism appeared by eradicating the laziness of the poor in the eighteenth century demonstrates how modern capitalism was replicating ancient Greek. The modern capitalist state was not merely the government of the intellectual politicians, but the government of the intellectuals who had become scientists and academics. The modern state was the product of the marriage between intelligence and power. Hence, not only politically radicals such as Sorel wanted to destroy the state, but people such as Lasserre who wanted to protect the scientific character of the university education. Why? Because the governments that followed the French Revolution prevented intellectual freedom in the university by allowing passion determining the movements of intelligence and deciding what questions should or should not be investigated with the help of the philosophers and intellectuals who had been incorporated into the state. Since the interference of the state in educational affairs made the question of the relationship between the state and the university political, the only way of solving the problem was radical political change. Benda agrees with Lasserre since he defines the intellectuals as an individual whose pleasure lies in his activity to reach the truth, the only activity that enables humanity to make a distinction between good and evil as the foundation of its civilization. Benda’s intellectual is a disinterested individual whose detachment from political passion and fixed ideas, leads him to reject the utility of the truth and the circumstantial nature of justice. Hence, the intellectual is the one who can make the Machiavellian distinction between politics and morality and never allow politics to determine morality. This distinction enables the intellectual to understand that a particular purpose cannot determine the morality of a particular action. Benda preferred democracy against totalitarian or authoritarian states because democracy does not consider liberty, justice, and truth as practical values and allows the intellectuals to distinguish between politics and morality and offers them a chance to overcome their passion for politics. The submission of the intellectuals to

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the truth, justice, and reason means that they cannot change the world but can remain faithful to the exercise of reason. However, intellectuals such as Gramsci and Nizen, who wanted to remain true to truth and justice, had to betray their vocation when they realized that their intellectual activities empowered the hegemony of an oppressive and exploitative class in the civil society. Nizan realized that the intellectuals who were spreading the fear that the revolt of the poor people would endanger freedom of thought were fearful of losing their enormous income and wealth. These intellectuals were trying to make their way of reasoning and morality as the universal way of reasoning and morality because their way of reasoning and morality would guarantee their privileged social positions. Continuing Nizan’s argument, Sartre described the intellectual as an individual who begins as a technician of practical knowledge but revolts against his or her normal functions. A true intellectual is, according to Sartre, someone who does not believe that the universal is completed but detects, illuminates, and recognizes the possibilities of people’s effort toward universalization. For Sartre, French leftist intellectuals who did not recognize or support the Algerian national struggle for liberation were false intellectuals. By excluding the Algerian people from the process of universalization, the false French intellectuals justified racism and colonialism in Algeria. Aron wanted the French intellectuals to stop opposing political power and dreaming about destroying capitalism in order to ascend to power, in the name of humanity and the universal. He expected them to contribute and participate in the decision making on the state level. Aron anticipated a new generation of the French intellectuals who, instead of comparing present France with their imaginary France, compare it with the France of the past. He expected this new generation to become a part of the élite who, instead of trying to overthrow the existing power, try to improve the standard of living of their working class. Aron encouraged the new generation of the intellectuals to remember that only freedom of criticism and the autonomy of the universities from the state authority have made contemporary Europe. Now, the question is, can the members of this new generation of intellectuals who are paid by the state, promote their careers while defending their freedom of expression. If by the new generation of the French intellectuals, Aron meant all intellectuals who held a French passport, Frantz Fanon was one member of this new generation. But instead of advising the state, Fanon began talking to the colonized men and women who wanted to emancipate themselves from French colonialism. He told the colonized people that

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the French intellectuals who distance themselves from the massacres that are committed in their name have always been in solidarity with the colonialist murderers. Fanon reminds the French intellectuals that the colonialized people can emancipate themselves because despite being dominated, they have never allowed the colonist to convince them of their inferiority. This intellectual resistance made the colonized people immune against the French politics of domestication. This intellectual resistance enabled the colonized people to universalize their national struggle for liberation as the struggle for the emancipation of all oppressed of the world. According to Fanon, the colonized people learned from the colonist’s way of reasoning who used to say that the colonized people only understand the language of force and violence. Now they use the same logic against the colonizers and argue that violence is the only language that the colonizers understand. As the colonized deprived the colonists of their ideological weapon, the colonized intellectual stopped supporting them. The colonized people succeeded in achieving their universalization despite the colonized intellectuals who were paid by the colonizers to function as the native informers who discredited their own national culture, preached about the merits of colonization, and the futility of the anti-colonial struggle. The native informer who denied the capacity of their nation to resist oppression and exploitation and wanted them pacified, tamed, subdued, and disciplined have never become more than interpreters who convey the master’s orders to the natives. However, unlike the native informer, the emancipated natives or blacks cannot remain in their assigned places because they talk back and fight back whenever they encounter racism and oppression. They refuse to remain in places to which the white man assigned them. Since the emancipated blacks and natives do not need the white man’s acknowledgment of their humanity, they reject the racist ideology that expects them to consider themselves as inferiors. The emancipated natives reveal how the scholars of the native affairs contribute to the strategy of social disintegration in the colonized areas. They reveal how the policy of unveiling in Algeria is a policy of disintegration to facilitate the hegemony of the colonial administration in the Algerian society. Those who defeated this colonial strategy were both the militant veiled and unveiled women who participated in the Algerian struggle for national liberation. The national liberation enabled the Algerian women to fight the French policy of disintegration because it created new means of perception for the Algerian men and women. This new means of perception changed the Algerian women’s perception

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of themselves as women for marriage into women for the revolution. This change reflected the change in the nation’s self-understanding, which the colonists had described as emotionally unstable, culturally immature, and backward. By the end of colonialism, crude racism was gradually replaced by refined racism that aimed to control and domesticate the human mind before exploiting his body. As a response to the struggles for national liberation and the emigration of the natives to Europe, refined racism focused on the native culture. Since the anti-colonial struggles demonstrated that all races share the same ability for reasoning and cultural maturity, the advocates of the refined racism argued that racism is a result of ignorance and passion of the masses, which will disappear as a result of a dialogue between different cultures. The strategy of inferiorization of particular social groups as a means of exploitation was not the invention of colonialism. However, the nineteenth-century European capitalists and states found the strategy of inferiorization a useful strategy and made it the main ideological principle of colonialism when they decided to export the superfluous capital and labor-power to the colonized territories. Members of this superflous labor-power, consisted of disgruntled educated people and members of the mob with criminal records, that represented a danger to the established order at home, were incorporated into the colonial administration abroad. Modern democracies survived because they exported their homegrown problems to the colonized lands. These economically and socially excluded people who had never been a part of the nation-states at home would do anything to elevate their economic and social status in the colonized areas. As loyalty to the colonial administrations became the key to their economic success and social promotion, and they were experiencing economic and social advancement, they began to treat each other as proud Englishmen or Frenchmen in their encounter with the native people. Whereas Fanon tried to expose the truth about the colonialist’s racist ideology from which the European intellectuals could not detach themselves and demonstrate the universal aspects of national liberation movements, Foucault argued that the truths about universal forms of domination and oppression could not liberate anyone because truths are produced by discourses which establish and perpetuate specific relations of power. The most important is, according to Foucault, the effects of truths produced within particular discourses which are neither true nor false but produce and reproduce relations of power which no state can

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control. As Foucauldian theory of truth-power undermined the leftist intellectuals’ claim to the historical consciousness and universal truth, it replaced the universal intellectual with the specific intellectual who advocates a specific cause and shows resistance to the relations of power within the specific field of his or her expertise. Others who came after May 1968, tried to remove the division between the intellectual and manual labor and erase the gap between the intellectuals and the masses. The same intellectuals who encouraged the masses to loud their voice in the early 1970s, labeled since the late 1980s, the Muslim population in Europe as a threat to the social fabric of European societies. Since the late 1980s, unlike Simone Weil, European intellectuals that include the former revolutionary leftists are no longer ashamed of colonization. While praising the civilizing mission of colonialism, these intellectuals expect the state to educate the children of Muslim and African immigrants about this “fact” in order to protect the European character of the nation’s identity. The fact that these intellectuals are imitating the late eighteenth-century racist ideologists indicates a farewell to the European intellectuals. However, it was not only the new generation of the European intellectuals who came after Sartre that took such a neoconservative turn. It was Edward Said who, in his Orientalism, turned Fanon’s anti-racist and anti-colonial concept of the intellectual into a domesticated critique of the Orientalist discourse. Said was hoping that his critique of Orientalism would enable the oriental or the native to talk back. However, the process of enabling the native to talk back contributed to the transformation of the political left into the cultural left that instead of addressing the masses, the proletariat, and the oppressed nations, it addresses the students, scholars, and intellectuals to build multiculturalist societies locally and globally. By sharing the same theoretical discourses and pedagogical methods, the academic intellectuals and journalists who constituted cultural left recognized each other as a transnational academic class, an international cultural bourgeoisie. As allegiance to this international cultural bourgeoisie, became the only means of remaining intellectually and academically relevant and politically powerful, and as this international cultural bourgeoisie included or affected almost all educational and political institutions around the globe, it formulated the ideology of globalization and its cosmopolitanism. As this international cultural bourgeoisie explained the need for humanitarian interventions to save the victims of inhumanities around the world, Western governments recognized no limits for the exercise of their control over the planet. Whereas the ideology of globalization indicated the transformation of the majority

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of the leftist intellectuals into cultural left, a fragment of the old European left that claims to have remained truth the ideals of the left, has discovered globalization and its consequences as the main enemies. Since immigration from the formerly colonized lands to Europe is one of the direct consequences of globalization, this “true left” considers immigrants as a threat to the social fabric of European society because their presence caused and will cause cultural and social conflicts. Whereas the remaining fragments of the old left advocate exclusive racism because they aim at purifying the social body from the inferior cultures, the members of the international cultural bourgeoisie or cultural left advocate inclusive racism as the structuring principle of the hierarchical national and international space. The common features of the exclusive and inclusive racism are their disdain for manual labor and their belief that non-Westerners cannot govern themselves. A large fraction of the educated white population in Europe consider the growing number of highly educated immigrants who seek to sell their intellectual labor, not as a threat to the social fabric of their society, but a real threat to the future of their careers and children’s careers. This same portion of the European intelligentsia complains about the inability of the state to integrate the immigrants into society. What the European intellectuals mean when they say that the European states have failed to integrate the immigrants into society is that they have failed to offer an education to the immigrants and their children that could domesticate them to the extent that they automatically find their destined place in society. As the European intellectuals realize the failure of the state to domesticate the immigrants, they began to racialize the working class and blame the immigrants for being the cause of overexploitation, unemployment of the European working class. They soon discover that immigrants are the cause of the increase of criminality, the failure of the educational and health care system, and, more importantly, a threat to freedom of expression. The fact that the European intellectuals blame the immigrants for every problem they discover in Europe is in total contrast to Said’s definition of the intellectual as an exiled person ready to expresses unconventional opinions, ready to voice the voiceless and speak truth to power. Said did not help the voice of the voiceless to be heard but enabled the international cultural left or the international cultural bourgeoisie to create the condition of possibility of a new imperialist project in the name of democracy and human rights. Contrary to what Said imagined, the intellectuals incorporated into the international cultural bourgeoisie are not marginal but fully domesticated with no desire to reinvent themselves.

