The Humanities, the Social Sciences and the University: A Study in Knowledge Production 2022057721, 9781032410036, 9781032410050, 9781003355748

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Morality, Society and Culture

THE HUMANITIES, THE SOCIAL SCIENCES AND THE UNIVERSITY A STUDY IN KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION Harry Redner

The Humanities, the Social Sciences and the University

The Humanities, the Social Sciences and the University is an intellectual history of research in the humanities and social sciences. It scrutinizes the priorities, values, objectives and publishing agendas of the modern university in order to assess the institutional pressures on research in major disciplines such as literature, history, sociology and economics. It argues that all these disciplines are currently experiencing a deep malaise – though to different degrees – due to loss of faith in the Enlightenment project, which entailed the pursuit of knowledge through reason. Extreme scepticism, promoted since the 1970s by French Theory, which regards knowledge as an instrument of power, is a major factor in this disorientation. Overall, the book concludes that though universities have grown stronger, wealthier and more powerful in the last century, the quality and seriousness of the research they typically produce are weaker and intellectually less important and the institution is in danger of losing its way. An accessible and compelling read, this book will appeal to scholars of sociology, education and intellectual history with interests in higher education policy and academic life. Harry Redner was Reader at Monash University. He also held endowed chairs at Darmstadt and Kassel Universities in Germany and visiting professorships at Yale, the University of California at Berkeley, Haifa University and the École des Hautes Études in Paris. He was the author of 18 books ranging across the natural and social sciences and the humanities, notably Beyond Civilization: Society, Culture and the Individual in the Age of Globalization, Quintessence of Dust: The Science of Matter and the Philosophy of Mind and Politics, Ethics and Culture in our Time: A Post-civilizational Perspective.

Morality, Society and Culture Series Editors John Carroll is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at La Trobe University and Fellow of the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University. Peter Murphy is Adjunct Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences at La Trobe University and Adjunct Professor in the Cairns Institute at James Cook University.

The Morality, Society and Culture series publishes rigorous scholarly work exploring how moral questioning and action have been transformed in contemporary social relationships and by contemporary culture. Can cultural texts such as films, television broadcasts and art be vehicles for moral demands? Do we learn what it means to be ‘good’ from soap opera and advertising? If cultural texts are forms of moral mimesis, then are the standards of the ‘right’ and ‘good’ dependent on external considerations of cultural visibility and social relevance – and if so, how are some moral issues made visible or invisible, relevant or irrelevant? Now that morality has become cultural and is amenable to sociological and cultural study as well as philosophical investigation, this series explores how and to what effect moral questioning, action and debate are inextricably entwined with contemporary social and cultural forms, texts and institutions. The books in this series offer new understandings of the connection of morality, society and culture, analyse key contemporary events and establish new methodologies. Titles in this series Kant: Anthropology, Imagination, Freedom John Rundell The Politics of the Soul: From Nietzsche to Arendt John Dickson The Humanities, the Social Sciences and the University A Study in Knowledge Production Harry Redner For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/ Morality-Society-and-Culture/book-series/ASHSER1429

The Humanities, the Social Sciences and the University A Study in Knowledge Production

Harry Redner

First published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 Harry Redner The right of Harry Redner to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Redner, Harry, author. Title: The humanities, the social sciences and the university : a study in knowledge production / Harry Redner. Description: London ; New York, NY : Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2022057721 | ISBN 9781032410036 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032410050 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003355748 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Humanities--Study and teaching (Higher) | Social sciences--Study and teaching (Higher) | Scholarly publishing. | Education, Higher--Aims and objectives. Classification: LCC AZ182 .R43 2023 | DDC 001.3071/1--dc23/ eng/20230227 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022057721 ISBN: 978-1-032-41003-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-41005-0 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-35574-8 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003355748 Typeset in Times New Roman by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.

This book is dedicated to the memory of the author’s father and his step-father Bernard Redner (1908–1941) Joachim Bernstein (1914–1978)

Contents

Foreword by David Roberts Acknowledgements List of abbreviations and acronyms

ix xiv xv

1 Literature and Criticism: Revitalizing a Dynamic Relationship1 Section I – The success and failure of criticism  1 Section II – The failure of criticism in academia  12 Section III – Theorybabble  24 Notes  32 Bibliography  33

2 History: The Need for a New Grand Narrative

35

Section I – Schools of history  35 Section II – History and literature, history and sociology  47 Notes  58 Bibliography  60

3 Sociology: The Search for a Common Theoretical Core62 Section I – Sociology in Europe  62 Section II – Sociology in America  69 Notes  81 Bibliography  83

4 Economics: Bridging the Divide between Scientific and Socio-Historical Models Section I – Economics and Ideal Types  85 Section II – Mirowski and postwar economics  95

85

viii  Contents Section III – The professionalization of economics  106 Notes  116 Bibliography  118

5 From the University to the Multiversity – and beyond120 Section I – Academic politics  120 Section II – University ranking  132 Section III – Metric bias  143 Section IV – The impact of ranking on academia  149 Notes  156 Bibliography  157

6 Academia and Publishing: A Fraught Relationship

159

Section I – Publish or perish and what ensues  159 Section II – The crisis of quality  178 Notes  196 Bibliography  199

Index

201

Foreword

At the time of his sudden, unexpected death in September 2021, Harry Redner had just completed three book-length manuscripts. The three books were conceived as a trilogy but one in which each part could be read independently on its own terms. Together they constitute a last comprehensive reflection on the themes that had constantly preoccupied him and take the form of a stocktaking at the end of European civilization. These themes were explored in depth across four volumes published between 2013 and 2016, beginning with Beyond Civilization, and this new three-volume study provides a critical overview. It takes its orientation from what Karl Polanyi named the “great transformation” that ushered in the new world of capitalism, the market economy and the ever-more rapid expansion of industrial production, scientific progress and technological invention in Western Europe. What were the consequences of these combined and cumulative revolutions for the civilization from which they sprang and for the culture of modernity since the Enlightenment – the epoch of European Modernism from the French Revolution through to the Second World War? The crucial turning point in Redner’s retrospective is the endgame of Modernism as it played out after 1945, when the arts and sciences celebrated a last burst of creativity in the United States. The 1960s marks the watershed, registered in the rise of Postmodernism: a programme and a self-description that succumbed to its own contradictions and has since mutated into the “contemporary” as the moving index of the loss of all sense of historical tradition. The first of the three books, Art and Science: A Parallel History, is based on the Weberian premise of rationalization. Western civilization was the only civilization to have systematically pursued a thoroughgoing rational development of the arts and sciences. This shared spirit opens the possibility of a comparative history of these two distinct expressions of human creativity, which Redner has realized in an illuminating fashion, building on his previous work in this field, from The Ends of Science (1987) to Quintessence of Dust: The Philosophy of Mind and the Science of Matter (1920). A first chapter on the cross-influences between music and physics, painting and perspective in the Renaissance – “The Birth of Science from the Spirit of Art” – introduces a comparison of the arts and sciences in the twentieth

x  Foreword century up to Postmodernism when they go their separate ways. Although the natural sciences were scarcely affected by the postmodernist siren song that “anything goes”, the sociology of science was not spared (see below). The arts, however, after the break with the moderns’ distinction between high and popular art, find themselves increasingly determined by the fashions of the art market and defined as art industries. The end of the shared modern history of the arts and the sciences is for Redner a symptom of the loss of the creative power of Western civilization, the final logic and outcome of the great transformation that has now expanded to become the globalized technological society we all live in today. World technological society lies, as indicated, beyond civilization and is to be understood as the successor to the civilizations of both the East and the West. Global consciousness has placed the necessity and challenge of conservation on the agenda, most obviously in relation to the threats of climate change but also in relation to the threats to the historical inheritance – and here most obviously in United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO’s) efforts to preserve world heritage. For Redner, there is also a third imperative beyond saving the planet and conserving the cultural inheritance: to understand the present through the past, to affirm civilizational continuities against the deep discontinuities of today and to conserve, that is, as far as possible not just the material cultural inheritance but the spirit that once inhabited it. All the more in that modern Western civilization was itself a continuation and renewal of the civilizational legacy of Athens and Jerusalem. This third imperative gains its force from Redner’s penetrating analyses of the negative consequences of the far-reaching changes over the last half-century to Western culture in the arts and sciences (the first part of the trilogy), in the humanities and the social sciences and the university itself (the second) and to politics and ethics (the third). He sees a civilizational dialectic at work here, in which, for all its tremendous productive dynamic, the process of progressive rationalization of all spheres of life finally split substantive and formal rationality apart and led to a self-destructive formalism. Thus, the practice of science has on the one hand become ever more specialized and driven by ever more powerful technologies and on the other ever more bureaucratized. In this respect, all spheres of life from business enterprises to public services and from government to health and education are governed by the same process-driven bureaucratization, which Weber already recognized a century ago as the iron cage of modernity, where substantive values have given way to the formal rationality of the law, the sciences and the rules of politics. The third part of the trilogy, Politics, Ethics and Culture in Our Time: A Post-civilizational Perspective (Leiden: Brill, 2022), provides the wider civilizational perspective, both historically and geographically, to the trilogy as a whole through an introductory overview in Part I of the ages and stages of history in East and West. The problems of modern politics (Part II)

Foreword xi are acutely diagnosed in the two abiding contradictions bequeathed by the French Revolution: the failure to achieve equality despite all the promises of socialism, whether democratic or totalitarian, and the failure to achieve fraternity other than in the regressive exclusionary forms of nationalism, as for instance in National Socialism. In turn, the problem of ethics lies for Redner in its reduction to formalism, once it has cut its ties to the ethos, the living context of expectations and duties, which give life to the rule of law. Part III focuses on the commodification of culture in our time with a striking analysis of what Redner calls the sportification of culture, underpinned by a novel application of Canetti’s theory of the crowd to mass culture. This brief survey of the themes of Art and Science: A Parallel History and Politics, Ethics and Culture in Our Time provides, I hope, a sufficient indication of the framing perspective of the trilogy. Here, it is important to stress that this framing perspective is a grand narrative, directed against Postmodernism’s consignment of all grand narratives to the rubbish bin of history. There is no question, however, of any kind of teleological or prophetic narrative, whether Marxian or Spenglerian. Redner speaks in relation to his three book-length essays of a historical retrospective in the spirit of Hegel’s Owl of Minerva, who sees what the actors could not see. His grand narrative is a critical reflection on the end of Western civilization and of the world’s Axial civilizations in East and West. In the present volume, Redner critically dissects the disciplines of literature and history (Part I), sociology and economics (Part II) and the far-reaching transformation of the university and in academic publishing (Part III). After differentiating itself from the earlier humanistic continuum of literature, history writing and philosophy, literature in the modern sense has been closely tied to the rise of modern criticism with all the battles of the books in the eighteenth century and the contending literary movements. In Aesthetic Life (2007), Redner argues that aesthetic life can only flourish when the practice of cultivated aesthetic judgement also flourishes. Once literary criticism declines, this has serious consequences for literature itself, for without a living critical culture no fundamental values and standards can be maintained. Postmodernism in all its variants – under the general heading of “theory” in departments of literature – epitomizes this decline, whether it takes the form as in French Theory of the cult of the critic (Foucault, Derrida, French feminism) at elite universities or the form of cultural studies in popular and mass culture at red brick universities. The proliferation of specializations with their varied political agendas from Marxism to post-colonialism and identity politics all coalesce in the confused jargon that Redner dubs “Theorybabble”. His special scorn is reserved for French theories of “reading”, which amount to the loss of all reference outside the text and the concomitant eclipse of meaning. The overall loss of a sense of purpose in academic criticism means that literature as such and literary culture are now no more than special interest courses at today’s university. In turn, the

xii  Foreword effects on writers are equally deleterious. Writers have now become part of a culture industry that thrives on publicity and celebrity and where success is the measure of value. The “prestige” that derives from best-seller lists is complemented by the rivalry between the top-ranking literary prizes that is turning literary production into a competitive sport. History as it was traditionally practised set out to recall the past for its own time. It was a form of literature depicting events and in no sense a kind of generalizing science. This all changed across the nineteenth century with the Marxian and the positivist conceptions of historiography, whose most important successor in the twentieth century was the Annales School of the 1920s, which brought together historians, economists and sociologists, who shared a common vision of history governed by long-term underlying changes. The limits of this approach became apparent in its inability to account for the political actions and responsibilities of individual agents, above all in relation to the totalitarianisms of the interwar period. In Part II, Redner contrasts the development of sociology and economics since the Enlightenment. Economics has consolidated itself ever more strongly into a discipline modelled on mathematics, whereas sociology has split into an ever-growing spectrum of specializations, characterized by a deep gulf between theoretical and empirical approaches. Sociology’s great period lies in the first third of the twentieth century, with such leading luminaries as Simmel, Durkheim, Weber, Mauss, Pareto and Hobhouse. But after World War II, when the United States became the centre of sociology, questions of method largely replaced European historicist interpretative approaches. This split has stood in the way of all later attempts to reunify sociology from Parsons to Habermas and Luhmann. Rather, as we have seen with literature or in historiography, special interest studies have come to predominate with their own ideological agendas. The self-defeating extremes of theory are particularly evident in the sociology of science, where knowledge and reason are treated as social constructs. Redner thus registers a process of scientization in economics on the one hand and of specialization in the humanities and sociology on the other that has led to a whole series of parallel universes, each with its own selfenclosed discourse. The loss of any common theoretical core in the humanities and the social sciences can be seen as both cause and effect of the flight into multiple forms of identity politics from minorities to race, ethnicity and gender. The bigger social questions of class and inequality have been largely abandoned to economics. The neoclassical idea of economics as a strict science has largely displaced the historicist approach. Professionalization has been bought, however, at the cost of a strict and increasingly self-referential economic formalism and intellectual conformism. But even here, the debates over methods and models are still largely pre-formed by the opposing positions of Keynes and Hayek in the 1930s and 1940s.

Foreword xiii The correlate of ongoing specialization in the study of literature, history and society is the competitive struggle in the new type of university that emerged in tandem with the vast expansion of student numbers since the 1960s. The decline of the modern humanistic disciplines is the other side of the enormous growth in funding for the natural and applied sciences. The present commercialization of research and commodification of education are primary symptoms of the education industry, in which bureaucracy has supplanted the former collegial autonomy of the university. As an education industry, metrics now rules supreme, whether it be in the form of competing university rankings, citation indexes, publications, research funding or student employment prospects. The ongoing multiplication of what is measured eliminates both in practice and principle everything that is not measured – with cumulative consequences for the humanities, whose social relevance in technological society becomes less and less evident. When the only criterion becomes the market, it is not surprising that the humanities and the social sciences are desperately engaged in chasing fashion as a proof of their “relevance”. In short, the old university of scholars has gone the way of the civilization that sustained it. In inviting us to take stock of the present state of culture, Harry Redner is not counselling despair. Recognition of things as they are is a call not to despair but to reflect on what values and traditions can still be maintained. David Roberts, Emeritus Professor in the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University, Australia.

References Harry, Redner. The Ends of Science: An Essay in Scientific Authority. Boulder, CO, and London: Westview Press, 1987. Harry, Redner. Aesthetic Life: The Past and Present of Artistic Cultures. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2007. Harry, Redner. Beyond Civilization: Society, Culture, and the Individual in the Age of Globalization. New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, 2013. Harry, Redner. Quintessence of Dust: The Science of Matter and the Philosophy of Mind. Leiden and London: Brill Rodopi, 2020. Harry Redner. Politics, Ethics and Culture in our Time (Leiden: Brill, 2022)

Acknowledgements

On behalf of the author, my late husband, I wish to thank David Roberts and Peter Murphy for reading the manuscript of this book, commenting on the content and providing invaluable advice on how to present it for publication. I am grateful also to Neil Jordan and the editorial staff at Routledge for their support throughout the publication process. Jill Redner

Abbreviations and acronyms

ARWU BISAC CIBER

Academic Ranking of World Universities Book Industry Standard and Communication Centre for Information on Behaviour and the Evaluation of Research COVID-19 Coronavirus CV Curriculum Vitae DNA Deoxyribonucleic Acid DWM Dead White Males ERA Excellence in Research (Australia) ET Extra-Textual FTEs Full-Time Equivalents ICMJE International Committee of Medical Journal Editors IMF International Monetary Fund IP Intellectual Property JISC Joint Information Systems Committee LSE London School of Economics MIT Massachusetts Institute of Technology OECD Organization for Economic Development PCS Post-colonial Studies R&D Research and Development RAND Corp. Research and Development Corporation (USA) REF Research Excellence Framework (UK) RLN Research Library Network RNA Ribonucleic Acid SRG Statistical Research Group STM Science, Technology, and Medicine ToP Top of the Pile UCL University College London VDC Verein Deutscher Chemiker (Association of German Chemists) WTO World Trade Organization

1

Literature and Criticism Revitalizing a dynamic relationship

Section I – The success and failure of criticism Criticism, understood as the expression of artistic judgement based solely on an intuitive registering of likes and dislikes, is a feature of every form of art and aesthetic culture. However, criticism as a form of cultivated artistic judgement based on a discursive sense of the qualities of works of art has only existed in a few highly sophisticated aesthetic cultures, above all the Western and the Chinese. It was a feature of Western art almost from the start. Aristotle’s Poetics attests to the acuity and depth of critical discourse in ancient Greece. A small number of other classic texts have survived, notably Longinus’ work on the sublime from the Roman period; undoubtedly a vastly greater number did not. Fortunately, almost all critical writings from the Medieval and Renaissance periods have also survived, among them the critical writings of Dante, Petrarch and many others. This is not the place, however, to recapitulate the well-known history of criticism or to expound the various historic schools and approaches. Our interest here is solely in the current state of criticism and in accounting for its successes and failures. We begin with the Enlightenment when criticism and aesthetics in general took a new turn and developed into what we now recognize as their modern form. It was then that Baumgarten and Kant laid the foundation of modern philosophical aesthetics, and, not coincidentally, also when a long line of critics of the various arts developed modern approaches to criticism. To mention but a few leading figures, there was Diderot for painting, Rousseau for music, Lessing for drama and sculpture and Dr Johnson for literature. From then on, each of the leading artistic movements generated whole schools of criticism. Thus, there were Romantic critics, neo-Classical critics, Realist and Naturalist critics and Symbolist critics. In what follows we shall mainly be concerned with literary criticism. In English literature, the great critics after Dr Johnson were Coleridge, Arnold, T.S. Eliot and F.R. Leavis. In French literature, there were Saint-Beuve, Théophile Gautier, Baudelaire and Gustave Lanson – and many more in the twentieth century. Each of the great literary traditions in the European languages generated its own rich trove of critics, but, as we have said, we do not wish to embark on a history of criticism. DOI: 10.4324/9781003355748-1

2  Literature and Criticism The crucial point about criticism that we wish to stress is this: the development of literature at least since the eighteenth century was closely tied to the rise of modern criticism, for without a critically informed public discourse this kind of sophisticated literature could not have found readers. Critics played an essential role: they were the intermediaries between the authors and the reading public. Their role became even more important during the nineteenth century, as various new literary movements arose which had to be introduced and explained to the public, often in the face of fierce opposition from earlier generations of readers and their representative critics. A constant battle of the books became part and parcel of the literary scene, quite common and to be expected from then on, as one literary movement supplanted another. Criticism became the sine qua non of literature and art in general once the various schools of Modernism began to flourish in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Critics became the writers of manifestos for new revolutionary movements or the writers of apologies for the older ones. Often, of course, the artists themselves exercised this critical role, sometimes before even producing the art itself. Thus, in English literature, Pound was the critical exponent of literary Modernism before even he or Eliot wrote the poetry that would match these critical doctrines. D.H. Lawrence was both novelist and critic of the novel at once, and his creative and critical writings are best understood together. Much the same can be said for author-critics in other literatures, of which there are too many obvious examples even to begin listing them. It is clear that Modernism could not have arisen or developed without the critical debate, sometimes extremely acrimonious, surrounding it. To some extent, this is continuing even now, but it is already becoming apparent that in the period of Postmodernism, the debate has begun to falter and might eventually peter out. This does not bode well for the future of art, for the failure of criticism is symptomatic of a failure of art itself. Without a living critical culture, no standards or fundamental values can be maintained in art, especially in literature, which must convey something worth talking and disputing about to readers. When it ceases to do so “anything goes” and the market decides who are the great writers of our time, namely those whose books sell more copies or capture more publicity. We are already witnessing the hypertrophy of the best-seller phenomenon, which shows that criticism has been relegated to a minor place in shaping public appreciation of literature. It also suggests that serious literature will struggle to survive. For if criticism fails to perform its essential function in supporting creative endeavour in the arts, it will atrophy. The failure of criticism and the failure of literature are co-extensive. Criticism is in decline in the public domain of reviewing, critical debate, journal articles and all the other media in which critical discourse has been accessible to the reading public. An equally serious decline is taking place in the academic domain, where literary criticism as a subject is now seldom taught. To show how and why this has happened will be the major burden of this chapter. But before we begin to do so we must first establish how literary criticism or, indeed, art criticism, in general, differs from other kinds

Literature and Criticism 3 of involvement with literature or art. We must, that is, distinguish the critic from the connoisseur, on the one hand, and the pure scholar, on the other. The connoisseur of literature or art, in general, is the amateur, an art lover in the best sense, one who has considerable knowledge and appreciation of literature or art without being dedicated to it as a calling, in the professional sense. The connoisseur is the judge of works of art based on an intuitive sense of rightness or good taste born of long immersion in a particular artistic style. Such judgements can often be unerring and true, but they are not the outcome of full understanding and cannot be properly justified. Connoisseurship is, of course, necessary for criticism, for without it the critic could not proceed, but it does not amount to criticism. Nor does literary or art scholarship amount to criticism. The scholar deals with those features that have an objective presence in the work, those that can be shown to be there. This is essential for many activities that are preparatory to criticism, and without it, criticism can easily go wrong. One of the basic tasks of any scholarship, for example, is to establish authorship and period of composition and another is to uncover fakes and plagiarisms. At a higher level, scholarship seeks to establish relations between works and authors and thereby define schools, styles and whole movements. Another crucial aspect of scholarship is to describe the technical features and methods of composition by means of which given works or types of work are created. Without invaluable research of this kind, it is difficult to see how criticism could proceed, especially for works of the historic past where the whole context of art has to be recreated by scholarship. Both connoisseurship and scholarship are indispensable; however, they only prepare the ground for criticism, which goes beyond both of them. Criticism is neither subjective good taste nor factual objectivity; it is a matter of aesthetic judgement. In short, it is in the first place evaluative and calls for reasons or justification. This in turn requires two ancillary critical functions, those of analysis and interpretation. Analysis focuses mainly on the formal properties of a work, that is, those that bear on its structure and the interrelation of its parts. This, of course, can be extended beyond the work to the body of works of an author or to the whole style to which all such works belong. Interpretation has more to do with content, requiring the elucidation of meaning and significance or what the work is essentially about and what it is intending to communicate. This kind of intention to mean something is inherent in the work and not necessarily in the author, who might be quite unconscious of it. In other words, criticism is concerned with interpreting what the work is saying or showing and not what the author might or might not tell us about it. The three critical functions of analysis, interpretation and evaluation are not distinct activities; rather they are aspects of the one act of criticism and together constitute a coherent whole, at least where sound criticism by a good critic is concerned. Such criticism is, of course, not carried out by a solitary critic in isolation but is always part of a critical culture or community

4  Literature and Criticism where many critics are at work at once, often preoccupied with the very same works. These critics enter into debate with each other concerning all these aspects of analysis, interpretation and evaluation. They both agree and disagree with each other on all these issues. Where the leading critics agree as to what is a great, mediocre or bad work, this constitutes critical consensus within a given culture, which is the closest criticism can come to objective judgement or truth. But such agreement is never long-lasting since the arrival of an innovative revisionist critic who sees things differently or a revolutionary change of style within the current art form will invariably upset the existing consensus and lead to intense and frequently furious debate until a new consensus is formed. We have expounded all this at much greater length and perhaps more lucidity in Aesthetic Life.1 As a professional activity, criticism dates mainly from the eighteenthcentury period of the Enlightenment when a large reading public arose, when the first public exhibitions and museums of art were established, when concerts for a paying audience were performed and so on for all the other arts. The professional critic at that stage was not an academic, for the universities shunned any involvement with art or even literature, apart from the classics in Latin and Greek. It would not be till the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that literature and the arts began to be taught at the universities and individual professorial chairs and later whole departments of study were founded. We shall turn to this academic stage of criticism in the next section. The professional literary critic prior to academicization began as a man of letters who wrote reviews and occasional essays and earned at least part of his living in this way. Usually such a person was an author as well. In England, Dr Johnson is the major figure in the transition from the man of letters to the professional critic. His Lives of the Poets (1779–1781) is the first major body of criticism in English literature. At the same time, it was a purely commercial enterprise, as his seemingly cynical statement attests: “No man, but a blockhead, ever wrote, except for money”. In France, Denis Diderot a little earlier initiated professional art criticism in his Salon of 1765 and Salon of 1767, about which the later art critic and poet Théophile Gautier remarked “in his monumental Salons, Diderot founded the criticism of art”. In Germany, this verdict might be contested in favour of Gottfried Ephraim Lessing’s Laocoon (1766), even though this deals with ancient art. In Germany, too, music criticism begins with Johann Mattheson and his journal Musica Critica, the first of its kind, though Jean-Jacques Rousseau also played a major role with his articles in the Encyclopédie and the controversy over opera with Rameau. But all these were only the beginnings of professional criticism. What made these beginnings possible and what drove the further professionalization of criticism throughout the arts were simultaneous changes both in the reading public and the public for art. Art was becoming public in a way it had never been before, when it was mainly the preserve of the aristocracy, the court or the church, and even literature was restricted to a small literate elite. Starting in the eighteenth century and becoming ever

Literature and Criticism 5 more so during the nineteenth, literature and art were becoming public on a new scale. This is manifested by the huge increase in the publication of books, and the appearance of magazines, journals, reviews and even a regular daily or weekly press. At the same time, exhibitions of paintings open to the general public were initiated and somewhat later, in the early nineteenth century, the first museums or art galleries were founded. Something similar occurred in music where public concerts were featured, though opera houses had already functioned as commercial ventures since the late seventeenth century. In saying that literature and art were becoming open to the public, we mean, of course, the new bourgeois public whose members took their place next to the nobility. This would intensify during the nineteenth century when the public became largely bourgeois. It was for this bourgeois public that professional critics functioned during the nineteenth century. They inserted themselves between the literary works and their readers, the works of the fine arts and their viewers, and musical compositions and performances and their listeners. These critical intermediaries became necessary for many reasons. One major reason is that the bourgeois public was no longer as cultured or educated as the earlier aristocratic patrons and connoisseurs had been. Good taste and connoisseurship were no longer sufficient. Professional critics were required who could set standards and make evaluative judgements and also explain these to the general public. Such explanations and explications were needed also because artists, at least from the Romantic period onwards, were no longer working within wellestablished traditions or within so-called classical forms and standards. Since originality and artistic personality became uppermost in judging literature and art, highly specialized and frequently professional critics had a crucial role to play in interpreting and adjudicating the revolutionary departures taking place in every generation or so. As the artists and writers went from one artistic movement to another, so the critics had to follow close on their heels and report back to the waiting public, informing them of where the artists were heading and how well they had realized their goals. With the beginnings of Modernism in the twentieth century, the critics began marching ahead of the artists, so to speak, for the avant-garde movements were frequently preceded by manifestos and proclamations, penned before the art was even produced. This was sometimes the work of artists themselves, but frequently such anticipatory pronouncements were produced by partisan critics. Thus, for example, Richard Wagner wrote about his futuristic music before he had composed any of it. Many other artists followed suit, including Wagner’s great admirer Baudelaire. Much later this became the common practice, as when the Futurists were preceded by the “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism” written by their theoretician and poet F.T. Marinetti and published in the Parisian newspaper Le Figaro on 20 February 1909.2 More such manifestos followed apace, with other programmatic declarations by members of other groups acting as critics before they became painters, architects, composers and so on. It was the same with

6  Literature and Criticism the Russian Futurists under the leadership of Vladimir Mayakovski. The Leningrad Formalist critics would initiate such projects as well. At the same time, the Surrealists under André Breton, also a critical theorist and poet, started in a similar way. In Germany, the critic Wilhelm Worringer wrote an influential article for Der Sturm magazine in August 1911, and this enabled him to play a definitive role in the formation of the group, which he baptized Expressionists. We find analogous forms of collaboration between critics and artists throughout all the Modernist movements. Simultaneously, but not coincidentally, with the rise of Modernist movements in the arts there occurred the start of the academicization of criticism. The earliest university departments of literature, fine arts and musicology began to be institutionalized in a few of the major universities of Europe and later of America as well, starting late in the nineteenth century. Those who would formerly have been freelance critics and artistic intellectuals were only too glad to become salaried lecturers and university professors. This was part of a modernizing drive in the universities which led to a gradual transition from the Classics to modern languages and literatures. Thus, the first department of English was established under Quiller-Couch at Cambridge in 1912. In the initial period of the academicization of criticism, which lasted roughly from just before the First World War till a decade or so after the Second World War, a close interaction occurred between the newly minted academic critics and their precursors and contemporaries among the modernist artists. The academics took up these works as primary objects of study, for they were of intense interest to them and their students. In English, the novels of Joyce and Lawrence and the poetry of Eliot and Yeats received concentrated critical attention. In the case of Eliot, his work was both critical and poetic at once, which made it eminently suitable for academic discussion. The critic who wrote “Tradition and the Individual Talent” and the poet who wrote “The Wasteland” could be studied and researched in conjunction with each other. To a lesser degree, this was also true of Lawrence, who was also no mean critic and reviewer, as Leavis was so keen to point out. Neither Joyce nor Yeats were critics to that degree, but the work of both urgently called for criticism. Joyce especially provided enormous scope for critical commentary – Ulysses to begin with but even more so Finnegan’s Wake – and American critics in particular were very keen to take up the challenge of making sense of prose that made little sense to ordinary, academically uninitiated readers. What ensued during this approximately 40- or 50-year period from 1920 till 1960 or 1970 can deservedly be called the high watermark of modern criticism. It was during this period that the greatest literary critics were active. They generally operated in an intermediate zone between academia and freelance writing, some tending more to the one side than to the other, but most had a foot in both domains. This was still possible because although criticism has already become academicized and departments of English, Comparative Literature and other critical specialities had already

Literature and Criticism 7 been established, these were not as yet all exclusive. It was still possible to mix teaching with writing in some suitable proportion. Down to the Second World War, the professional status of critics remained fluid. Though many did become full-time academics, some chose to be part-time ones only, and a few refused academic appointments altogether. We can see this in the careers of the leading critics of the period. In England, T.S. Eliot became a publisher and rejected a university role. In Germany, Walter Benjamin would have been glad of such a position but could not obtain one and had to remain a freelance writer. In Russia, Mikhail Bakhtin had no choice about it; he was sent into exile to teach in a distant provincial teachers’ college. In America, Edmund Wilson did some teaching but mainly supported himself as a writer. It was, indeed, a remarkable period of critical writing. Every major literary language produced outstanding schools of criticism. English gave rise to F.R. Leavis and his school at Cambridge around the journal Scrutiny as well as William Empson and others. In America, the New Critics took up this work and carried it further in a more formalist direction; among them were such outstanding figures as Cleanth Brooks, Ivor Winters, John Crow Ransom and others. The New York school of intellectuals with Lionel Trilling at the head was another major group. In French criticism, there was the Geneva School with its illustrious exponents, Mariel Raymond, Albert Béguin, Jean Rousset, Jean Starobinski, Jean-Pierre Richard and Georges Poulet. Leading critics were the Romance philologists Ernst Robert Curtius, Leo Spitzer and Erich Auerbach, and contemporary with these there were the Marxist critics Georg Lukacs, Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. Russian criticism featured the school of Leningrad Formalists, among them Viktor Shklovsky, Boris Eikhenbaum, V.W. Voloshinov and the star of them all, Mikhail Bakhtin. There were all kinds of outstanding individual critics in other countries and other languages, such as the Canadian Northrop Fry and the Mexican Octavio Paz. Altogether, the first half or so of the twentieth century was full of great critics. The great period of criticism did not last much beyond the 1960s, for the remainder of the century witnessed a gradual decline to a point where criticism has become nearly obsolete. This holds for both the academic and extramural environments. Thus, for example, the reviewing of new works no longer takes place as a matter of course in the leading journals and the press. There are only a few publications left dedicated to this essential task. Academics are now loath to carry it out because it no longer brings credit for promotion, unless it is done for journals of high prestige. Many academic journals no longer even bother to carry reviews. Those which do so relegate this task to juniors who are swayed by status and glamour. The failure of criticism has had disastrous consequences for reception in the arts, especially in literature. Without responsible and authoritative critical guidance, the public has to rely on other means to establish what is worth reading, viewing or listening to. These other means vary from “democratic”

8  Literature and Criticism considerations, such as what attracts the biggest audiences, to commercial valuation of what secures the largest prices. Both of these can be swayed by publicity, advertising and specially staged contests to determine winners. All of these means of establishing popularity existed in the past, but never before were they so important that they replaced both connoisseurship and critical judgement. Publicity, éclat or other ways of attracting attention have always mattered, but never before was there a media apparatus of print and television which could so decisively sway public opinion in artistic as well as other matters. Jackson Pollock was declared the greatest American painter by Look magazine, and this has been accepted by the American public ever since. Advertising in the form of puffery has always existed, but never before has marketing become so crucial to public acceptance. How a book is marketed is critical to any chance it might have of succeeding in finding a readership. Largely, this depends on the celebrity of its author, and celebrity is a febrile product, easily manufactured by television appearances, for example, and as easily lost. Another crucial determinant of success is winning prizes in competitions. Such contests have always been staged and winners declared, the Athenians held dramatic contests each year and the Meistersingers of Nuremberg also held musical competitions, but never before has there been a system of contests and prize-giving as extensive as at present when so much depends on winning. Being a loser is synonymous with being a failure and therefore without talent. This last factor has brought art down to the level of sport, and the process whereby it takes place might be called the sportification of art. This is a major and most important topic in determining the nature and status of art in our time. It has been dealt with at great length by James English, though not under that designation.3 English deals extensively with the current extremely widespread practice of awarding prizes of all kinds to artistic performances or works of art on the basis of competitions which are generally judged by expert juries or by popular vote. This assumes that performers and artists can compete against each other just as athletes and other sportsmen do and that winners and losers can be decided by standard criteria adhered to by unbiased judges or according to public choice, as this takes place in sporting contests such as diving, ice-skating or body-building, or, closer to the arts, ballroom dancing. The analogy does not stop there, for just like sportsmen, performers and artists who win prizes are accorded the accolades of prestige and stardom. They are frequently featured side by side on the media, actors with footballers, writers with golfers and so on. Clearly, they are all treated as celebrities of the same ilk. The result is that in our success and achievement-oriented society art is treated as no more significant than sport, as English notes: The rise of prizes over the past century, and especially their feverish proliferation over the past decade, is widely seen as one of the more glaring symptoms of a consumer society run rampant, a society that can conceive

Literature and Criticism 9 of artistic achievement only in terms of stardom and success, and that is fast replacing a rich and varied cultural world with a shallow and homogeneous McCulture based on the model of network TV.4 English focuses specifically on literary prizes which were inaugurated at the start of the twentieth century with the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1901. By a curious historical irony, this dating coincides closely with the start of the international system of professional football competitions. There are also a number of such parallels in the rise of football and the rise of arts festivals: Alongside this developing system of international sporting events, we can trace a parallel rise from the 1850s to the 1890s of festivals of fine art and culture, as these events, too, emerged in more expressly international forms in major European cities, such as London, Paris and Rome, and then in the United States.5 Obviously, arts festivals and sporting competitions catered to very different publics, separated by vast differences of class, upbringing, education and taste. But both phenomena were responding to similar developments in society at large, such as big-city living and the fast transportation connections between cities established by railways. Such changes emerging from a common social predicament at the very same time served to bring art and sport together as never before, except for some distant echoes in the ancient Olympics: Art and sport were coming to be thought of as related or analogous practices in which the same interests were at play and the same stakes were at issue. Expositions and festivals of the fine arts became simultaneously more international and more explicitly competitive … artists from different countries were in effect competing with one another for cash prizes and medals, often delivering speeches from a winner’s podium and so on.6 This inspired the founder of the Venice Biennale in 1895, Riccardo Selvatico, “in conceiving the basic aims and contours of his new festival, it was the rise of international football he turned to …”.7 Literary competitions and prize-giving have grown almost exponentially. There are now well over 6,000 such prizes, and the number is growing every year. Writers compete for them less for the prize money itself, which is often negligible, than for the associated publicity and celebrity that comes with it and the potential opportunities for sponsorship in the form of grants, academic appointments and other sinecure prestige jobs. As in sport, winning is just the start for a collateral series of other rewards. And also as in sport, a winner-take-all process ensues, as those who win a few prizes then go on to win many more, based on their reputation as winners, and it’s just the

10  Literature and Criticism inverse for losers whose chances of ever winning become steadily diminished, regardless of the quality of their work. Thus, it is not unusual for top literary performers to collect around 40 prizes. It is worse in the other arts, as in architecture where Frank Gehring has won well over 130 awards, and worse still in the popular arts where Michael Jackson gained 240 before his untimely death at a young age robbed him of many more awards. This sportification of literature and the other arts has had disastrous consequences in terms of quality. It is counter-productive, discouraging what the prizes set out to encourage in the first place. The sales of a book are largely determined by the prizes it wins – so that to win the Booker is to be automatically guaranteed to sell in excess of 100,000 copies. Lesser but nevertheless sizeable numbers are guaranteed for the lesser prizes, and not to win any prize is to be a loser when it comes to sales – hence the aim of writers is to win prizes at all cost. And it can cost their artistic integrity, for there is a strong incentive to write less to satisfy their own literary conscience or to appeal to a certain kind of interested reader, than to meet the requirements of a certain select jury awarding the prize. With that aim in view, some unscrupulous writers or their supporters will put pressure on jury members that is at times little short of blackmail, hence the numerous scandals that attend all the well-known prizes in all languages. But that does not discredit those who perpetrate such outrages; on the contrary, it leads to more publicity that redounds to their fame and the fame of the prize itself, making it even more prestigious. As English goes on to point out, in this international system of literary and artistic competition, the judges and sponsors of prizes and awards compete with each other for prestige just as the writers and artists do. National rivalry and prestige are at stake in this. Thus, for example, the Japanese set up the Praemium Imperiale to compete directly with Sweden’s Nobel Prize. There is now talk of a Catalan Nobel and a Russian Booker. Some prizes serve no other purpose than to create artistic success and secure marketplace gains. The most obvious of these is the Turner Prize in Britain, set up by the advertising firm Saatchi and Saatchi to crown chosen painters or installationists as winners and profit from the huge rise in prices for their works. This is as close as one can come to coining money and remaining within the law. No literary prize has descended to quite that level, but some are coming closer to it. Competitions and prizes are not the only substitutes for criticism and connoisseurship. The others are ratings, best-seller lists, bums-on-seats numbers and many other such purely quantitative measures. Such more “democratic” means of assessing value have themselves worked to displace criticism from public discourse. The newspapers that used to employ art critics and cultural commentators no longer do so. Fewer of them any longer carry book reviews. And, as we shall show next, criticism has not only disappeared from the public arena but also from the academic sphere. Some of this is undoubtedly due to the onset of a postmodernist aesthetic.