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The history of the American intellectual is a history of their integration into the state and their subsequent domestication. After the short period of mutual distrust, in the early 1950s, came the mutual recognition of the state and the intellectuals. The mutual recognition resulted in the intellectuals being recruited by the state institutions to produce knowledge that could serve the state’s domestic and foreign policies. As the state convinced the intellectual that it is not the consistency and relevance of their arguments but their political stance that determines the security or insecurity of their position in the academic and social hierarchy, they gave their consent to the American intervention in Vietnam. Chomsky was one of the few American intellectuals who reminded his fellow intellectuals of their responsibility toward the war their country was waging against Vietnam. He reminded the American intellectuals that they should use their analytical capacity to expose the lies of their governments about the war in Vietnam because they cannot betray the truth in the name of national interests. However, the intellectuals who were trusted by the state advised the United States to use even mass starvation as a means of making its policies successful in the Indo-China region. Now, the intellectual, academics, and journalists who select topics of public debates know that if they maneuver within the limits put by the ruling class toward public consensus, they will have professional success. Otherwise, they would lose their credibility and relevance. After becoming the principal shareholders of the state, the new intellectuals have learned to function as the agents of the broker state that mediates between competing interest groups that have demonstrated their allegiance to the existing political order. The radical students of the 1960s and early 1970s who targeted the university as the ideological apparatus of the existing order returned to university in the late 1970s, as professors preoccupied with feminism, post-colonial theories, history from below, radical philosophy e.t.c. From now on, it was not the secret police, surveillance, blacklisting, and prison that could prevent the intellectuals from becoming dissenters but professional insecurity. One of the results of the integration of the former radicals into the university system, by the late 1970s, was the expansion of the Area Studies which in the name of democracy, good government and human rights in the non-Western world, explained why should Western governments violate the sovereignty of many nations and states. We have witnessed, since the 1990s, that Western intellectuals who have given up their ambitions to transform their own states have used the Area Studies to change or transform unfriendly governments throughout

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the world. Consequently, the Middle East Studies as a subdivision of the Area Studies has represented the history of the indigenous struggle for democracy and state sovereignty in Iran as a history of the failure of the forces of modernity in their encounter with tradition and religious fundamentalism. Contrary to this representation, the issue at stake in modern Iran has always been the fight that democratic and socialist forces waged against dictatorship and imperialism. While resisting British imperialism in the 1940s, the Iranian intellectuals coined democratic socialism to challenge the hegemony of the Soviet Union on the international communist movement. Ale-Ahmad’s Westoxication discourse and Shariati’s Islamist ideology, which resulted in the 1979 Revolution and then post-Islamism in post-revolutionary Iran, perpetuated the struggle of the Iranian intellectuals to resist both local dictatorship and foreign imperialism. Through the Westoxication discourse and the Islamist ideology, the Iranian intellectuals of the 1960s and 1070s, recognized that former colonists were returning as Orientalists and government advisers to consolidate the position of the Westoxicated intellectuals who functioned as the outposts of the neocolonialist culture and imperialism in Iran. The Westoxication discourse and the Islamist ideology anticipated the rise of a new generation of Iranian intellectuals who could bridge the gap between the intellectuals and the masses and defend and advocate the democratic and sovereign features of the nation and the state. The anticipated generation of the Iranian intellectuals that emerged with the 1979 Revolution was well aware that as ideas and revolutions change their character they become institutionalized. When the Iranian revolution became institutionalized, and the generation of the Iranian intellectuals who advocated the Revolution and built the post-revolutionary state realized that the new state had not fulfilled its democratic promises, they turned against the state through a new discourse called post-Islamism. As a fraction of the advocates of the post-Islamist discourse did not distinguish between the nature of their own political demands in Iran and the theory of the historical gap between Western political culture and its post-historical time and their own political cultures, promoted by the international cultural bourgeoisie, they disappeared in its ideology of globalization and cosmopolitanism. The Iranian intellectuals who have been criticizing the entire Westoxication discourse, the Islamist ideology, and the postIslamist discourse have never been successful in generating a genuine public debate in Iran. They mostly criticize the former Islamists for monopolizing and using the post-revolutionary higher education for

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ideological purposes and consolidation of the post-revolutionary state. The most persistent as well as absurd, among such critics is dreaming of reconstructing the university education to make Iran both as a cultural sphere and a nation-state the subject of human and social sciences to produce an Iranian national consciousness in the same way that Western universities have produced national consciousness for their nations. There are few Western countries whose intellectuals have taken their post-historical time status and their privileged epistemological and political position vis-à-vis non-Western countries as seriously as Norway. Whereas, Ibsen believed that he was thinking thoughts that the majority may think a decade later, the Norwegian intellectuals believe that nonWesterners at home and abroad may catch the Norwegian political culture and its level of respect for democracy and human rights some times in future if they are carefully educated by Norwegians. The Norwegian intellectuals have made citizens with origin in Muslim countries that constitute less than 5% of the Norwegian population the main subject of public debates for more than two decades. Where the intellectuals attached to inclusive racism want them to act as lights Muslims to call them Muslim parvenu whenever they are no longer useful, other intellectuals associated with exclusive racism want them either expelled from society or as outraged believers with no ambitions or dreams and who know their assigned place in society. Five decades after Bjørneboe reflected on the relationship between racism and colonialism and on how colonizers created their inferiors to exploit them as effortlessly as possible, the majority of the Norwegian intellectuals share the colonizers’ world view. Bjørneboe was dreaming that his contemporary radical students would as the future academics and scientists decode and dismantle the racist and imperialist systems. However, five decades later, those radical students have restored the racist and imperialist system. Whereas, as the heirs of those radical students, a large segment of the contemporary Norwegian intellectuals expects their fellow citizens of Muslim origin to become exceptional or light Muslims, other Norwegian intellectuals who try to purify the social body from these unwanted elements tell these exceptional Muslims that it is not Europe but Muslim lands that need them most. Whereas the Norwegian proponents of inclusive racism invite Muslim intellectuals to dialogue, they make them listen to and repeat their own monologues on the cultural and political gaps between Europeans and Muslims and how to overcome such gaps. In such monologues, we find prescriptions on why and how Muslim intellectuals should approach

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their people, cultures, and political systems critically. The proponents of inclusive racism argue that if Muslims refrain from the politics of identity, Islamophobia will gradually disappear. They claim that Islamophobia is not an expression of the practice of exclusion and discrimination, but a result of the real fear among the Europeans for a Muslim political take over and the abolition of freedom and democracy, although the cause of this fear is imaginary. The Norwegian proponents of inclusive racism at home and the exponents of imperialist projects for democracy abroad belong to the same international cultural bourgeoisie that has formulated the ideology of globalization and cosmopolitanism. However, an inclusive racist at home and imperialist abroad can turn into an exclusive racist and anti-globalist overnight, as it happened in the case of Fjordman, the ideologue of the Oslo mass murderer. The interesting thing is that there no ideological difference between Fjordmann and the leftist intellectuals who claim that immigrants are changing the egalitarian structure of Norwegian society and are causing social and cultural conflicts. Even Norwegian intellectuals who try to expose the myth that Norway is a humanitarian superpower, do not reveal the hypocritical, oppressive, and exploitative contents of this myth but how its elite has misused and exploited the naïve Norway. Such critics never question Norway’s position within the new imperialist arrangements abroad and the position of its intellectuals in the new racist arrangements at home. It never accords to the minds of these critics how beneficial this humanitarian superpower position has been for Norway and its intelligentsia. The critique that indicates that Norway never brings to the underdeveloped world technology or its welfare state model, but its Christian fundamentalism, never discusses the political and economic consequences of such policies. The absolute majority of the contemporary Norwegian intellectuals promote the project of making Norway a humanitarian superpower, because the Ministry of Foreign Affairs funds their work and position and because they understand themselves as the extension of the state. The consensus between the politicians, academics, and journalists on almost every subject of national and international importance in Norway indicates the ideological unity between universities, research institutions, mass media, NGOs, and the state. This ideological unity generates involuntary supervision, pacification of intellectual dissent, and domestication of researchers and journalists before they can interrupt the consensual public opinion. The fact that the one who argues that compared with the Norwegian humanitarian superpower, the nineteenth-century colonialism was a more efficient and effective

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conveyor of true civilization to the colonized land, is described as one of the most radical and critical minds in Norway demonstrates how absurd the concept of the intellectual has become in Norway. The same radical critical mind claims that immigrants have changed the social fabric of the Norwegian society from a homogenous cultural and political community into a society full of socio-cultural conflicts. This statement implies that the Norwegian national unity is possible if the Norwegian ethnic homogeneity returns. However, a return to ethnocultural nationalism in Norway would be a return to the Norwegian national socialism of the 1940s. The danger of this ethnonationalism is that it considers even the most domesticated citizens of Muslim origin as unfit and removable from the social body. What this radical critical mind does not discuss is that the entire Norwegian intelligentsia, regardless of their intellectual positions, believes that the gap between the state and civil society in Norway has disappeared. That is why the statement that Norway should promote its national values on the international level to protect its interests is so farcical that can be uttered only by someone, who according to his admission is the first professor in the developmental studies in Norway, which means one of the major products of the project of making Norway a humanitarian superpower. The claim that Norway’s national interests do not coincide with the interests of its elite might be true or untrue, but only a detailed study of Norway’s economic and political interests within the new imperialist arrangement since the early 1990s can provide an answer to this question. The fact that the new imperialist arrangement in the age of globalism is more exploitative and cannier than old imperialism means that Norway is pursuing its interests in a more exploitative and cannier way than before. Thanks to its intellectuals, Norway has become a country that practices new racism at home and contributes to the new imperialism abroad more efficiently than many other European countries. As a reward, it brands its intellectuals who are nostalgic about the nations’ ethnic homogeneity and interpret colonialism as a civilizing mission as nonconformists and rebellious. At the same time, the larger group of the Norwegian intellectuals who prefer inclusive racism at home and empower new imperialism abroad in the name of democracy and human rights are described as courageous and vanguard. Six decades after Bell’s prediction, the revolutionary intellectuals have disappeared in the West as well as in the third world, while neoconservatism and neoliberalism have replaced liberalism and welfare state as ideas and practices in the West and the third world. In the 1960s and the 1970s,

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the sociological process of integration of the intellectuals into the sate accompanied the anti-totalitarian ideology. However, since the 1990s, the integration of the world intellectuals into the international cultural bourgeoisie was the final state of reconstructing imperialism as globalization. With the ascendency of the ideology of globalization, the communist totalitarianism was replaced with Islamist totalitarianism. While communist totalitarianism represented a distortion within Western modernity by obstructing legal equality and intellectual freedom, Islamist totalitarianism is a negation of modernity in its entirety. Strangely, the small fraction of the European intellectuals who remained true to the radical left has blamed the ideology of globalization for the freedom of movement of the labor force from Muslim countries and Africa to Europe while using its conception of Islamist Totalitarianism to attack the Muslim population in contemporary Europe as existential threats to the European Welfare state, democracy, and intellectual freedom. In response to the Muslimophobic fear and insecurity created partly by the former radical left, the European governments made the management of insecurity and fear in society their main object of governance and have tried to make sure that the society is dominated by fear. In a society dominated by fear, not only the individual and collective interests become identical, but values and interests become the same. The fear generated by Islamist totalitarianism since the early 1990s and the 9/11 terrorist attack led Western intellectuals and politicians to present the interests of the state and citizens but Western interests and values as identical. Hence, Western intellectuals have never questioned the foundation of the consensual state and society because they believed in the convergence of law and morality, state and society, and values and interests in the West. As the intellectuals are integrated into the state, and their existence and sustainability become fully dependent on the state, they disappear from the public sphere. Since the intellectuals, scholars, and various organs of civil society are dependent on the state, they collectively defend the consensual state and society whenever they are under threat. Hence, the contemporary European intellectuals act as if the existing political structure expresses or has expressed until recently, before the flow of immigrants, the ethical values of the community, while ethics is reduced to Ethos as the way of being and living.72 As Western

72 Jacques Rancière, Dissensus (New York: Continuum, 2010), pp. 99–100.

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societies are no longer juridico-political communities but ethical communities based on individual liberty and freedom of thought, the Muslim population that does not respect these values is threatening the modes of being of these communities. As Western democracies are transformed from juridico-political communities into ethical communities, politics is reduced to policing the Muslim population in the public sphere. In a shrinking public sphere, politics is no longer about the questioning of the power of the law, its limits and ambivalences, but about the assertions that acknowledge the identity between the laws and social facts. This consensual expression between the state of society and the meaning of the law generates a circular relationship between social facts and laws, which implies that people who fall outside this circular relationship are not subjects of racist discrimination and other forms of injustice, but people who must be removed from the national and international social body or focus of humanitarian aid and intervention.73 In the past, the leftist intellectuals argued about the discrepancies between the founding principles of Western democracy and democracy’s actual practice. Now the discrepancies between the founding principles of democracy and actual practice of the states are inappropriate topics in the European public sphere. Instead, the public discourse is about the absolute victim whose rights are either undermined by the political regimes whose practices are reminiscent of the Soviet crime and Nazi genocide, or Muslim families or fathers in Europe who do not recognize the individual freedom of their daughters and women. For a long time, Western intellectuals were depicting a bright future for humanity. However, as they began to replace the revolutionary figure with the absolute victim of the infinite evil who cannot defend their basic rights, they made themselves and their governments as the only force that can defend those basic rights. The limitless nature of the suffering of the absolute victims gives their Western protectors unlimited rights to all available means, which means, in most cases, extra-juridical means including military intervention to save the absolute victims.74 Twenty years after Western intellectuals defending the rights of the absolute victim, Claude Lefort tells Pierre Rosanvallon that the major problem of contemporary democracy is “the absence of great social

73 Ibid., p. 102. 74 Ibid., p. 103.

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conflicts,” which means a desire for a return to the political community.75 Rosanvallon’s response is the encouragement of the Western intellectuals to challenge the passivity of the people by helping them understand the world since, as he claims, the transformation of the world begins by understanding it, and since interpretation and action that are not interconnected, will not contribute to any egalitarian political event in the West.76 But, as far as Western intellectuals do not recognize the nonWestern countries such as Iran as political communities and are reluctant to understand the way politics is changing these societies and refuse to recognize their political possibilities, their desire for new Western political communities will remain nostalgic and impractical.

75 Pierre Rosanvallon, The Test of the Political: A Conversation with Claude Lefort, https://arditiesp.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/rosanvallon_interview_lefort_2012.pdf, p. 13. 76 Ibid., p. 14.

CHAPTER 10

Conclusion

Since its emergence, in the early 1800s, the intellectual has mediated or supposed to have mediated between the two seemingly opposing spheres of the state and society, public and private, universal and particular, law and morality, and reality and its image. Hegel expected the state as the expression of the universal and general interests to recruit the intellectual to incorporate the particular issues of civil society and the private interests of the individuals and corporations into the state. Hegel assumed that by taking part in the universality of the state, the intellectual as a member of the state bureaucracy would undergo a spiritual experience and since the fundamental principle of bureaucracy was knowledge, all citizens had equal opportunity to become members of the state bureaucracy and experience the same spirituality. Against Hegel’s approach to bureaucracy as the condition of possibility of the intellectual’s spirituality, stands Saint Simon’s materialist conception of the intellectual. The Saint Simonian intellectual would help the industrialists to influence decision makings on the state level to facilitate the processes of production, educate the current and future members of the proletariat to perform their duties in these processes while they are managing different processes of production on the national level toward economic success. Whereas Hegel’s theorization of bureaucracy and Saint Simons’ defense of public education seem unrelated, since bureaucracy was meant to serve the state and education

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was supposed to assist the capitalist production, their interconnections and communications consolidated not only the modern state but colonialism and imperialism. However, Marx realized that from the moment the intellectual is a member of the state bureaucracy, he cannot preserve his autonomy. Since autonomy is the precondition of one’s search for the truth, the universal, and spirituality, the bureaucrat can neither pursue the truth nor the universal or spirituality. Criticizing Hegel, Marx argues that the principle of bureaucracy is not knowledge, but authority. Marx reveals that bureaucracy keeps authority as the principle of knowledge and passive obedience to the authority as the principle of ethics. As authority becomes the principle of knowledge and passive obedience to authority as the principle of ethics, the citizen is no longer a political or public being. Hence, the state bureaucrats become subservient civil servants whose fascination with formal behavior within the social hierarchy, and their practice of vulgar materialism, convince them that competitions for higher posts within the bureaucracy and the struggle for higher social positions are the most meaningful aims in life. Marx argues that the intellectual’s integration into the state or capital will never allow him to experience the universal and the spiritual. Marx claims that only revolutionary efforts to eliminate both the state and capital allow humans to experience a bite of the universal and the spiritual. However, the union of the state and capital has succeeded in recuperating the revolutionary intellectuals. As a result, the intellectuals were transformed into the bureaucrats, politicians, or educators who served the state and capital. While similar to the bureaucrats, a great number of the Dreyfusard intellectuals were more concerned with their future positions in the government, a segment among these intellectuals learned from the Affair, that they could defend the universal through petitions. But, the Dreyfus affair created an opportunity for the socialist intellectuals to reach the governing positions and from where they nationalized the masses that turned them from being a threat to the state into an asset for the state. The nationalization of the masses convinced the state that the intellectuals who were thinking for the masses and deciding their actions could guarantee their obedience to the state authority. As the socialist intellectuals became eligible to govern the state and succeeded in extending political democracy to the economy, the intellectuals began to monopolize the state. Hence, governments of the right and left came and went, but what they left was a stronger state. The intellectuals wanted to be identical with the state because they wanted to enjoy the privilege of being lazy, and they were allowed to govern

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because they convinced the capitalists that buying politicians and intellectuals were cheaper than buying voters. While the intellectuals have been fighting for gaining and keeping the right for laziness for themselves, they have never defended the proletariat’s struggle for achieving the same right because they knew, similar to their Greek predecessors that the principle of laziness functions as long as the majority does manual labor. They knew that capitalism became the dominant mode of production after the eradication of the right to laziness for the absolute majority. As this right remained the privilege of the few, the modern intellectuals realized that they could enjoy the right to laziness if they offered their services to capital or the state institutions. Hence, as the modern capitalist state became the government of the intellectual politicians, scientists, academics, writers, and journalists, has been, since the early twentieth century, it became the site of interaction between intelligence and power. However, since the early twentieth century, some considered the interplay between knowledge and power in the modern state as a serious threat to intellectual and academic freedom. Some observers believed that only a political revolution could return intellectual freedom to the university. For others such as Benda, the danger to intellectual freedom was not the state but the incursion of political passions into intellectual activities. By driving the intellectuals to think of the utility of truth and the conditional nature of justice, political passions undermine the intellectuals’ disinterestedness as the main requirement for seeking truth and justice as the universal phenomena in the concrete realities. Hence, instead of being a Machiavellian thinker who distinguishes between politics and morality in order to decide whether an action is moral or not, the intellectual judges a particular action with a political purpose in mind. The intellectuals of the early twenty-century preferred democracy because they believed that contrary to the totalitarian or authoritarian states that reduced morality to politics, democracy allows the intellectuals to distinguish between politics and morality because it does not consider individual liberty, justice, and truth as practical values. Benda believed that democracy would allow the intellectuals to defy all practical interests in order to defend truth, justice, and reason because democracy cannot reject political dissent. The intellectuals who mistake an oppressive order that does not allow intellectual and political dissent for democracy, function as the watchdogs of the existing order. Hence, the intellectuals who function as the watchdogs of the existing system cannot decide whether other intellectuals betray their vocation or not. The European intellectuals who describe

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the revolts of the poor European citizens of African and Muslim origin or even their mere passive existence as a threat to freedom of expression and decent politics in Europe are the watchdogs of the existing order. In the name of freedom of expression, these intellectuals protect a particular way of reasoning and morality that have thus far secured a privileged social position and comfortable life for themselves and their children. Hence, the intellectuals must always be ready to demonstrate that their way of reasoning and morality are the results of their disinterestedness. They demonstrate their disinterestedness by demonstrating, according to Sartre, the incompleteness of the universal and the fallacious character of false intellectuals who, as the watchdogs of the existing order, present it as the completed universal against new efforts toward universalization. The French intellectuals who refused to recognize the efforts of the Algerian people to universalize their struggle for national liberation were false intellectuals who functioned as the watchdogs of racism and colonialism in Algeria. The intellectuals remain intellectuals as long as they discover the universalizing potentials of particular collective actions. Thinkers such as Aron rejected new attempts toward universalization because they understood those attempts as the delusion of the French intellectuals who, instead of finding ways to be included in the decision making on the state level, aimed to overthrow the entire system. Aron invested his hope in the new generation of the French intellectuals with the working-class origin who, instead of new universalizations, would gladly and proudly consider themselves as a part of the French élite that takes part in decision making to improve the standard of living of the working class. The question which remained unanswered was: how the French intellectuals, as decision-makers and salaried personnel of the state, could defend freedom of expression and criticism without harming their professional career? However, for a while, the new generation of the French intellectuals was exposed to Fanon’s arguments on the universalizing aspects of the Algerian struggle against French colonialism. Fanon demonstrated the false universality of the established French intellectuals who were quick to distance themselves from the massacres committed in their name but always remained in solidarity with the colonist murderers. He reminded the new generation of the French intellectuals that the colonized subjects were able to emancipate themselves without the assistance of the established French intellectual who had always been trying to convince the colonized people of their inferiority. Fanon reminded the new generation of the French intellectuals that the Algerian people

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discovered the logic of universalization by making Dien Bien Phu the victory of all colonized people and an undeniable proof that all colonized people can achieve their universalization. Whereas the colonists succeeded in turning the colonized intellectuals who did not recognize the capacity of their nation toward universalization into native informers, the emancipated native masses and intellectuals refused to remain the inferiors of the colonizers who had never recognized their humanity. Whereas the native informer described the colonial administration’s strategy of unveiling Muslim women in Algeria as a step forward in the emancipation of the Algerian women, the emancipated native intellectual exposed the policy of social disintegration behind the unveiling. Consequently, as the emancipated native women participated in the struggle for national liberation, the colonists refrained from their so-called liberation of the Algerians women whose engagement in the revolutionary actions had made their fathers, brothers, and husbands proud of being related to them. From the late eighteenth century to the early 1950s, colonialism protected the European states by incorporating the angry mob and frustrated and unemployed young men, who were considered as an existential threat to the state, into the colonial administration. The colonial administration made a miracle by turning the former members of the mob, and frustrated young men into the proud agents of the superior European civilization that came to the colonized lands to civilize the indigenous people. Again, since the late 1960s, Western democracies incorporated the angry young and frustrated students who wanted a revolution into the state institutions, universities, and media. One of the consequences the integration of the former angry young students into the state is the renewal of the native informers, this time recruited in the departments for Area Studies and related think tanks. The new native informers assist their American and European tutors to rationalize new racism in the name of integration of the new citizens into society, and neocolonialism, and neo-imperialism in the name of democracy, and human rights. What the proud colonists and racists of the past and the neocolonialists and new racists and their informers have in common is that non-Europeans cannot govern themselves. Whereas the old racists and colonists produced their exceptional and parvenu Jews and native informer, the neocolonists and new racists have produced their scholars and expert, and moderate and light Muslims to spread Western values among their new citizens and throughout the world. Foucault’s arguments on the relations between knowledge and power entertained for a while the angry students of the

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late 1960s and early s who, since the late 1970s, constituted the new generation of the European intellectuals. Foucault’s argument that what is at stake on the discursive level is not whether a particular discourse represents the truth, but what roles do its truth-effects play on the establishment of particular relations of power. As this argument undermined the belief of the leftist intellectuals in the historical consciousness, universal truth, and universal intellectual, the angry students, mostly with the working-class origin, became the specific intellectuals who explored and advocated specific social causes. The new generation of the Western intellectuals, as Aron depicted them, were no longer interested in overthrowing the state but were looking for improving the conditions of different social groups, including women and the working class. As the state was no longer the object of public disputes, society was reconstructed as an ethical community in which politics and morality, and laws and facts were identical. Whereas during their full integration into the state in the 1980s, the former radical and angry students acted as specific intellectuals, they returned to the idea of the universal intellectual since the early 1990s. Whereas these new universal intellectuals have become the agents of democracy and human rights in the global south, another section of the former radical students has demanded the state to protect the nation’s common identity or its ethnic homogeneity. However, the return of the universal intellectual, in its degenerated version, would be impossible without the recuperation and domestication of the Fanonian intellectuals. Surprisingly, it was Said who contributed a great deal to the recuperation of the emancipated native intellectuals by arguing that the native has not learned how to talk back to the former colonizers. In his effort to enable the native to talk back, Said put the last nails in the coffin of the intellectual by transforming the political left into the cultural left that instead of communism promised multiculturalism. As the cultural left organized itself as the international cultural bourgeoisie, it succeeded to ally itself with the bureaucratic power throughout the Western world as a part of the transformation of the political community of every Western society into an ethical community. In their attempt to restructure the national and international space hierarchically, the pair of the Western bureaucratic power and the international cultural bourgeois formulated the ideology of globalization whose cosmopolitan intellectuals, citizens, and NGOs called for humanitarian interventions to save the victims of inhumanities around the world. Hence, we have the absolute victims who cannot defend the rights that the members of the contemporary