Literature and Criticism 11 To appreciate the negative effect that Postmodernism had on criticism in the universities, we must review the positive effect that Modernism had during the first half of the twentieth century. As we have noted already, during this period the establishment of criticism as a discipline and the founding of departments of Literature and other humanities were coeval with the rise of Modernism as an artistic movement. In the literary sphere, the two were particularly closely integrated because modernist literature needs critics to act as intermediaries between the works and their reading public. This kind of writing was in itself intellectually demanding and difficult to understand for the uninitiated reader. The critics had a crucial role to play in providing education and scholarly commentary for their students in the first place and for the general public eventually as well. It is remarkable how quickly modernist authors penetrated the universities and how soon critics arose to take up their works. In fact, most of the great critics in all the literary languages were closely aligned with modernist authors. To give but a few examples we might mention the following cases: in England, Leavis was the great exponent of D.H. Lawrence; in Germany, Benjamin was close to Brecht and wrote on Proust, Kafka and many others; in the French sphere, the Genevan School was also preoccupied with Proust; in Russia, the Leningrad Formalists were engaged with Mayakovski and the Futurists; and, finally, in America, the practitioners of New Criticism were strongly influenced by T.S. Eliot both as poet and critic, and Edmund Wilson and many other critics were writing on Joyce and Faulkner. Indeed, the critics’ response to modernist writers shaped their whole critical approach to all previous literature, in the way that Eliot explained in his early, highly influential essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent”. But once Modernism collapsed and Postmodernism arose to take its place, the whole relation between author and critic also collapsed. The critics could not engage with the new authors in the way that their predecessors had done. A postmodernist literature that was inherently based on parody, pastiche and plagiarism could not arouse in critics the old sense of serving a progressive cause or a prophetic author or some other such high aspiration. Critics no longer had the old role of interpreters to play in relation to new literature that no longer took itself seriously. What is the point of explaining a parody or literary joke to readers? To attack these authors for failing to live up to the standards of their predecessors was also a futile exercise since nothing better or more serious was at hand to act as a standard. Consequently, critics in the universities found themselves in the position of becoming superfluous with nothing of any great importance to do. Some who already held prestigious positions responded by finding greatness in postmodernist literature, or indeed in popular literature, leading them, for example, to find Bob Dylan a great poet worthy of the Nobel Prize – though Dylan himself may have been surprised by the accolade of literary greatness thrust upon him. Most academic critics, however, were too self-aware to engage in that kind of propagandistic salesmanship. There were a number

12  Literature and Criticism of courses they could follow and still maintain some self-respect. One was simply to keep on reinterpreting the classic authors, which is what conservatives tended to do, but with increasingly less of an audience to address or students to teach. The more radical ones, and especially the younger up-and-coming cohort, those eager to quickly make a name for themselves and a brilliant career, took up the two other courses also becoming available: either French Theory or special interest studies of one kind or another, or some combination of both. But whatever it was, it no longer amounted to serious criticism. We shall examine both these options in what follows. This whole heritage of European and American criticism began to be challenged around 1970 and subsequently came under threat. This has continued and intensified ever since. It would be simple and satisfying to be able to assign an external cause to it: such as the counter-culture movement of student activism starting in the mid-1960s and culminating in the 1968 student uprising in Paris and all over the world; or the Sexual Revolution that ran parallel to this and gave rise to the radical Feminist movement; or in the Marxist manner to point to economic factors, such as the shift from Fordism to post-Fordism in management and production; or alternatively, to accuse the new media revolution of television; or to place the blame upon any of the other external social factors favoured by different sociologists. Undoubtedly all of these played a part, but it seems more germane to the issue in this context to place the major weight of responsibility on internal factors to do with the changing nature of the university as a whole and how that determined specific transformations in the production of knowledge in specific fields within it.

Section II – The failure of criticism in academia A clear prefiguration of the future fate of literary and art criticism in the universities is provided by the past history of Classics. It is a historical irony of academia that Classics lost out to criticism just as criticism is now losing out to other disciplines. During the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, modern languages and literatures or Literature displaced Classics, despite the fierce resistance of the classicists. Ultimately student numbers decided the issue, for more and more of them chose modern languages and literatures, especially those from the lower classes and women who were enrolling in increasing numbers and who had no background in ancient languages and literatures. From then on Classics was continually on the decline. By now it barely survives, as it is largely taught only in a few prestigious and usually elite universities, such as Oxford and Cambridge in England and the Ivy League in America, as well as Catholic universities and in theological seminaries and colleges, and even there, Classics is mainly taught in translation. There are various reasons why it is maintained in such places, mostly to do with traditional sentiments and with religion. So, while Classics was declining, Literature was enjoying unparalleled success. But this lasted

Literature and Criticism 13 only till around 1970, when gradually and almost imperceptibly Literature, too, began to decline. Student numbers have been dropping absolutely, and even far more as a proportion of the total student population. Staff numbers have correspondingly also been reduced. If this process continues for much longer, then inevitably Literature will soon find itself in the same position as Classics is in now, just the remnant of a once powerful field of study. Inside the university itself Literature, even more so than any other of the humanities, had to battle against the onslaught coming from the sciences and the more rigorous of the social sciences whose exponents accused it of being a useless discipline, unable to make any contribution to knowledge, such as they themselves were making. In an environment where “hard” knowledge and Method-driven research were the currency, the study of literature seemed to have little value and could easily be dispensed with, a view that administrators generally accepted and tended to act on whenever they thought they could do so without arousing too much opposition. Hence, there was a gradual decline in positions and research funding for Literature. There was also mounting internal opposition to Literature as more activist and politically correct exponents of the special studies and social sciences charged it with being irrelevant to the burning problems of the day, those of class, race and gender. This is in a general sense true, for Literature has no such propagandist utilitarian purpose or political goal. Some of the more activist of the literature professors pretended that they did have something to contribute to such social issues, though this was usually unconvincing. What none of these critics of criticism realized or tried to allow for is that Literature serves the higher goals of maintaining the culture of our civilization. Without it, civilization can no longer be sustained. We shall not be further concerned with these external attacks on Literature, though what makes them possible and seemingly plausible is the changed nature of the university which we shall discuss in Chapter 5. Here we shall only deal with what has happened inside Literature itself in the various departments of literary study. It is obvious that of late great changes have ensued. What these were like can be quickly gleaned by comparing two editions of the one anthology of critical writings, that of 1972 and that of 2008 of 20th Century Criticism, a textbook mainly intended for higher students of literature.8 The changes are vast, so much so that the discipline is almost beyond recognition at the later date. Of the 50 and 48 pieces, respectively, that feature in the two Readers, only three names remain the same. Clearly, something very drastic has occurred in 36 years. The three who survive are Freud, Raymond Williams and Roland Barthes. Freud remains intact because psychoanalysis is always relevant to literature. Williams is there because he was one of the initiators of Cultural Studies which was to play an ever-greater role in special interest studies in general. The inclusion of Barthes in the first edition is somewhat surprising at that early date, especially in Britain, and is due to the acute foresight of the editor David Lodge, who in his introduction to the

14  Literature and Criticism volume very presciently identified him as the harbinger of something that goes beyond criticism as then understood. Otherwise, all the other names have changed. And not only has there been a wholesale name change but also the countries where criticism pre-eminently takes place have changed. The scene has largely shifted from Britain to America with France acting as the main conduit of influence. In the edition of 1972, of the 50 entries, only 18 are American or Canadian, the rest are overwhelmingly British. In the edition of 2008, of the 48 entries, only 8 are British, the rest being American or French, usually French academics teaching in America. The change we have noted amounts to the near destruction of criticism and its displacement by three independent developments that gradually joined up and merged: Postmodernism, French Theory and special interest studies. Postmodernism first arose in American architecture, then spread to the other arts and eventually was utilized by the publishing houses as a general marketing label for any new kind of revisionist theoretical writing. French Theory sprouted in the intellectual avant-garde hothouse atmosphere of Paris and was taken up in elite American universities where it has remained ever since. Special interest studies arose first in Britain in the provincial universities such as Birmingham, where Cultural Studies was first institutionalized, and Warwick University at Coventry, where Feminism was first taught. All three were parallel developments in America, France and Britain in the 1960s and 1970s which at first did not have much to do with each other. But before too long all three came together in the universities, starting first in America and from there being exported to the rest of the academic world. We shall briefly outline the starting point of each before dealing with them more thoroughly separately in subsequent sections. Barthes was the first exponent of French Theory in relation to criticism. But he was a transitional figure who still plied the old trade of literary criticism in a recognizably traditional manner. He dealt with major literary works, but in his interpretation he began to depart very far from the procedures of traditional criticism, that of the analysis of form and style, interpretation of meaning and judgement of value.9 Instead he favoured what he called écriture, or writing, which José Guilherme Merquior explains as follows: He was indeed the main practitioner and proponent of creative criticism. In the exercise of this mode, the truth that great criticism is an art degenerates into the perverse idea that it may be creative writing shorn of the duty to further the objective interpretation (and no less objective explanation) of imaginative literature (Aristotle’s logos phantasticos).10 According to Merquior, Barthes was inspired to place the critic’s writing next to or even superior to that of the author being studied by extrapolating from the esoteric ideas to be found in the poetics of Mallarmé, Bataille and Blanchot, regarding a contentless, objectless art. Such ideas and writings were to exercise a no less significant influence on Foucault and Derrida who followed in

Literature and Criticism 15 Barthes’ footsteps. They also brought Nietzsche and Heidegger into that purely French formalistic intellectual context to generate varieties of French Theory very different from that of Barthes, usually considered a Structuralist, whereas the latter two came to be referred to as post-Structuralists. But the difference between them is not all that significant, for all three are exponents of the Parisian intellectual avant-garde mode of écriture. However, it was Foucault and Derrida who introduced French Theory to America, not Barthes, who never taught there, whereas the former two were regulars in the elite universities of the West Coast and the East Coast, respectively. It is crucial from the academic political point of view to realize that French Theory was from the start a matter of elite universities. In France, it derived from the École Normale Supérieure, where Derrida first taught; later he taught at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. In America, Derridean Deconstruction first took off from Yale, where it was housed in the Comparative Literature department headed by Paul de Man and Jeffrey Hartman who became Derrida’s collaborators in the proselytizing mission of transmitting it to all the other elite universities. The success of this can be gauged from the fact that so many of their pupils took up elite chairs, such as Jonathan Culler at Cornell and Frederic Jameson at Duke and many others elsewhere, including such faraway ones as Melbourne where Howard Felperin held the chair of English. At the same time on the opposite coast of America, Foucault began teaching at Berkeley, even while occupying his eminent position at the Collège de France. He, too, inspired a literary movement, that of the New Historicism under Stephen Greenblatt, which we shall discuss in the next chapter. Deconstruction and New Historicism followed quite different approaches and entered into an opposition that was furiously contested in America, just as the feud between Foucault and Derrida had aroused bitterness in Paris. But at bottom they were on the same side, in so far as both were different sides of French Theory. French Theory has from the very start been an affair of elites, of elite teachers for elite students at elite universities. Yet at the same time, it has cultivated a revolutionary discourse of subversion, transgression and reversal of privileged and dominant binaries. It is clear that this serves as an ideological cover for the reality of its hold on positions of academic power and its drive to further extend this power. It is conveyed through the charisma of the great masters, at whose feet anyone has to sit if he or she hopes to enter into the circle of exponents of this arcane and abstruse theoretical knowledge. It cannot just be acquired from books. Hence, a master-pupil passing on of knowledge and authority operates, a mode of transmission even more tightly controlled in America than the usual patron-client relations of academia in France. All this is well captured by John Guillory who refers himself to the theory of professionalization developed by the sociologist Magali Sarfatti Larson.11 He puts it as follows: Such charisma is always a “blending of personal and organizational prestige”. Yet within the ideology of professionalism, the charisma of

16  Literature and Criticism the master theorists appears to constitute a realm of absolute autonomy, and therefore, as we noted an “other scene” of politics. Nothing confirms this point more certainly than the mutation of the master theorists of the 1980s into “superstars”, into free agents of pure charisma. It is not difficult to see that the deployment of this category was driven by the interests of competitive university administrations, for whom the content of theories, subversive or otherwise, was largely irrelevant. What mattered was that the charisma of the master theorists could be converted into Bureaucratic prestige …. For the professoriate, it is only in the superstar as a form of celebrity that autonomy or free agency truly resides, an autonomy ratified by “horizontal upward mobility”.12 But not only are the administrators not interested in the content of theories, they are also not interested in whether such theories constitute genuine criticism or something else altogether. What is crucial to them is that the prestige of their elite universities should be maintained and if possible enhanced. French Theory with its charismatic superstar masters can do so much better than ordinary literary criticism. With its cachet of exclusivity, it is far better at attracting bright, ambitious but gullible students from all over the world, eager to be initiated into its intellectual mysteries through imbibing the mystique of its masters. This is as much true of British universities as of the American ones where this system was first perfected. Both Derrida and Foucault have established academic outposts in Britain, and Derrida has lectured at Oxford, not without arousing considerable controversy from the academic traditionalists. The contributions of British academics to the furtherance of French Theory in Britain can be gauged from the Reader on Deconstruction edited by Martin McQuillen.13 In contrast to French Theory, the system of special interest studies began in British universities largely as an affair of secondary universities and designed for students not considered first-class scholarly material. This is how Cultural Studies began at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University, one of the old Redbrick universities located in industrial regions which had seen better days. It was founded on an explicit Left-wing working-class agenda formulated by Richard Hogarth and Raymond Williams, followers of Leavis. It was dedicated to the study of popular and mass culture, a far from worthless undertaking and very necessary in the context of present times. Much the same is true of most of the other special interest studies, which at least in their initial stages were genuinely worthwhile projects. It is what happened to them later that became so damaging and played into the hands of those who attacked literary criticism. In the view of the exponents of Cultural Studies, literary criticism came to be held to be elitist and against popular culture, and so by extension anti-working class, which is, of course, absurd. But under the later leadership of Stuart Hall such antagonistic views were, indeed, entertained. From Birmingham cultural studies was transferred to Santa Barbara, where

Literature and Criticism 17 Dick Hebdige, an alumnus of the Birmingham Centre, had a post. However, America already had its own exponents, such as Robert Scholes at Brown, who were pushing in the same general direction. Women’s Studies also had English origins at the hand of Germaine Greer, an Australian who graduated from Cambridge, and Kate Millet, an American who graduated from Oxford. Both published their bestselling books in 1970. Both were trained in literature departments and carried over their literary bent into their work on feminist issues. However, it was not long before Women’s Studies was infused with the antinomian spirit of French Theory. This began in Paris at around the same time as its English origins with Hélène Cixous, a close associate of Derrida, and Luce Irigaray, a follower of Lacan, who were joined by Julie Kristeva, a friend of Barthes. In this far more intellectually heady form, the subject was transferred to America through the usual Yale conduits. At present Judith Butler, a graduate of Yale’s Comparative Literature, has emerged as the doyenne of the field. The unfortunate consequence of this is that women students, who used to form the bulk of those enrolling in English and Modern Languages departments, have now been deflected to Women’s Studies, if not further afield to Gender Studies or Queer Theory. The growth of the special interest studies from the 1970s onwards has been almost exponential; there are now literally dozens of such fields. Many directly compete with Literature, such as Cinema studies, Media studies, Communications studies, and many more; others such as post-colonial studies (PCSs) do so indirectly. Most cluster around the triad of class, race and gender. There are numerous studies that cater to all kinds of minority interests, and quite a few that are concerned with every variety of sexual preference. One of these latter cases, Queer Theory, has been dominated by Foucaultians, though Deconstruction at the hands of Judith Butler also plays a major role in this field. Literature or literary criticism might not survive the combined onslaught of French Theory, Postmodernism and the various special interest studies that bear on literary subjects and cultural issues in general. It is clearly on its way out, just like its predecessor Classics. A sure sign of that fact is that it is itself now being regarded as a special interest study, no more worthy of attention or regard than any other of the score or more in the same league, as it were. Jeremy Bentham once sardonically declared that “the quantity of pleasure being equal”, poetry is no better than the game of push pin; the truth of this has now in a way been vindicated in the universities. But what students now read poetry, anyway, though most play games that are the electronic equivalents of push pin. But even if they are superior to push pin, special interest studies do not measure up to the study of poetry which they have now displaced. Once again, we will turn to a volume of collected essays in a Reader, which is the preferred method of delivering printed material to students who no longer read, in order to establish the validity of the above claim, this time to The Sage Handbook of Cultural Analysis.14 Of 33 articles dealing with

18  Literature and Criticism special interest fields in culture alone, there is but one devoted to literary studies, the one by James English. It is clear from this alone that literary criticism has been usurped by a host of special interest studies, including some not even mentioned in this volume, such as translation studies, which has taken over from Comparative Literature. But English is hardly fazed by this at all. Paradoxically, he takes a perverse pride in the fact that a large proportion of the faculty in special interest studies have been trained in Literature: “The large number of contributors, who are now or have been at some time in their careers members of English or Comparative Literature faculties is an index of literature’s enduringly powerful position within the disciplinary spaces where cultural theory and analysis are practiced”.15 It somehow does not occur to him that the fact that many people educated in literature are no longer able to teach it is an index of just the opposite of what he claims it to be. He does not consider it highly ironic that “here, as in the profession at large, there seem to be many literature professors, but scarcely any of them writing about literature”.16 It is surely a sad fact that they have to resort to teaching everything but literature, which is no longer their metier, even though they were trained for this purpose. What they are concerned with, according to English, is “the range of possible objects of scholarly study that include forms of art more likely to satisfy the demands for curriculum relevance that had been articulated in the 1960s, and more closely associated with the younger and somewhat less homogeneous Literature faculties that had emerged during the period of the postwar higher-education expansion”.17 This is widely referred to as the “cultural turn” that started with the proliferation of special interest studies in the universities. It is to these that the younger faculty trained in Literature turned for job opportunities and career prospects with greater prestige. This is what English takes as evidence that “literary study is far from having withered or faded away”, for the following reason: It has imposed its practices, its politics and its personnel with startling effectiveness. A look at the mastheads of humanities centres, centres for cultural study and cultural history, Africana or Latino or generalised ethnic studies, or for women’s studies or gay and lesbian studies, for new media studies or transnational or global studies, turns up a disproportionate number of literature professors as does a survey of the contents pages of interdisciplinary journals in which the work produced in such centres is published.18 Unfortunately, the practices that these policies imported into special interest studies centres have been far from conducive to their effectiveness in the goals they set themselves. As we have already noted, this has led to the proliferation of the jargon of French Theory and other such barely comprehensible “critical” discourses, which only the elite know how to deploy. Clearly, the “politics” they practice is that of elite exclusiveness, for it is the

Literature and Criticism 19 graduates of the elite universities who have captured the bulk of leading positions in these centres of special interest studies. English does allow that there is still a place for literary criticism, but admits that only in “spaces of special privilege where private endowments supplement high tuition fees”, is it “possible to garner support for both the narrow, essentially departmental base of literary study and for the new interdisciplinary programmes and centres with which many literary scholars are now more closely affiliated”.19 Thus he concludes: “It may be that over the coming decades literary study will by and large dissolve into emergent forms of post-disciplinary knowledge production, while at the same time reconstituting itself in a handful of increasingly elevated locations around a renewed investment in the literary object”.20 In other words, the study of literature is only for the children of the very wealthy, for “already there is some indication that the wealthiest institutions are the ones where literature is being given its firmest and narrowest respectification (sic) …”.21 Literature and Classics will soon be in the same boat together, both providing tuition for small, privileged affluent elites who for some obscure reason, that few others share, believe it desirable to study antiquated subjects. But the more popular special interest studies – originally intended for students coming from the lower classes and from the minorities – have not fared much better either. They, too, have often fallen into the hands of those who graduate from the elite universities. For they are the only ones qualified to teach Theory; not necessarily French Theory, but also other variants of what has collectively become known as Critical Theory, of which the Frankfurt School version is but one instance together with many other varieties of Cultural Marxism. Marxism is, of course, a long-standing critical tradition taking numerous forms which we cannot fully discuss here. We will only be concerned with that version called Cultural Marxism that bears directly on the Critical Theory current in special interest studies. By Cultural Marxism, we mean the kind of Marxism that has lost its original revolutionary ideology, that is no longer much concerned with economics or politics, and that functions purely as cultural critique. Academics in the humanities and in some of the social sciences are its sole exponents, for it is no longer allied to any workers’ movement or political party. It has become purely an academic subject in the universities. Critical Theory in its omnibus sense has arisen as an amalgamation of Cultural Marxism with semiotics and semiology, Structuralism and post-Structuralism, and all the varieties of French Theory, including Derridean Deconstruction and Foucaultian discourse. It has become a dense theoretical mishmash of abstract terms and concepts laced with technical locutions and professional terminology. If the curse of Babel was the dispersal of the one original language into many tongues no longer comprehensible to each other, then the curse of Theory is the curse of Babel backwards: the agglomeration and agglutination of many distinct and in themselves comprehensible languages into the one confused jargon, which

20  Literature and Criticism we can call Theorybabble, for short. Once Theorybabble enters into any subject, it renders it completely opaque, obscure and impenetrable to any but the exponents of this diction who delude themselves that they understand it. These are invariably the elite academics who have acquired it in the elite universities. It becomes their forte which no others can dispute, and frequently their sole claim to advancement and fame. In the progress of language from the tower of Babel to the ivory towers of today, it has regressively degenerated from the many tongues to the one babble. Theorybabble has even invaded that most “proletarian” of all the special interest studies, Cultural Studies in the original Birmingham Centre sense. What this amounts to is explained by Anthony Easthope: While the field of literary studies from its inception took as its exclusive object of interest the literary canon, cultural studies has generally been concerned with what is left over, popular, or mass culture – newspapers, magazines, radio, film, television, popular song, and so on – following especially Raymond William’s argument in his Culture and Society: 1780-1950 that a proper study of culture should be concerned with not just part, but with the whole of cultural production.22 However, when the Birmingham Centre for Cotemporary Cultural Studies was set up it was not the whole of Cultural production that was studied but only that part of it that the word “contemporary” connotes. This does not include the literary canon, only popular or mass culture, that which the working class reads. One would have expected such a subject to be highly practical and to exclude Theorybabble. But it was not to be kept out and soon began to intrude, especially under the directorship of Stuart Hall. Marxism of various varieties, such as the Gramscian, Lukacscian and Frankfurt School modes, could hardly have been kept out, but they began to be mixed with the terms and theories that had nothing to do with any kind of Marxism, those drawn from Structuralism and post-Structuralism, together with Semiotics and much else besides. On top of that, the very distinction between high art and low art began to be challenged so that the latter was considered as good as the former. Any idea of standards of evaluation was abandoned, all was indifferently grist to the mill of Theorybabble. Why study Hamlet when James Bond is ever so much more relevant and “contemporary”. According to Easthope, the turning to “cultural criticism” in this sense was part of a general move away from literature in Britain in the 1970s: In Britain these changes followed particularly the initiatives worked through in the early 1970s in the area of Film Theory by Stephen Heath, Colin Mc Cabe and Jacqueline Rose, and others associated with the journal Screen, initiatives that soon became influential in other academic fields – in art history, literary studies proper and musicology, as well as in the social sciences, historical studies, and social psychology.23

Literature and Criticism 21 That all this involved Theorybabble is apparent from what Easthope goes on to say: The Screen project set out to theorize the “encounter of Marxism and psychoanalysis” in the terrain of semiotics (Heath, “Jaws”). In doing so it relied heavily on Louis Althusser’s essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus”, which in turn rests on Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic account of how the infant identifies itself in the mirror stage.24 It was the same in America where variants of Theorybabble emanated largely from Yale and other elite establishments. When radical exponents of Cultural Studies or other such special interest studies claim to take an oppositional stand against the university disciplines and values, what they really mean is that they wish to usurp them and take their place. Cultural Marxism, devoid of any revolutionary potential in society, becomes the perfect cover for seizing power in the academy. In fact, the march through the institutions that the radicals began in the 1970s has largely succeeded; they now command the academic high ground in the humanities and many of the social sciences. A typical and highly successful example of a radical who introduced Theorybabble into a number of special interest studies is Gayatri Spivak. A product of Yale Comparative Literature and an exponent of Deconstruction, who translated Derrida’s De la grammatologie, she “has brought her knowledge of deconstruction to bear on feminism and cultural studies, particularly on issues in colonialism and phallocentrism”, according to J. Douglas Kneale.25 She has no difficulty combining “phallocentrism”, a favourite item of feminist jargon, with Marxism for “as her essays demonstrate, deconstruction and Marxism can intersect profitably, though not entirely rigorously, in her analysis of hierarchies, opposition and power structures about which the two methodologies may have something to teach each other”.26 Thus Cultural Marxism and Heideggerian philosophy, of which Deconstruction is a variant, come together quite effortlessly in Theorybabble; that they do so “profitably” is manifest in Spivak’s stellar career. Spivak has also made a great contribution to PCS, where the founding text is Edward Said’s Orientalism, which we shall discuss in the next chapter. Basing themselves on the questionable thesis expounded in that book, post-colonial authors have called into question the whole canon of Western literature, not to speak of Western civilization altogether. Both have been found wanting in many respects. Thus, Georg Gugelberger takes it as axiomatic that PCS “obviously has to question the genesis of the Western canon. In other words, PCS is instrumental in curriculum debates and demands a multicultural curriculum. It also perceives the former discipline as participating in the colonizing process and is therefore bound to cross borders and be interdisciplinary”.27 Thus in the name of the ex-colonial people, the

22  Literature and Criticism advocates of PCS are demanding nothing less than the dismantling of the Western university humanities curriculum and replacing it with a range of PCS and ethnic minority studies, which, they claim, actually represent the majority: PCS is not a discipline but a distinctive problematic that can be described as an abstract combination of all the problems inherent in such newly emerging fields as minority discourse, Latin American studies, African studies, Caribbean studies, Third World studies, (as the comparative umbrella term) Gastarbeiterliteratur, Chicano Studies, and so on; all of which participate in the significant and overdue recognition that hegemonic Western (Euro-American) studies have been unduly overprivileged for political reasons ….28 Those voicing such demands are, of course, Westernized university-trained intellectuals, mostly brought up under the old dispensation against which they are now agitating. Kwame Anthony Appiah states that “postcoloniality is the condition of what we might ingenuously call a comprador intelligentsia: a relatively small Western-style, Western-trained group of writers and thinkers who mediate the trade in cultural commodities of world capitalism at the periphery”.29 In effect, what Appiah is saying is that PCS is a power struggle of aspiring scholars in the Western elite universities in their battles against the upholders of the Western canon and the Western university in general. This has nothing to do with and has nothing to offer to the actual post-colonial countries and the real problems they are confronting in a globalized competitive world. In fact, what they are advocating is detrimental to the struggles of such people, as Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay claim: There is little reason to believe that previously colonized people have any use for postcolonial theory or decolonialization that argues that maths is a tool of Western imperialism, that sees alphabetical literacy as colonial technology and postcolonial appropriation, that views research as the production of meta-texts of colonial knowledge ….30 Pluckrose and Lindsay argue in general that special interest studies courses when pursued in this kind of radical vein are detrimental to the very cause that they purportedly advocate. In fact, Spivak is a key instance of their case. She is an elite Western scholar, who has a foot in many special interest studies, for she has also been very active in gender studies, which is a large complex of studies pertaining to various genders; among which women’s studies is the oldest and most popular. Deconstruction has a particularly large stake in women’s studies; Derrida was personally very close to its French founders, Cixous, Irigaray and Kristeva.

Literature and Criticism 23 His “deconstruction of phallocentrism” has been a hallmark of this speciality. At present Butler is the leading exponent of Theorybabble in this rapidly proliferating field. Gay and Lesbian studies or so-called Queer studies is one of its offshoots. The latter considers itself more of a political movement than a sexual liberation one. It has given rise to lesbian criticism, which, according to Bonnie Zimmerman, originates “in the political theory and movement of lesbian feminism, itself an outgrowth of women’s liberation and gay liberation movements”.31 One of its main representatives is Adrienne Rich, but as an older poet, she is mercifully free of Theorybabble. Literary critics have played an inordinately large role in most of the special interest studies. The main reason for this is not their knowledge of literature, but rather, according to the historian Peter Burke, that “they are more open to theory than (say) historians are. Alternatively, it might be claimed that literary critics were looking for a new activity following the crisis of the canon – that is, the loss of faith in the educational curriculum based on a selection of ‘classic’ texts: most of them written by DWM (dead white males)”.32 In fact, dead white males are the bugbear of nearly all the special interest studies that are intent on class, race or gender. In so far as they are dead, and most often long dead, white males are dismissed as part of history and thus no longer relevant to current concerns. History itself is the realm of the dead, an underworld that nobody wishes to enter, apart from a few antiquarian ghosts from the past. In so far as they were white, they are branded as colonialists and racists; and even if not themselves slave traders or slave owners, they profited from those who were. In any case, so the grievances argument goes, they were part of Western hegemony over the rest of the world, members of a civilization that suppressed all others. In so far as they were males, and consequently phallocentric, they were exponents of a patriarchal culture dedicated to the repression of women, gays and lesbians. This was a culture that glorified male heroism in war and warrior virtues such as courage and perseverance. Hence who now, given these strictures and the prevailing precepts of political correctness, would choose to be preoccupied with a dead white male, even if his name happens to be William Shakespeare? The castigation of dead white males seems to older scholars like a juvenile joke, not something to be taken seriously. But no matter how trivial it might seem, there are serious consequences involved that touch on the way things are studied, or rather not studied and neglected in Western universities. What is at stake is the very survival of the humanities and most of the social sciences in the academic system of the future, once special interest studies and Theorybabble have become all pervasive. Hence it is essential to remove it from serious intellectual consideration, to lay it to rest as dead and finished, as an unfortunate irrationalist phase in academia which one day, one hopes, will be forgotten by everyone except for historians of outlandish movements and ideas.

24  Literature and Criticism

Section III – Theorybabble The history of Theorybabble is now well-known to everyone and is an often-told story that need not preoccupy us unduly. It arose in the hothouse atmosphere of the avant-gardist intellectual circles of Paris in the 1960s and 1970s. But it only really flourished in the American elite universities of the 1980s and 1990s. Since then, it has become much more widespread, though not in Paris itself where it has more or less petered out. We have already touched on its origins by reference to Barthes, the thinker who first introduced it into literary criticism. In America, this was taken up and furthered by Derrida in the form of Deconstruction, a literaryphilosophical movement that originated in the Comparative Literature department at Yale. We shall also go on to touch briefly on Foucault, but shall deal with his theories much more thoroughly in the next chapter by reference to history and the social sciences where his work more properly belongs. The third major figure, Francois Lyotard, will also be briefly discussed, particularly in relation to his definition of Postmodernism. Theorybabble in its deconstructivist and other forms has had a particularly deleterious influence on literary criticism. This is because it disregards and discounts the most fundamental features of literary works – their uniqueness and originality. Criticism at its best is the elucidation of these specific characteristics of usually great literary works. The critic is an interpreter of a pre-existing work, and therefore the servant of the text. For criticism to be successful and illuminating of the work, the critic must place himself or herself in a subordinate position in relation to the work and its author. And this, as we have seen, Barthes rules out by claiming that the critics’ écriture is a form of creative writing that parallels and equals the author’s writing. By placing himself or herself on the same level as the author, the Barthian critic cannot elicit from the work what it uniquely has to offer and makes it different from every other work. The critic’s own écriture will always be the same no matter what works it deals with, whereas the works themselves are inherently different. These differences are a function of the uniqueness of each one, which is what proper criticism aims to bring out and elucidate. Every significant work is unique in the sense that no two such works carry an identical meaning – if they did, they would be merely variants of the one work – and that meaning, specific to each true work, is itself some kind of truth that cannot be generalized from one work to another. Criticism is always, therefore, ultimately specific and devoid of generalizations. Nevertheless, the truth of a work is not internal to itself, as if it were its own hermetic secret, but refers itself outside the work to some aspect of reality, usually the human condition of life and death within a specific historical culture. This is the reason that this truth is accessible to critics and can be shared with all others who inhabit or have entry to that culture or can come to imaginatively appreciate it.