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democracies or ethical communities take for granted. As the absolute victims do not have the power to defend their basic rights, they must depend on the protectors who come from Western ethical communities. Since the ideology of globalization and cosmopolitanism, rationalize and justify the ethical, economic, political, and military superiority of Western ethical communities, they can use, as a consequence, all available means to save the absolute victims from people and regimes that violate their basic rights. We know what the protection of the rights of the absolute victims has achieved in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and elsewhere. The absolute victim with no rights and the protectors with absolute rights are the products of the transformation of Western societies as ethical communities in which politics and morality, laws and facts, state and society, and Western values and interests became identical. These theoretical identical twins that have rationalized the advocacy of democracy, human rights, and humanitarian intervention abroad are the final products of the full integration of the Western intellectuals into the state. In return, the fully integrated intellectuals into the state reconstructed their political societies into the ethical communities that have been saying, since the early 1990s, that they protect the basic rights of the rightless women in the European Muslim families as well as the rights of the rightless citizens of the authoritarian and totalitarian regimes. Whereas the ethical community is defined as the expressions of the ethical values that members of the community share, the community’s way of living or ethos is supposed to have generated those ethical values. After the way of living of the ethical community became the fundamental means of the continuity and viability of the community, the intellectuals began to consider the Muslim citizen’s way of living as a threat to the community. The Western intellectuals who combine anti-capitalism, antiimperialism with anti-immigrant and racist discourse, argue that they oppose immigration to Europe because they do not want to see their society falling into social and cultural conflicts. The intellectuals who consider the movement of labor to their countries as a socio-cultural problem, never question the benefits of the movement of capital abroad. The intellectuals who are not shy to claim that colonialism was a civilizing mission, constitute a significant pillar of the new European racism. The challenging discourse of these advocates of the exclusive racism toward the state’s so-called anti-racist policies and their interplay with the anti-racist public discourse rationalize, legitimize, and normalize racist

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practices in Europe. At these sites of interactions of policies and interplay of discourses, the state is blamed for its inability to integrate the immigrants into society, or rather educate and domesticate them to the extent that they can easily find their destined place in society. The anti-immigrant posture of the European intellectuals is not only a total negation of Said’s definition of the intellectual whose similarity to the exiled people makes him the voice of the voiceless but also against his view that the intellectual speaks truth to power for the simple reason the contemporary western intellectuals constitute both political and social power. The engagement of the intellectuals who constituted the international cultural bourgeoisie in the inclusive racism and new imperialist projects to spread democracy and human rights throughout the world and among the European Muslims demonstrates the full domestication of the intellectual whose desire for new experimentations disappeared since the early 1990s. The history of the integration of the American and European intellectuals into the states and capital and their subsequent domestication is a history of reciprocal recognition. This reciprocal recognition enabled various Western governments to pursue their policies at home and abroad with the full backing of their intellectuals. At the same time, the state allowed a limited degree of dissensus among its domesticated intellectuals to take anti-racist or racist postures regarding blacks, African, Asian, Latino, and Muslim citizens, and pro-Islamist or pro-secular postures regarding the Middle East. However, the state and capital are unable to recruit all intellectuals, although they can recruit and integrate the absolute majority to dominate the academic and public discourse. As a result of the state’s inability to incorporate all the intellectuals as scholars, experts, and advisers, a group of the left-behind intellectuals targets the state for its submerging into the anti-racist discourse. Gone are the intellectuals whose analytical capacity would, according to Chomsky, expose the lies that their governments spread to betray the truth in the name of national interests. The contemporary intellectuals as an indivisible part of the welfare state turned neoliberal have never tried to transform the existing socio-political order, but have always been ready to argue how to integrate the new citizens into Western societies and how to transform the unfriendly foreign governments into friendly governments. That is why the intellectuals have gained the privilege of selecting topics that keep public debates within the limits of the national interests at home and abroad. The Area Studies developed after the expansion of the universities and the integration of the Western intellectuals into the state

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have the same task as the native informers during colonialism. Theorizing the socio-political and cultural causes of the lack of democracy, good government, and human rights in the non-Western world, Area Studies have produced tens of thousands of experts and journalists who have justified Western political and military interventions in the numerous sovereign nation-states since the early 1990s. Keeping the superior epistemological position of the West and its political leadership, the Area Studies have to misrepresent the history of the intellectual and political traditions of the societies which have insisted on the indigenous struggles for democracy and state sovereignty. Instead, they represent these struggles as the reactionary responses of tradition and religion to modernity. In the same way, the Area Studies failed to register the role of Said’s Orientalism in the rejection or recuperation of Fanon’s work; it failed even to mention that Al-e Ahmad’s Westoxication was an extension of Fanon’s effort to formulate a theory of decolonization as a part of a general theory of emancipation. It did not take a long time to transform the European and American students who were preparing themselves to erect barricades in the streets of the major cities of Europe and the US to start the revolution, into the advocates of democracy and human rights abroad and the integration of the newcomers or indigenous people at home. Once again, the West has succeeded in exporting its problems to unknown territories. The unknown territory can be China, Iran, or the newly emerged ghettos of Europe and the US, wherever Blacks, Latinos, Africans, Asians, and Muslims are dwelling. Furthermore, this is what Al-e Ahmad predicted that the Europeans colonizers expelled from the colonized lands would return to the formerly colonized lands as Orientalists and advisers because the absence of these frustrated young people in the American and European politics guarantee the safety of their states and because Western democracies function when nobody uses them. Hence, the idea of the end of history did not come out of the blue. Western intellectuals used the idea of the end of history to preserve a post-historical time and a privileged epistemological position for the West to guide the rest of the world in political matters. Judging from a post-historical time allowed the Western intellectuals to explain to the non-Westerners how they could fill the historical gap between their backward political cultures and the advanced political cultures of the West. These neocolonialist ideas attracted a segment of the Iranian intellectuals who were not as integrated into their state as their Western counterparts have been. These Iranian intellectuals have been dreaming

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of making the Iranian nation-state and national consciousness the subjects of the university education in the same way that Western universities have made these questions the subjects of their theorization and empirical research and investigations. What these Iranian intellectuals do not know or do not care about is how this privileged epistemological position has assisted countries such as Norway, supposed to represent an ideal model of Western democracy to create an official image of itself that in no way corresponds to its reality. Unlike Iran, whose intellectuals are relentless to expose the contrast between its image and reality, Norway is a consensual society and an ethical community where facts and values, law and morality, and reality and its image are identical. Reality and its image are identical in Norway because anybody who tries to contrast the reality and its image in Norway is simply excluded from the academic discourse and the public sphere. Why? Because no change will happen in an ethical community. It can only be replicated by others and integrate others such as newcomers who adopt its ethos and values into itself. In this climate of no change and no expectations, repetition means the normal. That is why the Norwegian intellectuals expect a talented Muslim writer to write in the same way that the nineteenth-century talented Jewish authors were writing about their ambitions and frustrations as well as about their misconceptions about their right place in society. Yes, in the past, there were Norwegian intellectuals who tried to expose how Europeans used racism and colonialism to create their inferiors to exploit them as easily as possible. Now, they argue in the same way as the old racist and colonialists who were looking for exceptional Jews and native informers. They select among citizens of Muslim origin exceptional Muslims and claim that they deserve to be sponsored and elevated because they have internalized the Norwegian cultural codes, respect freedom of expression, and advocate the rights of Muslim women. Nonetheless, the Norwegian benefactors always remind these exceptional Muslims that their lot depends on whether they obey their authority and keep themselves useful against the fundamentalist and anti-democratic Muslims. The educated Muslims will remain useful as long as they do not question the Norwegian intellectuals’ complicity with racist and imperialist practices at home and abroad. Ideologues of terrorism such as Fjordman are the products of Norway as an ethical community whose academic and public discourses construct the tiny minority of Muslim citizens the sources of all future social and cultural conflicts. The former leftist Norwegian intellectual who exposes the myth of Norway as a humanitarian superpower,

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produced by the total control of Norway’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the universities and research institutions and media, by deciding who deserves to get funds and who does not, and by buying every journalist to elaborate on this myth, but at the same time tributes to colonialism as a “civilizing mission,” indicates a farewell to the Western intellectual.

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Index

A Abrahamian, Ervand, 160, 168, 170 Absolute victim, 246, 254, 255 Academic and social hierarchy, 240 Academic community, 190 Academic environment, 149, 150 Academic freedom, 149, 251 Academic globalization, 116 Academic independence, 210, 211 Academic intellectual, 5, 149, 238 Action Français, 4 Adorno, Theodor, 129 Afghanistan, 111, 155, 198, 203, 209, 255 African intellectual, 62 African literature, 128 Ahidjo, 68 Al-Afghani, Jamal Ad-Din, 158, 168 Al-e Ahmad, Jalal, 161–167, 169, 180, 181, 257 Algerian family, 75 Algerian national culture, 70 Algerian people, 71, 75, 76, 79, 235, 252

Algerian revolution, 3 Algerian struggle for independence, 53, 79, 127 Algerian violence, 113 Algerian women, 75, 236, 253 Algiers School of Psychiatry, 71 Alienation, 50, 169, 174 Althusserian, 100 Althusser, Louis, 3, 54, 93, 100 American anti-intellectualists, 133 American Conscience, 189 American culture, 61 American intellectuals, 1, 6, 12, 61, 133, 135–141, 147, 151, 178, 188, 189, 229, 240 American intervention, 140, 145, 240 American socialism, 147 American way of life, 136 Analytical guidelines, 144 Ancient Greek, 28, 40, 234 Angry intellectual, 227 Anthropological studies, 126 Anthropology, 94, 126, 195 Anti-capitalist Left, 59

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 Y. Shahibzadeh, Public Intellectuals and Their Discontents, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56588-6

269

270

INDEX

Anti-Christianity, 186 Anti-clericalism, 83 Anti-colonial, 5, 9, 53, 62, 94, 168, 200, 238 Anti-colonial intellectuals, 71 Anti-colonial struggles, 3, 65, 66, 71, 128, 236, 237 Anti-Dreyfusard, 2, 6 Anti-immigrant, 111, 191, 204, 255, 256 Anti-imperialist discourse, 125 Anti-intellectual, 3, 7, 54, 133 Anti-intellectualism, 131, 133–135, 137 Anti-Jewish passion, 184 Anti-Jewish sentiment, 184 Antillean, 74 Anti-monarchist Left, 59 Anti-racist intellectuals, 120 Anti-racist left, 121 Anti-Semitism, 9, 19, 21, 37, 81–83, 92, 117, 185, 200, 202 Anti-totalitarian ideology, 245 Arab intellectuals, 129 Arab-Israeli war, 188 The Arab people, 127 Arab Spring, 181, 200, 201 Arab worlds, 127, 129 Arani, Taqi, 160 Arbitrary absolutism, 28 Area Studies, 156, 157, 240, 241, 253, 256, 257 Arendt, Hannah, 11, 81–84, 88, 91, 92, 112, 119, 163, 187, 195, 204 Aristocratic values, 61 Aron, Raymond, 8, 11, 58–64, 94, 145, 180, 228, 235, 252, 254 Artificial State, 28 Aulard, Victor Alphonse, 35 Authentic intellectuals, 43, 48 Authoritarianism, 37, 128, 201