Literature and Criticism 25 It is these presuppositions of criticism that Barthian criticism and every other Theorybabble disregards and discounts. It considers the text to be a mere pretext for expounding its own terms and ideas, a mere blank screen for projecting its own image. The work as pre-text becomes literally the text prior to the critical text which becomes the real text taking the place of the original text. Some even considered it as the superior text, as when Stanley Fish took his friend Geoffrey Hartman to be “the Wordsworth of our time”, and as such capable of taking the place of Wordsworth himself. Thus, the work itself becomes like a mirror in which the critic sees only a reflection of the variation of French Theory held up to it. This is the reason that all the so-called readings of different works sound so very much alike. The technique of “reading against the grain” really means imposing on quite other works the same critical terms and forcing them by a kind of “interpretative violence”, which is really a violation, onto the work itself. Not only is it impossible to interpret single works in this way, it makes it also impossible to compare different works to each other or to make a critical assessment of a given body of works. To do so calls for comparative studies and the exercise of evaluative judgement. Valuation is precisely what so-called reading carried out in terms of French Theory is designed to avoid so as to bypass the need for critical judgement. Judgement has to be exercised not only in respect of valuation but also in respect of analysis and interpretation, which together are the triad of essential functions of criticism.33 These functions must be validated, as far as possible cooperatively through debate and the reaching of agreement among reputable critics, which is the closest criticism can come to objectivity. This notion of critical consensus in art is very different from that in science, but it, too, is a matter of exercising a rational procedure for the negotiation of differences and disagreements. This process does not require agreement in everything, just minimal agreement to disagree and carry on the debate, rather than ending in mutual incomprehension and bafflement, usually the prelude for coming to blows. French Theory avoids such issues of judgement and validation in criticism by applying the blanket term “reading” and rejecting any reference to “truth”, “validity”, “rationality” or even “reference” itself. In principle, this should make any kind of discourse impossible, but in practice, it has proved no bar to the incessant production of “readings” couched in the appropriate Theory jargon. All the celebrated masters of French Theory have agitated vociferously against these elementary conditions of discourse, which are basic to the formation of the smallest unit of discourse – the sentence itself. In what follows we shall seek to show that without reference to “truth”, “validity”, “rationality” and “reference” it is not possible to account for the formation of meaningful sentences as assertions or propositions capable of being validated as true or false. The explanation as to why this is so belongs to the science of logic, for which the masters of French Theory have no regard whatever, preferring to remain in the sphere of linguistics

26  Literature and Criticism and semiotics, that is, the theory of signs which are pre-logical and so prior to the formation of sentences. With the sentence we enter another dimension of meaning, one higher than that of the sign; and with discourse or argumentation a still further level of logic is reached. All this was already initially spelt out by Aristotle and every major logician since, such as Frege or Russell, has built on these Aristotelian foundations. But the maîtres penseurs have apparently not read any Aristotle. But at least one linguist they should have consulted, for he lived literally next door, had read Aristotle and was aware that linguistics stops short of logic, namely Émile Benveniste whose major work was published in 1966, prior to most of those of French Theory.34 Merquior takes full note of Benveniste’s work and spells out its consequences for criticism: For, as Benveniste saw, in linguistic analysis, as soon as we get to the level of the sentence, we enter the realm of what lies outside language. Sentence meaning implies reference to the discourse situation. Logically speaking, this peculiarity should have forbidden from the very start every attempt to provide: a b

A “linguistics of literariness” based on the phonological model of finite units and a few rules of exclusion and combination; An ET-phobic [Extra-Textuality] theory of literature, since the full account of literature requires a semiotics of discourse (and hence of reference), and not just a semiotics of language.35

Unfortunately, Merquior has inadvertently slipped up in his terminology for there cannot be such a thing as a “semiotics of discourse” but only a logic of discourse. Semiotics is a science that can account for signs and codes, but falls far short of being able to deal with discourse which requires sentences and arguments. However, Benveniste was aware of this, for he carefully distinguished between levels of linguistic analysis. Barthes, however, was not, as Geoffrey Strickland, whom Merquior quotes, shows: In his well-known essay “Analyse de structure des récits” (Communications, 1966), Barthes contends that “the same formal organization (sic) most probably governs all semiotic systems, whatever their substance and dimensions”. This was written in the teeth of Benveniste’s ‘levels’ essay, to which Barthes actually refers to justify the – thoroughly opposite – view just quoted.36 It was Barthes more than anyone else who began this process of depriving literary language, or any other for that matter, of any “truth”, “validity”, “rationality” or “reference”, basing himself on a Mallarméan poetics of a purely objectless, contentless and “pure” language, a view which he sought

Literature and Criticism 27 to back up by reference to formalistic theories of linguistics and semiotics, as Merquior demonstrates. For such a view of a pure language, there can be no truth, or validity, or rationality or reference. Hence, all the critic can do is to accompany the author’s written text with an écriture which is a parallel text that doubles the original one, a kind of tautological reinscription of the original literary language into the language of criticism. According to Merquior, Barthes is the originator of the games that French Theory exponents have continued to play ever since: Indeed, if the history of the nouvelle critique may be told largely in terms of the eclipse of meaning and the loss of reference, this is, to a great extent, Barthes’ fault. Nobody else, not even Jakobson, encouraged so many to believe that “meaning is nothing but the possibility of transcoding” regardless of any reference to something beyond (though not exactly outside) language and the languages of culture; no one was this reckless in offering groundless suggestions that “generative” models could be drawn for literature as well as language; no other critic was so prodigal in giving his blessing to the misfired endeavour of narratology to establish an algebra of story-telling which was oblivious to the major differences between narratives in their degree of artistry and their moral scope or moral depth.37 But no matter how right and thorough Merquior is in denouncing Barthes and his ilk in French Theory, he has still not gone far enough. He is still somewhat chary of the idea that there is a reality outside language or culture for that matter, for he qualifies his view of reference when he states that meaning is not independent of “any reference to something beyond (though not necessarily outside) language and the languages of culture”. But this is precisely what meaning is if it is taken in Frege’s terminology as “reference” in opposition to “sense”, that is, as Bedeutung, in contrast to Sinn. The sense (Sinn) of the sentence “the cat is on the mat” can be understood without knowing whether it is true or false, namely, whether its reference (Bedeutung) to a specific cat or mat on the specific occasion of utterance in fact holds good or fails to do so. To establish its truth or falsity one actually needs to go and look and possibly to stroke the animal to make sure that it is not an illusion. This going and looking and stroking are surely outside language, and so basic as to be outside even the “languages of culture” that Merquior refers to (though it is far from clear what that may mean or whether culture can be embraced within any kind of language).38 There are such things as the practical realities of human life and the environment which exist prior to any language and on which both language and culture depend. For without such ordinary actions as going and looking and stroking, it would be impossible to establish the truth or falsehood of any sentence, as of any discourse or any science. This is precisely what empirical verification or falsification means, for

28  Literature and Criticism that is simply the methodical exercise of going and looking and stroking called experimentation. Derrida’s portentous proclamation il n’ y a pas hors de text must be shown up for the pretentious nonsense it really is, unless, per impossibile, one were to hold that the whole world is a text, as some kind of “book of Nature”. Only on this assumption, that everything in the world is treated as text, does this begin to make some sense. This is, indeed, the position into which Barthes and his disciples, such as Umberto Eco, as well as the more extreme of the semioticians fell. Thus, on this view battles are texts, and gymnastic exercises are texts, and markets are texts, and all other performances and activities are also texts. Thus, even going and looking and stroking can also be taken as text. Hence, there is nothing outside some text or other. This is a useful view for proponents of extreme semiosis for it means that everything can be and needs to be given a “reading” and that the semiotic empire can extend as far as “readings” can be given – imperium sine fine – but what is at stake is the academic empire, of course. But it is not only the cabbalistically-minded Derrida who is prone to such denials of truth and rationality, the much more sober-minded Foucault falls into such postures as well. His anti-empiricist formalism gets the better of him when he abjures all reference to truth in his account of scientific discourse: To analyse a discursive formation is to weigh the “value” of statements, a value that is not defined by their truth, that is not gauged by a secret context, but which characterizes their place, their capacity for articulation and exchange, their possibility of transformation, not only in the economy of discourse, but more generally in the administration of scarce resources.39 Foucault takes the expression “economy of discourse” in a quite literal sense, for he has evidently assimilated statements to money in his “economy of discourse”. Money, of course, does not have to be true or false, or even grammatical or ungrammatical. Its meaning lies solely in its practical utility as a medium of exchange. To “weigh the ‘value’ of statements” only makes sense if statements are treated as bullion whose value is, indeed, determined by weight. The rest of the extract takes further this “economic” model of discourse and leads to obvious absurdities. The capacity of statements for “articulation and exchange” makes sense for money but scarcely for statements. Their apparent “possibility for transformation … in the administration of scarce resources” makes no sense whatever for it yokes together a term that applies to language and not to money (“articulation”) with one that applies to money and not to language (“exchange”). What kind of exchange relations can statements enter into? He compounds this confusion of categories, of logic with economics, when he goes on to apply to statements an apparent “possibility of transformation … in the administration

Literature and Criticism 29 of scarce resources”. This way of putting it gives the game away completely for there is no such thing as “scarce resources” in statements or language in general. Language does not lack for statements; we can make up as many as we like ad infinitum without language becoming any the poorer for it. In short, the economistic and productive model does not apply to language or to logic and Foucault resorts to it only to omit logic altogether so as to deny truth and rationality. It is not much better with Foucault’s later denial of truth and logic by a resort to power. Truth is interpreted as a “will to truth” and this in turn is taken as a species of the “will to power”. Foucault follows Nietzsche and takes literally Bacon’s assertion that “truth is power”, transforming a pragmatic adage, like, Franklin’s “time is money”, into an identity. But to identify truth with power in any form whatever is to deny the autonomy of logic as providing norms of validity that do not translate into any other terms, whether this be power or production or utility or anything else. It is the first step in the direction of a general irrationalism into which Nietzsche fell and Foucault at times in his very variegated career was to stumble into as well. For there is no consistency in Foucault’s development. What is true of his earlier Nietzschean phase does not necessarily hold for his later “liberal” period when he came closer to Habermas’ rationalistic Enlightenment philosophy. However, the chief expositor of irrationalist mysticism masquerading as philosophy was not Foucault but Derrida. His Deconstruction is a tissue of pretences and deceptions in which it is difficult to tell what are jokes and puns and what are sober statements. Sobriety is not a virtue that Derrida or his followers espouse, they are far more fascinated by the intoxication of his prose. It is a style of writing that Derrida learned from Lacan. Lacan developed it not to interpret dreams, as Freud might have done, but to write in a dream-like way, utilizing the metaphoric and metonymic resources of dream-language. To this so-called language, Lacan applied the Saussurean principles of linguistics on the dubious assumption that “the unconscious is structured like a language”. Derrida took over this assumption but inverted it to “language is structured like the unconscious”. Thus, whatever Lacan referred to in his interpretation of the unconscious, Derrida applied to his interpretation of language. Lacan took over from Saussure the opposition of signifier to signified in the analysis of the sign, but totally against Saussure he went on to make the signified a function of the signifier, as Merquior explains: The Lacanian “law of the Signifier” stems from the alleged “incessant sliding of the signified under the signifier” [Lacan, Écrits, p. 154]. But this is to assert the primacy of the signifier in a spirit utterly foreign to Saussure’s sober polarity: with Lacan the signified goes overboard and the polarity is destroyed. Thus, ultimately the unconscious is no language – it is just one of the faces of the linguistic coin, obscurely endowed with a dense, dim margin of symbolic meaning. No wonder

30  Literature and Criticism that Lacan was so keen on the poetics and ontology of absence – on Mallarmé and Heidegger.40 Derrida followed Lacan in all this to the letter, but it was the letter as opposed to the spirit, namely, signifiers with no signifieds. As opposed to the Saussurean view, according to which language is made up of signs combining signifiers with signifieds, according to Derrida language is a matter of signs in which only the signifiers are present, the signifieds have somehow been elided through the doctrine that there is no reference. And these signs that constitute Saussurean langue never enter into any Saussurean parole. It is, as Hamlet states, all “words, words, words” with no meaning or matter and not addressed to anybody for any purpose. Derrida, like Lacan, was also very taken with Mallarmé and Heidegger and their ideas of absence, for it is presence that he shunned. Presence somehow stood in for the metaphysics that he attacked, yet continued to practise in the negative mode, with all the ambiguities of present-absence and absent-presence. Thus, in place of Heidegger’s all-inclusive Being, Derrida placed all his faith on Différance (a deliberate misspelling of différence) as a non-comparative abstraction or figure which he could trope as he liked. It became a kind of Deus Absconditus in his pseudo-theology. Under this one figure, or really a multi-textual pun, he could bring together all his favourite thinkers who affirmed one kind of difference or another, namely, Nietzsche, Saussure, Freud, Heidegger and Levinas. Robert Bernasconi reports on a lecture he gave right at the start of his illustrious career which confirms this: The lecture “La différance” was delivered to the Société Française de philosophie in 1968. In a summary provided on that occasion, Derrida records how the nonword or nonscript différance assembles “the juncture of what has been most decisively inscribed in the thought of what we conveniently call our ‘epoch’”. He names in this regard five thinkers and certain ideas associated with them: “the difference of forces in Nietzsche, Saussure’s principle of semiological difference, differing as the possibility of facilitative impression and delayed effect in Freud, difference in the irreducibility of the trace of the other in Levinas, and the ontic-ontological difference in Heidegger”.41 If the magic word “différance” can assemble all that, then one can only cry out in jubilation “vive la différance” as the old joke has it. But really it is all a play on words (misspelled or not), a play with words. The fundamental and irreconcilable differences between Nietzsche, Saussure, Freud, Levinas and Heidegger still remain where they always were – irreconcilable. Derrida loves to coin such magic words, just as children do, words that work for him like abracadabra to open all doors of thought. Another such is “trace”, which according to Bernasconi would do just as well as “différance” in collating his favourite thinkers: “The trace provides the focus of Derrida’s

Literature and Criticism 31 discussion of Saussure, Freud and Heidegger at least as much as the notion of différance does”.42 A third such is “writing”, or as he came to call it “archiécriture”, which obviously owes something to Barthes as well as to Cabbalistic mysticism. On this basis, he sets up the spurious binary opposition of writing to language and makes the false claim that ever since Plato language has been “privileged” over writing whereas the inverse ought to be the case, since writing is in some mystical way prior to language. As he puts it: “in all senses of the word, writing thus comprehends language”.43 Presumably, children write before they speak or cave-men wrote before they spoke, for otherwise it is difficult to see what “privileging” means in this context. Setting up such spurious binary oppositions, and claiming that throughout history the one has been in some peculiar sense “privileged” over the other, and then overturning the presumed dominance of the one over the other as an insurrectionary gesture of “liberation” – all this has been Derrida’s great signature accomplishment. Thus, one of his disciples, Barbara Johnson, puts it as follows: Speech is seen as immediacy, presence, life, and identity, whereas writing is seen as deferment, absence, death and difference. Speech is primary; writing secondary. Derrida calls this privileging of speech as self-present meaning “logocentrism”.44 Thus, the overcoming of “logocentrism” is seen as striking a blow against the shackles of logic and rationality that Western philosophy has imposed on minds since the very start of metaphysics. But in truth, to associate speech with one set of highly loaded terms and writing with the opposite set is nothing but the exercise of free verbal association. Setting up binary dualities, claiming that the one side is “privileged” over the other, and then inverting them, is the stock verbal game that Derrida plays. But it is no more than that for it carries no further weight. Derrida carries out numerous such exercises with other sets of terms. The male-female polarity is one of his favourites. Here he has endeared himself to Feminists by attacking Lacan who placed so much weight on the phallus as the primary signifier and followed Freud in defining femininity as the absence of a phallus. Derrida attacks this as “phallocentrism” which also implies “logocentrism” and Radical Feminists have taken it as the basis of their attack on patriarchy or male domination throughout the ages. Hence, it seems to them that if they can only deconstruct phallocentrism then women will be liberated from an age-old slavery. If only it were as easy as that, but playing with magic words will hardly change realities; for this much more practical solutions are required. In a similar way, by denouncing “ethnocentrism” Derrida has sought through deconstructivist means to place himself at the head of the so-called anti-colonialist struggle against a presumed Western domination of the Other. But here, too, the magic of words will change nothing, irrespective of what does or does not need changing.

32  Literature and Criticism Even though none of this has any significance in the world of real politics, it does matter in the world of academic politics. The followers of Derrida have been able to capture many of the special interest studies through takeover tactics which are well-known outside academia but have never been practised inside it. They have done so by inserting the language of Deconstruction into the much less sophisticated moral and political discourses that previously prevailed. They seem to be offering a new type of philosophical profundity that no other discourse can match. It is certainly not possible to argue against them from any other point of view, so they can easily discomfit their critics. However, whether this will be of any benefit to the causes these special interest studies were set up to serve in the first place is to be doubted. The betrayal of criticism that Theorybabble has perpetrated is not the only one of its kind, there have been others as well, though it is by far the most extreme. Many humanistic disciplines and some social sciences have been attacked by Theorybabble. History has not been spared, though the damage to it has been better contained than elsewhere. How this has worked itself out we shall see in the next chapter.

Notes 1 Harry Redner, Aesthetic Life: The Past and Present of Artistic Cultures (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2007). 2 Umbro Apollonio, ed., Futurist Manifestos (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), 19–24. 3 James English, The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards and the Circulation of Cultural Value (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). 4 Ibid., 2–3. 5 Ibid., 250. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid., 251. 8 David Lodge, ed., 20th Century Criticism (London: Pearson Longman, 1972). See also David Lodge and Nigel Wood, eds., Modern Criticism and Theory (London: Routledge, 2008). 9 See Redner, op. cit., Book III, 319–478. 10 José Guilherme Merquior, From Paris to Prague: A Critique of Structuralist and Post-Structuralist Thought (London: Verso, 1986), 181. 11 John Guillory, “The Problem of Literary Canon formation”, in Critical Theory Since Plato, eds. Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle (Boston, MA: ThomsonWadsworth, 2005), 1502. 12 Ibid., 1502. 13 Martin McQuillen, ed., Deconstruction: A Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000). 14 Tony Bennett and John Frow, eds., The Sage Handbook of Cultural Analysis (London: Sage, 2008). 15 James English, “Literary Studies” in The Sage Handbook of Cultural Analysis, eds. Tony Bennett and John Frow, op. cit. 126. 16 Ibid., 127. 17 Ibid., 138. 18 Ibid., 141. 19 Ibid.

Literature and Criticism 33 2 0 Ibid., 142. 21 Ibid. 22 Anthony Easthope, “Cultural Studies: United Kingdom”, in Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism, eds. Martin Groden and Martin Kreiswirth (Baltimore MA: The John Hopkins Press, 1994), 176–179. 23 Ibid., 176. 24 Ibid. 25 Jamie Douglas Kneale, “Deconstruction” in Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism, op. cit., 190. 26 Ibid. 190. 27 George M. Gugelberger, “Post-Colonial Cultural Studies”, in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism, op. cit., 581–584. 28 Ibid., 582. 29 Ibid., 584. 30 Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, Cynical Theory: How Universities Made Everything about Race, Gender and Identity – and Why This Harms Everybody (London: Swift Press, 2020), 88. 31 Bonnie Zimmerman, “Gay Theory and Criticism: Lesbian”, in Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism, op. cit., 329. 32 Peter Burke, History and Social Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), 105. 33 See Redner, Aesthetic Life, op. cit. 34 Émile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics (Miami, FL: Miami University Press, 1971). 35 Merquior, From Prague to Paris, op. cit., 180. 36 Ibid., 181. See also Geoffrey Strickland, Structuralism or Criticism: Thoughts on How to Read (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 37 Ibid., 175. 38 See Harry Redner, Quintessence of Dust: The Science of Matter and the Philosophy of Mind (Leiden: Brill, 2020), ch. 3, 105–170. 39 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. Alan M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 120. 40 Ibid., 180. 41 Robert Bernasconi, “The Trace of Levinas in Derrida”, in Deconstruction: A Reader, ed. Martin McQuillan (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 431. 42 Ibid., 431. 43 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatry Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 7. 44 Barbara Johnson, “Writing”, in Literary Theory: An Anthology, eds. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan (Malden, MA and London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2017), 531.

Bibliography Apollonio, Umbro, ed. Futurist Manifestos. London: Thames and Hudson, 1973. Barthes, Roland. “Introduction á l’analyse structurale des récits”. In Communications, 8. Recherches sémiologiques: l’analyse structuralke du récit, 1–27, 1966. Bennett, Tony, and John Frow, eds. The Sage Handbook of Cultural Analysis. London: Sage, 2008. Benveniste, Emile. Problems in General Linguistics. Miami, FL: Miami University Press, 1971. Bernasconi, Robert. “The Trace of Levinas in Derrida”. In Deconstruction: A Reader, edited by Martin McQuillan, 431–442. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000.

34  Literature and Criticism Burke, Peter. History and Social Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatry Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. Easthope, Anthony. “Literacy into Cultural Studies”. In Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism, edited by Martin Groden and Martin Kreiswirth, 176–179. Baltimore, MD: The John Hopkins Press, 1994. English, James. The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards and the Circulation of Cultural Value. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Translated by Alan M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon, 1972. Gugelberger, George M. “Post-Colonial Cultural Studies”. In The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism, edited by Michael Groden and Martin Kreiswirth, 581–584. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. Guillory, John. “Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation”. In Critical Theory since Plato, edited by Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle, 1500–1508. Boston, MA: Thomson-Wadsworth, 2005. Johnson, Barbara. “Writing”. In Literary Theory: An Anthology, edited by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan, 528–535. Malden, MA and London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2017. Kneale, Jamie Douglas. “Deconstruction”. In Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism, edited by Martin Groden and Martin Kreiswirth, 185–191. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. Lessing, Gottfried Ephraim. Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766). Translated by Edward Allen McCormick. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984. Lodge, David, ed. 20th Century Criticism. London: Pearson Longman, 1972. Lodge, David and Nigel Wood, eds. Modern Criticism and Theory. London: Routledge, 2008. McQuillen, Martin, ed. Deconstruction: A Reader. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000. Merquior, José Guilherme. From Paris to Prague: A Critique of Structuralist and Post-Structuralist Thought. London: Verso, 1986. Pluckrose, Helen and James Lindsay. Cynical Theories: How Universities Made Everything about Race, Gender and Identity – and Why This Harms Everybody. London: Swift Press, 2020. Redner, Harry. Aesthetic Life: The Past and Present of Artistic Cultures. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2007. Redner, Harry. Quintessence of Dust: The Science of Matter and the Philosophy of Mind. Leiden: Brill, 2020. Strickland, Geoffrey. Structuralism or Criticism: Thoughts on How to Read. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Zimmerman, Bonnie. “Gay Theory and Criticism: Lesbian”. In Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism, edited by Martin Groden and Martin Kreiswirth, 329–331. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.

2

History The need for a new grand narrative

Section I – Schools of history By contrast to literature, history writing seems to be in a much better shape both inside and outside the university. There is no shortage of historical works in either; in fact, there is an almost superabundance of them. The presses put out yearly tens of thousands of books on all kinds of historical subjects. However, a large proportion of these are preoccupied with military history close to our own time. The Second World War and the Nazi regime in Germany are still of perennial interest both to lay readers, to students, and, going by what they publish in book form, to academic historians themselves. The First World War and the other wars of the twentieth century constitute another sizeable portion of historical writing. Apart from military history, there are biographies of famous people, again mainly concentrated on twentieth-century celebrities, and these account for the bulk of publications and draw most attention. Most of this can be considered history as entertainment. Discounting popular history, there is still a great deal of serious and sometimes outstanding historical work being produced. History in academia is therefore nowhere near the debilitated state of literature. Yet all is not altogether well there either. History, just like the social sciences, is now being subtly subverted, even if not openly challenged, by the new special interest studies courses that are taking over much of what history is designed to deal with in a much more serious and responsible way. It has not yet come to the point where anyone in academia declares that “history is bunk”, as Henry Ford once so memorably put it. But the practice of denouncing white males “dead”, comes very close to declaring history itself not worth bothering with. But as well as being attacked from below, by those who no longer have any historical traditions or historical knowledge, it is also attacked from above by super sophisticated theorists, the exponents of French Theory. History is, of course, not singled out for this negative attention for, as we have seen, this disrespect is even more prevalent in literary and artistic subjects; and as we shall see later, the so-called “softer” social sciences are also implicated. DOI: 10.4324/9781003355748-2

36  History Thus far history has been able to resist these attacks much better than many of the other humanities or some of the social sciences. But it, too, has suffered considerable damage. It is generally acknowledged that history is a humanity, not a science, so it cannot be expected to have the coherence or consistency of a unified science. In fact, history diversifies across all spheres of knowledge and can be conducted in a natural scientific, social scientific or humanistic manner. There are branches of history that are applied natural sciences, such as the history of palaeolithic peoples based on DNA research, or the history of diseases and the way they affect populations, and many more such. Every social science has its correlative history: there is sociological history or historical sociology, there is both economic history and the history of economics, political history and the history of politics, there is anthropological history, archaeological history, cultural history, linguistic history and many more. Historical sociology as a branch of history will preoccupy us towards the end of this chapter. But, on the other hand, history can also be a branch of literature, as, for example, literary history, the life stories of famous people, or narrative history of political movements, crucial events or campaigns. Such historical writing lends itself readily to epic, dramatic or novelistic treatment which can be done in a highly literary manner. History is not averse to rhetorical tropes and even now historians incorporate speeches and debates into their works in the manner of Thucydides. Any historical narrative can be seen as ultimately a form of storytelling so it can readily avail itself of structural patterning, plot sequences and literary forms. Thus, there are many ways of writing history and there are constant ongoing controversies as to which is the better way of doing so. Our brief and very provisional reply is that whatever might be the purpose for which historical research is undertaken, and to whomever historical writing is addressed, this determines how it is to be carried out. Values enter into the way in which history is done, though not necessarily into the doing of it. To concentrate on facts and scientific method is itself a value choice, but once this kind of approach is adopted, it can be carried out in a value-free way, even if in most contexts this will prove extremely limiting. Historians may argue that one kind of approach is the only true one, but those who do so are generally committed to a one-sided view of history. For there are always other aspects which require their own alternative approaches and are no less capable of yielding historical truth. However, in actual practice most historical research and writing falls somewhere between the humanities and social sciences, most often combining aspects drawn from both sources. Frequently it is a case of the research being conducted in a social scientific manner and the writing up of the findings in a more literary style. This has been a feature of the best history writing coming from the Annales School, the most important group of historians in the twentieth century – though they were not without their

History 37 critics, as we shall see. But this is not to say that history writing that lacks any literary qualities whatever is necessarily the poorer for it, since it might have the virtues of scientific exactitude. Alternatively, history writing that is all literature with very little science also has its place; though these days it is more for popular consumption. But in the nineteenth century, it was the most sought-after quality and we still read some of those works with that in mind. Frederick J. Teggart, the great American historian, said “History as traditionally practiced was a form of literature that recalled the past for each age anew, a depiction of events that recreated experience, not a generalizing science”.1 This view of history is by no means passé even now. Traditional history goes back long into the past. The Greek historians Herodotus and Thucydides are its founding fathers and the Roman historians Livy and Tacitus among many others continued this work. In the Christian era, the Bible, too, with its Providential view of history, played a major role, one that has been incorporated into Western historical writing at least since St Augustine. As with so much else in Western civilization, later writing on history has tended to be a combination of these two fundamental approaches, the Greco-Roman Classical and the Judeo-Christian Providential. It is important to note that no civilization had as extensive and developed a view of its own history as the Western. Its main rival is Chinese historical writing starting with Sima Qian’s The Grand Scribe’s Records (Shiji) dating to the time of Emperor Wudi (141–87 BCE), which set the pattern for all later Chinese historiography based on annals from the various dynasties and imperial reigns. Arab historiography is also well developed; such as that of Ibn Khaldūn, the author of the Bugaddimah. But strangely not so that of India, which never promoted any tradition of historical writing. Thus, for example, India produced remarkable art, but no art history.2 Why it is that India was averse to history is a difficult question to answer; most probably Hindu religious belief in the transmigration of souls, and the consequent view of life as ephemeral, played a part. However, even in the West history was not one of the traditional forms of learning. It played no role in the university curriculum during the medieval period and only featured later as part of Classics, that is, as ancient history. Modern history was not introduced into the university curriculum till the nineteenth century. In England, even though the Regius Professorship of Modern History was established at Oxford by George I in 1724, in fact, modern history was not part of the curriculum and the chair became little more than a sinecure. A fully autonomous Tripos (examination) in history was not established till 1875. Chairs in history and courses of historical study arrived much earlier in Germany and France. Leopold von Ranke became Professor of History in Berlin in 1825, and Jules Michelet became Maître de Conférence at the École Normale Supérieure in 1827. Chairs for other major historians followed apace, and, indeed, they constitute a stellar list of names. But history was still not very far removed from literature, despite Ranke’s famous asseveration to depict the past “wie es eigentlich gewesen war”.

38  History During the nineteenth-century history was not only literary in presentation, it was also closely tied in with politics, especially so in Germany in conformity with the aggressive nationalism of the new German Reich after 1871. A prominent example of this is the anti-Semitic historian Heinrich Treitschke, whose views assumed great importance during the Nazi era. It was not all that different in Britain where imperial interests served as a main instigation to historical writing. A prominent instance is Thomas Babington Macauley, a so-called Whig historian, long resident in India, who saw history as part of the British imperial venture involving the actions of heroes and villains. Later Lord Acton bristled at that kind of history writing. Gradually the realization emerged that history had to be freed both from literature and politics by being brought closer to science. But this idea was slow to develop and still slower to be realized. During most of the nineteenth century, there was as yet little thought given to conceiving of history as a science or seeing it in relation to the social sciences. The great exceptions to this were Marx and Engels and their Socialist successors who conceived of scientific history as a form of dialectical materialism, which was Marx’s inverted Hegelian idea of historical science. But it was completely extra-curricular, though destined to have a great effect on the later study of history in the universities during the twentieth century. The other scientific history approach was that of Hippolyte Taine – the founder of École Libre des Sciences Politiques – who based his idea of Positivist history on Comte’s Positivist sociology. In German academia, it was not till near the end of the century that Karl Lamprecht and Kurt Breysig argued for the introduction of an economic materialist approach to history, much to the consternation and fury of the traditional historians, such as the academically prestigious Georg von Below. If the course of historical scholarship had been largely a German prerogative in the nineteenth century, it gradually became a French one in the twentieth. The foundation of that transition was set by two critical developments that occurred at the turn of the twentieth century in France, as William Keylor explains: The first is the establishment of history as an academic discipline in the French university system between 1870 and 1914, and the second is the formation of the “scientific” school of history during the same period and the same institutional framework … A new generation of French historians succeeded in transforming the craft of history, which had formerly been an avocation of journalists, politicians, men of letters, and amateurs from all walks of life, into a scholarly discipline pursued by specialists who had been trained in and were subsequently employed by the state university system. It was this new group of specialists in the study of writing history that was responsible for severing the umbilical cord that had tied history to its two parent disciplines, literature and philosophy, thereby enabling it to hitch its wagon to the advancing juggernaut of science.3

History 39 As Keylor goes on to point out, there was a political purpose behind this after all: these men “expected history, the empirical science par excellence, to liberate French social thought from the straitjacket of formal philosophy and classical literature that had retarded its development during the nineteenth century, while German and Anglo-Saxon civilization was experiencing an enviable vitality”.4 But to achieve that aim they had to formulate a “universally acceptable definition of the historical method that would justify the institutionalization of history as an autonomous academic discipline”; and for this, they had to provide “persuasive proof that the historical profession possessed a distinctive epistemology appropriate to the study of man and society, and an assortment of methodological tools sufficiently different from those employed by the existing branches of humanistic scholarship to justify its claim to an independent status”.5 By the close of this period, ending with the First World War, French History had, indeed, attained an independent academic status and scientific standing with a methodological rigour to enable it to compete with the rising new discipline of sociology. But as practised by Charles-Victor Langlois and Charles Seignobos, it became trapped in its own Positivistic emphasis on factual research based on documentary evidence: “L’histoire se fait avec des documents”, as they put it. The foundation of the Annales school and journal in the 1920s by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, first in Strasbourg and then in Paris, was a liberating moment from this kind of myopic obsession with facts, as Keylor recounts: The new review was soon to restore France to the front rank of historical scholarship in the Western World by liberating French history from the positivist strictures and monographic proclivities of its recent past. It assembled historians, economists, sociologists, and other such scientists for an exchange of views on a broad range of substantive and methodological questions relating to historical problems.6 The new review started in 1929; it was entitled at first Annales d’histoire economique et sociale, but was renamed numerous times, becoming during the period 1946 to 1994 Annales: economies, sociétés, civilizations, and from 1994 on it was called Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales. As we shall show, the dropping of the term “civilizations” is indicative of what the school failed to achieve. The success of the journal was in no small measure due to the fact that though its contributors were strongly influenced by the Durkheimian approach, they benefited in no small measure from the disarray of the sociologists in the period following the First World War. Durkheim died during the war and many of his students perished in the war. The school “split into five sections, each dealing with a separate branch of knowledge”,

40  History according to Keylor, who explains how this worked to the advantage of the new historians: These centrifugal tendencies impeded the sociologists’ attempts to maintain a coherent point of view and more important, had the result that the better students in the social sciences tended to flock to other disciplines. Just as the sociologists had capitalized on the weaknesses of academic history in the pre-war era to advance their own professional ambitions, the historians became the beneficiaries of sociology’s crisis in the interwar decades.7 Nevertheless, the Durkheimians exercised a considerable influence on the founders of the Annales School which continued long after and is still very much alive. A key instance of this is the close collaboration between Bloch and Maurice Halbwachs, both in private and public, on the Durkheimian idea of collective memory. Bloch reviewed Halbwachs’ book on the subject. The theme was to play a long-term role in the later work of the Annalistes, as is brought out in the Introduction to an edited collection of articles on this topic by Jeffrey Olick, Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi and Daniel Levy.8 They write as follows: Both Bloch and Febvre took significant inspiration from the Durkheimian tradition represented long at hand by Halbwachs in underwriting what later came to be called “total history”, an approach that emphasized large structures and long-term transformations (the “long durée”) over events in the short term (the “conjuncture”). And their social-psychological emphasis on “ways of life” and “mentalities” – which gave rise to the vibrant “history of mentalities” of the 1960s and 1970s – was clearly related to Halbwachs’s emphasis on a social-psychological topic like memory as well as by Durkheimian ideas about “collective psychology”, their understanding of which was at least partly mediated by Halbwachs.9 A direct descendant of this interest in collective memory is Pierre Nora’s seven-volume work on lieux de mémoire, as well as so much else in memory studies, now a speciality in its own right as the Collective Memory Reader exemplifies. There are many reasons for the failure of Durkheimian sociology, including its own overreach in seeking to absorb psychology and other sciences, but its demise was catastrophic for sociology in general in France. Sociology never recovered in France, and this was at least partly due to the fact that the Annales school of history took its place. At the same time, the Annales historians had no time for German or American sociology and tended to be scathing of both varieties. Thus, for example, Braudel took no account of Weber’s voluminous work on economic life and capitalism,

History 41 and his colleagues were no more impressed by Weber’s other achievements. Consequently, Weber, Simmel and the other German sociologists were largely unknown in France, apart from a few exceptional individuals, such as Raymond Aron and Julien Freund. Foucault knew no Weber and came to regret this towards the end of his life, but by then it was too late to rectify this lack. Equally so, Parsons remained without any influence in France, as did most other American sociologists, till Pierre Bourdieu took an interest in American sociology as well as in Weber. This is not the place to recount the vicissitudes of the subsequent history of the Annales school or the numerous controversies swirling around it, as well as within it. There are a number of books on this subject.10 It is generally held that the history of the school falls into four periods or generations of historians. The first was that of the founders, Bloch and Febvre, who specialized in medieval and late modern French History, which remained a speciality of the school. The second, beginning in the post-Second World War period practised the total history of the long durée, and based itself as far as possible on quantitative data and strict methods; it featured such luminaries as Fernand Braudel, Ernest Labrousse, Georges Duby, Pierre Goubert, Robert Mandrou, Pierre Chanu and Jacques Le Goff. The third, starting around the 1970s, rebelled against the hard facts and structures of economy and society of their predecessors and turned instead to mentalities, or the subjective side of human existence, a theme that had already featured among the founders, as well as to detailed regional studies, later called “new history”, represented by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Francois Furet, Jacques Revel and Philippe Ariès. The main approach of the fourth period, from the 1990s onwards, is best represented by Roger Chartier, who has taken a cultural and linguistic turn focussing on cultural practices, such as the history of reading and writing, and the history of the book. There are also a number of others, such as Serge Gruzinski, who are without doubt outstanding historians. All in all, the Annales school is the most important school of historiography in the twentieth century, which we can dub French History for short. Obviously, the differences between these “generations” involved intense internal debates and disputes which it would be futile even to mention. There are a number of books and numerous articles on these matters, such as, for example, the excellent and informative survey of the contentions surrounding the so-called “critical turn” of the fourth generation during the 1990s by the Polish historiographer Tomasz Wislicz.11 Criticisms by outsiders both inside and outside France have not been lacking either. A prominent French critic is Francois Dosse whose book attacks New History for its turn to case studies which, he maintains, threatens to fragment any comprehensive approach to history into crumbs.12 A good example of an outsider critic is the Englishman Lawrence Stone who, as might be expected from this historical tradition, is averse to anything that goes against an individualizing approach.13

42  History However, we cannot forbear to point out a major omission in the Annales school that reflects its inability to deal with two crucial issues concerning the very twentieth-century period during which it flourished: the failure to address totalitarianism, and the consequent inability to deal with the issue of what was happening to European civilization. The gravamen of the first charge is, in fact, admitted by André Burguière, himself a member of the school: The increasingly overt tendency, on the part of those who revived the Annales after World War II, to privilege the study of economic and social structure (Labrousse) or even special structures (Braudel) was perceived by some historians as a flaw and an explanatory deficiency. In particular, specialists in contemporary history criticized the Annales for divesting actors of their responsibility and of supporting a demobilization of civic conscience by refusing to confront the most burning issues and tragic aspects of history.14 It was particularly remiss for the postwar members of the school not to raise the subject of Nazism in view of the fact that their founder, Bloch, had died as a resistance fighter and as a Jew. The Holocaust, too, received no attention from them. The whole subject of totalitarianism was almost taboo among them. There are many reasons for this interdiction, some understandable and excusable and others not so easily forgiven. They were more interested in large-scale social and spatial structures, such as pre-eminently Braudel’s study of the Mediterranean world, and avoided politics, especially during the contemporary period, as so much surface foam on the long waves and deep currents of history. But at the same time, they were subject to strong Communist influences, many of Labrousse’s students were members of the Party, then under Stalinist control, and the then prevailing Marxisante attitudes in French academia. As Burguière explains, they constituted “a generation of historians who had been very politicized as students [and] were for the most part attracted to Communism”.15 Consequently, they were prevented from seeing that there is anything in common between Nazism and Bolshevism which the term totalitarianism makes visible. In fact, this was a frequent oversight in France in general, where the crimes of the Stalinist regime were not commonly admitted until Solzhenitsyn’s exposure in the 1970s; which in France was first taken up by the so-called New Philosophers, such as Bernard-Henri Lévy and André Glucksmann, and not by the New Historians. It was not till the 1990s, after the fall of Communism, that Francois Furet published his taboo-breaking study, The Passing of an Illusion.16 This, in turn, led to an even graver failure in not addressing “the most burning and tragic aspects of history”, in Burguière’s words. Such issues have generally to do with the fate of whole civilizations. However, despite the fact that at that time the title of their journal was Annales: économies,

History 43 sociétés, civilisations, the articles in it had nothing much to do with civilizations. On the whole, they ignored all the work that had been done on the comparative study of civilizations from Oswald Spengler in Germany to Arnold Toynbee in England and William McNeil in America. Hence, when very much later they came across Norbert Elias’ book on the so-called civilization process – which in any case mainly dealt with their favourite topics of medieval France – it struck them as a revelation; as Burguière reports, “in the 1980s there was an Elias moment of the Annales School, just as in the 1960s there was a Labrousse moment”.17 But this was hardly enough to arouse any serious interest in comparative civilizational studies in which Elias did not engage either. It was the same with their attitude to German work on civilization coming from the sociologists, such as Weber’s exemplary studies of the impact of the various world religions on economy, with particular reference to the rise of capitalism. Braudel, who dealt with capitalism at length, was scathing and dismissive of Weber’s Protestant Ethics thesis. The reasons for such a rejection reach deep into French historical consciousness. As Burguière explains, “Weber, Simmel and later in a different realm of ideas, the sociologists of the Frankfurt school and Freud, all emphasized the repressive character of civilization and progress”.18 Hence, they represented for the French the “pessimism of German cultural thought”, which was anathema in France: Its delay in influencing French thought, after two world wars and multiple convulsions of the twentieth century, was not limited to historians. It may have resided in the difficulty that the country of Condorcet and Comte had letting go of the religion of progress.19 Abandoning the religion of progress and taking up German cultural thought in France became the métier of the philosophers, the exponents of French Theory. But they were very limited in what they took up, mainly Nietzsche and Heidegger, apart from Marx and Freud, who had already had general currency for a longer period. What happened to these German thinkers at the hands of the new French philosophers was almost in the nature of an inverse alchemical transmutation, turning gold into lead. There is something leaden in the way that Marx, at the hands of Althusser, and Freud, at the hands of Lacan, are turned into Structuralists. Something similarly dull and deathly is achieved by turning Nietzsche, at the hands of Foucault, and Heidegger, at the hands of Derrida, into post-Structuralists. All the other philosophers joined in this process of translating and transmuting serious German thought into the Theorybabble of French Theory, with notable contributions from Lyotard, Baudrillard, Deleuze, Kristeva, Irigaray and many others. In France itself French Theory and French History had almost nothing to do with each other, with the one notable exception of Foucault, as

44  History we shall presently see. But in America French Theory made a huge impact on history, as well as many other disciplines. It fed into a general academic movement which gave rise to a heady cultural brew, intoxicating to historians as much as other academics. However, unlike many of the others, especially the Deconstructionists, this did not always render historians too inebriated to exercise their proper historical function, as the historiographer Georg Iggers points out: “There were historians such as Joan Scott, who preached the gospel according to Derrida, but conducted archival research in pursuit of serious questions of feminist concern in a very traditional manner”.20 In France itself there was no Annales historian who preached the gospel according to Derrida, but there were for a time many who followed the teachings of Foucault. This was a most unusual, never before encountered and never to be repeated episode in the history of the Annales school, namely, that a philosopher came to exercise a major influence on historians. It is understandable that Foucault’s work should have appealed to the Annalistes at a time when the mentalities approach was all the rage, for he dealt with intellectual and cultural complexes in a prima facie historical way. His books discussed the history of madness and psychiatric confinement, the institutions of confinement in general, which according to him included not only prisons, but hospitals, barracks and schools, as well. He dealt with what he called discourses, such as the history of the social sciences and the history of sexuality, and so on. However, the way he treated these historical subjects was far from the acceptable historical canons of any school of history. Foucault imposed an à priori philosophical schema on historical developments, which he tends to periodize into four major stages or ages: the Renaissance (1500–1650), the Classical (1650–1800), the Modern (1800–1950) and what has been called the “Postmodern” (1950 and after), though Foucault never calls it that. Each of these periods is marked by the one all-embracing discursive épistème that governs just about everything that takes place within it. Thus, in discussing the formation of economic thought, which historians of economics invariably see as influenced by changing economic conditions that give rise to new practices and institutions, he writes as follows: A money reform, a banking custom, a trade practice can all be rationalized, can all develop, maintain themselves or disappear according to appropriate forms; they are all based upon a certain ground of knowledge: an obscure knowledge that does not manifest itself for its own sake in a discourse, but whose necessities are exactly the same as for abstract theories or speculations without apparent relation to reality. In any given culture at any given moment, there is always only one épistème that defines the possibility of all knowledge, whether expressed in theory or silently invested in practice.21 Thus, we are to understand that the one épistème in the seventeenth century is the “ground of knowledge” both for the new practices of share trading

History 45 on the bourse as well as Cartesian philosophy in Amsterdam, and later for the monetary policy of the Bank of England and Newtonian mechanics in London. Such an épistème is much more than a Hegelian Zeitgeist, for it was invisible to the participants involved or to all later historians and only became apparent to Foucault in our own time. And if there is only the one épistème in any given culture at any one period, then when the one épistème changes to another, then everything in culture must change as well in a completely synchronous way. How is the simultaneity of such total change to be explained? What makes it possible? Foucault goes to great and highly implausible lengths to meet his own Structuralist demands on history. He comes to treat closely related things that happen to fall into different epistemic periods, especially towards the end of one and the start of another, as if they were utterly different and had nothing to do with each other. Thus, for example, in the history of economic thought, he provides highly implausible and specious reasons to argue that the political economy of David Ricardo does not really continue and develop on that of Adam Smith. This must be so, according to Foucault, because a kind of Bachelardian “coupure épistemologique” separates these two closely aligned British economists. And even while he imputes a sharp epistemic caesura separating Smith and Ricardo, he barely registers a noticeable break between classical political economy and the neoclassical Marginalist school, presumably because that took place around 1870, in the very middle of Foucault’s modern épistème, when such revolutionary changes are not supposed to take place according to his schema. Yet every history of economic thought features the Marginalist Revolution as the great change, not that from Smith to Ricardo. Foucault treats his épistèmes as Procrustean beds into which continuous and interconnected historical developments must be made to fit, both by cutting ties that constitute inseparable linkages and stretching relations that are extremely distant and far-fetched. There are literally scores of instances of both these tactics in his work that critics have located, many of which José Guilherme Merquior lists in his work on Foucault.22 Thus on the purely factual level of history, Foucault is extremely unreliable. He seems to have imbibed Fichte’s dictum that if the facts go against his theories, too bad for the facts, for there is an extremely poor fit between facts and theories throughout his work. Furthermore, by disallowing continuities and the usual empirical work of tracing relations, locating sources, assessing influences and establishing causes, etc., Foucault has no way of explaining real change, which is usually slow and subtle. To allow for change all he has to rely on are spontaneous quasi-Structuralist total transformational revolutions from one épistème to another. But why an épistème transforms itself into its actual successor and not the successor of that successor or any other structure whatever, for that there is no explanation. Why was it impossible for the Renaissance épistème to change immediately to the Modern one and not have to go through the

46  History Classical? Since there is no progress or continuous development from one épistème to another, and since the earlier épistèmes are not necessary as presuppositions for the later ones, there is no bar to supposing that history could just as easily have taken this utterly absurd jump. Merquior makes this point in different words: His archaeological glance froze historical processes into successive strata utterly unrelated to each other. In Foucault’s oeuvre, change is never shown in fieri. Its results are described, its roots are not even identified. In this sense, no explanation of history was attempted. Historiography as a rational discipline can hardly be expected to live on such a diet.22 But Foucault is not interested in any rational discipline, for the most disturbing aspect of Foucault’s work, in general, is his utter indifference to truth and rationality. During his most radical period, at the time of his accession to a professorship at the Collège de France, he justified himself by recourse to the Nietzschean idea that all truth is a form of power. But, unlike Nietzsche who sees power as openly manifest in the domination by masters of slaves, Foucault’s power is silent, invisible, a kind of flow of some ethereal influence operating behind peoples’ backs and beyond their awareness. Thus, thinkers and scientists might consciously believe they are working to establish the truth, and seek to do so by means of rational procedures; they might think that they are the creators and authors of the theories and ideas that they propound. But, according to Foucault, there are no authors and truth is really a volonté savoir, an impersonal will to truth, a kind of power that operates through people to bring about epistemic changes. As the historians soon came to realize, such abstract and abstruse speculations were of little use in historical work, though at first, some found them highly suggestive. In discussing this episode in the history of the Annales School, Burguière refers to it as a momentary “passing of the Comet”, and he is sceptical as to its lasting effect: “I leave to others more qualified the task of deciding whether his influence was fleeting because too closely linked to the ideological climate of an era, that of the late 1960s … or whether it marked a lasting break in ways of thinking”.23 However, Timothy Tackett, who writes the introduction to his book, is in no doubt where Burguière actually stands: “Foucault’s approach seemed initially to offer historians a ‘phenomenal shortcut’ in their search for an explanation, it was in the end ‘an illusion’ born of a ‘reductive view’”.24 In other words, Foucault’s épistèmes and the rest of his Structuralist paraphernalia do not have the capacity to explain anything. On some points Burguière is openly scathing: he charges Foucault with a “conspiratorial notion of history that can be inferred from Foucault’s decision to confuse knowledge and power”.25 Such a conspiratorial notion of history can also be inferred in Foucault’s treatment of all institutions as

History 47 inherently repressive and domineering, regardless of the liberating or welfare intent behind them. Thus, all the ameliorative reform measures introduced by states since the Enlightenment, whether in medicine, law, education or punitive practices, are seen by Foucault as nothing but disguised repression by other means. Burguière’s comment on that view is that “any consideration of the welfare state as the euphemistic, or rather internalized, form of the totalitarian state belongs to the realm of sophism”.26 Worse still, it elides the difference between totalitarianism and liberal democracy since both are lumped together as variant form of repression. Clearly then, for the Annales historians Foucault was a “passing Comet”, a brief appearance on the intellectual firmament that soon vanished below the horizon. But this was not the case in America where he has remained a stellar presence ever since, a polar star from whom many take their bearings. He acquired numerous followers in many disciplines, though not so much in history where his work was not well regarded; in fact, his name is not even mentioned in Peter Burke’s survey of current historiographic methodologists.27 Nevertheless, his work did inspire two movements of historical study which directly emerge from his theories of power and domination. It is telling that neither was initiated by an established historian, but rather by two literary scholars.

Section II – History and literature, history and sociology The first movement of historical study influenced by Foucault goes under the heading of Orientalism and was devised by a Palestinian litterateur in America, Edward Said, who explicitly took his lead from Foucault. It has had enormous influence as the founding text of post-colonial and subaltern studies, a special interest field for many academics in Western universities, such as Gayatri Spivak, whom we have already encountered in the previous chapter. These scholars set themselves the task of denouncing the influence of the West in whatever shape or form it might have presented itself in the Orient. In their view, all the achievements of the West anywhere else in the world are negated by the original sin of its colonialist past. Indeed, this even holds for Western historiographical scholarship of the Asian world, dubbed Orientalism by Said and his followers; that, too, aimed at maintaining colonialist domination by covert means. It was an instance of Foucaultian power masquerading as knowledge. In response, Western scholars of the Orient have generally been highly dismissive of Said’s knowledge of Western scholarship on Oriental cultures and societies. Robert Irwin, calls it “malignant charlatanry, in which it is hard to distinguish honest mistakes from wilful misrepresentations”.28 The distinguished Sinologist, Simon Leys, refers to Said’s book as “300 pages of twisted, obscure, incoherent, ill-informed and badly written diatribe”.29 Western scholars in these fields have little to say in favour of Said’s work. The kind of post-colonialist attack on the West that Said’s work represents is plausible and appealing to some because it draws on a deep source

48  History of guilt and a desire to provide recompense for past injustices that historians who specialize in what used to be called ex-colonial or Third World societies tend to feel. This often leads them to adopt a compensatory attitude of disparagement towards the achievements of their own civilization. A favourite ploy is to maintain that these were really Asian or even African in origin and were acquired by subterfuge, without due acknowledgement of their original sources. Thus, Martin Bernal argues that the Greeks owed everything to Egypt, which was an African civilization.30 In a similar vein, according to the distinguished Cambridge African anthropologist, Jack Goody, most of the great technological inventions originated in China and were only later appropriated, really “stolen”, by the West.31 In fact, on this view, there is not much that the West can truly call its own. Another school of Asianists, mainly economic historians who take their lead from Fernand Braudel, such as Immanuel Wallerstein and André Gunder Frank, argue that Europe was just a promontory of Asia and unimportant in world affairs until very recently, usually dated to the early nineteenth century when colonialism began in earnest. Before that point, Asian trade and economy, in general, exceeded the European, and for them, this is all that matters. The second of the major schools of history that was inspired by Foucault, is New Historicism, devised by the Renaissance literary scholar Stephen Greenblatt, and it is also a concerted attack on objectivity in history. Of its Foucaultian derivation there is no question, as one of its critics, Frank Lentricchia points out: New Historicists have not only reopened their Marx; they have embraced Michel Foucault (the deeper theoretical influence on their work), and the effect of this (I think uncritical) acceptance is traced everywhere in new historicism in the coded word “power”. The odd theoretical identity of new historicism is constituted by its unlikely marriage of Marx and Foucault, with Foucault as dominant partner.32 Lentricchia goes on to attack Greenblatt’s major work Renaissance SelfFashioning (1980) for its typical Foucaultian failings. Everything is reduced to a vague and ill-defined notion of power: “not finitely anchored but diffused from nowhere to everywhere, and saturating all social relations to the point that all conflicts and ‘jostlings’ among social groups become a mere show of political dissention, a prearranged theatre of struggle set upon a substratum of monolithic agency which produces ‘opposition’ as one of its delusive political effects”.33 The other aspect that has a Foucaultian source in New Historicism, which Lentricchia overlooks, is an application of the totalizing approach to everything within a given period that the notion of an épistème invites. Thus, the New Historicists treat the Renaissance, their favourite period, as if it all constituted the one cultural text containing both literary works and all other writings of every possible kind, as well as

History 49 cultural practices, political institutions, class relations, etc. It is all text, thus ripe for literary interpretation in the way that Clifford Geertz pioneered in anthropology and the way that Hayden White theorized about in history, as when he stated “one is justified in speaking of history as a text”.34 Little wonder then that White comes to the defence of New Historicism given that his view is that there is little, if anything, to distinguish history writing from writing fiction. According to White one cannot even say “that the difference between ‘history’ and ‘fiction’ resides in the fact that the historian ‘finds’ his stories whereas the writer ‘invents’ his, for ‘invention’ also plays a part in the historian’s operations”.35 Hence, according to White, there is no problem with applying a Foucaultian paradigm to historical writing any more than there would be in applying it to a literary work. And the same goes for all the other such postmodernist thinkers and critics both French and American, as he states: In principle, therefore, there is nothing inherently a- or anti-historical in importing models, methods and strategies borrowed from Geertzian cultural anthropology, Foucaultian discourse theory, Derridean or Manian deconstructionism, Saussurean semiotics, Lacanian psychoanalytic theory or Jakobsonian poetics into historical studies. The version of history you will get by employing such models, methods and strategies will certainly look different from that composed on the basis of other principles, such as those of Marxist dialectics or the methods of what used to be called “the new social history”.36 Unfortunately, White omits to mention a few vitally indispensable conditions before a form of writing can be called “history”, rather than literature or mythology or ideology or propaganda or anything else that is not history as this is usually understood both by scholars and lay people. One condition is that the model utilized must be rational and reliable or at least plausible; another is that it must have some relevance to history; still another is that it matches our understanding, both common sense and scientific, of how people can be expected to behave, think, feel etc; and there are many more such elementary conditions, too many to be ever stated in full, short of a methodological textbook. As it happens, many of the names of which White approves as models for historical writing do not satisfy even the most elementary of these conditions. Apart from Geertz and Foucault, it is doubtful if any of the other theorists have any relevance to history, so dragging them into historical studies is a wilful misuse of interpretation. Quite a few of them are far from rational or reliable, and most historians would have their doubts about Derridean or Manian deconstructionism and Lacanian psychoanalysis. To what extent one can refer Geertzean cultural anthropology, devised to explicate symbolic rituals of pre-modern societies such as those of Bali or Java, to modern history or Western history, in general, is a moot point, and not to be

50  History assumed without much further extensive argumentation. And the same goes for Foucaultian philosophy which has been subject to so much devastating criticism, as we have seen. White’s view that historical “description is a product of processes of linguistic condensation, displacement, symbolization and secondary revision of the kind that inform the production of texts” makes it impossible to separate historical texts from all others, or from dreams for that matter, for all such “texts” share these basic features. In White’s work, there is no reference to truth or rationality any more than there is in that of Foucault or any other of the so-called Postmodernists. To argue against such irrationalist approaches does not mean espousing the view that there is but one correct approach to history, since there are many such at any given time, all contending for the truth; in that respect, history is no different from all other spheres of knowledge where there are always multiple theories and areas of disagreement at any one time. As in the social sciences, some of these historical approaches emerge as sound and significant, and therefore worthy of being followed or at least being taken into account, whereas many others disappear as mere speculations or as representatives of the point of view of past stages of scholarship that nobody any longer shares. It must also be stressed that to argue against White and others of similar views that history is literature is not to deny that some types of historical writing have distinct literary qualities and are read for the sake of these; or that such histories can have much in common with novels, dramas and poetry in the use of all the standard literary devices. However, for texts to be taken as history and not mere literature, they must satisfy the basic conditions of historical writing: they must aim for truth, rationality, and plausibility in respect of what we know about the propensities of people’s behaviour and the possibilities of events occurring for known causes, and so on for all the other factors of historical explanation. It is, of course, also possible to combine history and literature in the one text, as Tolstoy does in War and Peace or George Eliot in Middlemarch, novels which depict military, social and political history. How such mixed modes are assessed raises difficult issues in literary and historical criticism which we cannot enter into here, but suffice it to say that the conditions of historical reliability we place on these are not as exacting as in historical writing proper. In treating history writing as literature, White was not just content to draw on the great literary exemplars of historical novels from Walter Scott onwards, to which George Lukacs has directed our attention, such as Balzac, Stendhal, Tolstoy and George Eliot, or even to refer to critics who favoured figurative language and rhetoric in literature and history, such as Northrop Fry and Kenneth Burke. He also opened up reflections on history to Theorybabble and postmodernist “discourse”. And this is where the real and lasting damage occurred. For it is one thing to treat history as a form of literature, it is quite another to see it as subject to the “liberating” influence of Theorybabble and postmodernist “discourse”, since the “liberation” that

History 51 these afford is far from the normal requirements of realism and rationality that mark out fact from fiction or truth from imagination. As a result of the well-meant but ill-considered advocacy of people such as White, Theorybabble and postmodernist “discourse” have become accepted in the writing of history and in a large range of social sciences. It has become a permanent feature of academia because so many in these disciplines as well as in the special interest studies have taken it up, as Pluckrose and Lindsay argue: … by the late 1990s, postmodernism in its purest, original form had fallen out of fashion, but Theory had not. It provided radical activists, including scholar-activists with an all-encompassing way of thinking about the world and society, which still informs much scholarship in the humanities and has made considerable inroads into the social sciences, especially sociology, anthropology and psychology. Postmodernism has been re-envisioned and has since become the backbone of dominant forms of scholarship, activism and professional practice around identity, culture, and Social Justice.37 In what follows we shall mainly be concerned to show how this exemplifies itself in history and historical sociology, we shall return to a discussion of sociology proper, where these problems have become just as urgent, in the next chapter. In history the process of corruption began with the eminently sensible suggestion made by White and others that rhetoric has a key role to play in historical argumentation, which often consists in making a case in defence of one’s own thesis and in rebuttal of those that contradict it. White was not the only one to adopt a rhetorical approach to history; as Allen Megill and Donald McCloskey point out, there are also such eminent historians as J.H. Hexter and Paul Veyne of the Annales school (who incidentally was an ardent advocate of Foucault), who do so as well. This kind of rhetorical approach to historical writing is certainly valid, as Megill and McCloskey argue convincingly, provided rhetoric is understood in the way they mean it: “The writing of history is rhetorical – that is, argumentative, using at its behest all the devices of language and fact and logic to sustain an argument”.38 And they insist that “the need is not to abandon the epistemological standards”.39 However, despite these qualifications, they deny the role of the social sciences in history: The social sciences were born of a Cartesian philosophy that proclaimed its hostility to rhetoric: Descartes, Locke and Kant saw rhetoric as a deceiver. Such philosophy gives allegiance rather to Method, seen as rhetoric-free. The social sciences have had recourse to a methodological rigorism, insisting that one Method alone has legitimacy and that Science is no mere argument before the Athenian Assembly.40

52  History This might have some relevance to the views of some very scientifically minded economists, but none to most sociologists or any other social scientists. The diverse roles of the various social sciences in history have been amply brought out in the book on this subject by Peter Burke, to which we previously referred.41 The main danger to history comes not from rhetoric itself but from its use in connection with Theorybabble. This gives rise to a kind of writing that is a peculiar combination of history, sociology and philosophy of the Continental variety based on Heidegger. Foucault, as we have seen, was the pioneer in this kind of historical sociology, and he was followed by many others, among the most noteworthy are Michel Serres, Gilles Deleuze, Jean Baudrillard and Jean-Francois Lyotard. This has enabled the entry of Theorybabble into history which is now widely and extensively practised to a lesser or greater degree in historical writing, including the history of science as exemplified by Bruno Latour and his school, as we shall see in the next chapter. Perhaps the most influential of such thinkers in regard to contemporary history is Lyotard, who has the signal distinction of having first brought together French Theory and American Postmodernism in his book The Postmodern Condition (1984).42 Till that point Postmodernism had been strictly a term of architecture and art criticism; Lyotard recast it as “postmodernity” and applied it to the whole contemporary historical condition which gave it an undue intellectual scope – and in so doing turned it into a huge publishing scoop. Many intellectuals and publishers rushed in to follow this usage. Unfortunately, it was one that was highly confused and confusing. For the fact that postmodernist art is current in a given period does not make everything in it postmodern. It does not mean that science is also postmodern, for example. The main confusion is even more seriously confounded by the fact that Lyotard treats as postmodern works of arts that are clearly Modernist, such as the novels of James Joyce or Abstract Expressionist painting; and from that, the contradictory conclusion can be drawn that Modernism is postmodern or, as in the original version of the term, Postmodernist. This initial move to extend “Postmodernism”, a term that was originally used specifically for art, to a more generalized concept of postmodernity, which can be applied outside the sphere of art, leads to analogous contradictory outcomes. Lyotard takes as the main manifestations of postmodernity phenomena in science and technology that have always been taken as cynosures of modernity and modernization, such as computers, computer “languages”, artificial intelligence, automatic translation, data manipulation, and all the rest. Bringing technology and Big Science together with Modernist and postmodernist art into one category is a mixing of terms that can only lead to confusion. Postmodernity becomes an arbitrary designation that Lyotard or anyone else can make use of to include or exclude anything whatever within its scope.

History 53 Lyotard’s book itself manifests these failings; like so much of postmodernist art, it is largely composed of parody, pastiche and plagiarism. He himself believed it to be his worst work, despite the adulation heaped upon it; hence the criticism of it does not necessarily apply to his other works. In this work Lyotard parrots all the fashionable dicta of French Theory: there is no truth in science, only “operability”; scientific theories are “narratives” not fundamentally different from other stories, such as myths; the methodology and criteria of truth of science are considered to be “metanarratives”; science must be legitimated by “metanarratives” concerning which one can be incredulous; as he famously put it, “I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives”. But what has credulity or incredulity to do with science? He provides a pastiche of a large number of utterly incompatible philosophies: he combines French Theory with the Oxford linguistic philosophy of Wittgenstein and Austin, and adds American pragmatism and Cognitivism or what we have elsewhere called Materialist Cartesianism.43 His borrowing of the Wittgenstinnian term “language game” contravenes what Wittgenstein might have meant by this most unfortunate metaphor for language, and compounds this initial error by applying it to any kind of intellectual or cultural complex of ideas which, in Foucaultian style, he treats as a discourse that he calls a “narrative”; and all this he interprets as a “game” in a very literal sense as requiring rules, and players, and “moves” of play.44 As for plagiarism, Lyotard himself admitted that he utilized and quoted from many books that he had not actually read. In short, it is a bad book that has had equally bad consequences in the minds of the many readers who took to it for reasons that defy a single or simple explanation; it is a reflection of the rapid decline of the humanities in the university that began in earnest around the later 1970s when he published his book. One of the worst consequences is that it introduced the term “postmodern” into historical sociology. Playing around with the term modern or modernity is bad enough for it leads to great conceptual imprecision, as is evident from the work of Shmuel Eisenstadt, Anthony Giddens, or Ulrich Beck, but “postmodern” has further amplified that confusion.45 Numerous books have been published in which this term is brandished in the title, such as those by Zygmunt Bauman, Mike Featherstone, Frederic Jameson, Scott Lasch and David Harvey, and there are many others in which it figures as the major topic, for it seems to have become a speciality of British historical sociology, which came most often with a Marxist bent. Historical sociology is an intermediate realm between history and sociology. It comprises many outstanding authors whose work could be just as well located under history as under sociology.46 Two, in particular, are, in my view, appropriately discussed as historians, Norbert Elias and Zygmunt Bauman. Both wrote extensively on historical topics and their works were favourably received by historians. As we noted previously, Elias was an influential figure among the Annales School of historians during the 1970s and 80s. Both were coincidentally Jewish refugees

54  History in England, the former escaping Nazism in the 1930s, the latter an exile from Communism in the 1970s. Neither was altogether welcomed by the established English historians and both were side-lined into provincial universities as sociologists. We have already treated Elias’ work extensively in an earlier book, together with the social writings of Freud, on whose basic premises Elias depends.47 Hence, there is little we need add to that here and can only once more reaffirm that as a general theory of the civilizing process or of cultural and state formation his approach is sadly wanting. However, that does not mean that his work is unworthy of attention, or unimportant, for it does contain fascinating historical studies which have drawn the admiration of historians. Two such studies, in particular, have been of interest: the history of the development of aristocratic manners, in the first volume of his magnum opus; and the political unification process in France from the many medieval autonomous entities to the one absolutist monarchy, in the second volume.48 The problem with Elias’ history of manners and mores is not with what he writes, but with what he leaves out of account. He makes no attempt to relate manners to all the other ways of governing, guiding and shaping social behaviour, such as religious precepts, moral norms, laws, customs, ways of disciplining, or of inculcating standards and character-forming value ideals in general, and many more. Apart from that, though he describes Western European aristocratic manners minutely, he makes no study comparing these with those of the aristocracies of other societies and civilizations. Hence, we have no way of knowing just how important manners are to the development of a civilization. In the case of Western European civilization, the question arises as to what extent the growth of courtoisie and civilité among the nobles mattered for the rise and expansion of that civilization as compared to the achievements of the cities and their varied classes. One suspects that it was not all that important, since it was in the latter and not the former that there arose all the crucial creative factors that made for civilization, such as literacy, learning, art and science, not to speak of technology, manufacture and commerce. The princely courts and the aristocrats contributed little to that civilizing side of things. It is true that aristocrats built the monarchical state, which is the subject of Elias’ second volume. However, it is questionable that this was an autonomous process governed by a mechanism of competition for the monopoly of power and domination, as Elias presents it. Could any such competitive struggle have led to the establishment of the unique structure that is the modern state rather than any of the multiple other forms of autocratic or aristocratic lordship found in all civilizations all over the world? Once again Elias’ work suffers from the absence of any comparative perspective. Here, too, it must be stressed that political developments in the cities, especially those of north Italy, north Germany and Flanders, were crucial for the emergence of the legal, administrative, commercial, fiscal, consultative,

History 55 representative, diplomatic and all other agencies, for without these historical precedents the modern state in its early absolutist form, with its numerous departments and divisions of responsibilities, power and other functional separations, could not have arisen. Consideration of this preceding urban context for the territorial state, making for its modernity, is absent in Elias, as he did not realize that the governance of cities was the precursor of the government of states. One of the best books of recent historical sociology is Bauman’s Intimations of Postmodernity.49 As is usual in such works, postmodernity is identified with Postmodernism and Modernism at once, for many of the distinctive features of Modernism are ascribed to postmodernity. There is also no clear differentiation between postmodernity and modernity for there is no clear demarcation drawn as to where the latter ends or begins. At times the beginning of modernity is located in the nineteenth century and it is identified with Progress, Positivism and Socialism; at other times it is backdated to the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the beginning of the Enlightenment and the formation of what Bauman calls intellectuals; then it is projected still further back to the philosophies of Descartes, Hobbes and Spinoza; and so it goes on, further and further back in time. The problem is that Bauman lacks a worked-out historiography or a periodization of Western civilization since he never engages in any theorization of a general civilizational kind, unlike Elias. This is only one indication of Bauman’s lack of any overall theory of historical development. It means that though he makes many insightful individual aperçus, his work never coalesces into an approach that can be compared with any of the classical historical sociologists. At its best it is a kind of impressionistic set of perspectival viewpoints on history; a charge which was also levelled against Simmel, but Simmel had a sound neo-Kantian formalism, tying it all together whereas Bauman has no such philosophical basis. Consequently, his sociology is fragmentary and written in the form of disjointed essays. Bauman was aware of his own inadequacy and justified himself with the peculiar argument that the chaotic times of postmodernity require a postmodern historical sociology that is equally disjointed in order to match and represent the disorder of these times. The argument is highly seductive and must be quoted in full to be appreciated: It is not easy to narrate postmodernity. If the purpose or effect of the narration is to bring order into a semantically loaded yet confused space, to conjure up logical consistency where chaos would otherwise rule – any narrative aiming to serve well its raison d’être stands at risk of implying more coherence than the postmodern condition could possibly hold. Once we remember that incoherence is the most distinctive of the attributes of postmodernity (arguably its defining feature) we need to reconcile ourselves to the prospect that all narratives will be

56  History to a varying extent flawed. The closer they come to picturing the postmodern condition as a balanced system, the graver their faults will risk being. It is for fear of such an (all too easy to commit) error that the essays collected in this volume bear no other ambition but to report a number of sightings, or glimpses, of the postmodern scene – each conscious of being partial and perceived from just one of the many possible observation points.50 It is all very well for an artist to make impressionistic sketches of a scene from various angles, but for a sociologist to do so for a social situation is a sign of inadequacy in his approach. The argument he deploys to justify himself only highlights his shortcomings, for it is fallacious. It is not true that a representation of a chaotic situation must itself be chaotic. This is like saying that because a madman’s tale is full of sound and fury signifying nothing, therefore the psychological account and explanation of it must also signify nothing. On the contrary, the science of psychology and the scientific analyses it offers in no way correspond to the madman and his tale. Likewise, the historian narrating and explaining the mad, mad world of the postmodern does not produce an insane narrative; the incoherence of postmodernity does not translate into an incoherence of its historical representation. On the contrary, the more the condition to be represented lacks order or rationality, the more orderly and rational must its representation be to adequately account for it. Hence, the fragmentary nature of Bauman’s historical sociology simply reflects, not the disorder of the postmodern condition, but the disorganized and disordered state of historical sociology at present and his inability to rise above it. He is not to be singled out for blame alone, since this is something that he shares with many others in the discipline, but we shall come to sociology in the next chapter. But before we come to sociology and the other sciences perhaps a final comment on the humanities is in order. The humanities now find themselves in a perilous state and before too long some of them might go under. History is perhaps better cushioned against these shocks than any of the others since it has always had and continues to have popular appeal. But this is no guarantee of its quality, for it might continue to decline as an academic discipline. Literature, too, has great popular appeal, but as we have seen the study of literary criticism in universities is hanging on by a thread. It is possible that eventually, all that will remain is literary scholarship, which only the well-endowed elite universities can afford to finance. Other of the humanities are in a similar predicament. The whole make-up and functioning of the university and its role in society is against them, as we shall see in Chapter 5. Philosophy, too, might not survive outside the few elite universities. History is much more robust, but it suffers from the wholesale neglect and forgetting of the past that is characteristic of the twilight of a cultural dark age. Louis Montrose points

History 57 to this as one of the reasons for the recent attempts to combine history with literature as a bulwark against the threats both face: There is another complementary perspective from which to view the recent revival of interest in questions of history in literary studies in The United States: namely, as a compensation for that acceleration in the forgetting of history which seems to characterize an increasingly technocratic and commodified academy and society. Many of those who profess the Humanities in American universities see themselves and their calling as marginalized within the system of higher education increasingly geared to the provision of highly specialized technological and pre-professional training; within an academic institution that encourages industrial and military application in scientific research, and that promotes scientistic quantification in the study of society and culture; within an intellectual community ever more closely bound to the interest of the circumambient political and commercial workings of a multi-national corporate economy.51 This kind of situation affects not only history and the humanities, but all the serious studies that Peter Murphy calls the Platonic disciplines, as he reports: A recent study of 29 elite American liberal arts colleges found that none of them have very much interest anymore in the Platonic disciplines that one might expect in a national higher education system. The study looking into key disciplines of Composition, Literature, Foreign Languages, US Government or History, Economics, Mathematics and Natural Physical Science.52 Murphy comments wryly that “contemporary academia thinks that ‘studies’ (identity, gender, race, global and environmental ‘studies’) are a substitute for intellectual discipline”.53 To really appreciate what that comment amounts to we have to examine what is happening to the university as a whole and how it is changing from having been a predominantly European institution into a global one. That change parallels and is highly symptomatic of an even far greater transition from European civilization into something else which is not a civilization but for which as yet we have no name, since terms such as “global civilization” or “technological civilization” are tantamount to pleonasms or oxymorons, as we sought to argue in Beyond Civilization.54 In order to clarify and explain the condition in which the world now finds itself, that work attempted to combine the comparative civilization studies of historians, such as Spengler, Toynbee and McNeil, with the historical sociology of Marx and Weber, particularly the latter. Without this kind of large-scale, overarching approach, it is impossible to gain any deeper understanding of what has ensued in the apparent chaos of the twentieth-century

58  History “time of troubles”, in the Chinese sense. This is the kind of historical theorizing that Lyotard and other Postmodernists have castigated as “grand narratives”, for which apparently the time is past. But this is precisely what is called for by present times and is lacking in either history or sociology. History is either too engrossed with detailed particulars or with encyclopaedic surveys where the wood is lost for the trees. Even such worthwhile scholarly endeavours as the recent work of Lincoln Paine and David Abulafia on the history of the exploration and utilization of the seas throughout history suffer from this problem.55 Sociology in turn has its own difficulties, but these we shall come to in the next chapter.

Notes 1 Quoted in Dorothy Ross, The Origin of American Social Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 446. 2 Joseph Alsop, The Rare Art Traditions: The History of Art Collecting and Its Linked Phenomena (London: Thames and Hudson, 1982), 109. 3 William J. Keylor, Academy and Community: The Foundation of the French Historical Profession (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 2. 4 Ibid., 7. 5 Ibid., 6. 6 Ibid., 211. 7 Ibid., 213. 8 Jeffrey K. Olick, Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi and David Levy, eds., The Collective Memory Reader (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 9 Ibid., 23. 10 André Burgière, The Annales School: An Intellectual History, trans. Jane Marie Todd, forward by Timothy Tackett (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009). See also Peter Burke, The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School 1929–2014 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015). 11 Tomas Wislicz, “The Annales School and the Challenge of the late 20th Century: Criticisms and Tentative Reforms”, trans. Janina Dorosz, Acta Poloniae Historica 92 (January 2005): 207–235. 12 François Dosse, L’histoire en miettes : des “Annales” à la “nouvelle histoire” (Paris: La Découverte, 1987). 13 Lawrence Stone, “The Revival of Narrative: Reflections on New Old History”, Past and Present 85 (1979): 3–24. 14 André Burguière, The Annales School: An Intellectual History, op. cit., 247. 15 Ibid., 111. 16 François Furet, The Passing of an Illusion: The Cruel Century, trans. Deborah Furet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 17 André Burguière, The Annales School, op. cit., 246. 18 Ibid., 200. 19 Georg Iggers, “Reflections on the historiography of the twentieth century from the perspective of all twenty-first century”, Historein 16 (2017): 149–158. 20 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, trans. Anon. (London: Tavistock Press, 1970), 168. 21 José Guilherme Merquior, Foucault (London: Fontana Masters Series, 1985). 22 Ibid., 208. 23 Burguière, The Annales School, op. cit., 195. 24 Tackett, Forward to The Annales School, op. cit., xiii.