Autonomy of intellectual activities, 134 Avant-garde culture, 148 Ayatollah Mahmoud Taleqani, 166

B Backward people, 89, 120 Backward social groups, 121 Balanced representations of Islam and the West, 196 Balibar, Etienne, 117–119 Barbarians at the gates, 153 Barrès, Maurice, 2, 6, 10, 39–41, 111 Bayat, Asef, 156 Bell, Daniel, 141, 144–148, 215, 244 Benda, Julien, 29, 37–44, 48–50, 226, 228, 234, 251 Berman, Marshall, 150, 151 Berth, Édouard, 28, 29 Bjørneboe, Jens, 187–190, 242 Black Africans, 88, 89 Black intellectuals, 152 Blamchet, Peirre, 155 Bohemia, 6, 136–138, 149, 152, 153 Bohemian, 40, 137, 138, 149, 152 Boroujerdi, Mehrzad, 156 Bourdieu, Pierre, 1, 5, 116, 117 Bourgeois culture, 47, 116 Bourgeois democracy, 17, 57, 232 Bourgeois humanism, 55 Bourgeois humanist, 55 Bourgeois intellectual, 48, 49, 63, 132 Bourgeois philosophy, 50 Bourgeois state, 54 Breivik, Anders Behring, 195, 202, 203 Breton, André, 73 Brièr, Claire, 155 British imperialism, 126, 159, 211, 241 Broker state, 146, 240

INDEX

Brown, J., 156, 157 Bruckner, Pascal, 226 Brunschvicg, Léon, 49 Buchholz, Friedrich, 184 Bureaucracy, 8–10, 15–17, 25, 49, 61, 88, 89, 108, 137, 181, 232, 249, 250 Bureaucratic power, 116, 254 Bureaucratization, 145 Burgat, Francois, 200 C Cambodia, 144 Camus, Albert, 228 Capitalist order, 9, 10 Capitalist utilitarianism, 34 Cartesians method, 71 Castoriadis, Cornelius, 94 Castro, Fidel, 68 Césaire, Aimé, 73, 181 China, 63, 64, 100, 141, 142, 148, 198, 199, 257 Chinese culture, 199 Chinese social organization, 199 Chomsky, Naom, 127, 140–143, 150, 240, 256 Christian Bastholm, 184 Christian community, 179 Christian fundamentalism, 208, 243 Christian missionaries, 141, 208 Christian State, 21 Churchill, Winston, 210 Circle of guilt, 75 Circumstantial nature of justice, 234 Civilized coldness, 88 Civilizing mission, 4, 51, 211, 226, 238, 244, 255, 259 Civil rights, 184, 185, 189 Clash of Civilizations, 203, 212 Class-compromise, 94 Class consciousness, 56, 143, 146, 233

271

Class identity, 105 Class interests, 134, 169 Classless society, 56, 62, 106, 168–172 Clemenceau, Georges, 2, 10 Collectivism, 106 Colonial administration, 8, 75, 76, 86, 89, 228, 236, 237, 253 Colonial domestication, 75 Colonial expansion, 85, 114 Colonialism, 3, 11, 51, 53, 64, 65, 69, 70, 75, 76, 78–81, 93, 108, 109, 111, 113, 115, 123, 124, 162, 164, 169, 171, 176, 195, 211, 214, 226, 235, 237, 238, 242–244, 250, 252, 253, 255, 257–259 Colonial nations, 118 Colonial situation, 67, 76, 79 Colonial strategy, 68, 236 Colonial subjugation, 67 Colonial system, 66, 67, 79 Colonial territories, 67, 89 Colonist, 65–69, 75, 126, 236, 237, 241, 252, 253 Colonization of the public space, 129 Colonized elite, 66, 68 Colonized intellectuals, 66, 67, 70, 71, 236, 253 Colonized masses, 66, 124 Colonized people, 50, 65–70, 79, 80, 85, 109, 111, 113, 124, 125, 187, 226, 235, 236, 252, 253 Colonized population, 68 Colonized societies, 108, 109, 124, 125 Colonizers, 64–66, 68–71, 77, 78, 113, 118, 126, 163, 164, 236, 242, 253, 254, 257 Colonizer’s logic, 69 Colonizers’ world view, 242 Colonizing doctors, 77

272

INDEX

Color prejudice, 74 Committed spectator, 58 Common identity, 111, 254 Communism, 3, 9, 10, 58, 61–63, 81, 106, 108, 111, 133, 140, 142, 144, 147, 161, 162, 212, 254 Communist consciousness, 18 Communist dictatorships, 68 Communist ideology, 43 Communist intellectual, 9, 10, 18, 19, 48, 62 Communist movement, 161 Communists, 3, 5, 18, 19, 51, 62–64, 81, 103, 133, 140, 141, 144, 148, 159, 161, 229, 233, 245 Community leaders, 220 Computerized activities, 107 Comte, Auguste, 28, 32 Concentration camps, 186, 192, 213 Conceptual cognition, 14 Conceptualization of the future, 217 Conformism, 61 Congress of Vienna, 82 Conrad, Joseph, 88, 123, 124 Consensual democracies, 147, 178, 181 Consensual public opinion, 243 Consensual society, 204, 258 Consensual state and society, 245 Consensus, 19, 144, 145, 147, 205, 243 Conspiracy theory, 128, 197, 200 Constitutional government, 58, 91, 159, 160, 164 Constitutional regimes, 62 Consumer culture, 100 Continuity of tradition, 176 Contrapuntal approach, 128, 129 Convergence of law and morality, 245 Copernican opinion, 151 Cosmopolitan democracy, 157 Cosmopolitan identity, 199

Cosmopolitanism, 6, 20, 213, 238, 241, 243, 255 Costa-Gavras, Constantin, 123 Counter-translation, 224 Criteria of profitability, 107 Critical intellectual, 52, 138, 157 Critical knowledge, 139, 219 Critical thinking, 220 Critiques of religion, 175, 186 Crossley, Nick, 171 Crude racism, 77, 214, 237 Cultural adaptation, 136 Cultural alienation, 70 Cultural and political gaps, 198, 242 Cultural capitalism, 117 Cultural characteristics, 78 Cultural creativity, 136 Cultural differences, 118 Cultural discrepancies, 204 Cultural distances, 118 Cultural exchanges, 79, 163 Cultural exchanges as a means of consolidating Westoxication, 163 Cultural hegemony, 47, 48, 114 Cultural imperialism, 123 Cultural industry, 136 Cultural invasion, 166, 220, 221 Cultural left, 114–116, 238, 239, 254 Cultural lumpenproletariat, 139 Cultural maturity, 78, 237 Cultural movement, 200 Cultural patterns, 78 Cultural provincialism, 93 Cultural relativism, 199 Cultural revolution, 3, 5, 173, 179, 180, 220, 221 Cultural sphere, 242 Cultural stagnation, 196 Cultural synthesis, 221 Cultural theorists, 127, 128 Culture values, 197

INDEX

Curiosity and creativity of the invaded, 221 Czechoslovakia, 189, 190 D Danish Department of Defense, 201 Danish Jews, 184 Danishness, 185 Darwinists, 31 De-alienation, 169, 174 de Beauvoir, Simone, 228 Decay of the Intellectual, 215 De-clericalization, 10 Decolonization, 67, 124, 129, 257 Deleuze, Gilles, 95, 96, 116 Democracy, 7, 9–12, 16, 28, 29, 36, 41–43, 57, 59, 103, 108, 112, 113, 127, 134, 135, 137, 140–143, 145, 147, 156–158, 172–174, 176, 181, 182, 187–189, 191, 194, 196–201, 203–205, 209–211, 214, 215, 226, 227, 232, 234, 237, 239–246, 251, 253–257 Democratic coup, 201 Democratic despotism, 26 Democratic methods, 141 Democratic propaganda, 144 Democratic rights, 161, 177, 181 Democratic sentiments , 133 Democratic socialism, 145, 161, 167, 241 Democratization of the Muslim world, 210 Depoliticization of the cultural studies, 117 Desirable Jews, 82 Development, 1, 19, 21, 22, 32–34, 57, 83, 96, 100, 106, 136, 137, 140, 148, 158, 195, 205, 207, 208, 211, 212, 221 Dialogical cultural action, 221

273

Dien Bien Phu, 68, 253 Differentialist racism, 118 Disappearing Western intellectual, 155 Discourse of emancipation, 202 Disgruntled educated people, 237 Disinterested community, 169 Distinction between politics and morality, 39, 234 Dogmatic left, 217 Domesticated intellectual, 256 Domestication of time, 217 Dominant ideology, 9, 10, 55, 56, 141, 162, 167, 189 Drake, David, 6 Dramatization of inequality, 224 The Dreyfus Affair, 3, 6, 7, 9, 10, 31, 55, 56, 84, 215, 233, 250 Dreyfus, Alfred, 2, 6, 10, 21, 84, 152 Dreyfusard, 6, 7, 21, 22, 24–26, 31, 44, 55, 250 Dreyfusian revolution, 23–26 Driant, Émile, 109, 110 Drumont, Édouard, 110

E East Timor, 144 Economically and socially excluded people, 237 Educated immigrants, 239 Educated public, 148, 149, 151 Educational philosophy, 221 Education as a gradual transmission of knowledge, 221 Egalitarian government, 233 Egalitarian political event, 247 Egalitarian structure, 205, 243 Egypt, 114, 155, 181, 198, 201, 202 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 133, 135 Electoral democracy, 28 The Emancipated blacks, 236 Emancipated Muslim, 192

274

INDEX

Emancipated Muslim women, 192 Emancipated people, 225 Emancipation, 11, 17, 18, 23, 34, 49, 69, 75, 76, 83, 123, 124, 132, 187, 217, 223, 225, 226, 229, 236, 253, 257 Emancipator of the Arab people, 89 Emancipatory education, 218 Emancipatory mission, 4, 202 Empirical knowledge, 219 The End of history, 59, 103, 172, 178, 257 Engels, Friedrich, 16 Enlightenment, 69, 82, 123, 187, 226 Enlightenment philosophes, 54 Epistemological and ethical transformation, 178 Epistemological profile, 98 Epistemological qualification, 199 Epistemological uncertainty, 176 Equal intelligence, 217, 221, 223, 229, 230 Equal opportunities, 9, 172, 190, 249 Eriksen, Thomas Hylland, 195–199 Eriksen, Trond Berg, 184, 193–195, 197, 199 Established identities, 121 Established intellectuals, 57 Ethical actuality, 14 Ethical communities, 187, 194, 246, 254, 255, 258 Ethnic homogeneity, 244, 254 Ethnocultural nationalism, 213, 244 Ethnolinguistic nationalism, 20 Ethnonationalism, 213, 244 Ethos, 245, 255, 258 Eurocentric, 159, 196 Eurocentrism, 188 European critical theory, 128 European democracies, 200, 228 European gentlemen, 88, 163

European governments, 85, 164, 204, 245 European intellectuals, 50, 61, 62, 64–66, 109, 122, 137, 138, 188, 190, 199, 226, 237–239, 245, 251, 254, 256 European Jews, 81, 92, 93 European Muslims, 185, 193, 194, 197, 200, 256 European policymakers, 182 European self-image, 126 Exceptional Jews, 83, 84, 192, 258 Exceptional Muslims, 192, 193, 195, 242, 258 Exceptional Norwegian Muslims, 192 Exclusive racism, 11, 118, 194, 195, 239, 242, 255 Exiled intellectuals, 120 Explication in the social act, 224 Explicative method, 222, 225 Explicator in charge, 222 Extension of the state, 210, 243