History 59 2 5 26 27 28

Ibid., 213. Ibid., 207. Peter Burke, History and Social Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), 105. Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and their Enemies (London: Penguin Books, 2006). 29 Simon Leys, The Hall of Uselessness (Melbourne: Black Inc, 2014), 318. 30 Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (London: Vintage, 1987). 31 Jack Goody, The Theft of History, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 32 Frank Lentricchia, “Foucault’s Legacy: New Historicism?”, in The New Historicism, ed. Harold Aram Veeser (New York: Routledge, 1989), 234. 33 Ibid., 235. 34 Hayden White, “New Historicism: A Comment” in The New Historicism, ed. Harold Aram Veeser, op. cit., 297. 35 Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 6. 36 White, “New Historicism”, op. cit., 295. 37 Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender and Identity – and Why This Harms Everybody (London: Swift Press, 2020), 49. 38 Allen Megill and Donald N. McCloskey, “The Rhetoric of History”, in The Rhetoric of the Human Sciences, Language and Argument in Scholarship and Public Affairs, eds. John S. Nelson, Allen Megill and Donald N. McCloskey (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 222. 39 Ibid., 235. 40 Ibid., 222. 41 Burke, History and Social Theory, op. cit. 42 Jean-Francois Lyotard: The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 43 See Harry Redner, Quintessence of Dust: The Science of Matter and the Philosophy of Mind (Leiden: Brill, 2020), ch. 7, 292–344. 44 See Harry Redner, The Triumph and Tragedy of the Intellectuals: Evil, Enlightenment and Death (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2016), ch. 5, 153–178. 45 See Harry Redner, Beyond Civilization: Society, Culture and the Individual in the Age of Globalisation (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2013), 105–106. 46 See John Mandalios, “Historical Sociology”, in The Blackwell Companion to Social Theory, ed. Bryan S. Turner (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000). 47 See Harry Redner, The Tragedy of European Civilization: Towards an Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2015), 73–99. 48 Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: Vol. I The History of Manners; Vol. II Power and Civility, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982). 49 Zygmunt Bauman, Intimations of Postmodernity (London: Routledge, 1992). 50 Ibid., Introduction, xxiv. 51 Louis A. Montrose, “The Poetics and Politics of Culture”, in The New Historians, ed. Harold Aram Veeser, op. cit., 25. 52 Peter Murphy, Universities and the Innovation Economies: The Creative Wasteland of Post-Industrial Societies (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 166. 53 Ibid. 54 Redner, Beyond Civilization, op. cit. IX–XVI. 55 Lincoln Paine, The Sea of Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (New York: Knopf, 2013).

60  History

Bibliography Alsop, Joseph. The Rare Art Traditions: The History of Art Collecting and Its Linked Phenomena. London: Thames and Hudson, 1982. Bauman, Zygmunt. Intimations of Postmodernity. London: Routledge, 1992. Bernal, Martin. Black Athena: The Afro-Asiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. London: Vintage, 1987. Burgière, André. The Annales School: An Intellectual History. Translated by Jane Marie Todd. Forward by Timothy Tackett. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009. Burke, Peter. The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School 1929–2014. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015. Dosse, François. L’histoire en miettes: des “Annales” à la “nouvelle histoire. Paris: La Découverte, 1987. Elias, Norbert.  The Civilizing Process: Vol. I The History of Manners; Vol. II Power and Civility. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. New York: Pantheon Books, 1982. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things. Translated by Anon. London: Tavistock Press, 1970. Furet, François. The Passing of an Illusion: The Cruel Century. Translated by Deborah Furet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Goody, Jack. The Theft of History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1980. Iggers, Georg. “Reflections on the Historiography of the Twentieth Century from the Perspective of the Twenty-First Century”. Historein 16 (2017): 149–158. Irwin, Robert. For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and Their Enemies. London: Penguin Books, 2006. Keylor, William J. Academy and Community: The Foundation of the French Historical Profession. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975. Lentricchia, Frank. “Foucault’s Legacy: A New Historicism?. In The New Historicism, edited by Harold Aram Veeser, 231–242. New York: Routledge, 1989. Leys, Simon. The Hall of Uselessness. Melbourne: Black Inc, 2014. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by Geoffrey Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Mandalios, John. “Historical Sociology”. In The Blackwell Companion to Social Theory, edited by Bryan S. Turner, 389–415. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. Megill, Allen and Donald N. McCloskey. “The Rhetoric of History”. In The Rhetoric of the Human Sciences, Language and Argument in Scholarship and Public Affairs, edited by John S. Nelson, Allen Megill and Donald N. McCloskey, 221–238. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987. Merquior, José Guilherme. Foucault. London: Fontana Masters Series, 1985. Montrose, Louis A. “Professing the Renaissance: The Poetics and Politics of Culture”. In The New Historicism, edited by Harold Aram Veeser, 15–36. London: Routledge, 1989. Murphy, Peter. Universities and the Innovation Economies: The Creative Wasteland of Post-Industrial Societies. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. Olick, Jeffrey K., Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi and David Levy, eds. The Collective Memory Reader. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Paine, Lincoln. The Sea of Civilization: A Maritime History of the World. New York: Knopf, 2013.

History 61 Pluckrose, Helen and James Lindsay. Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender and Identity – and Why This Harms Everybody. London: Swift Press, 2020. Redner, Harry. Beyond Civilization: Society, Culture and the Individual in the Age of Globalisation. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2013. Redner, Harry. The Tragedy of European Civilization: Towards an Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2015. Redner, Harry. The Triumph and Tragedy of the Intellectuals: Evil, Enlightenment and Death. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2016. Redner, Harry. Quintessence of Dust: The Science of Matter and the Philosophy of Mind. Leiden: Brill, 2020. Ross, Dorothy. The Origin of American Social Science. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Stone, Lawrence. “The Revival of Narrative: Reflections on New Old History”. Past and Present 85 (1979): 3–24. Tackett, Timothy. Forward to Andre Burguière. The Annales School: An Intellectual History. Translated by Jane Marie Todd. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009. White, Hayden. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973. White, Hayden. “New Historicism: A Comment”. In The New Historicism, edited by Harold Aram Veeser, 293–302. London: Routledge, 1989. Wislicz, Tomas. “The Annales School and the Challenge of the Late 20th Century: Criticisms and Tentative Reforms”. Translated by Janina Dorosz. Acta Poloniae Historica 92 (January, 2005): 207–235.

3

Sociology The search for a common theoretical core

Section I – Sociology in Europe Economics and sociology were initiated as sciences during the Enlightenment around the mid-eighteenth century in close proximity and mutual interaction with each other. Economics took its first systematic form at the hands of the Physiocrats, Quesnay and Turgot. They inspired Adam Smith to expound the first comprehensive theory of economic behaviour in his masterpiece The Wealth of Nations. Smith’s theory was then developed during the nineteenth century into the science of political economy through the work of Thomas Malthus, Jean-Baptiste Say, David Ricardo and J.S. Mill. At around the same time in the mid-eighteenth century, sociology took its start with Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws and Adam Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society. However, even before these works, Giambattista Vico’s New Science had opened up an even more comprehensive approach to socio-cultural historical development. Unfortunately, however, this was neglected till well into the nineteenth century, so it played little part in the initiation of sociology. The term “sociology” itself and the idea of a systematic science of society came even later in the nineteenth century through the work of Comte. At the same time, Marx and Engels developed a combined economic and sociological approach called dialectical materialism, which from then on would parallel and vie with the more orthodox sciences of economics and sociology. There was no foundation for either economics or sociology in the classical philosophers or historians. Thus, for example, Aristotle’s oeconomia, from which the modern term derives, has nothing to do with economy as we now understand it. It deals with household management and with chrematistics or money making. Similarly, Aristotle’s politics and ethics, though they touch on sociological topics, do not bear much relation to sociology. Much the same might be said for the histories of Herodotus and Thucydides. In short, neither economics nor sociology has any classical precedents and there are only scattered prefigurations in later centuries before the Enlightenment. As modern sciences, they are both products of the Enlightenment. How and why was this the age to generate the intellectual DOI: 10.4324/9781003355748-3

Sociology 63 developments that promoted such studies? It was not just a matter of the new ideas, for which the term Enlightenment is usually invoked, but also a matter of economic and social developments of an unprecedented kind. The economic changes fall under the general rubric of the maturing of modern capitalism, while the social changes relate to the rise of bourgeois society. Both of these are vast topics which concern the huge transformations to do with the opening up of the monetized free-market economy and the start of industrial manufacturing. At the same time, urbanization, class mobility and a measure of meritocracy gave rise to the notion of “civil society” and the sphere of public discourse. This was the economic and social background to the conceptualization of economy and society as autonomous forms of existence, each with its own structure that could be scientifically represented. The conception of science that then prevailed was, as Weber puts it, “integrated into the great scheme of the natural law and rationalistic Weltanschauung of the eighteenth century … with its optimistic faith in the theoretical and practical rationalizability of reality …”.1 Consequently little distinction was at that time drawn between the social sciences and the natural sciences, so that the former could unproblematically be modelled upon the latter: “As the rational analysis of society arose in close connection with the modern development of natural science, so it remained related to it in its whole method of approach”.2 This remained true of the subsequent development of both sociology and economics almost till Weber’s day, with but few exceptions, such as, to begin with, Vico, who strove to separate nature, which God had made, from society and culture, which Man had made. But Vico’s distinction was rarely taken up later. The relation between the social and natural sciences still remains confused to this day, despite the attempts by Weber and many others to clarify it. But we shall return to that later. Even though economics and sociology both modelled themselves on the ideal of “science”, once they were constituted as sciences – at least in an incipient way by the authors previously referred to and subsequently many others – they went on to develop themselves in very different ways. To anticipate what is to come, we might say that economics consolidated itself around something like a Kuhnian paradigm which eventually emerged fully formed in Marginalist neoclassical economics. By contrast, sociology took the opposite course, and remained in what Kuhn would consider a pre-paradigmatic stage. Sociology amplified and dispersed itself in ever wider and more diverse ways. Starting with a small number of key foundational figures, as it were, the fathers of the discipline, such as Comte, Marx, Spencer, Tönnies and a few others, it kept on diversifying by incorporating newer names and approaches, like a snowball rolling down a hillside which grows bigger as it indiscriminately picks up more and more snow and dirt. We are now approaching a situation where there are scores of major sociologists, each with a different theory. Thus, a recent book entitled Key Contemporary Social Theorists has entries on 41 names, starting with Adorno and ending with Žižek, and there are many other books with an almost equal number of entries on celebrated contemporaries.3

64  Sociology It is clear from this that sociology has diversified into an omnibus discipline in which just about any social thinker can be included. Some sociologists take pride in that fact, as the blurb of one such survey book by Steven Seidman proclaims: “Today, social theory is truly interdisciplinary, global, politically engaged, and reveals a dizzying variety of perspectives”.4 Economists can only sadly shake their heads and mutter, as Alan Binder did some time ago, that “sociology is really very undeveloped” – that is, compared to economics.5 Whether sociology is or is not undeveloped is a moot point depending on how one judges development in the social sciences. It certainly cannot be judged by reference to a Kuhnian central paradigm such as economics seems to have attained, at least in its neoclassical guise. Nevertheless, it is true that sociology has become so dispersed as a discipline as to lose any inner coherence or focus. This is reflected in the fact that among its theoretical approaches, there is a considerable preponderance of French Theory and other “postmodern” influences. A very rough and ready indication of the importance of French Theory in contemporary sociology and of the general scattering of sociology in all directions can be obtained from a crude bibliometric measure based on the number of entries in the index of representative survey books. For this purpose, we have selected one such prominent work, The Blackwell Companion to Social Theory, the second edition published in 2000 and edited by Bryan S. Turner.6 It incorporates 18 essays on a large variety of topics in sociology, mostly by British authors but with a considerable number of American ones as well. Its date of publication is significant, for by the year 2000 sociology had drastically changed from what it had been in 1970 and had absorbed numerous influences, which had scarcely existed or been known about 30 years before. Counting the entries in the index for author names and ordering them in terms of their numerical magnitudes, taking 10 entries as the minimum, the results for the outstanding 26 are as follows: 1) Weber (82), 2) Parsons (82), 3) Giddens (52), 4) Durkheim (45), 5) Marx (41), 6) Habermas (38), 7) Foucault (36), 8) Adorno (36), 9) Freud (34), 10) Mead, (31), 11) Bourdieu (28), 12) Simmel (27), 13) Lévi-Strauss (23), 14) Althusser (22), 15) Derrida (21), 16) Schutz (2), 17) Elias (20), 18) Hegel (12), 19) Horkheimer (19), 20) Benjamin (16), 21) Lyotard (17), 22) Luhmann (17), 23) Baudrillard (16), 24) Heidegger (15), 25) Deleuze (10), 26) Irigaray (10). What emerges out of this admittedly inadequate survey are some surprising outcomes that are in a very general way indicative of what has happened to the science of sociology. There is an overwhelming bias towards contemporary figures as against those of the past. Some of this can simply be attributed to academic politics, which is the obvious explanation for Giddens emerging as the third most important sociologist after Weber and Parsons,

Sociology 65 but before Durkheim and Marx. The other striking feature is the presence of all the well-known Parisian figures, some of whom one would not have imagined had anything to do with sociology. What is Derrida doing in the middle ranking ahead of Schutz, Elias and Hegel? In fact, adding up the index entries for the Parisian contemporaries, who in fact constitute all of the French names with the exception of Durkheim, we arrive at the total of 187, which is more than a quarter of the grand total of 770. We might conclude from this that a quarter of sociology is now occupied by French Theory or post-Structuralism and its immediate Structuralist precursor, Lévi-Strauss, who was not a sociologist either, in any serious sense; only Bourdieu can be considered as such. Bibliometric data such as this gives only a very vague estimate of what has happened to sociology. Nevertheless, it is indicative of some things, above all of the huge divergence that has now occurred between theoretical and empirical work. Only about half the names on the list can be credited with any kind of empirical work in sociology, and most of these are from the older generations; there are few contemporaries among the empiricists. Theorists and empiricists now seem to have little to do with each other, the former taking flight into an abstract empyrean of more and more rarefied and abstruse concepts and the latter keeping their noses to the grindstone, close to the factual ground of statistical data collecting and surveys. In the absence of theories, the latter rely increasingly on information processing methodologies, frequently implemented by computers. This work seldom results in anything more significant than statistical correlations, rather than causal relations. The two sides keep to themselves as far as it is possible within the one department, but they publish in different journals and attend their own sessions at conference proceedings. It is now beginning to look increasingly doubtful that sociology can survive as an integral discipline. It looks more likely that it will break up into innumerable “studies” courses, a fate which also awaits all the other social sciences, with the possible exception of economics, but threatens sociology even more than any of the others. If sociology were to dissolve, it would bring to an end three centuries of extraordinary intellectual development that began together with the inception of the period of Enlightenment in Western civilization and lasted for as long as that tradition continued to exert an influence on intellectual life. The demise of sociology would be a symptom of the end of the Enlightenment as a civilizational force in Western modernity. The first setback that sociology suffered came in the 1930s as a direct result of the attack on Enlightenment values stemming from the onset of the totalitarian ideologies, Communism, Fascism and Nazism. Prior to that date sociology had experienced the full flowering of its development in a kind of Indian summer before winter set in. The first three decades of the twentieth century were the acme of European sociology prior to its near demise in Europe over the next three decades, followed by a partial revival. Even though continuity was maintained in America, where many European

66  Sociology sociologists fled, it was no longer at the same pitch of endeavour or achievement as during the earlier period when the great classic authors of sociology were active. Down to the 1930s each of the major European nations, as well as America, had its own sociological tradition, each with its great masters, Weber, Simmel, Durkheim, Mauss, Pareto, Hobhouse, Mead – these are names to conjure with in sociology. And besides these more established academic sociologists, there were various schools of Marxists who studied economy and society in their own somewhat different fashion. The sociologists overlapped in their work with economists before this became an impenetrable mathematical discipline, as well as with anthropologists and linguists before Structuralism, with psychologists before Behaviourism, and with historians as we have already outlined in the previous chapter. None of these disciplines were as yet hermetically closed-off worlds of specialization. Not only was communication between disciplines still open, but so, too, was intercourse between the different languages in which sociology was written, much more so than at present, despite the Internet and jet travel. It would be perfectly otiose to try to spell out the various major movements and schools of the trente années glorieuses at the start of the twentieth century as there already exist numerous quite weighty tomes on the whole or part of this period.7 However, it might be useful to provide a few notes on how sociology became an academic subject, for it had scarcely been one till that point, but rapidly became one during those thirty years. The process was more or less simultaneous in all four countries, with France slightly in the lead and America, Germany and Britain following behind in that order. The institutionalization and professionalization of sociology as an academic discipline began just before the turn of the century in the late 1890s. An exhaustive study is obviously impossible, but a few indicators touching on the careers of the main figures will illustrate how this took place. Durkheim began in pedagogy at the University of Bordeaux, but in 1895 acquired the first chair of sociology at that university, followed by a similar chair at the Sorbonne in 1902. In 1898 he founded the journal L’Année Sociologique, the very first such sociological publication. Weber began as a professor of economics, first at Freiburg in 1894 then at Heidelberg in 1896, specializing in Roman agrarian history. He turned to sociology after his nervous breakdown, published The Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism and assumed the associate editorship of the Archives for Social Science and Social Welfare in 1904. In 1909 he convened the German Sociological Association. Pareto succeeded Walras to the chair of Political Economy at Lausanne in 1893 and gradually shifted from economics to sociology early in the new century. In England the Sociological Society was inaugurated at the London School of Economics (LSE) in 1903; that school itself, a unique institution devoted to the social sciences, had been established by the Webbs in 1895 in the teeth of strong opposition from the traditional universities. Hobhouse and Westermarck were granted chairs in

Sociology 67 sociology in 1907. Such chairs were already well established in America as from the 1890s, as we shall see. As well as stern opposition from the traditionalists within the university, mainly the well-established historians, sociologists had to face the extra-mural challenge of the Marxists, who at this stage were very rarely admitted to positions in the universities; in Germany, the so-called Kathedersozialisten were the few exceptions. Marxism covered much of the same ground as sociology, but did so from an ideological point of view, with revolutionary political goals. Sociology sought to distinguish itself from Marxism by insisting on its scientific character and practising value-neutrality in regard to politics. The tension between sociology and Marxism became ever tauter in the subsequent post-First World War period when Marxists began to acquire chairs and engage in debates with the sociologists. These debates continued from then on and often became acrimonious, especially after the Second World War in France, when some professors were members of the Communist Party and many were fellow travellers. It is one of the main reasons why sociology never fully developed in France. At present Marxism is simply lumped in with all kinds of other political orientations as a branch of sociology, particularly in its cultural form, which emerged after it had lost its revolutionary edge. The onslaught of doctrinaire Marxism against sociology was particularly virulent after the French Communist Party became Stalinist during the 1930s and sociology was branded a bourgeois ideology. As bad luck would have it, the Durkheimians were in no position to put up much opposition. Durkheim had died in 1917, and soon after Simmel and Weber were also dead. Almost half of the Durkheimian school fell on the field of battle. With only Marcel Mauss and Maurice Halbwachs left as major figures, the school never recovered. Its journal, L’Année Sociologique, only appeared twice in the 1920s and then ceased publication altogether.8 To add to the woes of sociology in France, from the mid-1920s the Durkheimians fought a losing battle against the Annales school of historians under Marc Bloch and Lucien Lefebvre whose work covered very similar ground to that of historical sociology. As we have already studied the interaction between the two schools in the previous chapter, we need only add that after the Second World War the Annales historians completely dominated the social field, and “Fernand Braudel could afterwards say that social history and not sociology was the heir of Emil Durkheim … ”, as Wolf Lepenies puts it.9 Besides, a tacit understanding had been entered into between the Annales historians and the Marxists to pursue a joint materialist interpretation of history and society, as practiced by Labrousse and Braudel in particular. Some, in fact, were members of the Communist Party or fellow travellers. After the Second World War, the Marxisante atmosphere in French academia was so all-pervasive that the one major sociologist advocating Weber in France, Raymond Aron, was dismissed as some kind of reactionary. The Annales historians shunned Weber, and it was they who dominated the newly founded academic institutions, such as the École

68  Sociology des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, half of which – despite its social science designation – consisted of historians. The one distinguished sociologist there was Alain Touraine, and he was not much given to Weber. Eventually, too, the rise of Structuralism and post-Structuralism, particularly the influence of Foucault among the Annales historians, proved to be inimical to sociology. Hence, sociology has remained stunted in France ever since. The situation for sociology in England was not much better than that in France. Sociology was almost completely confined to the London School of Economics (LSE), where Morris Ginsberg taught and where Karl Mannheim later gained a post when he came to England as a refugee. But few other such exiles, generally Jews from Germany, could resume their work or careers in England because, apart from residual anti-Semitism, there were very few departments of sociology. As a result, Norbert Elias was left to languish for almost twenty years in England, till in advanced years he managed to gain a lecturing post at Leicester, one of the provincial universities. Oxford and Cambridge shunned sociology, as did most of the other prestigious universities. It was not till the mid-1960s, with the foundation of the new universities that sociology was generally accepted and became established in British academia. In Germany, the fate of sociology after the First World War was at first far more hopeful, but eventually cause for despair. During the Weimar years, thanks to the influence of the Minister for Culture and Secretary of State, Carl Heinrich Becker, sociological teaching in the universities received a huge boost. Becker had been a follower of Weber and Troeltsch; he believed that sociology had the capacity to awaken in students a synthetic mode of thought that combined a number of different branches of knowledge. He saw sociology as eminently fitted for providing the generalist education, so necessary for the new Weimar Republic, as he put it: Chairs of sociology are an urgent necessity in all higher institutions of learning. At the same time sociology, in the widest sense of the word, includes scientific policy-making and contemporary history … Through sociological reflection alone can there be created in the intellectual domain a spiritual training which, transferred to the ethical domain, will then become political conviction.10 Whether such high hopes had any chance of being realized was very dubious; nevertheless, thanks to Becker’s instigation chairs in sociology multiplied during the Weimar period. Sociologists in Germany at that time had to confront the opposition of most of the entrenched academic mandarins who were of a conservative, if not outright reactionary, disposition. As we have already mentioned, the traditionalist historians turned against sociology as from the late nineteenth century after Karl Lamprecht and Kurt Breysig made modest proposals that social scientific methods be introduced into the study of history. Historians persisted in their hostility during the Weimar years. At the same

Sociology 69 time, opposition also came from the opposite political extreme, from the Marxists who were falling increasingly under the control of dictates from Moscow, especially after Stalin’s accession in the late 1920s. A prime example of this was Georg Lukacs, before the war a pupil of Simmel and close friend of Weber, who turned against him and sociology in general as a “bourgeois” mode of thought; a view which he even more virulently repeated in his book The Destruction of Reason, written at the height of Stalinism immediately after the Second World War.11 As far as the Frankfurt school Marxists were concerned, the best one can say is that they were equivocal on this score till well after the Second World War and that Weber’s work never played a major role in their thinking. Hostility to sociology in Germany also came from sundry other quarters as well, for example, the literary critic Ernst Robert Curtius attacked Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge, and the philosopher Heidegger was vehemently opposed to sociology: he denounced Weber’s relative Eduard Baumgarten to the Nazi authorities, as having been associated with the hostile liberal-democratic “Weber circle,” frequented by Jews.12 As far as sociology was concerned, the Nazis put an end to its brief period of efflorescence during the Weimar years. There were some established sociologists who were already favourably disposed to Nazism, such as Werner Sombart, once Weber’s friend, and these survived unscathed; most others, especially Socialists and Jews had to flee. Of the younger sociologists, those prepared to make their obeisances to the regime, such as Hans Freyer, Helmut Schelsky, and Ernst Kriek, did well and thrived. They continued to do so after the war as well for they retained their former positions, as did most Nazi sympathizers. But sociology in Germany had been fatally wounded even though not killed outright. It only began to revive in the 1960s when younger figures emerged, such as Jürgen Habermas, a protégé of the partially restored Frankfurt school, and Niklas Luhmann a follower of Talcott Parsons and exponent of American-style systems theory. But by this stage, the onus in sociology had passed to America.

Section II – Sociology in America After the Second World War America came to dominate sociology, as was also the case in most other natural and social sciences. In sociology this was only partly due to the fact that many refugees had gathered there from Europe; it was due even more to the fact that America had already established its own somewhat different foundations for this science. In sociology, as in other sciences, the Americans made early promising beginnings at the turn of the twentieth century. In fact, the first chairs of sociology, those of Albion Small at Chicago in 1892 and Frank H. Giddings at Columbia in 1894, were established even earlier than any in Europe. The professionalization of sociology, as of many other social sciences, was much more thorough in America than in Europe and has continued to be so throughout the twentieth century.

70  Sociology In fact, even apart from professionalization, the spirit with which Americans approached sociology was very different from that of the Europeans, as Weber had noticed during his brief visit to America in 1904.13 Dorothy Ross has characterized it as embodying “liberal values, a practical bent, shallow historical vision, and technocratic culture”.14 These themes have prevailed in American sociology from start to finish because they are key aspects of American culture in general. The last point, technocratic culture, issues in a particularly scientistic and rigorous conception of methodology which, as we shall see, is even more predominant in economics. However, unlike economics, in sociology, the rigorous method cannot amount to mathematization, though as Ross notes, “scientific method [means] freedom from the vagaries of history, [together with] practical utility”.15 Both points are crucial: American sociology is beset by a lack of historical consciousness, or presentism, as it might be called; and together with that goes an emphasis on pragmatism or harnessing sociology to do useful work. What this has meant is that American sociologists, with some obvious exceptions, above all that of Parsons, have tended to eschew European-style theorizing, whether it be English evolutionism, French Functionalism or German historicism. This is evident in the work of the Chicago School, featuring William J. Thomas, Robert Park and Ernest W. Burgess, which focussed on the then-present state of the new immigrant city of Chicago, and thereby pioneered urban sociology and invented new quantitative methods of research. Something similar is true of the work of Giddings, as Ross writes: The sociological tradition that Giddings established at Columbia came to centre on statistical method. The more fearful Giddings was of the American future, the more he propagandized for the scientific method of exact measurement.16 This stress on Method was closely in keeping with Pragmatist philosophy, initially that of Dewey, later that of Karl Pearson who favoured the “statistical description of the measurable characteristics of aggregates of individuals”.17 These methodological prescriptions were only rarely relaxed. Nevertheless, Small, who had studied in Germany under Simmel, as so many of the early American masters had done, encouraged his student Florian Znaniecki to combine Method-driven science with sympathetic understanding in his classic study The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1918–1920). The tendency to model sociology on the natural sciences became ever more pronounced after the Second World War. It led to the adoption of much of the paraphernalia of scientific research, especially that of so-called Big Science. It frequently involved large-scale data gathering, requiring extensive instrumentation, such as measuring devices, calculating procedures and eventually the use of computers for data analysis. Such research

Sociology 71 could only be done by large teams financed by large research grants. The publications that resulted featured group authorship of a dozen names or more. In general, the altered nature of sociological research involving teamwork was registered by the statistical fact that whereas previously most articles in the major sociological journals had featured a single author or at most two, in the later stages such individual publications became a rarity. In a reversal of what had been the case during the golden years of European sociology, the individual mind no longer commanded much credence. Hence, despite the fact that so many German sociologists came to the United States and taught in American universities, some of them friends and pupils of Weber, the Weberian approach never really caught on in American sociology or in the social sciences in general. Hence, the concluding criticism that Ross makes is that “the desire to achieve universalistic abstractions and quantitative methods turned American social scientists away from interpretative models available in history and cultural anthropology, and from the generalizing and interpretative model offered by Max Weber”.18 Ross believes that Weber’s work could have offered a corrective to the Method-driven tendencies of American social science by balancing statistical analysis with history and interpretative understanding: Had American social scientists followed such models, they need not have abandoned a generalising aim or the appropriate use of statistical methods of analysis. Systematic study of the oligopolistic market of finance capitalism or of representative democracy in mass-communication society could be imbedded in an ideal-typical analysis in a Weberian social science, where they would keep their relation to changing social formations and keep open the possibility of other kinds of analysis. Conscious of the interpretative character of their knowledge, social scientists would not deliberately forget their own history, but develop the capacity of that history to generate critical self-awareness and conceptual sophistication.19 Unfortunately, that was not to be the case in America; instead of any such harmonious fusion between empirical work and theory, the split between these two sides of the science increasingly widened until it became a veritable impassable gulf. The whole discipline tended to divide into empiricists and theorists. Social theory became a separate speciality of its own, independent of any empirical findings and not even requiring such findings or the relevant research undertaken for confirmation. Perhaps the remedy that Ross recommends of returning to Weber and the practice of historical sociology might still be relevant even now, as we shall try to show at the end of this chapter. This process of establishing theory in its own right began with the one theoretical giant of American sociology: Parsons. Over a long career at Harvard, where he founded a school, he sought to establish something like

72  Sociology the one central theoretical paradigm for sociology that would render it as scientific as economics. It was perhaps predictable that this was bound to fail but it was, nevertheless, a heroic attempt. And it is by no means dead even now, as so many of his students and students of students have continued his work. The sources of his Herculean efforts are identified by Stephen Turner as inhering in the American sociology of his time: In the United States, the politics of disciplinary competition and the role of the Rockefeller philanthropies led to the emphasis on the idea of sociology as a science. Parsons, influenced by Harvard writers on science, such as his patron L.J. Henderson, combined the impulse towards conceptual system construction and systematic survey of past theory with the aspiration of making sociology a science. Parsons took from Henderson the belief that every science possessed and required a single, unified, conceptual scheme, and he set about providing one through an analysis of what he took to be the most important canonical figures in sociology, including Vilfredo Pareto, Émile Durkheim, and especially Max Weber, as well as Alfred Marshall. Parsons’ huge undertaking, similar to the many analogous systems provided by his German counterparts in the 1930s that were influenced by the neo-Kantian idea that an organized and hierarchical scheme of concepts was the key to being a science, had little to distinguish it, other than his insistence that this was science in the sense of natural science.20 Parsons, who had studied with Max Weber’s brother Alfred Weber in the early 1930s, was extremely well versed in all the European developments in sociology and he sought to bring them together in a grand synthesis. As Turner notes, he was particularly intent on combining the sociologies of Weber, Durkheim and Pareto with the neoclassical economics of Marshall. He sought to do so on the basis of what he called “the functional prerequisites of social systems”.21 He focused this on the primary requirement of social order; and this led him to emphasize the importance of “a value system and a normative order”, which he held to have derived from the aforesaid Weber, Durkheim and Pareto.22 This led him to postulate a “tripartite division of individuals as organisms and personalities, the ‘interactive system’ (that is, the social system narrowly identified), and the system of cultural patterning”.23 This is the kind of scheme that Habermas has also pursued in opposing life worlds to systems. Parsons’ structural-functionalist account suited Durkheim and Pareto much more than Weber or Marshall, but Parsons took this in his stride and thought he had found ways to integrate them all. Working at this high level of generality he could make anything in sociology fit with anything else. But this brought him the predictable criticism of “equating theory with conceptual scheme, so much so that much of his work has been definitional and

Sociology 73 taxonomic rather than propositional”, as even his sympathetic expositor Wilfred E. Moore notes.24 C. Wright Mills was among the first to lay this kind of charge: Grand theorists … are so rigidly confined to such high levels of abstraction that the typologies they make up – and the work they do to make them us – seem more often an arid game of Concepts rather than an effort to define systematically – which is to say, in a clear and orderly way – the problems at hand and guide our efforts to solve them.25 According to John Holmwood, “he criticized the ‘grand theory’ of Parsons as well, as arid, but technically sophisticated, ‘abstract empiricism’, in the name of a sociology engaged with ‘private troubles’ and ‘public problems’”.26 As we shall see later, Alvin Gouldner and many others soon joined in, above all the Marxists, who pointed to the lack of conflict or contradictions in his view of a harmoniously functioning society. But Parsons’ work was not done with, and the work of systems theorists such as Niklas Luhmann came straight out of Parsons’ system-like Structural Functionalism. Luhmann was not alone in absorbing the influence of Parsons; his German colleague Habermas, as we have already noted, made a similar attempt, as Gerard Delanty asserts: Habermas attempted to reconcile the critique of instrumental reason – from Marx through Weber to the Frankfurt School – with the functionalist tradition and symbolic interaction, from Durkheim and Mead to Parsons. By means of the theory of communicative action, Habermas believed that a synthesis of grand theory could be possible.27 Habermas’ grand theory far exceeded that of Parsons, or that of any other theorist; it was a feat of omnivorous proportions that included just about every major twentieth-century current of thought. For as well as the thinkers and schools of thought that Delanty refers to, Habermas also incorporated into his grand synthesis Psychoanalysis from Freud to Marcuse, the Hermeneutic tradition from Dilthey to Gadamer, the Phenomenological philosophy of the “life world” from Husserl to Schutz, from Dewey to Mead, Linguistic analysis from Austin to Searle, and much else besides. But, as Delanty goes on to say, Habermas’ “attempts to rescue social theory from fragmentation ultimately failed to achieve the ascendency enjoyed by Parsons”.28 The reason for this is not so much that “the age of grand theory had passed”, as that the fragmentation of sociology could not be arrested by one man’s efforts and certainly not by an omnibus theory that sought all-inclusiveness. However, by the 1980s the criticism of Parsons started to moderate and his theories once more began to play a crucial role in American sociology. One of his students, Jeffrey Alexander, reinterpreted Parsons in a

74  Sociology metatheoretical way. According to George Ritzer, Alexander presents a new version of Parsons’ convergence thesis, one that is now applied both to him and his critics.29 Stephen Turner goes even further than that and claims that the so-called cultural turn in late twentieth-century American sociology derives indirectly from Parsons through Alexander and Robert Bellah. Bellah, “a typical product of the Parsonian career-making machine, reappeared as a cultural sociologist in the 1980s and 1990s, and went on to devote himself to the sociology of religion”.30 But perhaps that is too specific a derivation for the “cultural turn”, which was a widespread movement in sociology, as well as many other social sciences. In anthropology, Clifford Geertz developed a quasi-literary hermeneutics of symbolic interpretation, which was also taken up by sociologists, as was the similar work of Victor Turner and Mary Douglas. Marxists who dealt with cultural issues also began to play leading roles in sociology; these ranged from the more orthodox Gramscians and Lukacsians to the more heretical Frankfurt School thinkers. At the hands of Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno, Critical Theory was absorbed into sociology. In this way, sociology was gradually incorporating what had formerly been critical movements opposed to it, and this did not sit well with its claims to be a science. Cultural Marxism was hardly conducive to the kind of empirical work sociologists had practised in America. Perhaps the most disruptive and unsettling of these new entrants into sociology were the exponents of French Theory, which, as we saw from even our cursory prior survey, was already well established in sociology by the start of the twenty-first century. This began with the Structuralists: the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, the critic Roland Barthes and the Marxist Louis Althusser, whose work inevitably debouched into sociology, given its absorptive propensities. They were followed by the post-Structuralists, who had an even more decisive effect on sociology and among whom the most influential were Foucault, Lyotard, Baudrillard, Deleuze and Bourdieu – only the last of whom was an accredited sociologist. Each developed his own idiosyncratic approach which ran quite counter to the sociological tradition; and, in fact, they tended to denounce it as pseudo-science or “sociologism”, as Foucault contemptuously called it.31 But they, too, were somehow incorporated into social theory as wayward but, nevertheless, integral members of the family. Steven Seidman devotes a whole section of his book to them as if their role as sociologists is a fait accompli.32 Something similar holds for all other so-called postmodernist approaches in sociology. Books expounding and, indeed, propounding and even propagandizing, what Postmodernism amounts to in the social sciences and what interesting “alternative” possibilities this opens up have not been lacking. One such is Pauline Marie Rosenau’s Post-Modernism and the Social Sciences published in 1992 when the postmodernist wave was at its height.33 As for what this kind of approach has to offer the social sciences, we are told the following right at the outset:

Sociology 75 Post-Modernists, defining everything as text, seek to “locate” meaning rather than to “discover” it. They avoid judgement, and the most sophisticated among them never “advocate” or “reject” but speak rather of being “concerned with” a topic or “interested in” something. They offer “readings” not “observations, “interpretations” not “findings”, they muse about one thing or another. They never test because testing requires “evidence”, a meaningless concept within a postmodern frame of reference.34 If we allow ourselves to invoke the forbidden idea of testing, we might test what results if this prescription for postmodernist procedure is applied to the politics and sociology of Nazi extermination. Auschwitz emerges as an “interesting text” in which we can “locate” the meaning that the Nazis gave it as ridding humanity of “human waste”, like any garbage incinerator. We are forbidden to “discover” what role it really played in the Nazi program of extermination and what this meant to both victims and perpetrators. We must avoid judgement about what is true or false, rational or irrational in the “meaning” we “locate” there, and, above all, not judge it as moral or immoral. We must maintain an equivocal position about Auschwitz and never either “advocate” or “reject” it, but merely be “concerned” with it or “interested” in it. We can “muse” about it, but not offer “observations” or “findings” only “readings” or “interpretations”. As to whether there were gas chambers in operation there, we can allow people to differ in their “readings” and “interpretations”, for there can be no evidence either way since “evidence” is a “meaningless concept”. A Holocaust denier could not ask for anything better than social science practised in this postmodernist manner. Indeed, these are precisely the tactics that Holocaust deniers adopted, some of them, we might say, were Postmodernists avant la lettre, for they thought in this way without knowing it, even before Postmodernism was invented – or should that be “located”. But a no lesser personage than Derrida himself was not above resorting to similar rhetorical ploys of “reading” when defending his mentor Heidegger and his friend Paul de Man from well-founded charges of Nazi sympathies. Rosenau herself quotes Derrida as maintaining that “de Man’s behaviour was understandable although admittedly ‘not laudable’”; and if understandable, then excusable presumably.35 But as far as the Postmodernists are concerned, it is, of course, pointless to argue against Postmodernism in this manner since it is proof against any form of rational argumentation or logic as it denies their validity. This touches on the ultimate, in principle, self-defeating nature of Postmodernism, which, in practice, it simply ignores – and which has not prevented it from being influential in the social sciences, especially in sociology. However, Postmodernism did not make its main impact in social science departments. It had far more impact in the special interest studies that

76  Sociology began to proliferate in the American universities from the 1970s onwards. These dealt with issues of identity-politics mainly concerning class, race and gender. Sociologically considered, their main raison d’être is to play on and exploit feelings of grievance and resentment, and, as Stephen Turner contends, “are driven primarily by particular notions of oppression and injury that are rooted in personal experience and related to policies and programs”.36 In itself there is nothing wrong with special interests pursuing mission-oriented studies with a policy agenda – there are many such in all areas of science. However, coupled with an impenetrable jargon largely derived from French Theory and enforcing political correctness restrictions on debate, the special studies have become a danger to intellectual discourse that threatens to swamp sociology itself in irrationalities. What can happen to drive a field of study in sociology into self-defeating and ruinous postmodernist extremes is well illustrated by the history of the sociology of science over the last half-century. Till that point, the sociology of science had been a well-established branch of sociology with a considerable body of work spanning major schools in Germany, France, Britain and America. Then a revolutionary departure took place with the publication of Kuhn’s work, which explained major changes in science with its idea of paradigm revolutions as transformations in ways of practising science that, according to Kuhn, cannot be rationally justified.37 This gave the lead to ever more extreme attacks on truth, objectivity, methodological procedure, evidence, verification or falsification or any other of the principles that were previously held to govern scientific developments. Eventually, even Kuhn himself was appalled by these outré sociologies of science which had taken off from his work; towards the very end of his life in 1994 he told his friend, the great physicist Steven Weinberg, “I am among those who have found the strong program absurd, an example of deconstruction gone mad”.38 But by then it was far too late to do anything about it for the irrationalist alternatives had become well established. By the “Strong Program” Kuhn was referring to the new school of British sociologists of science pioneered by David Bloor and David Barnes. These took their philosophical bearings from the late philosophy of Wittgenstein, particularly his work on mathematics, according to which all the so-called rational modes of human thought are nothing but “language-games”, purely conventionalist practices, just like any other customs or cultural habits. From this, it follows that science is no more rational than myth. The Strong Programmers interpret this to mean that all such forms are “social constructs”, manufactured according to the ideological dispositions of given cultures. Thus, they take objective scientific facts to be conventional artefacts made like any other social products. Applying this to science, they arrive at their so-called principle of symmetry, namely, that “true” theories are to be accounted for in exactly the same way as false theories by reference to the same motives or interests, struggles for power, propaganda and all the other persuasive devices used in rhetorical warfare. This is clearly a travesty

Sociology 77 of scientific argumentation and procedure. We have already provided a refutation of this approach elsewhere, so we will not repeat it here.39 Deriving from the Strong Program, but taking it further in the direction of French Theory, is the work of Bruno Latour. Calling itself Actor-Network Theory, this is an approach that is even more extreme than that of his British colleagues, against whom he eventually turned, resulting in an acrimonious quarrel.40 He took his philosophical inspiration from his mentors Foucault and Michel Serres rather than Wittgenstein. Foucault taught him that truth is power and the latter provided him with a metaphorical and rhetorical way of interpreting the truths of science. Clearly, this represents an even greater degree of “deconstruction gone mad” than the Strong Program. Despite this, or perhaps precisely because of it, Latour’s work has enjoyed extraordinary success, his book Science in Action is the closest to a best-seller in the sociology of science, and numerous undergraduate programs all over the world, particularly in America, use it as a textbook.41 Whether the sociology of science can ever recover from such debasement is now a dubious matter, and an indication of the fate that awaits other branches of sociology if they continue to proceed in the same direction. All these varied approaches that constitute “social theory in the postmodern era” are celebrated as “truly interdisciplinary, global, politically engaged, and reveal a dizzying variety of perspectives” as Seidman puts it in the extract we previously quoted.42 Other theorists are indeed dazzled by this superabundant diversity as an “explosion of knowledge”; but it is not so much that new knowledge has been gained, but rather that the old knowledge has been splintered and split into a huge array of fields, methods, approaches, and orientations constituting an ever greater proliferation of sub-disciplines and sub-subdisciplines. We have already seen how the sociology of science, a subdiscipline of the sociology of knowledge, itself a major branch of sociology, is in turn subdivided into further constituent specialities almost without cease. The same is happening to all the other major branches of sociology. Each little shard of the shattered mirror of sociology, like a windowless Leibnizian monad, reflects an image of the world in its own way, one which it is unable to communicate to any other. Such vast profusion only spells confusion. The problems that sociology as a science and as a coherent discipline face have been neatly summed up in a short paper by the distinguished Hungarian-American sociologist Ivan Szelenyi. As compared to neoclassical economics and rational-choice political science, sociology faces a triple crisis: “It lost its political appeal (and radical mission); it could not find, so far, an appropriate response to the methodological challenge from economics and rational choice; and the discipline appears to be in utter confusion over whether it has a common theoretical core (which are the “great books” every sociologist should be familiar with), and even debates whether such a core would be desirable”.43 In all these three respects sociology seems to Szelenyi to be worse off than its cognate social sciences, economics and

78  Sociology “hard” politics – there is, of course, a “soft” politics that is more like sociology. The latter two have clearly defined academic missions and are wellbounded disciplines; they have a rigorous methodology and are therefore much more “scientific”; and they seem to have an agreed-upon theoretical core and classical authors who expound it. But Szelenyi wonders whether what appears to provide them with something approaching Kuhnian paradigms is really such an advantage as compared to sociology, which obviously lacks any such thing. According to Szelenyi, the first crisis of sociology is political and has to do with the waning of radical politics as compared to the heady days of the late 1960s and early 1970s or what in France came to be known as the generation of ‘68. At that time in America and the rest of the Western world sociology was a “hot” subject attracting droves of radicalized students. Since then, as the heat has diffused from the political and academic scene, sociology has lost much of its attraction, and is now in a situation where it can barely fill its classrooms. To attract students, it has had to resort to so-called sexy topics in direct competition with the special interest studies fields, those based on race, ethnic identity, gender, class and popular culture. This threatens to turn it into a macédoine of all flavours to please all tastes, but provide little intellectual sustenance. The second crisis is methodological and concerns empirical sociology; it has to do with the problem of establishing causal relations between independent variables in sociology. This problem affects empirical studies such as survey research. It means that through the statistical techniques of random sampling correlations can be established and predictions made very accurately about a large population on the basis of a very small sample, yet, according to Szelenyi, this is nowhere near enough to establish causal connections, such as those established in medicine through random assignment, where one group is treated with a drug and a control group is denied this treatment. In sociology, such an experimental approach is almost impossible in real-life situations and can only be carried out under artificial arrangements which do not reflect real-life conditions; as a consequence, the results obtained cannot be generalized outside the “laboratory”, so to speak. Szelenyi believes that this problem of causality is insuperable in sociology, though here he seems to think that it is less pressing in economics and political science, which, as he himself later admits, is far from the case. He poses the leading question: “Can the study of social (and economic) phenomena make believable claims about causality?” And he answers it by saying that Weber suspected it cannot, hence he opted for “interpretative social sciences”. He is wrong about Weber and has given up too quickly on the problem of causal attribution. Obviously, the social sciences cannot establish causal relations with the rigour and objectivity with which this can be achieved in the natural sciences through experimental controls. But this does not mean that causal relations cannot be established in the social sciences.

Sociology 79 Weber devoted a methodological essay to this problem entitled “Objective Possibility and Adequate Causation in Historical Explanation”.44 We cannot expound here what Weber means by “adequate causation”, but clearly it contradicts Szelenyi’s contention that Weber was content with merely “interpretative social sciences”. Weber’s methodological essays have a major bearing on Szelenyi’s third crisis of the role of theory in sociology. What he means by this is the fact that there is no consensus in sociology as to a common theoretical basis for the discipline, unlike in economics, at least in its neoclassical form where there is no disagreement as to what are the basic principles, or what is to be commonly taught in introductory courses for students, such as those of Microeconomics and Macroeconomics. There is no such undisputed starting point in sociology; nor is there agreement as to which authors should feature in it. This became even more so the case in America after the 1980s with the overthrow of the Parsonian structural-functionalist hegemony that had ruled during the post-World War Two period. This leads to an even deeper problem, for “as we lose our agreement over the ‘classics’ of our field, we become less certain about the questions our discipline should pose”.45 Embarrassingly so, for some of the key issues once dealt with in sociology, such as that of inequality, have now been usurped by economists, as recent publications by Thomas Piketty and Joseph Stiglitz have so glaringly revealed to a worldwide audience. Szelenyi’s answer to this triple crisis of sociology is to advocate a “return to the concerns of the majority – class, racial and gender inequality, power, poverty, oppression, exploitation, prejudice …”, namely, the good old Leftist causes. The problem is not that these are not good causes, but that they are old causes; everything we need to know about them is mostly known. We know what to do about them; and there are numerous organizations, political parties, and government bureaucracies dedicated to achieving positive results. What can sociologists add to that except for another propagandist voice? Perhaps they can serve as handmaidens to the bureaucrats by providing better data, but that will not transform the discipline, or the inequitable situation. Szelenyi’s other suggestion is much more promising: “to return to the tradition of Marx and Weber when sociology was able to confront the big issues, not to accept the role of do-gooders while economists are the ‘smart ones’”.46 The role of do-gooders is certainly to be avoided as is also the role of objective scientists, namely, to try to “turn sociology into a ‘normal science’ much like economics or rational choice political science …”.47 Returning to the classics of sociology, to all the major figures of the recent past, particularly those of the early decades of the twentieth century, would certainly be a good unifying move at present when “sociology is on the verge of chaos where the lines of communication tend to be breaking down”.48 And it might not be a bad move for economics either, as the classic economists are no longer taught and “one can get a PhD in economics in

80  Sociology respectable departments without any significant exposure to the classics”, such as Smith, Marx, Keynes and Hayek.49 An interesting recent example of a return to the classics is John Love’s book on Max Weber and Joseph Schumpeter, which deals at once with sociology and economics as exemplified by both these classic masters, for just as Weber was a sociological economist so was Schumpeter an economic sociologist.50 Love focuses the work of both on the great issue which is at the heart of the contemporary globalized world: the origin and development of capitalism. He sets himself to initiate this endeavour by working for a general theory of capitalism. This is the kind of project that very few undertake these days given the fragmented state of sociology and the equally grave problems of specialization besetting economics. In sociology, we are told by the Postmodernists that the time of such “grand narratives” is past. The economists take it for granted that capitalism exists, that there is a free market together with secure private property and everything else they need to set their equations in motion, so they need not bother themselves with explaining how such things came to be. But this is precisely the kind of question that the work of Weber and Schumpeter sets itself to answer. The importance of providing a general theoretical account of capitalism is unquestionable, for without capitalism the modern world could not have come into being or continued for such a length of time. The first thinker to fully realize this fact was Marx and he was the earliest to produce an all-embracing comprehensive theory of capitalism combining what we now might call economic and sociological theory. However, his theory is no longer adequate, for critics have since uncovered a host of lacunae and deficiencies in it. On the sociological side, Weber showed that the origins of capitalism derive from non-economic factors, such as the Protestant ethic, which Marx neglected. On the economic side, neoclassical Marginalist economics put paid to the labour theory of value on which Marx relied. Schumpeter was one of those critics, although he was sympathetic to Socialism, as was Weber also. According to Love, in the light of the shortcomings of Marxist theory, it becomes imperative to produce a general theory of capitalism that is at least as comprehensive as that of Marx. He thinks that this can be accomplished by combining Weber and Schumpeter. This synthesis is possible, he believes, because they have so much in common, as he set out in point form: First and foremost, both thinkers see capitalism as the most fateful force of modern society, and the key institution requiring our understanding. Second, both thinkers accepted that capitalism as an economic system had achieved a high level of prosperity for the mass of the population and that any socialist transformation in the short term was unlikely to be an improvement in this respect. But third, though they rejected socialism, they both saw socialism as an understandable reaction to the volatility of capitalism, and as a predictable response to the inequality and relative deprivation, a consequence of the competitive

Sociology 81 market. Fourth, despite such negatives, as we have seen, both Weber and Schumpeter provide (qualified) justifications for the capitalist system as a whole.51 Since Weber and Schumpeter’s time the achievements of capitalism have proved even more remarkable than they might have thought possible; but so, too, have been the problems this brought about, some of which, such as the potential for an environmental catastrophe, they could not even have imagined. On the theoretical plane, both Weber and Schumpeter held that an approach based both on economic history and economic theory is what is required. Both of them engaged in the Methodenstreit, the conflict between the economic Historicists and the neoclassical Marginalists, at the turn of the twentieth century, but they held that a reconciliation between the two warring parties is possible. According to Weber, this could be achieved through his theory of ideal-type models; and Love believes that Schumpeter concurred with this kind of solution. What it amounts to we shall examine in greater detail in the next chapter. Love is fully aware that devising a general theory of capitalism based on the combined work of Weber and Schumpeter will not be enough to deal with all the changes that have occurred since their time. Neither had any inkling of anything like the numerous contemporary forms of capitalism within the one global economy. They were only incipiently aware of the Welfare State and could not have suspected the preponderant role that the State would assume in economic management after the Second World War. The rise of Asian countries, above all Japan and China, was also beyond their ken. Nevertheless, Love holds that a general theory based on their work can be enlarged to accommodate such subsequent developments. In a final brief chapter, he provides some leads as to how this might be done. Nevertheless, most of that work still remains to be done. Love has provided a start; it will require the joint effort of many others as well before this particular return to the classics can come to fruition and a fully developed general theory of capitalism along these lines begins to emerge. One can only hope that there will be others to take up this quest. Since Weber and Schumpeter wrote, much has happened to the science of economics itself. It, too, would have been difficult for them to recognize in its present form. Whether this has been altogether to the good of this discipline we leave to the next chapter to determine.

Notes 1 Max Weber, “‘Objectivity’ in Social Science”, in The Methodology of the Social Sciences, eds. Edward A. Shils and Henry A. Finch (New York: The Free Press, 1949), 83. 2 Ibid., 83. 3 Anthony Eliot and Larry Ray, Key Contemporary Social Theorists (Malden, MA: Routledge, 2003).

82  Sociology 4 Steven Seidman, Contested Knowledge: Social Theory in the Postmodern Era (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1994). 5 Alan Binder, quoted in Arjo Klamer, Conversations with Economists (Totowa, NJ: Rowman, 1983), 166. 6 Bryan S. Turner, ed., The Blackwell Companion to Social Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000). 7 For example, Ronal Fletcher, The Making of Sociology: A Study of Sociological Theory, Vol. 2. Developments (London: Nelson, 1971). 8 William R. Keylor, Academy and Community: The Foundation of the French Historical Profession (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 212. 9 Wolf Lepenies, Between Literature and Science: The Rise of Sociology, trans. Reginal John Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 282. 10 Ibid., 249. 11 Georg Lukacs, The Destruction of Reason, trans. Peter Palmer (Atlantic Highland, NJ: Humanities Press, 1981). 12 Joachim Radkau, Max Weber: A Biography, trans. Patrick Camiller (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), 555. 13 Max Weber, “Science as Vocation”, in From Max Weber, eds. Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951). 14 Dorothy Ross, The Origin of American Social Science, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 1. 15 Ibid., 2. 16 Ibid., 221. 17 Ibid., 327. 18 Ibid., 473. 19 Ibid. 20 Stephen Turner, “The Future of Social Theory”, in The Blackwell Companion to Social Theory, ed. Bryan S. Turner (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009), 551. 21 Talcott Parsons, The Social System, (Glencoe, Ill: The Free Press, 1951), 26. 22 See Wilbert E. Moore, “Functionalism”, in A History of Sociological Analysis, eds. Tom Bottomore and Robert Nisbet (New York: Basic Books, 1978), 329. 23 Ibid., 348. 24 Ibid., 352. 25 C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), 43. 26 John Holmwood, “Contemporary Sociological Theory”, in The Blackwell Companion to Social Theory, ed. Bryan S. Turner, op. cit., 41. 27 Gerard Delanty, “The Foundations of Social Theory”, in The Blackwell Companion to Social Theory, op. cit., 44. 28 Ibid., 44. 29 George Ritzer, cited by John Holmwood in The Blackwell Companion, op. cit., 48. 30 Stephen Turner, in The Blackwell Companion, op. cit., 554. 31 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, trans. Anon., (London: Tavistock Press, 1970), 348. 32 See Seidman, Contested Knowledge, op. cit. 33 Paulene Marie Rosenau, Post-Modernism and the Social Sciences: Insights, Inroads and Intrusions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992). 34 Ibid., 8. 35 Ibid., 156. 36 Stephen Turner, in The Blackwell Companion, op. cit., 559. 37 Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1964).

Sociology 83 38 Steven Weinberg, “The Revolution that Didn’t Happen”, the 1997 Bohner Lecture at Rice University, New York Review of Books, Vol. XLV, No. 15, October 8, 1998. 39 See Harry Redner, Art and Science: A Parallel History (forthcoming). 40 See Andrew Pickering, ed., Science as Practice and Culture (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 41 Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to follow scientists and engineers through society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987). 42 Seidman, Contested Knowledge, op. cit. 43 Ivan Szelenyi, “The Triple Crisis of Sociology”, Contexts (A Publication of the American Sociological Association) (April 20, 2015), 4. 44 Max Weber, The Methodology of the Social Science, trans. and eds. Edward A. Shils and Henry A. Finch (New York: The Free Press, 1949), 164–188. See also Fritz Ringer, Weber’s Methodology: The Unification of the Cultural and Social Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 163–174. 45 Szelenyi, op. cit., 4. 46 Ibid., 5. 47 Ibid. 48 Ibid., 4. 49 Ibid. 50 John Love, Weber, Schumpeter and Modern Capitalism: Towards a General Theory (New York: Routledge, 2017). 51 Ibid., 212.

Bibliography Binder, Alan. Quoted in Arjo Klamer. Conversations with Economists. Totowa, NJ: Rowman, 1983. Delanty, Gerard. “The Foundations of Social Theory: Origins and Trajectories”. In The Blackwell Companion to Social Theory, edited by Brian S. Turner, 21–46. Oxford: Blackwell, 2009. Eliot, Anthony and Larry Ray. Key Contemporary Social Theorists. Malden, MA: Routledge, 2003. Fletcher, Ronald. The Making of Sociology: A Study of Sociological Theory, Vol. 2. Developments. London: Nelson, 1971. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things. Translated by London: Tavistock Press, 1970. Holmwood, John. “Contemporary Sociological Theory: Post-Parsonian Developments”. In The New Blackwell Companion to Social Theory, edited by Bryan S. Turner, 38–59. Oxford: Blackwell, 2009. Keylor, William R. Academy and Community: The Foundation of the French Historical Profession. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975. Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1964. Latour, Bruno. Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987. Lepenies, Wolf. Between Literature and Science: The Rise of Sociology. Translated by Reginal John Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Love, John. Weber, Schumpeter and Modern Capitalism: Towards a General Theory. New York: Routledge, 2017.

84  Sociology Lukacs, Georg. The Destruction of Reason. Translated by Peter Palmer. Atlantic Highland, NJ: Humanities Press, 1981. Mills, C. Wright. The Sociological Imagination. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970. Moore, Wilbert E. “Functionalism”. In A History of Sociological Analysis, edited by Tom Bottomore and Robert Nisbet, 321–361. New York: Basic Books, 1978. Parsons, Talcott. The Social System. Glencoe, Ill: The Free Press, 1951. Pickering, Andrew, ed. Science as Practice and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Radkau, Joachim. Max Weber: A Biography. Translated by Patrick Camiller. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009. Redner, Harry Art and Science: A Parallel History (forthcoming). Ringer, Fritz. Weber’s Methodology: The Unification of the Cultural and Social Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Rosenau, Paulene Marie. Post-Modernism and the Social Sciences: Insights, Inroads and Intrusions. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992. Ross, Dorothy. The Origin of American Social Science. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Seidman, Steven. Contested Knowledge: Social Theory in the Postmodern Era. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1994). Szelenyi, Ivan. “The Triple Crisis of Sociology”. In Contexts (A Publication of the American Sociological Association), April 20, 2015. Turner, Bryan S., ed. The Blackwell Companion to Social Theory. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. Turner, Stephen. “The Future of Social Theory”. In The New Blackwell Companion to Social Theory, edited by Bryan S. Turner, 551–566. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. Weber, Max. “Objectivity in Social Science”. In The Methodology of the Social Sciences, edited and translated by Edward A. Shils and Henry A. Finch, 49–112. New York: The Free Press, 1949. Weber, Max. “Science as a Vocation”. In From Max Weber, edited by Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills, 129–156. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951. Weinberg, Steven. “The Revolution that Didn’t Happen”, the 1997 Bohner Lecture at Rice University, New York Review of Books, Vol. XLV, No. 15, October 8, 1998. Znaniecki, Florian and William I. Thomas. The Polish Peasant in Europe and America: Monograph of an Immigrant Group. Boston, MA: Richard G. Badger, The Gorham Press, 1918–1920.

4

Economics Bridging the divide between scientific and socio-historical models

Section I – Economics and Ideal Types Economics is at present facing a crisis in the very opposite way and for the contrary reasons to those confronting sociology. As we saw in the previous chapter, sociology has proliferated and diversified almost without limit; by contrast, economics has narrowed and concentrated on the one core concern. It has limited itself to just one way of proceeding and treated all others as peripheral. Economists generally consider this course of development of their discipline both justified and methodologically inevitable, since it has brought it to within striking distance of a Kuhnian paradigm, the cynosure of scientificity. But sociologists and others in the social sciences are not so sure that this is the direction that such disciplines ought to take, even though there are those among them tending in that way as well and hoping that their disciplines, too, might become more like economics. Almost from the very start, the classical economists took physics as their model for what it is to be scientific. Thus, Newtonian physics played a key role in shaping the nature of economics from Adam Smith onwards. This took the form of Equilibrium Theory, which could be modelled on its close analogue in mechanics. Later in the so-called neoclassical school, other such models deriving from physics came into effect, as Philip Mirowski remarks: In order to truly understand the impasse of neoclassical economic theory, we must appreciate that the importation of physical metaphors into the economic sphere has been relentless, remorseless, and unremitting in the history of economic thought.1 At present such abstruse and arcane physics as chaos theory, catastrophe theory and such oddities as the solid-state physics of spin glass have invaded economics. The latter, as Mitchell Waldrop notes, “refers to a group of obscure magnetic materials whose practical utility was nil, but whose theoretical properties were fascinating”.2 Much the same might be said of the kind of economics pursued by economists such as Brian Arthur at Stanford, who maintains that “spin glass was quite a good metaphor for DOI: 10.4324/9781003355748-4

86  Economics the economy”.3 Apparently people and atoms are not altogether distinguishable for physicists and economists. Economists of this persuasion have also pursued the vagaries of game theory, cybernetics and the other kinds of science that Mirowski dubs “cyborg sciences”, and have also tended to end up with axiomatic formalizations that have little bearing on any kind of economic reality and are of no use for economic analysis or for policy guidance. Equilibrium Theory in particular has been beset by problems of this kind. In respect of General Equilibrium Theory, Richard Whitley has this to say: The fetishization of formalism and concomitant disregard of what Coddington terms “semantic properties”, or substantive issues seem to be almost parodied by this part of economics.4 One can readily see what this amounts to in the economics based on game theory where the main contention is whether to adopt the von Neumann or the Nash model of equilibrium. As for Nash Equilibrium Theory, according to Martin Shubik (who was familiar with Nash during his Princeton days), “you can only understand the Nash equilibrium if you have met Nash. It’s a game and it is played alone”.5 Since Nash could not or would not communicate, it is obvious what Mirowski, who quotes this, means to imply about such equilibrium theory. How did it come about that economics reached this level of abstractness and abstruseness? Did it have to model itself on physics to claim scientific status? Can there be laws of economics that are at all comparable to the laws of physics? To answer these and other such questions, we shall briefly sketch the history of how it came about that economics reached such an impasse. The claim to be a science on par with the natural sciences was most confidently asserted by the exponents of the so-called Marginalist Revolution, who founded what was subsequently called neoclassical economics. One of them, Léon Walras, stated unequivocally that “the pure theory of economics is a science which resembles the physical-mathematical sciences in every respect”.6 It is true that Neoclassicism, especially in the hands of Walras, did introduce a much more rigorous scientific approach to economics, together with novel mathematical techniques, as Stanley Bruce and Randy Grant explain: The marginalist school developed new and powerful tools of analysis, especially geometric diagrams and mathematical techniques. Thanks to these thinkers, economics became a more exact social science…The methodological controversies that the marginalists initiated resulted in a separation of objective and verifiable principles that are based on stated assumptions from those principles that depend on value judgements and a philosophical outlook.7

Economics 87 It is these methodological controversies, known in German as the Methodenstreit, which are of greatest interest to us because they concern the issue of whether economics is a science, and if so what kind of science it is and what is its relation to the natural sciences. Numerous other issues to do with the laws of economics, their applicability and other such matters were thrashed out in these methodological controversies. Hence a brief review of them is essential before further discussion as to the nature of economics and its development as a social science. Neoclassical economics had to contend against various rival approaches, which attacked it on numerous grounds. In the first place, there was the older type of theorizing, known as political economy, going back to Smith and Ricardo, which relied on the premise that labour was the fundamental measure of value. By contrast, the Neoclassicals took value to be based on utility. In so far as Marx also based his approach on the labour theory of value, his work was also strongly criticized by the Neoclassicals, especially those of the so-called Viennese school founded by Karl Menger, with Eugen Böhm-Bawerk and Friedrich von Wieser writing extended critiques of Marxist and Socialist economics in general. These in turn came back with extensive attacks on neoclassical economics, aiming in particular at the notion of utility and marginalist principles. However, the Methodenstreit was at its most intense in German-speaking universities where the Vienna school encountered a solid phalanx of opposition from the so-called Historicist school of economics, which was almost universally prevalent within that academic milieu. The German and Austrian economists had almost from the start been opposed to what they called the Manchester school or English economics, and later they were even more adamantly against the scientistic pretensions of the Neoclassicists. They maintained that economics is not a science of universal laws akin to natural science, one which could be couched in mathematical terms and the axiomatics of deduction, but rather a historical science of socially and culturally specific conditions that varied from nation to nation. The founder of this approach, Friedrich List, spoke of a uniquely German system of political economy. He was followed by such illustrious historians of economics as Wilhelm Roscher, Carl Knies, and perhaps most import of all Gustav Schmoller. Popular accounts of Historicism usually include Max Weber and Joseph Schumpeter, but this, as we shall see, is largely mistaken, for though they began within the Historicist school, they soon also gravitated towards Neoclassicism as well. In America the Historicist school came to be represented by the so-called Institutionalists, among whom were Thorstein Veblen, his student William C. Mitchell, John R. Commons and many later distinguished economists, such as John Kenneth Galbraith. The main argument that the Historicists launch against the Neoclassicals is that their so-called laws of economics are purely formalized abstractions that bear little relation to the way that real economic agents, be they individuals, firms or governments, actually behave in real economies. Such

88  Economics arguments based on historical premises continue to be made till the present day. Thus, a contemporary German writer, Joseph Vogl, in a recent publication puts it as follows: A glimpse into the tangled mass of nonlinear historical development invites us to block the process by which economic activity is subsumed under coherent economic logics. Primitive forms of allocation are not the same as markets, local markets are not the same as global markets, and these in turn are distinct from capitalist exchange relations. And even the brave new world of global finances has been beset by doubts as to how – if at all – its transactions still conform to classical market processes.8 He, therefore, adopts the extreme conclusion that “it seems appropriate to adopt a sceptical attitude towards all homogeneous economic models with systemic pretensions”.9 This, if taken strictly, would serve to eliminate most of neoclassical economics, but there is, nevertheless, something to be said for it, if it is taken as referring to some of the contemporary manifestations of this approach, as we shall see later. Historical examples where the laws of economics apparently break down are not difficult to find; these are cases where people behave economically in ways that are quite irrational from an economic point of view, but for which they have their reasons when considered within the context of their own culture and total way of life. A commonly quoted example of this is owing to the Polish economic historian Witold Kula: Polish nobles in the seventeenth century apparently managed their landed estates in a way contrary to the principle of the maximization of utility and the law of diminishing returns. They were engaged in the export of rye, but paradoxically they increased production when the price of rye fell and decreased it when the price rose.10 How is this “economic irrationality” to be explained? According to Kula, the explanation lies in the feudal nature of the economy in Poland at the time. The estates owned by nobles were worked by their serfs. The nobles were not intent on maximizing their profits or increasing their fortunes, but rather on maintaining a traditional way of life at a steady rate of income. Hence, when the price of rye fell, they had to work their serfs harder to produce more to reach the expected level of earnings; but when prices rose, they could reach that level without having to produce so much or exert their serfs unduly, so they could give them time to relax. A line of argument against neoclassical economics parallel to that of the Historicists had been invoked by Marxists and other Socialists. Vogl points to such objections when he refers to “primitive forms of allocation” and the various types of markets, local, global and capitalist. Such an approach, critical of so-called bourgeois economics was developed in a very interesting and historically persuasive way by Karl Polanyi in his masterpiece of historical economics The Great Transformation.11 Polanyi takes up the

Economics 89 theme of primitive forms of allocation and refers himself to the work of the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski who had studied forms of allocation and exchange among primitive people, such as the Trobriand islanders in the South Pacific. He was particularly taken by a form of exchange known as kula in which gifts were given on the expectation that eventually there would be a return gift to the giver. This case subsequently became a subject of intense interest as an example of the many forms of non-market exchange to be encountered in both anthropology and history. Marcel Mauss elaborated a theory of prestation and the related practice of potlach found among American natives. Historically, both gift-giving and tribute (at the opposite pole of compliance) have played extremely important roles, for example in the relation between Chinese emperors and the rulers of subordinate states. The economist Kenneth Boulding has developed a whole branch of economics on this basis.12 It is thus amply apparent from such anthropological and historical studies that the allocation of resources through a free and open market utilizing money as a means of exchange did not exist until relatively recently in historical terms. How it arose, and why, is indeed, the main subject of Polanyi’s work. He shows that this way of allocating resources did not exist prior to the institution of a capitalist mode of production and the kind of market this requires, roughly about the time of the Industrial Revolution in England. Prior to that point in time, economic provisioning was achieved in three non-market ways that Polanyi dubs redistribution, reciprocity and householding. What these processes amount to is not something that we can enter into here, and is not the main point of our exposition. The main point of interest is Polanyi’s argument that the kind of exchange and market that neoclassical economics presupposes is not, as it were, a natural historical occurrence that emerges of its own accord out of the utility-seeking actions of masses of individuals. Rather it is the result of deliberate actions on the part of governments, classes and interest groups designed to break up old established patterns of traditional economic arrangement and substitute market ones in their place. Thus, freeing up land, labour and capital from the ties and restrictions that cause them to be embedded in the traditional society and disembedding them so as to make them available as commodities freely exchanged on the market is a matter of complex and sometimes long-term historical processes. One need only think of the long duration and social agony of the enclosure movement in England to realize what it took to make land freely available for capitalist exploitation. Polanyi’s work leads to the historicist conclusion deployed by Socialist economists that the kind of free market economy to which neoclassical economics applies is the creation of a specific historical development in certain European countries, with Britain in the lead, and that it is, therefore, in some sense a cultural product. According to this critique of neoclassical economics, the assumptions it is based on are idealized versions of real but ephemeral historical phenomena, such as the capitalist mode of production

90  Economics suiting acquisitive individuals bent on the pursuit of profit and property. Furthermore, such critics contend that the ideological purpose of neoclassical economics is to justify and promote this type of economic system and the bourgeois society ancillary to it. An extreme form of this kind of critique of what he calls neoliberalism is to be found in the work of Philip Mirowski. By neoliberalism, he is referring to the monetarist form of neoclassical economics of the Chicago school following the teachings of Hayek, Friedman, Stigler and their many disciples. He contends that not only do they promote the kinds of economic policies whose market outcome is intended to produce results that suit their economic theories and models in a self-validating process, but also the kinds of science and academic policies that bring these about in accord with the “marketplace of ideas”. But in achieving such an outcome, they bring about that science and academia in a paradoxical way generate ignorance as well as knowledge, and this is also in keeping with their theories. Mirowski derives these conclusions from the neoliberal conception of the “marketplace of ideas”: “The primal presumption of the neoliberal concept of the marketplace of ideas is that if information is a commodity, then it must necessarily be a ‘good’ …”.13 And he argues that “markets are not only limited and intermittently unreliable information processors; but they can equally well be deployed to produce ignorance”.14 According to Mirowski, “the manufacture of ignorance … is precisely this third kind of ignorance that neoliberals have theorized and promoted”.15 He backs up this contention with copious quotes from the aforementioned economists. This, then, is the state of the Methodenstreit at present. On the one side are the Neoclassicals who seek to promote economics as a strict science on par with physics, so they engage in ever more abstruse theoretical modelling, with mathematical techniques frequently derived from physics. On the other side are the critics who seek to disqualify neoclassical economics by reference to real economic history and arguments of a historicist and culturalist nature based on an interpretation of that history. The contention has not changed all that much since the original Methodenstreit at the turn of the twentieth century for it seems that nothing much has been resolved since. But a possible resolution was even then available in the work of Weber. And it is one that we can still avail ourselves of even now, over a century later. Weber was particularly involved in this controversy because he had begun his professional academic career as an economist, a professor of economic history at Freiburg, trained in the Historicist approach. But later in his life, after his nervous breakdown, he developed a close intellectual kinship with Menger and the Marginalists at the University of Vienna, the only ones expounding Neoclassicism in the German academic milieu. During the First World War, he taught economics in Vienna and came to know personally the members of what is now called the Austrian School,16 including Schumpeter.