F The Fabric of society, 191 Failure of the integration, 191 Failure of the state to domesticate the immigrants, 239 False intellectuals, 56, 235, 252 False Islam, 173 False universality, 9, 68, 252 Fanon, Frantz, 3, 8, 9, 12, 64–77, 79, 113, 118, 125, 127, 128, 167, 187, 209, 228, 235–238, 252, 257 Fascism, 4, 43, 45, 48, 137, 138, 144, 145, 164, 201 Fascistic regimes, 144 Feiner, Samuel, 83 Feminism, 149, 240 Ferry, Luc, 103

INDEX

Feuerbach’s critique of Christianity, 175 Finkielkraut, Alain, 109–112, 185, 226 Flaubert, Gustav, 28 Fontana, Benedetto, 169 Foreigner-citizens, 190, 191 Foucauldian approach, 96 Foucault, Michel, 12, 94–101, 117, 124, 128, 155, 198, 216, 237, 253, 254 Foundation Saint Simonian, 232, 249 France, Anatole, 24 Freedom from exchange, 129 Freedom of speech, 11, 101 Freire, Paulo, 11, 217–221, 226 French anti-intellectualists, 133 French Communist Party, 51–53, 93, 100 French democracy, 103 French Empire, 41, 127 French intellectuals, 1, 3–10, 14, 19, 36, 37, 42, 44, 51, 52, 58, 60–62, 64, 65, 79, 93, 108, 110–112, 145, 155, 193, 235, 236, 252 French leftist intellectuals, 4, 8, 102, 235 French political culture, 103 French race-thinking, 87 French radicalism, 60 French Revolution, 3, 4, 6, 19, 26, 102, 103, 171, 234 Frustrated Muslims, 197 Furet, Francois, 102, 103, 107 G Galileo, 151 Gardell, Mattias, 200 Gauchiste intellectuals, 101, 102 Gauchistes, 100 General strike, 27, 48, 233

275

German intelligentsia, 87, 92 German nationalism, 87 Germanness, 87 German philosophy, 36 German race-thinking, 87 Ghettoization, 205 Gibb’s interdisciplinary Orientalism, 115 Globalism, 244 Globalization, 199, 206, 213, 239, 245 Glucksmann, André, 101, 102, 112 Gogol, Eugene, 171 Goldmann, Lucien, 94 Goldschmidt, Maïr Aron, 185, 186 Good government, 140, 156, 157, 173, 187, 240, 257 Goodness-tyranny, 206 Gorz, Andre, 12, 105, 107 Gouldner, Alvin Ward, 116 Gramscian, 165 Gramsci, Antonio, 45, 47, 48, 93, 169, 219, 235 Great Game, 88, 126 Greece, 189, 190 Greek culture, 33, 234 Greek Junta, 189 Greene, Graham, 123 Guizot, Francois, 36 Gulag, 100, 102 Gusset, Francois, 116

H Hajjarian, Saeed, 177 Harrigan, Amanda Rae, 51 Hate discourse, 200 Hegel, G.W.F., 8–10, 14–17, 39, 42, 53, 231, 232, 249, 250 Hegemonic role of Orientalism, 115 Heidegger, Martin, 140, 174 Heine, Heinrich, 92

276

INDEX

Herman, Edward S., 142 Herzel, Theodor, 10 Hierarchical national and international space, 239 Hierarchical world of intelligence, 222 High culture, 84, 137 Historical alienation, 169 Historical crisis of humanity, 171 Historical gap, 173, 194, 241, 257 Historical subjectivity, 67 History from below, 240 History of Bestiality, 188 History of salvation, 176 Hofstadter, Richard, 6, 133, 135, 137, 139 Homogenous cultural, 211, 244 Houllebecq, Michel, 109, 110 Howe, Irving, 136 Human emancipation, 17, 31, 50, 169, 170, 223, 232 Human fraternity, 113 Humanism, 38, 40, 55, 64 Humanist Marxism, 168, 169 Humanitarian, 41, 140, 206–208, 210–214, 246 Humanitarian crises, 157 Humanitarian interventions, 116, 157, 206, 238, 246, 254, 255 Humanitarian organizations, 206 Humanitarian-political complex, 206, 207, 212, 213 Humanitarian superpower, 157, 186, 187, 205–208, 210, 212, 213, 243, 244, 259 Humanization, 83, 84 Human perfection, 171 Hungarian socialist government, 53 Huntington, Samuel P., 203 I Ibsen, Henrik, 22, 183, 227, 228, 242

Ideological age, 147 Ideological convergence, 198 Ideological interest, 58 Ideological particularism, 55 Ideological struggles, 170 Ideological thinking, 91 Ideological transformation, 127 Ideological unity, 243 Ideology of globalization, 238, 241, 243, 245, 254, 255 Ideology of racism, 56, 89, 187, 188 Ignorant masses, 227 Ignorant worlds, 222 Imbalance reporting, 144 Immigrants, 83, 111, 119–123, 129, 187, 190, 197, 204–207, 238, 239, 243–245, 256 Immigration flow, 205 Imperial interests, 127 Imperialism, 11, 12, 57, 59, 86–88, 123–125, 127–129, 166, 167, 179, 181, 194, 209, 211, 241, 244, 245, 250, 253 Imperialist expansion, 85, 88 Imperialist states, 81, 85, 86, 124 Imprudent racist, 201 Inclusive racism, 118, 214, 239, 242–244, 256 Individual liberty, 43, 108, 109, 226, 246, 251 Indo-China, 240 Industrial and military complex, 190 Inequality of talents, 29, 233 Infantilization of the individual, 225 Inferior cultures, 127, 239 Inferior intelligence, 222 Inferiority, 60, 67, 73, 74, 78, 126, 220, 223, 236, 252 Inferiority complex, 73 Inferiority of the working-class, 55 Inferior minds, 224 Inferior races, 55, 78, 118, 119, 121

INDEX

Innate personality, 87 Institutionalization of the intellectual, 138 Institutionalized violence, 228 Integration of Muslim citizens into Western democracies, 210 Integration of newcomers into the community, 187 Integration of the intellectuals into the state, 12, 215, 231, 233 Intellectual, 1–12, 14, 15, 19–23, 25–33, 35, 37–45, 47–58, 60, 61, 63–65, 67, 69, 71, 72, 74, 79, 81, 92–102, 108, 109, 111– 113, 115, 120–125, 128, 129, 131–141, 143–148, 150–153, 155, 156, 160, 162–167, 169– 175, 177–181, 183, 188–190, 192–194, 196, 203–206, 209, 210, 215, 216, 219, 221, 223, 225–235, 238–245, 249–259 Intellectual and academic reciprocity, 150 Intellectual aristocracies, 24, 28 The Intellectual as French passion, 2 Intellectual betrayal, 48 Intellectual capacities, 14, 18, 30, 47, 222, 223, 232 Intellectual community, 169 Intellectual conformity, 117 Intellectual culture, 37 Intellectual elite, 36, 121 Intellectual emancipation, 221, 230, 231 Intellectual environment, 108, 150 Intellectual freedom, 12, 36, 149, 211, 234, 245, 251 Intellectual hegemony, 165, 201 Intellectual hierarchy, 129, 225 Intellectual historians, 1 Intellectual infertility, 166 Intellectual laziness, 179

277

Intellectual merchandise, 30 Intellectual milieus, 192 Intellectual movements, 129, 161, 173 Intellectual or clerical regime, 28 Intellectual pioneer, 183 Intellectual proletariat, 21, 32 Intellectual resistance, 236 Intellectuals as watchdogs, 48 Intellectual’s intervention, 101 Intellectuals’ marginality, 122 Intellectuals’ public role, 228 Intellectuals of industry and politics, 32 Intellectual superiority, 72 Intellectual workers, 132, 146 Intelligentsia, 2, 59, 60, 82, 85, 120, 145, 186, 189, 239, 243 Internalization of Norwegian conventions and cultural codes, 191 International aid system, 207, 212 International breakthrough, 206 International communist movement, 241 International consciousness, 70 International cultural bourgeoisie, 116, 238, 239, 241, 243, 245, 254, 256 International network of universities, 116 Iran, 124, 156, 158–162, 164, 166–168, 171–173, 177–181, 198, 241, 242, 247, 257, 258 Iranian Communist Party, 160 Iranian communists, 159 Iranian Constitutional Revolution, 158 Iranian intellectuals, 158, 159, 162, 165, 166, 169, 170, 179, 180, 241, 257, 258 Iranian Islamism, 156

278

INDEX

Iranian Islamists, 168, 172, 177 Iranian politics, 159 Iranian public sphere, 156, 159, 162, 182 Iranian Revolution, 12, 128, 130, 155, 158, 166, 167, 173, 178, 198, 209, 241 Iranian socialists, 159, 162 Iranshahr, 180 Islam, 110, 111, 155, 158, 167–171, 175, 176, 196, 198, 200–202, 204, 206, 209 Islamic civilization, 158, 194 Islamic culture, 81, 158 Islamic tradition, 176, 199 Islamism, 155, 156, 158, 178, 197, 199–202, 212 Islamist ideology, 168–170, 172, 173, 241 Islamist intellectuals, 165, 172 Islamist leftists, 177 Islamist revolutionary ideology, 171 Islamist totalitarianism, 245 Islamization of social and human sciences, 180 Islamophobia, 81, 199, 200, 243 Islamophobic, 6, 199 Ivy League professors, 151

J Jacobine patriotism, 4 Jacobinism, 102 Jacoby, Russell, 1, 5, 6, 148–153 Jacotot, Joseph, 217, 221–226, 229–231 Jazani, Bijan, 162, 166, 167 Jennings, Jeremy, 51 Jensen, Peder Are Nøstvold (known as Fjordman), 195, 201 Jewish ban in Norway, 184, 186 Jewish citizens, 10, 20, 184, 186

Jewish emancipation, 83, 184 Jewish intelligentsia, 82, 83, 87, 93 Jewish masses, 82, 184 Jewish messianism, 113 Jewish nation, 184 Jewishness, 83, 84, 88, 185, 192 Jewish parvenu, 84, 92 Jewish subjects, 184 Jews in disguise, 186 Jihadism, 201 Johnson, Paul, 226–229 Judeo-Christian tradition, 110, 111 Judeophobia, 10 Judofobic, 6 Juridico-political communities, 246

K Kadivar, Mohsen, 177, 178 Kafka, Franz, 92 Kautsky, Karl, 21, 22, 44, 93, 145, 216 Keddie, Nikki, 158 Kennedy, John F., 135 Kenyatta, Jomo, 68 Kepel, Gilles, 200 Kermani, Nazemoleslam, 158 Keynesian, 105, 147 Khilnani, Sunil, 2, 4, 51–53, 93, 101, 102 Khomeini, Ayatollah, 165–167, 171, 172 King Leopold of Belgia, 188 Kipling, Rudyard, 89, 126 Knausgård, Karl Ove, 204, 205 Kojève, Alexander, 53

L Lafargue, Paul, 7, 29–34, 44, 226 Lagardelle, Hubert, 44, 45 Language of force and violence, 236

INDEX

Latin America, 127, 156, 162, 188, 190, 208 Lawrence, T.E., 89, 127 Lazare, Bernard, 7, 10, 20, 21, 92 Laziness, 33, 34, 184, 218, 220, 234, 251 Lecourt, Dominique, 173 Lefort, Claude, 94, 102, 103, 246 Leftist ideologies, 146, 149 Leftist intellectuals, 8, 61, 99, 120, 121, 160, 166, 181, 189, 226, 238, 239, 243, 246, 254 Legal State, 28 Legal universalism, 51 Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel, 107 Less Norwegian, 191 Lévy, Benny, 97, 112, 113 Lévy, Bernard-Henri, 109, 111, 112, 209 Lewis, Bernard, 125, 185, 196 Liberalism, 24, 40, 55, 103, 166, 244 Liberal media, 142 Liberal optimism, 136 Liberation from the illusion of action, 218 Liberation movements, 3, 4, 9, 68–70, 79, 159, 237 Liberation of Muslim women, 192 Liberation of the urban spaces from the state, 129 Liebknecht, Wilhelm, 132 Light Muslim, 192, 193, 242, 253 Limits of Democracy, 17, 232 Locality of a theory, 95 Local struggles, 95, 96, 100 Logic of society, 106 Lumumba, Patrice, 68 Lutheran Church, 207 Luxemburg, Rosa, 93 M Macdonald, Dwight, 140