Economics 91 Weber sought to resolve the Methodenstreit by doing justice to both approaches and giving each its rightful due. In order to do so he developed his own signature conception of Ideal Types, which in the first instance was meant to apply to economics, though he also generalized it to historical sociology. An Ideal Type is a “unified analytical construct” based on an exaggerated abstraction from real historical entities from which it departs in given rational or irrational directions: “It is a conceptual construct (Gedankenbild) which is neither historical reality nor even “true” reality”.17 Economics is seen by Weber as a certain kind of Ideal-Type system: It offers us an ideal picture of events on the commodity market under conditions of society organized on the principle of an exchange economy, free competition, and rigorously rational conduct. This conceptual pattern brings together certain relationships and events of historical life into a complex, which is conceived as an internally consistent system. Substantively, this construct in itself is like a utopia which has been arrived at by the analytic accentuation of certain elements of reality.18 What is so distinctive of economics as an Ideal-Type construct is its internally consistent character which permits it to be set out in an axiomatic way, such that given certain initial assumptions as axioms many others can be deduced as theorems. But Weber is careful to stress the difference between the science of economics as an “axiomatic discipline” which “utilizes IdealType concepts” and actual economic realities:19 Economic theory makes assumptions which scarcely ever correspond with reality, but which approximate it in various degrees, and asks: how would men act under these assumed conditions, if their actions were entirely rational?20 The kind of men who answer to this question are not real men with all their historically specific diversities but economic Man who is an Ideal Type derived by abstraction from the real acquisitive individuals in predominantly capitalist societies. Economic Man is like a machine that seeks to maximize one predominant value, be it profit or utility or happiness or pleasure according to the various versions of economic theory. And to say that economic Man exercises rational choice is itself to adopt a highly formalistic concept of rationality that will tend to run counter to any substantive view of rationality as this is exercised in real life amidst the variety of values that are normally in play. It is also counter to any realistic sense of human psychology where it is rarely the case that the one overriding motivation is at work. Real rational choice has to take into account all these complications that theoretical economics can dispense with. What is the point, then, of constructing such “utopian” Ideal Types and utilizing these as axioms from which to derive the so-called laws of economy,

92  Economics which are themselves no less Ideal-Type constructs? According to Weber, it can serve a number of different ends. In the first place, it is “indispensable for heuristic and expository purposes”: Its relationship to the empirical data consists solely in the fact that where market-conditioned relationships of the type referred to by the abstract construct are discovered or suspected to exist to some extent, we can make the characteristic features of this relationship pragmatically clear and understandable by reference to an ideal-type.21 Thus, economic Ideal Types, such as the laws of economy, though they do not describe reality, enable us to grasp certain kinds of interrelationships in real situations and to articulate those with unambiguous clarity. They capture an aspect of a complex and confused picture. Secondly, and even more crucial, such Ideal Types, though not themselves hypotheses, enable us to frame testable hypotheses. This will “help to develop our skill in imputation in research”.22 In economic research, it will be an aid in making policy recommendations whether for governments of states or governing boards of firms. To a limited extent, it will enable predictions to be made of what will probably result if such policies are put into effect. Weber is quite clear that “the construction of abstract ideal-types recommends itself not as an end but as a means”.23 This holds for the laws of economy as for all other Ideal-Type constructions. These are not descriptions of reality, but aids in formulating such descriptions; not predictions of what must happen, but auxiliary means of making prognostications of what might ensue if other things do not intervene. Weber does not deny the scientific validity of economic laws, but such “empirical validity” must not be taken “in the sense of the deductibility of reality from such laws”.24 How the laws of economy are applied to reality is utterly different from how the laws of astronomy are applied. The model of the applications of laws in the natural sciences does not apply to the laws of the social sciences. In the former case, the laws are direct descriptions of the phenomena, in the latter case they are only prescriptions for arriving at such descriptions. This is the most frequent error perpetrated by all those who hold that the social sciences are scientific in the same sense as the natural sciences. Weber is quite adamant about exposing this misconception: Accordingly, the fantastic claim has occasionally been made for economic theory – e.g., the abstract theories of price, interest, rent, etc. – that they can, by ostensibly following the analogy of physical science propositions, be validly applied to the derivation of quantitatively stated conclusions from given real premises, since given the ends, economic behaviour with respect to means is unambiguously “determined”. This claim fails to observe that in order to be able to reach this result even in the simplest case, the totality of the existing historical reality including

Economics 93 every one of its causal relationships must be assumed as “given” and presupposed as known. But if this type of knowledge were accessible to the finite mind of man, abstract theory would have no cognitive value whatever.25 The fact that economic theories are modelled on those of the natural sciences as a matter of historical derivation does not mean that they work in the same way. According to Weber a primary instance of an Ideal Type is the Marginal Utility Theory in neoclassical economics. He devoted a whole paper published in 1908 to demonstrating this thesis.26 Marginal Utility Theory treats economic choice as if it were rational and calculable in an extremely systematic way, which is never true of real human behaviour; but the theory assumes, nevertheless, that some forms of economic action, those of a more profit-seeking capitalist kind, correspond much more closely than other kinds to this Ideal Type. Marginal Utility Theory makes the counterfactual assumption that economic action is subject to rational calculation and is like the accounting procedure of a business. It “treats human action as if it ran its course from beginning to end under the control of commercial calculation – a calculation on the basis of all conditions that need to be considered”.27 According to this Ideal-Type Theory, both the goods or commodities produced and made available for sale, as well as the demand for them or the “needs” they satisfy, can be “mathematically calculable in ‘sums’ or ‘amounts in a continuous process of bookkeeping”.28 Thus Weber treats the concept of “utility” as if it were a term in bookkeeping which has no direct bearing on happiness or pleasure or satisfaction or any other entity of a purely psychological nature. This would explain why attempts to measure it have failed. As we shall see later, Mirowski claims that it is modelled on the physics concept of “energy”, which by contrast can be measured. However, for Weber it is purely a matter of bookkeeping: The theoretical “values” with which marginal utility theory works should in principle make understandable to us the circumstances of economic life, in a manner like that in which commercial book values render information to the businessman about the state of his enterprise and the conditions of its continued profitability. And the general theorems which economic theory sets up are simply constructions that state what consequences the actions of the individual man in its entwining with the actions of others would have to produce on the assumption that everyone were to shape his conduct towards his environment exclusively according to the principles of bookkeeping – and, in this sense, “rationally”.29 According to John Love, Weber “did not accept that the principle was a universal law, valid for all time. But as a tool for analysing contemporary

94  Economics capitalism, he regarded it as indispensable”.30 Weber himself puts it as follows: The historical distinctiveness of the capitalist epoch, and thereby also the significance of the marginal utility theory … for the understanding of this epoch, rests on the circumstance that … under today’s conditions of existence the approximation of reality to theoretical propositions of economics has been a constantly increasing one. It is an approximation to reality that has implicated the destiny of ever wider layers of humanity. And it will hold more widely, as far as our horizons allow us to see. The heuristic significance of marginal utility theory rests on this cultural-historical fact.31 In the century that has passed since his time, Weber’s prediction has been completely vindicated, both for capitalism and for neoclassical economics, for just as the former, capitalism has become a world-wide condition, the latter has become the mainstay of economics in the academic world. These two kinds of economic development were closely related in America after the Second World War, as we shall see later. Love goes on to point out that Marginal Utility Theory and the whole of Austrian neoclassical economics was of particular relevance to Weber’s methodology in that it brought out in a very distinctive and logical manner the nature of Ideal Types and their heuristic value, and thereby served as the prime exemplar of his approach to sociology in general. Furthermore, as Love puts it: The theory of marginal utility suited Weber’s predilection to interpret social phenomena in terms of the subjective meaning individuals gave their actions; at the same time, it could explain how complex socio-economic phenomena come into being from such individualistic presuppositions – such as price formation through market exchange.32 But perhaps even further than that, it goes to show how stable practices and institutions can arise out of individualistically motivated behaviour. This way of looking at social phenomena might be a way of bridging the differences between the Neoclassical and Institutionalist schools of economics which have become almost irreconcilable in contemporary American academia. As Love’s book so amply demonstrates, by advocating the neoclassical approach Weber was able to come close to the Austrian school of Menger without having to abandon the historicist predilections that he shared with Schmoller. In the Methodenstreit he could support both parties without self-contradiction or confusion. According to Love, this is also true of Schumpeter, who in these respects was close to Weber both intellectually and personally. We cannot touch on the personal aspects of this relationship,

Economics 95 which deals with biographical details, but the intellectual aspect is thoroughly explored by Love. As he puts it, “Schumpeter more or less agreed with Weber’s position on the Methodenstreit – that the historical- empirical approach of Schmoller was as necessary as the theoretical-analytic approach of Menger …”.33 Schumpeter, as an economist, was “primarily concerned with theory from the very start and increasingly championed the purest form of theoretical economics imaginable, namely, that advanced by Walras”.34 But that did not mean that he was indifferent to history, for he “held that a division between history and theory was nonsense”.35 In fact, his own work was replete with historical studies and his major concern as an economist was with the historical process of economic development. Many of his key works, above all his late masterpiece, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy is of a thoroughly sociological character.36 If Weber can be considered an economic sociologist, then Schumpeter must be taken as a sociological economist. It is sad to say that during his long career in America, Schumpeter was unable to heal the rift between economics and sociology. Even though he was professor of economics at Harvard and thus potentially at least closely in touch with Parsons, he had almost no influence on sociology. Nor did he have any role in the mathematical economics his student Paul Samuelson was developing at nearby MIT. Thus, any opportunity to bring Schumpeter into sociology or Weber into economics was lost. Can it ever be recovered?

Section II – Mirowski and postwar economics What has prevented any such reconciliation happening in America is the ever-increasing pretension of neoclassical economics to the status of a rigorous science like physics and, as a result, its ever greater and more abstruse turning to mathematics. In fact, this course of development ensured that such economics would prove itself of little use as an Ideal Type in framing historical hypotheses or for any practical work of policy analysis and guidance. This is because the more purely mathematical the treatment of economy becomes, the more it is completely abstract and at a greater remove from any reality. It becomes utopian in the pejorative sense, aiming for an ideal of rigour that can never be attained even in conceptual reality, short of turning economics into a branch of mathematics. But, as Kenneth Boulding used to say, such rigour is rigor mortis. Why neoclassical economics has taken this kind of perverse turn in late twentieth-century America is a difficult matter to explain, as it involves many parallel pressures working together to give rise to this kind of end result. Partly, it is a matter of wanting to make economics more and more scientific so as to match physics in all its latest developments. Partly, it is the result of a kind of art pour l’art predilection on the part of mathematically trained economists. Partly, it is designed to establish economics as the only viable social science, and neoclassical economics as the most scientific of

96  Economics the economic specialities, to the exclusion of all others. It is also a matter of academic politics, for it makes it easier to win Nobel prizes and to win out against all other contenders for awards, promotions and jobs at all levels, right down to graduate students vying for first appointments. Perhaps this might seem to put a too cynical cast on the matter, but as we shall see later there is considerable warrant for it. What Weber would have made of the drift of economic theory into ever more abstruse mathematical formalism is difficult to say, since he never confronted such tendencies in his own time. Weber’s comments on neoclassical economics and the Marginalist Revolution were confined to the Austrian school of Menger and his colleagues in Vienna, who were not much given to mathematics; there is not much evidence that Weber took notice of Walras or Jevons, the much more mathematical exponents of the marginalist movement. Menger and the Vienna school in general, right down to Hayek, tended to shun excessive mathematization, as Mirowski explains: He was one of the very few remaining representatives of the Mengerian tradition of Austrian economics. That tradition … in fact opposed the importation of physical metaphors into economic theory. Hayek, in contrast to his British and American colleagues, actually had firsthand experience of the writers of the German Historicist school, and was familiar with their claims that economics, and indeed all the Geisteswissenschaften, were incapable of legitimate implementation of the concepts and techniques of the natural sciences.37 Hence, when after the Second World War Hayek came to sojourn in Chicago – notably not in the economics department – in fact, he was somewhat at odds with the incumbents of the economics department, such as Milton Friedman and the other members of the Chicago school. Also, against him in this respect were those in the rival school of mathematical economics under Paul Samuelson at MIT, as well as those in the Cowles Commission, a privately funded research institute founded in 1932, then also in Chicago. The division between the mathematical and the non-mathematical economists was already apparent from the very start of the Marginalist Revolution around the 1870s, when Walras, Jevons and Menger more or less simultaneously developed this new approach, which marked the end of the older classical political economy, apart from Marxism which followed a separate trajectory. Of the three founders of Marginalism, Walras is for our purposes the most representative case for he provided a foretaste of the application of mathematics to economics that was far more rigorous than that of the others. Hence in what follows we shall begin by focussing on Walras, before providing a more general exposition of mathematical economics. However, Walras was not the originator of this approach, that honour must go to Cournot his acknowledged predecessor. The foundation of mathematical economics can be dated from the publication in 1838 of his book

Economics 97 Recherches sur les principes mathématiques de la théorie des richesses. What this involved was the formulation of an Ideal-Type model of the economy at a great level of abstraction, far removed from the realities of historically specific economic institutions. Theodore Porter sets out what this involves: Cournot’s strategy of economic mathematization depended upon excluding history, with its irrationality and perpetual disequilibrium. Cournot was willing to pay the price of mathematical rationality by excluding the whole of economie sociale, all complications that would be as mud to the pellucid waters of pure economic reasoning. The “logical reconstruction” effected by Cournot’s mathematical approach was made possible by his willingness to assume pure rationality and not to limit himself to what could be ascertained empirically and applied to policy.38 As Porter’s article makes evident, right from the start and throughout the nineteenth century there was an opposition between those who favoured mathematization and formal theory and those who espoused quantification and empirical investigation, and at that stage they were the great majority of economists. Walras could make little headway against this established opposition, as he bitterly complained all his life. But the reason why he was not taken seriously by economists at the time was that his mathematical economics was useless for the kinds of purposes in which they were professionally engaged. Walras “virtually stopped claiming policy applications. ‘I am a man of pure theory’ he explained”.39 What he meant by pure theory was “deductions from an abstract model of free exchange leading to an even more abstract theory of general equilibrium”.40 We have already noted the key role that such a general theory of equilibrium would continue to play in the subsequent development of mathematical economics. Walras modelled his version on the physics of the solar system and on other branches of physics, “particularly from potential theory in statics”.41 Models derived from physics would continue to play a crucial role in all subsequent developments in mathematical economics right down to the present time, as the example we mentioned previously of the role in economics of the solid-state physics of spin glass so grotesquely reveals. But according to Porter and many other historians of economics, this was so right from the very start: The pioneers of neoclassical economics depended heavily on mathematical physics for the theoretical structure they imposed on their disciplines. Drawing their inspiration from statics and energy physics, economists built up a set of mathematical models as impressive and demanding as are to be found in any natural science.42 The role of energy physics in the rise of the neoclassical Marginalist Revolution is the subject of a major book by Mirowski to which we have

98  Economics already referred.43 He provides such a vast, detailed and extensive treatment of this topic that we can only give a bare intimation of what it amounts to; we cannot engage in any extensive critical assessment of it. The main thesis is summed up by Mirowski as follows: To put it bluntly, economics first attained its objective to become a science through a wholesale appropriation of the mid-nineteenth century physics of energy or, as we dubbed it, proto-energetics. The seeming simultaneous discovery [the Marginalist Revolution carried out by Walras, Jevons and Menger] was the direct result of the preceding watershed of nineteenth century physical theory, and the fact that the progenitors of Neoclassicism were trained in engineering-level physics and subject to particular philosophical trends of the time.44 Hence, the so-called mystery of this simultaneous discovery “is dissolved when it is realized that energy physics had filtered down to some textbooks by the 1860s and was rapidly becoming the primary metaphor for discussing the physical world”.45 Ever since, “physical metaphors have driven the evolution of neoclassical thought”, which is the general assumption we have adopted and will go on to spell out in what follows.46 However, it is not easy to demonstrate conclusively that, as Mirowski claims, “the neoclassical theory of exchange was an offshoot of the metaphor of energy”, and this still remains a contentious point among historians of economics.47 He bases his case on what he takes to be a tacit identification among the neoclassical economists of utility with energy: “We can only understand the difference of the so-called discoverers if we just have a clear idea of what an analogy of energy and utility implies …”.48 What it implies is that utility “was merely an integral, determinant only up to a constant of integration, best understood through a mathematical eidolon. The vacillating attitude of all Neoclassicals toward the measurement of utility provides an apt illustration of the elusiveness of the new field of value”.49 But this is where the analogy breaks down, for energy is definitely a measurable quantum whereas utility is not; but it seems that the Neoclassicals were not aware of this. Nevertheless, Mirowski maintains that “only if value looks like energy can there be any meaning to neoclassical economic rationality”.50 The one clear example that Mirowski can point to of someone who explicitly entertained the analogy of energy and utility is not a European economist, but the American Irving Fisher, whom he describes as “the one early Neoclassical who displayed the most sophisticated (although hardly comprehensive) understanding of the energy formalism”.51 Mirowski reproduces the table of coincidences between mechanics and economics that Fisher set out in his 1926 book, Mathematical Investigations into the Theory of Value and Prices.52 In this table, Fisher set out the physics equation: work or energy = force multiplied by space, and parallels it by the economic formula: utility = marginal utility multiplied by commodity. Fisher was obviously intent on

Economics 99 making economics look as much like physics as his ingenuity was capable of devising, no matter how far-fetched this might appear to anyone not so enamoured of physics. In his valedictory work My Economic Endeavours he stated: “The goal on which my heart has been most set is the goal of economics becoming a true science comparable to physics”.53 It is in America, not in Europe, that Fisher has come closest to seeing his goal most nearly realized. For it is in America that mathematical economics has reached its most extensive development and assumed dominance to such an extent as to be taken as almost synonymous with economics itself. But it took a long struggle, most of it following the Second World War, before this consummation of Fisher’s wishes came to be realized. For prior to the war, it was not an easy course to follow in the then academic environment. But starting in the 1930s and most decisively after the war, fortune turned in favour of the mathematical approach. Prior to the First World War Fisher had got nowhere in promoting mathematical economics. It took the Great Depression and the Roosevelt administration to turn things around. But the change came first not in pure theory but in econometrics, the empirically quantifiable aspects of economics that are mainly focussed on statistics. It was in this capacity that Fisher, Ragnar Frisch and Charles Ross convened the first meeting of the Econometric Society in 1930, and the first issue of their Journal Econometrics appeared in 1933 with an introduction by Joseph Schumpeter. The new movement received financial support from the Rockefeller Foundation and intellectual and moral support from the Cowles Commission. Its leader Jan Tinbergen, who was trained as a physicist, and Tjalling Koopmans became leading members of the movement. It was at this time that “American scientists and engineers with dim prospects in their original fields of endeavour were drawn to the new opportunities, as were many Europeans fleeing the political disruptions and persecutions of the decade”, as Mirowski explains.54 In one of his major later works, Machine Dreams, Mirowski enlarges this comment by spelling out how the intrusion of engineers, physicists and mathematicians into economics at various periods has steadily transformed the discipline ever further in the direction of the physical sciences: The first phase, that of the 1870s through the turn of the century, was the era of a few trained engineers and physicists seeking to impose some analytic structure on the energetic metaphors so prevalent in their culture. The next phase of entry came in the 1930s, prompted by the Great Depression contraction of career possibilities for science, and the great forced migration of scientists from Europe to America due to persecution and disruption of war. Wartime exigencies forced physicists to engage in all sorts of new activities under rubrics such as operations research … The third phase of scientific diaspora is happening right now. The End of the Cold War and its attendant shifts in the funding

100  Economics of scientific research has had a devastating impact on the career patterns of academic science in general. Increasingly physicists left to their own devices have found that economics (or perhaps, more correctly finance) has proved a relatively accommodating safe haven in the time of troubles.55 We are currently engaged in examining the effect on the scientification of economics of the second of these waves of invaders, and we shall presently go on to study that of the third, when so many applied mathematicians utilized their well-honed skills in Operations Research and decision theory at RAND and elsewhere, for the purpose of derivatives speculation on Wall Street, with the well-known consequences. As Mirowski shows, each brings with it a different image of science, which is then imposed on economics. A key figure in the second phase among those who entered economics from the sciences or mathematics was the mathematically trained Paul Samuelson. He in turn had a profound influence on the mathematical training of generations of later economists through the extraordinary success of his textbook Economics: An Introductory Analysis, published in 1948. Its influence was so pronounced in the shaping of economists’ minds that he later boasted: “I don’t care who writes the nation’s laws – or crafts its advanced treaties – if I can write its economics textbooks”.56 Samuelson developed an approach which he later called a “neoclassical synthesis”, combining Keynesian economics with Marshallian theory, but the crucial feature was his own contribution of mathematics. Samuelson’s work was a major step in the mathematization of economics by promulgating the idea that any theory in economics that is not mathematically expressed is somehow illicit and ought not even be seriously entertained. As Steven Pressman explains: In his professional work, Samuelson sought to provide mathematical underpinning for economic ideas, believing that economic theory without formalization was unsystematic and unclear … Mathematical formalism for Samuelson clarified the nature of models and arguments, and established the validity of economic theories. Through the influence of Samuelson, economic instruction at the graduate level has increasingly come to employ the tools and techniques of linear algebra plus differential and integral calculus, and communication among economists has become increasingly mathematical.57 As we shall presently see, Samuelson was relatively conservative in the mathematical tools and techniques he deployed, which did not go much further than those of nineteenth-century physics. Others were much more mathematically audacious than Samuelson. As well as questioning the limitations of his mathematical language, Mirowski is also critical of what he actually accomplished with it. Mirowski

Economics 101 maintains that he did not really further economic theory or contribute to its basic concepts: The key to the comprehension of Samuelson’s meteoric rise in the economic profession is his knack for evoking all the outward trappings and ornaments of science without once coming to grips with the actual content or implications of physical theory for his neoclassical economics. The net result, rapidly appreciated by Neoclassicals in general, was a nearly impervious defence of the legitimacy of the neoclassical research program, one that managed to dodge all the substantive issues …58 Mirowski sees Samuelson as the consummate statesman among the postwar Neoclassicals, one who, compared to his rivals in the profession, appeared to be both advanced and yet moderate: Throughout his career, Samuelson has been the master of scientific rhetoric, continually and consciously hinting at parallels between neoclassical theory and twentieth century physics, and just as consciously denying them, usually in the very same paper.59 Samuelson was extremely successful and together with Robert Solow established a powerful school of mathematical economics at MIT. However, that school faced opposition from two other such schools, both at that time located in Chicago: the department of economics at Chicago University and the Cowles Commission economists. These three schools of economists were at odds with each other and they fought for supremacy in the world of mathematical economics that became dominant in America. The only serious challenge to this work came from across the Atlantic from the other Cambridge in England. It was there that under the aegis of Keynes non-mathematical economics still flourished in the hands of Keynes’ disciples Joan Robinson and Richard Kahn, with the more or less desultory participation of Nicholas Kaldor, the neo-Ricardian Piero Sraffa and later Robinson’s student Amartya Sen. But in America the economists from the other Cambridge held little sway, especially after Robinson disgraced and disqualified herself by backing Stalin and Mao during the Cold War. In America, apart from some Institutionalist stalwarts, the mathematical Neoclassicists had it all to themselves after the Second World War. According to Mirowski, there had been no such orthodoxy prior to the war, even though “the indigenous strain of American Institutionalism held some strategic outposts at Columbia and Wisconsin”.60 After the war, a near monopoly was established by the three variants of American Neoclassicism “dubbed the Chicago doctrine, the Cowles approach and the MIT style”.61 He calls this “the three-school configuration of postwar American Neoclassicism”.62 He links each of these schools to important centres of wartime and Cold War research for the military: the Statistical Research Group of the Applied

102  Economics Mathematics Panel at Columbia, the RAND Corporation at Santa Monica and the Radiation Laboratory at MIT. He goes on to claim the following linkages between these military institutions and the schools of economics: Chicago economics derived from the experience at the Statistical Research Group of the Applied Mathematics Panel, whereas the Cowles Commission was predicated upon lessons learned from RAND. MIT economics, perhaps the least affected of all by the war, was nevertheless contingent upon experience at the Radiation Laboratory.63 Mirowski does not claim that his account provides a “full-fledged history of postwar neoclassical economics”, but he does maintain that such a history “would have to be structured to recount the complex interplay of Chicago, Cowles, and MIT in the ecology of academic economics and its intellectual jousts”.64 His is the more limited aim of showing how the war-time and postwar revolution in scientific research in general, funded by the military with military objectives, exercised a profound effect on the postwar triumph of neoclassical economics. In his judgement, Samuelson and the MIT economists were least affected by these affiliations and the Cowles economists the most. These latter were a very distinguished and powerful group, the subsequent recipients of many Nobel Prizes and other prestige awards comprising such people as Koopmans, Klein, Hurwitz, Marshack, Arrow, Debreu, Modigliani, Simon and eventually Tobin; the latter took over the direction of the school when it moved from Chicago to Yale. Most of Mirowski’s attention focuses on the Cowles school and its connection to RAND; he has less to say about the Chicago school and the Statistical Research Group or the MIT school and the Radiation Laboratory. Nevertheless, the comments he makes on the latter two cases are worth noting briefly before we return to the former which is the burden of his whole account. On the MIT school, Mirowski makes the snide comment that “Samuelson has been quick to point out the military connection of other economists but loath to discuss his own”.65 In fact, during the war Samuelson, together with a group of other mathematicians, was active in the anti-aircraft gun aiming and automatic firing devices section. This was also the project on which Norbert Wiener worked and the basis on which, after the war, he developed the science and philosophy of cybernetics, one of the constituent aspects of what Mirowski dubs “cyborg sciences”. This kind of work certainly bolstered Samuelson’s predisposition to view economics as a pure science that had nothing to do with history, sociology or psychology. It led him to seek to develop a “third way … located between the aggressive ‘Marshallianism’ of the Chicago school and the full-blown Bourbakist general equilibrium formalism of the Cowles Commission”.66 However, Samuelson was indifferent to and even averse to the other main pillar of the cyborg sciences, von Neumann’s work on game theory, which, as Mirowski goes on to show, had a profound effect on the Cowles economists.

Economics 103 The Chicago school, made up of such luminaries as Friedman, Stigler, Becker and later Lucas, was much more influenced by war-time work than the MIT school. According to Mirowski, the Statistical Research Group, where Friedman worked, was “the occasion for the consolidating of what later became known as the Chicago school of economics in the postwar period”.67 The work of the SRG “was basically an extension of wartime British Operations Research (plus some advanced statistical techniques) to a motley of problems in the American armed services”.68 Mirowski poses the rhetorical question: “Is it too farfetched to think that these neoclassical economists learned some of their trademark practices and theoretical ambitions from the natural scientists who staffed wartime Operations Research units?”69 He answers it in the affirmative, of course, and as evidence, he quotes Friedman’s own admission: One article of mine that in a very important sense grew almost entirely out of SRG was the article which I wrote in 1953 on “Choice, Chance and the Personal Distribution of Income”. It traced directly to our work on the proximity fuze.70 Mirowski goes on to trace much else in Friedman’s approach to economics to British-style Operations Research: “The Chicago school of economics, with its rough-and-ready pragmatism about the nature of the underlying objective function, was little more than Blackett’s Operations Research imported back into economics …”.71 As we shall see, this is one source of Friedman’s tendency to give a purely fictive conventionalist account of basic concepts in economics, such as utility. This finally brings us back to Mirowski’s main topic: the close connection that grew up after the war between the Cowles school and the newly established RAND, an offshoot of the US Air Force, and the role that von Neumann’s game theory played in that institution, as well as the impact of the cyborg sciences on economics in general. The cyborg sciences constitute all those postwar developments that we have elsewhere associated with the MIT-Mind.72 These were the sciences that “shared an incubation period in close proximity to the transient phenomenon called ‘cybernetics’”.73 Mirowski provides an extensive listing noting these sciences: “information theory, molecular biology, cognitive science, neuropsychology, computer science, artificial intelligence, operations research, systems ecology, immunology, automaton theory, chaotic dynamics and fractal geometry, computational mechanics, socio-biology, artificial life and, last but not least, game theory”.74 Perhaps the list is too wide-ranging; as far as economics is concerned game theory was the most important of all, so we shall restrict ourselves to that. As is well known, game theory was the joint product of von Neumann and the Austrian economist Oscar Morgenstern.75 This work, published during the war, was intended to make an impact on economics and the social

104  Economics sciences in general, and it largely achieved its aim in the postwar period, its influence extending down to our own time. In retrospect, one might well have doubts about whether what it accomplished was altogether salutary for these disciplines or whether it led them into tortuous formalistic paths from which it will be very difficult to extricate them. Does drawing abstract conclusions from the Prisoner’s Dilemma tell us anything very significant about politics or society or how people behave in reality outside artificially concocted situations? Mirowski’s work is designed to focus such doubts on the effects that game theory and the other cyborg sciences have exerted on economics, especially as evidenced in the work of the Cowles school. RAND, with which the Cowles school was closely associated, was the primary locale where game theory and some of the other cyborg sciences were utilized as key models in the social sciences in general and in economics in particular. As Mirowski writes: … RAND was the primary intellectual influence upon the Cowles Commission in the 1950s, which is tantamount to saying that RAND is the inspiration for much of the mathematical formalization of neoclassical orthodoxy in the immediate postwar period … Systems analysis, artificial intelligence, and the discipline of software engineering all enjoyed their first stirrings there; game theory found its life support there in those all-too-critical years. RAND itself was constructed to break down the barriers between the natural and social sciences and to spread the gospel of complexity …76 During the early 1950s, RAND came to be staffed by a great number of economists, many of them members of the Cowles Commission, primarily Koopmans, Marshak, Hurwitz and Arrow. At RAND they “took a marked turn away from the earlier quest for an econometric validation of neoclassical theory towards a reconceptualization of the rational economic agent as an information processor”. This was due to the strong influence that von Neumann’s work on the computer as well as game theory exercised there: At the bidding of von Neumann, the Neoclassicals at Cowles were exhorted to entertain the virtues of game theory and linear programming and the computer; and in turn, the Cowles economists proposed that what Neoclassicals had to offer to RAND and the world of Operations Research was something called “decision theory”.77 It was through this conduit that the mathematical formalizations of von Neumann came to shape postwar economics in America. Mirowski claims that this was decisive for the development of economics, for “the postwar Cowles Commission innovated the standards and practices of orthodox economic theory for the next generation of American economists …”78 Even the “peacenik” antagonists to RAND, such as Kenneth Boulding and Anatol

Economics 105 Rapoport at the Michigan Centre for Conflict Resolution, also followed suit with systems theory, the Prisoner’s Dilemma and all the other conceptual paraphernalia of formalistic game theory. Game theory and formal axiomatics began to pervade economics and the social sciences in general during the Cold War period. To explain fully why this was so would require a comprehensive study of the postwar development of the sciences, both natural and social, that would dwarf even Mirowski’s hefty tome, but clearly, his work is a start to such an endeavour. In economics the climax of this development came with the gametheoretic work of John Nash, which came to rival that of von Neumann. It is perhaps crucial for any appreciation of the recherché nature of this work that Nash himself knew next to no economics in the conventional sense, for he was a mathematician who as a student took a single course in international economics and nothing else in economics apart from that. And yet, Nash game theory and the Nash Equilibrium Theory, which were applicable to a wide variety of games, came to play an extraordinary role in economics; so much so that he was eventually awarded the Nobel Prize for economics, as have altogether ten other such game theorists, many of them ex-members of Cowles. Nash’s success in economics did not come immediately when he published in the 1950s, but he gradually came to the fore in the 1970s and 1980s as game theory came to prevail in the discipline. Nash’s version of game theory was supposed to provide a formalization of rationality, such as apparently even von Neumann’s version failed to achieve. Nash’s theory was particularly suited to neoclassical economics, as Mirowski points out: Also, to his credit, Nash managed to appeal to just those aspects of the formalism that were guaranteed to endear his approach to the doctrinal predispositions of neoclassical economists; hyper individualism, non-accessible utility functions, constrained maximization, and cognition as a species of statistical inference.79 As a result, the Nash equilibrium idea came to be preferred for a while over any other such concept. However, eventually “the Nash bargaining solution and the Nash Equilibrium concept were found deeply unsatisfactory and implausible” to economists such as Merril Flood: Flood became rapidly disaffected with the game theory research program because: 1 So-called irrational behaviour was more common in real-life situations than the game theorists would care to admit; 2 The individualist characteristics of rationality had been exaggerated to an untenable degree.80

106  Economics Mirowski goes on to engage in a long and extended study of what is wrong with game theory, both that of von Neumann and Nash, when applied to economics which we can scarcely even summarize here. Even he in the end has to concede that he is unable to “enumerate and explain the numerous conceptual problems that the Nash program encountered in game theory and economics in the 1970s and 1980s”.81 By the time his book was published in 2002, it had become obvious that this kind of economics had worked itself into a self-constructed formalistic mathematical cul-de-sac from which there was no escape. This has been the outcome of more than half a century of involvements with what Mirowski calls the cyborg sciences, as he concludes in one of his final comments: The fundamental message of this volume has been that the cyborg sciences have shaped most of the major developments in postwar economics but that in doing so they irrevocably transform the intellectual content in ways unforeseen and ill-understood by those seeking to co-opt it to the orthodox enterprise.82 On that sad note we must abandon Mirowski, the cyborg sciences and everything to do with the mathematical side of economics and turn to the sociological side, which has to do with its professionalization.

Section III – The professionalization of economics The extraordinary success of neoclassical economics in its formalistic mathematical form can in no small measure be ascribed to the suitability of this kind of economics to the rigorous professionalization of the discipline in the period following the Second World War. Mirowski points out that “the American economics profession only adopted widespread uniform standards of mathematical training and research after World War II”.83 One of the main reasons for this was the entry into economics of scientifically trained personnel which began as a mere trickle during the Depression in the 1930s when jobs in science were scarce, but became a veritable flood after the Second World War when so many mathematically skilled scientists, many of whom had had their skills honed by war-time work on Operations Research, sought academic positions before these became widely available in the sciences themselves. Hence, many changed direction and moved over into economics where their skills were readily marketable. They sought to transform economics in their own image and to do away with all the other elements that they deemed extraneous. As Mirowski explains: The exile of the history of thought from economics departments combined with the general innocence of the history of science, made it possible for each successive generation of tyro scientists to believe that it

Economics 107 would be the first, the blessed, the one to finally divine the secrets of information in the marketplace.84 The professionalization of economics and the concomitant success of Neoclassicism did not begin with the period of the Second World War or even of the First World War; nor were its initial steps taken in America. It began around the turn of the twentieth century at Cambridge in England and its main instigator was Alfred Marshall. It was Marshall who founded the Economic Journal, acting together with the other members of the newly inaugurated British Economic Association. Theodore Porter comments: “He was a thorough professionalizer, earnestly committed to the creation of an effective economics discipline”.85 In that discipline, his standing was preeminent, as Dorothy Ross reports, “the stature of Marshall and the hierarchical character of English academic and cultural life made it possible for Marshall’s neoclassical paradigm to absorb and entirely overshadow its competitors in English economics for two generations”.86 From its publication in 1890 Marshall’s Principles of Economics became the text-book of British economics well into the time of Keynes. His work together with that of Francis Ysidro Edgeworth at Oxford, and the young Irving Fisher at Yale, whose doctoral dissertation, “The Mathematical Investigation of the Theory of Value and Prices” was highly praised by his two seniors, established mathematical neoclassical economics as a professional discipline. Despite the difficulties Fisher initially encountered in getting mathematical neoclassical economics accepted in departments of Political Economy, such as the one he taught at Yale, it was sociologically and politically perhaps preordained that this variant would succeed best in America. This is the view of the historian of the social sciences in America, Dorothy Ross: Marginalism can be understood as an extension of the process begun by Ricardo, of abstraction from and reification of the liberal capitalist world and the positivist model of science. It emerged as a reorientation of classical political economy, and it proved most attractive to those professional cultures in which the classical economists’ positive scientific assumptions and liberal premises had strongest professional and cultural support.87 America was the country where these preconditions were most amply fulfilled. It was the liberal capitalist world least challenged by either conservative historicism from the Right or radical socialism from the Left. It was there that the “classical economists’ positive scientific assumptions” were most in tune with the general belief in science and in the miracles of scientific invention, such as were constantly coming to public attention. In America, too, there was a strong tendency towards academic professionalization with disciplinary associations being established earlier than elsewhere.

108  Economics These three factors preponderantly present in America, but also to a lesser extent in Britain, are the forces behind the eventual triumph of mathematical neoclassical economics over all its other branches. Porter puts it as follows: Mathematical economics triumphed in Britain and the United States as part of the professionalization of the field, and its success is difficult to explain in other terms. The weak interest it stimulated in France is due in large part to the lack of opportunity for professionalizing economics in the French university system.88 It was analogous in the German university system, where not only was professionalism lacking but neoclassical economics had to contend with the overwhelming preponderance of the Historicist economics everywhere except in Vienna, where the Austrian Marginalist school prevailed, but that, too, was non-mathematical. In America, according to George Stigler, “the mathematization of economics was the key to its professionalization. It provided disciplinary identity and a standard of competence that discredited outsiders”.89 According to Stigler, the professionalizing economist desired a “certain disengagement from the contemporary scene” and developed a preference for “non-vulgar instruments that displayed rigor, elegance and special techniques”.90 Any economics approach that did not possess such attributes was ipso facto discredited, regardless of how useful it might be in practice. This disengagement from the contemporary scene and preference for rigour, elegance and special techniques was fatal for economics as a policy science and for the education of economics students for the role of policy advisors. Mathematical economists go in for abstruse model building, axiomatization and the special techniques that we examined in the previous section. Marshall once gave voice to the dictum that anything in economics that cannot be expressed in ordinary language ought not to be published and he “relegated his mathematics to the back of the book”.91 Now the opposite dictum applies, namely that anything that cannot be expressed in mathematics will not be published. Indeed, ideas that are not couched in mathematics will not even be seriously entertained, as Melvin Reder reports: But without the capacity for mathematical implementation, conceptual originality is heavily discounted: full credit is not given for an original idea that is not a formal (i.e., mathematical) presentation. And, unaccompanied by conceptual originality or mathematical skill, breadth of knowledge relevant to understanding the functioning of an actual economy, and/or aptitude for hard and careful work with empirical materials, is considered as meritorious but nothing more.92 Students who are trained according to these precepts become skilful mathematical manipulators, but need know nothing about the real economy.