279

Machajski, Waclaw, 145 Machiavellian distinction between politics and morality, 39, 234 Mailer, Norman, 136 Maleki, Khalil, 161, 162, 166 Management of economic and social affairs, 217 Management of properties, 217 Managerial economy, 146 Manicheanism, 69 Manning, Chelsea, 153 Mannoni, Octave, 73, 74 Manual labor, 30, 31, 33, 34, 44, 58, 101, 119, 145, 234, 238, 239, 251 Manufacturing Consent , 142 Maoism, 53 Maoist intellectuals, 54 Maoists, 97, 198 Marriage between intelligence and power, 234 Marshall Plan, 138 Martinique, 73 Marxian optimism, 150 Marxism, 4, 21, 29, 45, 52, 62, 81, 99, 102, 108, 128, 146, 168–171 Marxist Fadiyan, 166 Marxist radicals, 162 Marxist scholar intellectuals, 180 Marx, Karl, 9, 10, 16–19, 23, 25, 33, 44, 49, 65, 73, 106, 131, 132, 151, 168, 174, 175, 227, 232, 233, 250 Mass culture, 61, 137 Massignon, Louis, 127 Mass politics, 145 Master’s reasoning, 222 Master explicator, 222, 223, 231 Materialism of passive obedience, 17, 232 Matrilineal structure, 75 McCarthyism, 61, 133, 137

280

INDEX

Means of domestication, 119 Media intellectuals, 4, 109 Mencken, H.L., 135, 150 Men of great expressions, 224 Men of great thoughts, 224 Men of letters, 6, 19, 30, 40, 215 Merits of colonization, 71, 236 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 53, 57, 171 Messianism of socialism, 145 Methodical reasoning, 222 Method of emancipation, 223 Method of equality, 12, 222, 223 Method of explication, 222 Method of universal teaching, 224 Metropolitan workers, 79 Michelet, Marte, 41 Middle Ages, 41 Middle East, 128, 155, 157, 178, 181, 187, 200–202, 256 Middle East Studies, 156, 202, 241 Middle East Studies Association, 127 Military Junta, 190 Mill, John Stuart, 8 Mills, C. Wright, 136, 151, 152 Modern capitalism, 234 Modernism, 150, 151 Modernity, 128, 139, 145, 176, 197, 200, 209, 241, 245, 257 Modernization, 124, 207, 221 Mojahedin-e Khalq organization, 168 Mojtahed Shabestari, Mohammad, 175, 176 Montesquieu, Charles, 54, 73 Moral actions, 39 Moral authority, 61, 138 Moral consciousness, 107, 163 Moral exigency, 107 Moral suffocation, 80 Morgan, Claude, 51 Morocco, 60 Morsi, Mohammad, 201

Mosaddeq, Mohammad, 159–161, 166, 167 Motahari, Morteza, 168 Movements of intelligence, 36, 234 Mujahedin, 111, 198 Multiculturalism, 115, 123, 124, 213, 254 Multicultural society, 12, 122, 197 Muslim as the Enemy, 195 Muslim civilizations, 194, 196 Muslim communities, 191 Muslim compatriots, 192 Muslim fundamentalism, 192 Muslim identity, 192 Muslim immigrants, 122, 212 Muslim intellectuals, 168, 196, 198, 199, 201, 203, 242 Muslim intelligentsia, 156 Muslim intolerance, 204 Muslimness, 192 Muslimophobic, 245 Muslim population in Norway, 185 Muslim veil, 120 Mutual trust, 191

N Nakhshab, Mohammad, 168 Nathanson, M.L., 186 National breakthrough, 205, 206 National consciousness, 70, 71, 108, 179, 242, 258 National culture, 108, 236 National decline, 21, 233 National goodness-regime, 206 National interests, 140, 214, 240, 244, 256 Nationalism, 4–6, 9, 19, 20, 38, 51, 52, 55, 57, 86, 87, 120, 125, 158, 186, 199, 213 Nationalist ideologues, 20 Nationalist movement, 166, 200

INDEX

Nationalization of society, 119 Nationalization of the Algerian rage and affection, 72 Nationalized public sphere, 159 Nationalized the poor and the masses, 233 National language, 108 National liberation, 3, 68–70, 72, 75, 76, 78, 93, 140, 159, 167, 236, 237, 252, 253 National values, 214, 244 Nation as a big family, 119 Nation-state, 20, 81–83, 85, 86, 108, 118, 157, 179, 180, 183, 184, 211, 237, 242, 257, 258 Native’s dependency complex, 74 Native intellectuals, 78, 253, 254 Native people, 77, 79, 88, 126, 237 Natives, 66, 71, 74, 75, 78, 79, 89, 123, 126, 127, 129, 236–238, 253, 254, 257, 258 Nativism, 127–129, 156 Nativist ideology, 155 Nativization, 180 Nazi Germany, 42, 90 Neo-colonialism, 162 Neocolonialist international organizations, 164 Neo-colonialists, 79 Neo-imperialist, 164, 204 Neoliberal university, 153 Neo-proletariat, 105, 106 New American Century, 178 New aristocracy, 29 New clergy, 227 New Deal, 134, 135, 137, 146 New European proletariat, 119 New generations of intellectuals, 2 New imperialism, 11, 195, 214, 244 New imperialist arrangement, 243, 244 New industrial order, 13

281

New intellectuals, 5, 8, 101, 138, 148, 152, 162, 240 New Jews, 192, 195 New left, 53, 59, 178 New Philosophers, 4, 102 New racism, 77, 78, 117–120, 122, 195, 244, 253 New racism as theory and practice, 120 New Stateman, 226 New York intellectuals, 151 New York Review of Books , 151 NGO-invaded countries, 213 NGO-Republics, 213 Nietzschean pessimism, 150 Nizan, Paul, 5, 7, 12, 48–51, 56, 235 Noble virtues, 34 Non-class, 105 Non-economic activity, 107 Non-Europeans intellectuals, 64 Non-proletarianized plebs, 98 Noqrehkar, Massoud, 166 Normalization, 145 Norway, 12, 156, 157, 183–187, 189, 191, 193–197, 199, 202–214, 242–244, 258, 259 Norway’s economic and political interests, 213, 244 Norway’s industry and trade, 187 Norway’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 208, 259 Norway’s oil revenue, 206, 208 Norwegian anthropologist, 195 Norwegian business community, 206, 207 Norwegian Christian missionaries, 208 Norwegian Church Aid, 207 Norwegian citizens of Muslim and African origin, 187, 190 Norwegian constitution, 191 Norwegian constitutionalists, 184 Norwegian dramatist, 187

282

INDEX

Norwegian elite, 206, 207, 214 Norwegian ethnic homogeneity, 244 Norwegian ethnocultural nationalism, 213 Norwegian Fritt Ord, 195 Norwegian historians, 185 Norwegian intellectuals, 185, 187, 189, 192, 195, 199, 203–205, 209, 210, 214, 242, 243, 258, 259 Norwegian intelligentsia, 187, 206, 244 Norwegian Jews, 186, 213 Norwegian journalists, 202, 208 Norwegian leftist intellectuals, 189 Norwegian Model , 206 Norwegian Muslims, 204, 212 Norwegian national socialism, 244 Norwegian national unity, 213, 244 Norwegian People’s Aid, 207 Norwegian politicians, 201, 208 Norwegian Refugee Council , 206 Norwegian society, 187, 190, 191, 205–207, 243, 244 Norwegians of foreign origin, 191 Norwegian state, 184, 186 Norwegian terrorist, 195 Norwegian think tanks, 190, 198 Norwegian values, 213

O Objective morality, 107 Objective scholarship, 114 Occident, 114 Occidentosis , 127 Oil nationalization, 161, 165 Old racism, 78, 117, 120 Ommat , 169 Oppenheimer, Robert, 95, 99 Oppressed communities, 220 Oppressed of the world, 236

Oppressors’ generosity, 218 Organic intellectuals, 48, 153, 165, 219 Orient, 114, 115, 163, 164, 197 Oriental, 114, 115, 164, 166, 198, 238 Orientalism, 114, 115, 123, 125, 155, 158, 238, 257 Orientalist discourse, 114, 238 Orientalists, 115, 123, 125, 127, 163, 164, 170, 241, 257 Orwell, George, 228, 229 Ory, Pascal, 2 Overney, Pierre, 102

P Palestinian, 114 Panecastician citizens, 231 Panecastic philosophy, 230 Panecastic teacher, 230 Pan-movements, 87 Pariah Jews, 92 Paris Commune, 32 Particularism in disguise, 55 Parvenu Muslims, 192 Parvenus of intelligence, 29 Passion for equality, 133 Passion of the masses, 48, 120, 184, 229, 237 Patrilineal pattern, 75 Paulhan, Jean, 51, 52 Pedagogical myth, 222 Pedagogization of humanity, 12 Pedagogized humanity, 225 Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 218 Péguy, Charles, 1, 42 Perfected man, 169 Philosophical knowledge, 175 Philosophies of history, 59 Philosophy of hypocritical cowardice, 24 Philosophy of immanence, 62

INDEX

Philosophy of solidarity, 24 Phouma, 68 Phoumi, 68 Pishdad, Amir & Katuzian, Homayon, 162 Plan International Norway, 207 Policy of disintegration, 236 Political anti-Semitism, 82 Political commitment, 37 Political community, 51, 90, 187, 194, 211, 244, 247, 254 Political consensus, 109, 146 Political contestations, 181 Political cultures, 157, 158, 173, 199, 201, 241, 242, 257 Political democracy, 29, 161, 178, 233, 250 Political dictatorship, 164, 165 Political dissent, 181, 251 Political dissenters, 177 Political emancipation, 11, 12, 17, 81, 233 Political idealism, 29 Political incapacity, 166 Political Islam, 81, 196, 198, 200, 204 Political optimism, 25 Political passion, 37, 38, 40, 43, 145, 229, 234, 251 Political pluralism, 147, 148, 176 Political polarization, 37 Political possibilities, 247 Political power, 7, 11, 29, 38, 47, 59, 63, 105, 139, 143, 174, 181, 198, 200, 233, 235 Political propaganda, 228 Political realism, 39 Political reconciliation, 147 Political regimes, 28, 174, 246 Political space, 103, 153 Political strike, 27, 28 Political struggle, 96–99, 148

283

Political subjects, 121, 157 Political Zionism, 10 Politics of domestication, 236 Politics of identity, 11, 199, 243 Politics of truth, 100 Popular consent, 48 Porot, Antoine, 71 Positive intellectual, 14, 107 Postcolonial countries, 148 Post-colonial theories, 240 Post-historical time, 173, 241, 242, 257 Post-industrial societies, 106 Post-Islamism, 156, 158, 172, 178, 241 Post-Islamists intellectuals, 172 Post-Orientalist, 158 Post-revolutionary, 26, 27, 30, 31, 35, 158, 171–173, 178–180, 241, 242 Postwar French nationalism, 5 Pouyan, Amir Parviz, 166 Power structures, 6, 101 Practical materialism, 29 Practice of exclusion, 200, 243 Private intellectuals, 148 Private law, 184 Privileged intellectuals, 32, 137 Production of society, 105, 106 Professional insecurity, 149, 240 Professional intellectuals, 137, 152 Professional revolutionary, 50 Progressive era, 134 Progressive intellectuals, 100, 203 Progressive movements, 171 Progressive Party, 204 Progressive revolutionary movements, 171 Progressivism, 90, 137 Proletarian awareness, 99 Proletarian revolution, 23, 27, 47, 67 Proletarian self-organization, 23

284

INDEX

Proletarian violence, 26, 27 Proletariat, 9, 10, 18, 19, 22, 23, 26–28, 33, 34, 43, 44, 47, 48, 50, 52, 54, 57, 62, 63, 69, 94, 97, 98, 106, 119, 131, 132, 146, 165, 169, 216, 227, 231, 233, 234, 238, 249, 251 Psychiatric practice, 70 Psychological flaw, 78 Public consensus, 143, 240 Public discourse, 12, 115, 125, 152, 159, 179, 195, 201, 202, 246, 255, 256, 258 Public education, 36, 226, 249 Public existence, 14 Public intellectuals, 6, 11, 111, 116, 148–152, 154, 194 Public language, 151 Public life, 16, 152 Public opinion, 16, 26, 139, 153, 211 Public power, 44 Public sphere, 5, 10, 58, 92, 110, 148, 157, 162, 178, 181, 182, 186, 192, 206, 207, 215, 245, 246, 258 Q Quisling, Vidkun, 186, 213 R Racial community, 119 Racialize the working class, 239 Racial prejudice, 78 Racism, 11, 12, 54, 57, 64, 65, 73, 77–81, 86–89, 117–122, 185, 187, 188, 192, 194, 202, 209, 212, 228, 235–237, 242, 252, 255, 258 Racism at home and imperialism abroad, 190 Racism from above, 120

Racism of the bourgeois, 119 Racism of the intellectuals, 122 Racism without races, 117 Racist community, 117, 119 Racist discourse, 73, 193, 255 Racist ideologists, 238 Racist ideology, 88, 188, 236, 237 Racist practices, 192, 193, 256 Racist structure, 73 Racist subjects, 118 Radical democracy, 102 Radical intellectuals, 82, 94, 95, 108, 109, 141, 147, 153, 156, 181, 219 Radical interventions, 220, 221 Radical Islam, 201 Radicalization of young Muslims, 191 Radical Muslims, 162 Radical philosophy, 240 Radical political change, 37, 234 Ra’isdana, Fariborz, 180 Ramadan, Tariq, 193, 194 Rancière, Jacques, 11, 120, 121, 221, 222, 225, 226, 245 Rationality of productivism, 106 Rationalization, 115, 145 Razavi, Massoud, 176 Refined racism, 237 Regime of truth, 100 Regionalism, 69 Relations of power, 99, 101, 102, 237, 238, 254 Religious fundamentalism, 241 Religious homogeneity, 81 Religious knowledge, 173, 175 Religious pluralism, 176 Renan, Ernest, 158 Representative democracy, 64, 103 Reproduction of the existing order, 217 Republican ideal, 225, 226 Research communities, 210

INDEX

Research institutions, 177, 206, 207, 209–211, 243, 259 Responsibility of Intellectuals , 140 Restrictive immigration laws, 120 Revolution, 4, 10, 12, 18, 20, 21, 23, 27, 30, 36, 37, 41, 47, 59, 60, 63, 66, 76, 89, 94, 101–103, 112, 124, 130, 131, 147, 155, 158–160, 165, 167–172, 178, 190, 217, 223, 226, 237, 241, 251, 253, 257 Revolutionary community, 169, 171 Revolutionary culture, 100 Revolutionary government, 36, 169, 171 Revolutionary hope, 23, 62 Revolutionary intellectuals, 52, 54, 171, 180, 215, 244, 250 Revolutionary Marxism, 48 Revolutionary syndicalism, 44 Revolutionary vanguard, 171 Ribuffo, Leo P., 153, 154 Right-populism, 204 Right to selfishness, 17, 233 Right-wing politics, 113 Rimbaud, Arthur, 51 Rolland, Romain, 51 Roosevelt, Franklin, 134 Roosevelt, Theodore, 133 Rosanvallon, Pierre, 103, 107, 246, 247 Rousseas, Stephen, 189 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 15, 30, 63, 227 Routsila, Markku, 133 Roy, Olivier, 155–157 Russia, 63, 101, 168, 183 Russian Revolution, 4, 58, 103

285

S Said, Edward W., 11, 12, 114, 115, 120, 122–130, 155, 157, 195, 196, 238, 239, 254, 256, 257 Saint Simon, Henri, 13, 14, 49 Sand, George, 28 Sand, Shlomo, 2, 51 Sarkozy, Nicolas, 111 Sartrean, 5, 53, 58, 93, 165 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 3, 8, 9, 12, 43, 48, 50, 52–58, 64–66, 101, 112, 113, 129, 180, 181, 209, 216, 228, 235, 238, 252 Schlesinger, Arthur, 140 Scholarly brilliance, 150 School of realism, 35, 36 Schwartz, Delmore, 136 Second International, 159 Secular intellectuals, 165, 167, 170 Seierstad, Åsne, 203 Seignobos, Charles, 35 Self-consciousness, 57 Self-education, 229 Self-governance, 114 Self-government, 115, 157, 158 Self-racialization of the working class, 119 Senegalese, 72, 74 Sennett, Richard, 150, 151 Separatism, 69 Shahin, Emad El-din, 156, 157 Shah, Reza, 160, 165, 167 Shareholders of the state, 240 Shariati’s Islamist ideology, 168, 171–173, 241 Shariati, Ali, 130, 162, 166–172, 174, 175 Shrinking public sphere, 246 Singular universal , 57 Sirinelli, Jean-Francois, 1, 2 Situated exploited classes, 56 Situated knowledge, 56

286

INDEX

Skeptical consciousness, 122 Slave morality, 39 Snowden, Edward, 153 Social and cultural gaps, 204 Social body, 31, 99, 118, 239, 242, 244, 246 Social Contract, 30, 63, 177 Social control, 191 Social criticism, 138 Social democracy, 29, 161, 206, 233 Social-democratic elite, 212 Social disintegration, 75, 236, 253 Social emancipation, 169, 229 Social inequality, 59, 191 Social injustice, 78, 218 Socialism, 22, 26, 32, 33, 38, 42, 44, 93, 103, 106, 109, 132, 137, 145, 146, 158, 161, 162, 165, 166, 168, 229 Socialist parliamentarians, 233 Socialist politics, 44, 48 Socialist Republic of Gillan, 159, 160 Socialist revolution, 7, 47, 62, 101, 103, 145, 168 Socialist totalitarianism, 172 Socially and culturally privileged, 205 Social movements, 94, 101, 122 Social myth, 23 Social progress, 226 Social structure, 95, 98, 197, 205 Socio-political contradictions, 187 Socratic method, 223 Sorel, Georges, 7, 9, 10, 21–28, 39, 41, 44, 45, 48, 108, 233, 234 Soroush, Abdolkarim, 173, 174, 176, 178, 179 South African, 73, 89 Sovereignty, 68, 79, 85, 161, 181, 183, 184, 240 Soviet-style Democracies, 58 Soviet totalitarianism, 4, 102, 147

The Soviet Union, 3, 4, 52, 53, 61, 98–100, 133, 147, 148, 160, 161, 166, 172, 178, 188, 189, 198, 226, 241 Spanish Civil War, 229 Spanish Communist Party, 229 Spargo, John, 131–133 Species-being, 17 Specific intellectual, 5, 11, 12, 95, 99–101, 238, 254 Specific knowledge, 8, 99 Spencer, Herbert, 31 Sphere of individual autonomy, 106, 107 Spinoza, Baruch de, 20 Spiritual doubles, 16 Spiritual existence, 15, 231 Spiritual Islam, 170 Spiritualism, 17, 232 Spiritual power, 36, 50, 58 Spiritual superiority, 29 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 116 State, 5, 8–10, 13–17, 19, 21, 23, 26–31, 56, 99, 143 State ideology, 26, 180 State sovereignty, 180, 182, 183, 241, 257 Staudenmaier, Peter, 92 Steger, B., 157 Strategy of inferiorization, 237 Structure of oppression, 219 Stultification, 80, 223 Stultified situation, 223 Submission of intelligence, 36 Successful integration, 192 Sunkara, Bhaskar, 153 Superfluous conceptualizations, 152 Superfluous labor-power, 86 Superior cultures, 127 Superior intelligence, 222 Superior minds, 223 Superior social positions, 224, 229

INDEX

Superstructure, 99 Surplus intellectuals, 153 Sweezy, Paul, 151 Syrian refugees, 204 Systematic de-humanization, 79 Systematized piracy, 77

T Tabari, Ehsan, 161 Tabatabai, Javad, 179, 180 Tajik, Hadia, 192–194, 213 Taliban, 209 Tamed professors, 153 Teacher’s intelligence, 222 Technicians of practical knowledge, 8, 52, 55, 57 Terrorist attack in Oslo, 203 Thaarup, Thomas, 184 Theist Socialists, 167, 168 Theoretical discourses, 116, 238 Theoretical practice, 93 Theories of essentialism, 125 Theorization of a preordained future, 217 Theory communicates one practice to another, 96 Theory of ability, 22 Theory of government, 19 Third force, 161, 162 Third International, 159 Third world countries, 142, 148, 210 Third worldist ideology, 148 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 19, 58 Tolstoy story, 37 Totalitarian ideologies, 4, 174, 200, 201 Totalitarianism, 4, 8, 11, 81, 91, 94, 98, 102, 103, 106, 108, 109, 141, 145, 200, 202, 245 Totalitarian politics, 227 Totalization, 95

287

Touhid, 168 Touhidi classless society, 168 Transnational academic class, 238 Treacherous intellectuals, 43 Tribalism, 69 Tribal nationalism, 86, 90 True intellectuals, 56, 57, 137, 174, 235 True Islam, 170, 173 Tschombe, Moïse, 68 Tudeh Party, 160–162, 166 Tunisia, 60 Tvedt, Terje, 156, 205–214

U Unconventional opinions, 122, 239 UN Declaration of Human Rights, 210 Underdeveloped countries, 148, 207, 208, 212 Underprivileged intellectuals, 32 Underprivileged social groups, 205 Undesirable Jews, 82 Unhappy consciousness , 57 Universal consciousness, 99 Universal intellectual, 5, 11, 12, 99, 101, 216, 238, 254 Universalization, 3, 56, 57, 68, 235, 236, 252, 253 Universal method, 12, 55, 225, 229, 230 Universal reason, 108, 109, 226 Universal teaching, 223, 224 University education, 60, 180, 234, 242, 258 University of Oslo, 198 Useful Jews, 184 Utility of the truth, 234 Utlending , 190 Utopian society, 174

288

INDEX

V Vichy government, 43, 45 Victor, Pierre (Benny Lévy), 97 Vietnam, 100, 124, 140, 142, 188, 240 Vietnamese people, 68 Virilio, Paul, 129 Virtual slavery, 89 Voltaire, 35, 40, 49 Von Humboldt, Wilhelm, 82, 195 Vulgar materialism, 17, 232, 250 Vulgar racism, 78

W Wallerstein, Immanuel, 117 Weil, Simone, 5, 110, 111, 238 Weitling, Wilhelm, 132, 227 Welfare state, 94, 111, 134, 141, 146–148, 191, 208, 212, 215, 228, 243–245, 256 Wergeland, Henrik, 185, 186 Western civilization, 89 Western democracies, 155, 190, 200, 246, 253, 257, 258 Western ideologies, 128, 144, 148, 169 Western Imperialism, 162, 190, 209 Western intellectual production, 116 Western intellectuals, 123, 124, 129, 141, 147, 188, 189, 194, 196,

199, 209, 215, 240, 245–247, 254–257 Western literature, 128 Western observer, 125 Western scientific method, 163 Western universality, 128 Western values, 203, 210, 253, 255 Western way of life, 202 Westoxicated intellectual, 163, 164, 241 Westoxication, 127, 162–167, 241, 257 The Will of the teacher, 222 Wilson, Edmund, 138 Woman-for-action, 76 Woman-for-marriage, 76 Women’s emancipation, 75 Women’s studies, 152 Women and gay rights, 191 Women liberation, 187 Workers’ movement, 21 Y Yemeni Muslim, 202 Youth Riot, 111 Z Zemmour, Éric, 111 Zibakalam, Sadeq, 168 Zola, Émile, 2, 21, 24