Economics 109 They are taught very little about real economic problems, nor encouraged to investigate them for themselves. In fact, this process has now gone so far that, as Arjo Klamer reports, “students consider knowledge of maths and problem-solving abilities far more important for their careers than being knowledgeable about the economy”.93 He goes on to comment ruefully that “here is a profession dedicated to the study of the economy and the brightest graduates are tethered to the mathematics of choice and allocation of scarce resources”.94 Indeed, this course of professional exclusivity has reached such a degree that the doyen of the neoclassicist Chicago school, Robert Lucas, has gone so far as to tell students that “advising policy-makers is not something that serious economists do”.95 Namely, it is the less serious and presumably less able, economists who engage in such mundane activities as telling the politicians how to manage the real economy. This is too much even for the older members of the Chicago school, such as Deirdre McCloskey, and would have been so for Hayek, whose follower Lucas professes himself to be, for “Austrian economists, notably, take issue with theorizing with ever more complicated models”.96 As Klamer comments, “even though the political ideology is fundamentally the same, the style of argument has changed so completely that the Good Old Chicago economists, such as McCloskey, feel out of place on their own turf”.97 Finally, political ideology is the other key factor that works in favour of scientification and professionalization in determining the development of economics as a science. Those who followed the Marginalist Revolution in economics and subscribed to its key premises were invariably also adherents of the liberal ideology of free markets and private property. This does not mean that they did not differ amongst themselves as to other issues, such as most crucially about the role of the State in the economy, or the extent to which the market was to be managed or not interfered with, or other issues to do with fiscal or monetary policy, etc. In fact, Keynes and Hayek had serious and long-lasting disagreements on all these scores, even though they were the best of friends otherwise. Their followers in America, Samuel and the MIT school and Friedman and the Chicago school, have continued to differ on such issues, though they have not always maintained such amicable personal relations. These disagreements have been crucial to the practical management of the American and British economies in the post-Second World War period. The huge expansion of the American and to a lesser extent the British economies down to the early 1970s was carried out under the aegis of Keynesian economics. But then from the late 1970s, there was a turnaround as the Keynesians had no answers to the stagflation that had ensued. This brought Hayek to the attention of world leaders such as Reagan and Thatcher. They proceeded along the lines recommended by the monetarist policies of Friedman and deregulated and privatized their economies, and also set about removing restrictions on banking and other financial transactions.

110  Economics This led to a renewed burst of growth but also set the stage for the Global Financial Crisis. After this, for a while, following a sluggish recovery, it remained uncertain which of the two courses to follow. But with the onset of the COVID-19 epidemic massive deficit spending was the only possible course to follow, and so Keynes has come back with a vengeance. Economic theory now finds itself in a quandary because basic conceptions that go beyond Keynes or Hayek are lacking. So, what has ensued is that upon a basic neoclassical ground of mathematical economics, economists develop approaches that more or less tend towards the one master or the other, or some attempt at a compromise between them. At the same time, there is an ever-wider divergence between academic economists and the pragmatic ones engaged in shaping government economic policy. On the whole, Monetarism and the influence of Hayek seems to have largely won out in the universities, with the proviso that the textbooks employed still reflect the older ideas of Samuelson’s neo-Keynesianism. However, in policy decisions, the Keynesians now have it all their way, as we noted. The most successful academically has been the purist mathematical Monetarism of Robert Lucas and the Chicago school, together with others elsewhere, such as Robert Barro at Harvard. This school has been called New Classical because it has gone back to Say’s law formulated in 1834 prior to Neoclassicism, according to which supply creates its own demand. This is as much as to argue that the market always works in clearing a glut in production and eliminates temporary unemployment beyond what can be considered a “natural” rate. No government intervention is called for, and where it does occur it is only an impediment to recovery by interfering with market forces. Similarly, inflation will always adjust, unless there is an excess in the money supply. Keynesian theory, such as the idea of the multiplier and aggregate demand are rejected as having only weak effects. In opposition to the New Classical school there has arisen a school of New Keynesians, represented by figures such as N. Gregory Markiw at Harvard, Michael Woodford at Columbia and others at other major universities. Even though they reject Say’s law and return to some of the Keynesian principles, they still maintain basically monetarist ideas. They allow that markets generally work, but can be subject to temporary sluggishness due to what they call “stickiness” or other imperfections that delay adjustment. In such cases, government intervention is justified. Further along the spectrum towards Keynesianism are more radical economists, such as Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, who have a large popular following due to their writing for the Left-inclined media, which is not generally reflected in the academic context. Both have been highly critical of where academic economics has gone. Stiglitz has written that “economics had moved more – than economists would like to think – from being a scientific discipline into becoming free market capitalism’s biggest cheerleader”.98 However, in general, the New Keynesians seek a compromise between the two major schools by combining elements from both, as Bruce and Grant

Economics 111 state: “In the past two decades some economists have adopted a ‘short-run Keynesian, long-run neoclassical’ approach drawing from the two traditions in an effort to create a more unified and complete theory”.99 However, their initial premises are no different from those of the Chicago school Monetarists, as Steven Pressman notes: New Keynesian economics begins where Robert Lucas and the rational expectation school begin – with very smart and very rational individuals. But unlike rational expectation macroeconomics, New Keynesians seek to explain why markets fail to work perfectly, thereby resulting in financial crises at times, and high unemployment at other times.100 The truth of the matter is that with the mathematization of Keynes and Hayek a rigid orthodoxy has developed in America which has frustrated the emergence of really alternative new approaches. Professionalized academicism in economics, as in other sciences, always exacts conformist costs. Bruce and Grant allow that there are “groups of economists dissatisfied with current orthodoxy”101 and they list the following: These include the neo-Austrians, who reject the mathematical orientation of the discipline and the static definition of efficiency that pervades much of mainstream thought. There are also the supply-side economists, who advocate policies to increase production and stimulate productive growth and who reject strict monetarism. There are traditionalist institutionalists and socialists, now on the defensive, but still working to formalize and popularize their ideas. There are the “post-Keynesians”, who are working to develop models in which prices and wages are “fixed” through the exercise of power as opposed to being freely determined in the marketplace.102 There are, indeed, all such figures, movements and traditions but they have been either excluded from or marginalized within the discipline. At best, as is the case with the Institutionalists, they are tolerated but only in an inferior sub-disciplinary position from which it is difficult to exercise much influence or make a brilliant career. Mathematical neoclassical theoretical economics and its close partner, model-building econometrics, rule the academic roost. The fate of Hyman Minsky, a radical Keynesian, is typical of what happens to those who fail to heed the orthodox line, and do not mathematize and formalize their theories. He was shunted into an academic backwater and very few took any notice of his major publication, Stabilizing an Unstable Economy, before the Global Financial Crisis; in this work, he predicted such an outcome within a capitalist market economy, despite the assurances of stability and equilibrium pronounced by the orthodox schools.103 Minsky developed his theory on the basis of the work of Joan Robinson and the so-called Left-Keynesians on imperfect competition and unstable markets.

112  Economics According to Minsky, equilibrium theories do not hold because the market system is in principle unstable. A boom period encourages ever more risky borrowing and speculative schemes to flourish. Inevitably such credit bubbles burst, causing collapses and depression in the economy. Financial innovations, such as futures trading, are particularly unsettling and bring about instability. This is precisely the kind of debt-laden financing that brought about the Global Financial Crisis, which Janet Yellen, then of the Federal Reserve Bank called a “Minsky Moment”. It is ironic that prior to the collapse the so-called theorem of Scholes-Black-Merton “proved” mathematically that futures trading is safe and that such a break-down cannot happen. For that “proof”, Myron Scholes and Robert C. Merton (Fischer Black was dead) were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1997. The only effective opposition to the mathematically driven paradigm, whether Keynesian following Samuelson or Hayekian following Lucas, and its econometric model-building partner has been the so-called Institutionalist approach. This school has deep roots in the earliest stages of the discipline. Its origin lies in the German Historicist movement that was engaged with the Austrian Marginalists in the Methodenstreit, as we have already seen. Its influence extended to America and led to the foundation of the Institutionalist approach. Its leading exponent was Thorstein Veblen, who did not study in Germany, but he was taught by economists who were trained there; Veblen, in turn, passed on these ideas to his pupil Wesley C. Mitchell, so that it has remained current ever since. It was an approach that was fundamentally opposed to equilibrium models and shunned mathematical economics. After the Second World War, it still continued to attract leading minds, among them John Kenneth Galbraith, Douglas North, Ronald Coase and James Buchanan. They differed widely amongst themselves, as is only to be expected from historicist interpretation based on a study of social institutions. This put the whole approach at the mercy of its orthodox detractors who accused it of failing to be scientific; consequently, few were tempted to go down that path, and the neoclassical consensus triumphed, as Bruce and Grant explain: Nevertheless, orthodox economics has experienced few casualties and even fewer defectors, put bluntly it marches on. For institutionalism to re-emerge as a major force in economic thought, it must win the minds of a future generation of economists. Its best hope for doing this is to develop a unified set of theories, readily understandable and teachable, that holds up to careful intellectual and statistical scrutiny. To date, say its detractors, it has not accomplished this.104 This kind of critique of Institutionalism shows up a typical tactic that orthodox economists adopt to deal with any opposing heterodox movement: they accuse it of not living up to the formalistic standards of neoclassical economics. In effect, what they demand of any challenger is to develop an

Economics 113 alternative paradigm that has largely the same features as the orthodox one, and this, by the very nature of the demand, is contradictory. What would be the point of having alternative approaches to economics utilizing the same narrow and rigorous conception of scientific method current in the natural sciences? Hence, orthodoxy always wins by default. The other tactic adopted by orthodox economists to put down their opponents is to accuse them of not doing “real” economics but some other social science that they do not consider deals solely with economic behaviour, understood in its essential purity. Friedman puts this kind of methodological requirements with great clarity: A hypothesis is important if it “explains” much by little, that is, if it abstracts the common and crucial element from the mass of complex and detailed circumstances surrounding the phenomena to be explained and permits valid prediction on the basis of them alone. To be important, therefore, a hypothesis must be descriptively false in its assumptions; it takes account of and accounts for none of the many attendant circumstances, since its very success shows them to be irrelevant for the phenomena to be explained.105 But it is precisely these “attendant circumstances” that provide the meaning and causal significance of economic behaviour. What Friedman propounds is, indeed, a good prescription for the natural sciences, such as the laws of mechanics, but such a scientific methodology applied to historical forms such as economic behaviour leads to abstractions at a great remove from reality and the construction of Ideal-Type models of little relevance to the sociological messiness of human action, as we saw at the start of this chapter. Friedman grants this in saying that a hypothesis must be descriptively false in its assumptions, namely, a mere arbitrary fiction, a view that not even Samuelson could stomach. It is far beyond Weber’s conception of Ideal Types as “utopias”. The whole point of Friedman’s approach is to validate his ideological presupposition that the market cannot go wrong and that any interference with it by governments only distorts it and prevents it from maximizing welfare. This might hold for idealized markets of perfect competition, but obviously not for real ones, as history has repeatedly shown. In order to make itself proof against any challenge from history or empirical reality, orthodox economics has severed itself and walled itself off not only from other social sciences, but also from other economic disciplines that are less scientifically rigorous and do not concern themselves with mathematical models. Orthodox economists do allow that such approaches cannot be completely excluded from economics departments, even though this would be the logical course to follow, given their view of what is essentially economic; however, for academic policy reasons and because of tradition they tend to tolerate other branches of economics, with the possible exception of Marxism. But these they treat as inferior to the true scientific economics that

114  Economics they themselves practise. Hence, what arises is a hierarchy of sub-disciplines where some are at the top in prestige and others are at the bottom. Already fifty years ago Benjamin Ward divided the status hierarchy of sub-disciplines into four categories and this might still remain the status ordering at present: A – Microtheory, macrotheory, econometrics. B – International trade, money and banking, public finance. C – Industrial organization, labour, economic history. D – Economic development, history of economic thought, comparative economic systems. For purposes of status ranking these fields are divided into four classes. Essentially the idea is that the highest status fields, those in Class A, define the nature of acceptable research problems in economics and the appropriate procedures to use in attempting to solve them … Some of the class C fields are occasionally referred to as the “slum fields of economics”; the class D fields face even more serious problems.106 The institution of neoclassical theory at the top in terms of prestige secures it from any challenge from below. Thus, as Robert Kutner comments, “the economic orthodoxy is reinforced by ideology, by the sociology of the profession, by the politics of who gets published or promoted and whose research gets funded”.107 And not only that, it also determines the lines of communication, who is willing to talk to whom and in what language, and who will be treated as an outcast not to be spoken to at all. Students considered to have real ability and career prospects are generally steered to the top-ranking fields and those of lesser promise are left to make their way in the bottom ones. Thus, such important practical fields as labour economics, developmental economics and in some respects even international economics are left to the practitioners deemed less competent. Things only change when a field can be formalized and made subject to mathematical treatment, as happened to welfare economics. Welfare economics, originally established by Pareto as an optimizing problem, was treated informally by Ludwig von Mises of the Austrian school, but only came to be considered truly respectable when mathematized by Kenneth Arrow and many others. So much so that, as Melvin Reder comments, “in recent years, the term ‘welfare economics’ has come to be reserved for esoteric and often highly mathematical studies of the efficiency properties of economic models”.108 By being cast in axiomatic mathematical form, such branches of orthodox economics are secured against serious challenge or even criticism. This means that they are established as irrevocable and cannot be altered. Such a formalization of economics ensures that no really striking new departures are any longer possible, and revolutionary developments in the discipline are almost unthinkable. The leading exponents are content to make the models and mathematics more elegant or extensive by adding extra axioms. If this

Economics 115 continues much longer, then this kind of economics will simply become a branch of applied mathematics. As such, nothing of any real import will any longer be capable of being expressed by this means. As Ronald Coase wittily put it: “In my youth it was said that what is too silly to be said may be sung. In modern economics it may be put into mathematics”.109 Nevertheless, despite such incoherence and a restricted and narrowing focus on formalization and mathematics, or perhaps precisely because of this, for it has made it of interest to mathematically-minded and trained science students, economics has succeeded remarkably well as an academic discipline, much better than any other social science. But there are also other reasons for this favourable outcome, as Philip Mirowski reports: Marion Fourcade estimates that economics has displaced other fields by growing from roughly 1 percent of the university faculty at the beginning of last century to about 4 percent at the end, and she links the phenomenon to the role of the American economy in the globalization of world trade and discourse … liberal economics lavishly benefits from this dynamics because it deals in a seemingly universal rhetoric of abstract economies and efficiencies, apparently unfettered by any geographic, cultural and intellectual specificities, economics is thus transformed into a generic technology of bureaucratic and political power by corporations, central banks, the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO, and so on. Very few natural sciences have enjoyed a comparable strategic role in the American century.110 This expansion and pre-eminence of economics is not only true of America, but of much of the rest of the world, especially in the English-speaking countries, as Mirowski goes on to point out: “In the British Commonwealth, the only field that met or exceeded the growth of total faculty numbers in economics from 1915 to 1995 was chemistry”.111 The position of economics in the academic system is thus fully secure, which is not the case with sociology. Sociology could gradually disappear as a coherent discipline as it fragments into numerous sub-fields and diffuses and dissipates into all kinds of special interest studies. We are already seeing this starting to happen at present. So, it is well possible that by the end of this century, sociology will go the way of the humanities, with which it is perhaps unfairly associated, and suffer their fate. By contrast, economics is associated with the natural sciences, as its claim to be an exact and rigorous science is generally accepted. Its fate as an academic discipline is thus linked to that of the natural sciences and these seem at present inviolable. However, serious difficulties have emerged in the natural sciences which now make them less secure than they were thought to be over the past centuries. But before we can come to that we must first examine the university, the home of all the academic disciplines, and try to ascertain what is going wrong there.

116  Economics

Notes 1 Philip Mirowski, More Heat than Light, Economics as Social Science: Physics a Natural Economics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 395. 2 M. Mitchell Waldrop, Complexity: The Emergence of Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos (New York: Viking, 1992), 137. 3 Ibid., 139. 4 Richard Whitley, “Changes in the Intellectual Organization of the Sciences” in The Social Production of Scientific Knowledge, eds. Everett Mendelsohn, Peter Weingart, and Richard Whitley, Sociology of the Sciences Yearbook (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1977), 157. 5 Quoted in Philip Mirowski, Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 333. 6 Léon Walras, Elements of Pure Economics, trans. William Jaffe (New York: Kelly Press, 1969), 71. 7 Stanley L. Bruce and Randy R. Grant, The Evolution of Economic Thought (Smith-Western, OH: South-Western Cengage Learning, 2013), 226. 8 Joseph Vogl, The Specter of Capital, trans. Joachim Redner and Robert Savage (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015), 104. 9 Ibid., 104. 10 Witold Kula, An Economic Theory of the Feudal System, trans. L. Garner (London: Verso, 1987). 11 Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (New York: Farrer and Rheinhart, 1944). 12 Kenneth E. Boulding, A Preface to Grants Economics: The Economy of Love and Fear (New York: Praeger, 1981). 13 Philip Mirowski, Science-Mart: Privatizing American Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 318. 14 Ibid., 318. 15 Ibid., 321. 16 See John Love, Weber, Schumpeter and Modern Capitalism: Towards a General Theory (New York: Routledge, 2017). 17 Max Weber, The Methodology of the Social Sciences, trans. Edward A. Shils and Henry A. Finch, eds. (New York: The Free Press, 1949), 93. 18 Ibid., 89–90. 19 Ibid., 43. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid., 90. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid., 92. 24 Ibid., 87. 25 Ibid., 88. 26 Max Weber, “Marginal Utility Theory and the Fundamental Laws of Psychophysics”, Social Science Quarterly, 56, I (1975), 21–36. 27 Ibid., 31. 28 Ibid., 32. 29 Ibid. 30 John Love, Weber, Schumpeter and Modern Capitalism, 74. 31 Max Weber, “Marginal Utility Theory and the Fundamental Laws of Psychophysics”, op. cit., 33. 32 John Love, Weber, Schumpeter and Modern Capitalism, op. cit., 75. 33 Ibid., 21. 34 Ibid., 28. 35 Ibid.

Economics 117 36 Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (London: Unwin, 1943). 37 Mirowski, More Heat than Light, op. cit., 336. 38 Theodore M. Porter, “Rigor and Practicality: Rival Ideas of Quantification in nineteenth Century Economics”, in Natural Images in Economic Thought, ed. Philip Mirowski (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 148. 39 Ibid., 150. 40 Ibid., 149. 41 Ibid., 143. 42 Ibid., 153. 43 Mirowski, More Heat than Light, op. cit. 44 Ibid., 196. 45 Ibid., 217. 46 Ibid., 356. 47 Ibid., 196. 48 Ibid., 222. 49 Ibid., 234. 50 Ibid., 336. 51 Ibid., 222. 52 Ibid., 224. 53 Quoted in ibid., 232. 54 Ibid., 573. 55 Mirowski, Machine Dreams, op. cit., 10. 56 Quoted in Philip Saunders and William Walstead, The Principles of Economics Course (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1990), ix. 57 Steven Pressman, Fifty Major Economists (London: Routledge, 2006), 243. 58 Mirowski, More Heat than Light, op. cit., 383. 59 Ibid., 382. 60 Mirowski, Machine Dreams, op. cit., 190. 61 Ibid., 190. 62 Ibid., 226. 63 Ibid., 191. 64 Ibid., 271. 65 Ibid., 225. 66 Ibid., 226. 67 Ibid., 203. 68 Ibid., 204. 69 Ibid., 205. 70 Quoted in ibid., 205. 71 Ibid., 204. 72 See Harry Redner, Quintessence of Dust: The Science of Matter and the Philosophy of Mind (Leiden: Brill, 2020), ch. 7, 292–344. 73 Mirowski, Machine Dreams, op. cit., 12. 74 Ibid., 11. 75 John von Neumann and Oscar Morgenstern, Theory of Games and Economic Behaviour (New York: Wiley, 1964). 76 Ibid., 208. 77 Ibid., 220. 78 Ibid., 242. 79 Ibid., 348. 80 Ibid., 354. 81 Ibid., 496. 82 Ibid., 503.

118  Economics 83 Ibid., 390. 84 Ibid. 85 Porter, op. cit., 156. 86 Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 217. 87 Ibid., 176. 88 Porter, op. cit., 153. 89 George Stigler, “The Adoption of the Marginal Utility Theory”, in The Economist as Preacher and Other Essays (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 72–85. 90 Ibid., 80. 91 Mirowski, More Heat than Light, op. cit., 300. 92 Melvin Reder, The Culture of a Controversial Science (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 8. 93 Arjo Klamer, Speaking of Economics: How to Get in the Conversation (London: Routledge, 2007), 5. 94 Ibid., 5. 95 Ibid., 9. 96 Ibid., 10. 97 Ibid., 100. 98 Joseph Stiglitz, Freefall (New York: Norton, 2010), 238. 99 Bruce and Grant, The Evolution of Economic Thought, op. cit., 563. 100 Pressman, Fifty Major Economists, op. cit., 308. 101 Ibid., 302. 102 Bruce and Grant, The Evolution of Economic Thought, op. cit., 563. 103 Hyman P. Minsky, Stabilizing an Unstable Economy (New York: McGraw Hill, 1986). 104 Bruce and Grant, The Evolution of Economic Thought, op. cit., 419. 105 Milton Friedman, Essays in Positive Economics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 14. 106 Benjamin Ward, What is Wrong with Economics (New York: Basic Books, 1972), 10. 107 Robert Kutner, “On the State of Economics”, Dialogue 73, no. 3. (1986), 71. 108 Reder, The Culture of a Controversial Science. 109 Ronald H. Coase, The Firm, the Market and the Law (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1990), 50. 110 Mirowski, Science-Mart, op. cit. 342. 111 Ibid., 339.

Bibliography Boulding, Kenneth E. A Preface to Grants Economics: The Economy of Love and Fear. New York: Praeger, 1981. Bruce, Stanley L. and Randy R. Grant. The Evolution of Economic Thought. SmithWestern, OH: South-Western Cengage Learning, 2013. Coase, Ronald H. The Firm, the Market and the Law. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1990. Friedman, Milton. Essays in Positive Economics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1953. Klamer, Arjo. Speaking of Economics: How to Get in the Conversation. London: Routledge, 2007.

Economics 119 Kula, Witold. An Economic Theory of the Feudal System. Translated by L. Garner. London: Verso, 1987. Kutner, Robert. “On the State of Economics”. Dialogue 73, no. 3 (1986). Love, John. Weber, Schumpeter and Modern Capitalism: Towards a General Theory. New York: Routledge, 2017. Minsky, Hyman P. Stabilizing an Unstable Economy. New York: McGraw Hill, 1986. Mirowski, Philip. More Heat than Light, Economics as Social Science: Physics a Natural Economics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Mirowski, Philip. Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Mirowski, Philip. Science-Mart: Privatizing American Science. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. Neumann, John von and Oscar Morgenstern. Theory of Games and Economic Behaviour. New York: Wiley, 1964. Polanyi, Karl. The Great Transformation, The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. New York: Farrer and Rheinhart, 1944. Porter, Theodore M. “Rigor and Practicality: Rival Ideas of Quantification in Nineteenth Century Economics”. In Natural Images in Economic Thought, edited by Philip Mirowski, 128–172. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Pressman, Steven. Fifty Major Economists. London: Routledge, 2006. Reder, Melvin. The Culture of a Controversial Science. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Redner, Harry. Quintessence of Dust: The Science of Matter and the Philosophy of Mind. Leiden: Brill, 2020, ch. 7. Ross, Dorothy. The Origins of American Social Science. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Saunders, Philip and William Walstead. The Principles of Economics Course. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1990, ix. Schumpeter, Joseph. Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. London: Unwin, 1943. Stigler, George. “The Adoption of the Marginal Utility Theory”. In The Economist as Preacher and Other Essays, 72–85. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1982. Stiglitz, Joseph. Freefall. New York: Norton, 2010. Vogl, Joseph. The Specter of Capital. Translated by Joachim Redner and Robert Savage. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015. Waldrop, M. Mitchell. Complexity: The Emergence of Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos. New York: Viking, 1992. Walras, Léon. Elements of Pure Economics. Translated by William Jaffe. New York: Kelly Press, 1969. Ward, Benjamin. What Is Wrong with Economics? New York: Basic Books, 1972. Weber, Max. The Methodology of the Social Sciences. Translated and edited by Edward A. Shils and Henry A. Finch. New York: The Free Press, 1949. Weber, Max. “Marginal Utility Theory and the Fundamental Laws of Psychophysics”. Social Science Quarterly 56, no. I (1975): 21–36. Whitley, Richard. “Changes in the Social and Intellectual Organization of the Sciences: Professionalization and the Arithmetic Ideal”. In The Social Production of Scientific Knowledge: Sociology of the Sciences Yearbook, edited by Everett Mendelsohn, Peter Weingart and Richard Whitley, 143–169. Dordrecht: Reidel, 1977.

5

From the University to the Multiversity – and beyond

Section I – Academic politics In its close to one thousand-year-old history the Western university has radically transformed itself numerous times in response to the changing demands made upon it by society and its culture. As we have already noted, it is an ever-changing institution, renewing itself constantly over the ages. It has undergone numerous transformations, first from the scholastic medieval to the Renaissance humanistic form, and later from the rigid ecclesiastical Catholic to the more liberal Protestant version. A much more radical change came with the French Revolution when the university in France was almost abolished in favour of the specialized Grandes Écoles. However, in Germany, partly in reaction against the French, there was renewal rather than rejection when the Humboldtian university was established in Berlin, and this proved so successful that eventually it became a model for all the universities in Europe and America. Each of these university regimes had its own regimen of study: its order of disciplines, its rankings and systems of authority, its way of teaching students and recruiting masters, and so on for all other aspects of university regulation and administration. Thus, the curriculum of studies began with the medieval trivium and quadrivium and this gradually changed with the introduction of the humanistic classics during the Renaissance. At first, these were exclusively Latin, but they began to be supplemented with Greek classics starting in the eighteenth century. The sciences were gradually introduced at that time as physics was taught on the back of an already long-established mathematics. During the nineteenth century the other sciences, starting with chemistry and biology, entered the university system with chairs of their own. The modern humanities and social sciences also made a start. However, engineering was generally kept at bay and segregated in polytechnics and other more technical schools. The biggest change of all came in the wake of the Second World War. The extraordinary triumphs of science and technology during the war led to the rise of Big Science and the pre-eminence of the institutes of technology, the most influential of which was the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). DOI: 10.4324/9781003355748-5

From the University to the Multiversity – and beyond 121 The subsequent arms race program during the Cold War resulted in huge government funds being allocated to scientific and technological research. The social sciences and humanities also benefitted from the largesse, especially after the so-called Sputnik scare in the late 1950s when the fountains of funding were gushing with dollars in abundance. But proportionately the lion’s share went to the natural sciences, and other faculties received only a fraction of that amount. During the postwar era a new type of university arose which came to be called the multiversity. This was the outcome of the huge expansion of funding in the natural sciences together with the multiplication of students and faculty as a result of government policies of mass higher education. The multiversity emerged as a huge conglomeration of faculties, disciplines, sub-disciplines, specialities, and so on in ever narrower specializations. Each of the major disciplines became more professionalized and organized, literally more disciplined; and each consequently established itself in its own departmental fastness and sealed itself off from intercourse with any other. Each developed its own form of academic politics and authority structure, which varied from impersonal relations and rigid hierarchies in the natural sciences to loose personal dependencies in the humanities. Finally, in the last half-century or so a new development has ensued in the multiversity as a result of changing funding arrangements in the natural sciences, which have shifted from relatively unconstrained no-stringsattached State support to that deriving from work done on contract for capitalist corporations. As the sciences became more commercialized, the university as a whole followed suit, with the result that it is now completely bound to follow what the natural sciences dictate. This has had concomitant deleterious effects on the social sciences and humanities, as we have already seen in the previous chapters. The humanities are coming closer to extinction as they are now bereft of the cultural prestige which gave them some measure of respect and support from university administrators, as well as sizeable enrolments of student numbers. They might only survive as vestiges in the wealthier elite schools that can afford such indulgences. Such changes were already on the cards in the first stage of the move from the old traditional university to the new multiversity. They became even more pronounced with the commercialization of research and also with the wholesale commodification of education, which has been taking place in the last few decades, together with the opening up of a global market for students, mainly from the newly developed Asian countries, so that education has become as export industry for the old established universities, especially in the English-speaking countries. This has led to the globalization of teaching and research which we shall study in greater detail in the second section of this chapter. All these changes, which we have so far only briefly sketched out, have led to a complete transformation in the nature of the university; it is no longer the institution it used to be under the old dispensation. Instead of teaching a

122  From the University to the Multiversity – and beyond small elite of students in time-honoured traditional ways, it caters to student masses, using a variety of new communication media. This has meant not simply a growth in size and numbers but a complete restructuring of what is studied and what is researched and how this is done. We have already examined how the sciences changed from small science to Big Science and how the social sciences and humanities were downgraded. But not only was the order of studies different; the way studies are managed has also changed. The administrators took over largely from the professors in the running of university affairs, and consequently, their priorities and ultimately their interests came to predominate, displacing those of the professors, namely, those actually doing the work of research and teaching. The number of administrators grew in proportion to the number of teachers so that eventually these were of equal size. Expenditure on administration also grew proportionately as more was being spent on this than on research and teaching. As the cost of administration grew, so did the cost of tuition for students. Now, at the more elite American universities, the costs are so high that only the very rich can afford to send their children there. In this respect, universities have once more become the preserve of the rich elites, as they were before the postwar expansions started. The key difference between the old university and the new multiversity is that the former was in some sense a community of scholars and scientists whereas the latter is far from any such thing. In the old university, all the faculty and students in the one institution had something to do with each other and they had a common attachment to and concern for their university. This is still a feature of academic life at elite universities such as Oxford and Cambridge where the lecturers and professors are attached to colleges and are engaged in person-to-person tuition, and where the faculty dine together and maintain some kind of contact with each other. Whether this traditional aspect of college life any longer means much in intellectual or cultural respects is dubious, however, for their disciplines are now utterly diverse, but at least the semblance of a common collegial life is still maintained. None of this is any longer possible in the multiversity where there are more than a dozen faculties each with scores of departments; and every department is a world unto itself and walls itself off in every way, both in terms of subject matter and intellectual contact, from every other. The so-called scientific “languages” they speak are no longer comprehensible to each other, but worse than this curse of Babel is that many no longer speak any comprehensible language at all and instead communicate in mathematical equations. As one wit remarked, any nonsense that is too embarrassing to be said can always be expressed in mathematics. The consequence is that an academic’s primary attachment is neither to the department nor to the university, but to the professional association of which the academic is a member. The academic does not identify with any specific department or university because his or her primary ambition is to leave the present posting for a better one at a higher-status university.

From the University to the Multiversity – and beyond 123 Promotion in terms of a sideways move to another university that is further up in the ranking hierarchy is usually more desirable than promotion upwards from one grade to another in the same one, as from assistant to associate to full professor. Academics tend to live in hope of being headhunted by a more prestigious place, for his or her own status as a scholar or scientist depends on this more than anything else, since position is the main measure of success in academic life. All other things being equal, it is usually preferable to be an associate professor at an elite university rather than a full professor at a less prestigious one. Only those who have given up hope of upward mobility resign themselves to remaining for the rest of their academic lives in the one university, that is, unless of course it is itself a top university. What counts for success is no longer teaching, publication, sharing ideas, reputation among one’s peers, and so on. Now it is what one commands on the market of preferment, namely, for how much one can sell oneself, how desirable one has become to head-hunters or other such recruiting agents of the administrators. There are all kinds of factors that can affect one’s academic market value, ranging from the ranking of the university where one obtained a PhD at the start of one’s career to who was one’s supervisor, where one gains one’s first posting, and so on, till ultimately one has really made it to the top. Now, most academics seek media attention, to enhance their careers, especially scientists for much depends on attracting the attention of science journalists who are intent on providing exposure for scientists and their findings, and arousing their interest has become a prime objective. However, the main factor in determining an academic’s value or status, in general, is still the standing or academic authority held by the given individual in a discipline. In an earlier publication, The Ends of Science, we called this a matter of academic politics, that is, the legitimate exercise of authority, as distinct from academic politicking, which is an illegitimate utilization of power usually considered underhand or corrupt.1 In that work, we outlined a theory of academic politics based on three forms of academic authority: formal-professional, collegial-elite and patronal. These three forms of authority can be exercised independently of each other and invariably any academic of standing will come to acquire all three to some degree, but the extent to which the given individual possesses each of these at any given time will vary depending on his or her career stage, on achievement, and on what counts for success in a specific discipline. We proceed to briefly outline the three types of academic authority, but for a full account, our earlier book should be consulted. Formal-professional authority is that which is indicated by an academic’s position within an organization. It typically takes the form of participation in two types of organization, the local and the national, as well as in some cases also the international. In the local setting, it concerns an academic’s official standing within a given department and university. Typically, it may

124  From the University to the Multiversity – and beyond consist in being full professor and chair of the department, as well as a committee member of a given university decision-making or advisory body. In the national and in rare cases international setting, it involves a position within the professional association of a given discipline, such as president or editor of the disciplinary journal, to mention the top spots; lower down it would be such things as conference organizer or chief speaker or panellist, or numerous other such roles that might be filled on a national or international level within a discipline. The extent to which formal-professional authority matters varies from discipline to discipline within the one national academic system as well as between different nations even within the same discipline. It all depends on the degree to which a discipline is formally structured and organized. Disciplines in America are usually far more professionally organized than those in Europe, for it is there that professional associations first arose. To this day most disciplines are still poorly organized in most European countries, especially in France where the other forms of authority are far more prevalent. In general, the degree to which formal-professional authority is operative within a discipline depends on the extent to which it functions to train students for established careers and the kind of research it typically undertakes. Thus, for example, chemistry has a very clearly defined formalprofessional authority structure as it is highly routinized in its research styles and procedures, and its teaching is designed to prepare students for established careers and jobs in industry and laboratories of government agencies. In stark contrast to formal-professional, there is collegial-elite authority which is largely informal and not tied to any professional association or departmental structure. It is the authority held within what were once called “invisible colleges” and are now considered as networks among the leading researchers in a discipline. Physics research is typically characterized by an international network of relatively small number of top scientists in each of its major branches. This was first initiated by the Solvay conferences of the outstanding European physicists in the late 1920s. Such conferences and seminars have continued ever since, now mostly American in origin. Not to be invited to such meetings means that one does not really count in the discipline and does not command much collegial-elite authority or respect. This makes it next to impossible to carry out the really cutting-edge research in physics or other disciplines where this is the key form of authority. Characteristically in a discipline where collegial-elites dominate the field, there is an age difference between those who command this kind of authority and those who hold the formal-professional positions. What usually takes place is that the brilliant achievers, who comprise the collegial elite, will only hold this kind of authority while they are young and high performers; with age, once past their peak, they will inevitably slow down and assume the formal-professional positions within the discipline, while a new crop of youngsters constitute a new collegial-elite. The older eminences

From the University to the Multiversity – and beyond 125 will gradually fall outside the communication networks within the discipline on which keeping up with the latest developments depends. They will begin to lose touch and no longer be privy to what lines of research to pursue and which to leave alone; and, most crucially, they will no longer know whose results to trust and whose to suspect as unreliable. And without this inside knowledge, passed down the grape-vine, as it were, anyone outside the collegial-elite, the charmed circles of young go-getters, will be excluded from carrying on with the first-rate work that really counts. However, it is the seniors rather than the young who exercise patronal authority, which counts to some degree in physics and the natural sciences in general, but much more so in the humanities and social sciences. The degree to which it counts depends on the discipline in question and on how this is conducted within a national academic system. It is generally much more preponderant in Europe, especially in France and Italy, than it is in America or even in Britain. It is the authority of established masters in a discipline who manage its affairs outside any established channels or positions. Frequently, these are the heads of “schools” or clusters – cliques as their detractors like to term it. But there need not be anything untoward or corrupt about it, for this is a long-established and respected form of academic authority. Patronal arrangements and master-pupil relations have been there for as long as universities have existed. And the more traditional the university system remains, the more this kind of authority is likely to be prevalent within it. But in every university setting those entering an academic life within a discipline depend completely on their patrons, in the first place their PhD supervisors, for without their intercessions and active support they are unlikely to get appointments or jobs. Usually, such well-placed patronal authorities collaborate with each other in providing initial appointments and research positions for each other’s students in reciprocal arrangements, and in all other ways helping their careers along. Sometimes, more rarely, a single master will assume dominance over a whole discipline within a country, as Durkheim did for sociology in France. This is more unusual for a highly diversified system such as that of America, but situations close to this degree of dominance have on occasions also occurred, as we shall see was the case with Talcott Parsons in sociology, B.F. Skinner in behavioural psychology and Noam Chomsky in formal linguistics and Cognitivism in general. However, the general tendency in America has been to break with patronal authority in favour of the other two types. Wielding concurrently or in succession, some combination of the three forms of authority is a measure of academic power that translates into an estimate of an individual’s influence and status within a given discipline. This in turn will determine just about everything else in an academic career. It will govern what opportunities for research or other work are available, what resources can be called on in the way of research grants or the

126  From the University to the Multiversity – and beyond recruitment of collaborators and assistants, what avenues of publication will be open, and finally how far these will be read and taken seriously by others, therefore, how influential they can become. As Richard Whitley points out, there are multiple ways in which authority becomes crucial in science: The more there is an apparatus to be organized, the more the important administrative authority becomes. Whereas previously prestige based on past achievement was the main form of “capital” in science, the development of a professional hierarchy and elaborate training facilities meant that control over resources used in scientific production constitutes an additional major form of capital. While prestige may be a necessary condition for obtaining such control – or at least of denying resources to deviants – it is not always sufficient and, correspondingly, administrative control need not imply scientific authority in terms of current work and approaches.2 Those without authority in terms of current work and approaches can often deny resources to those who do possess such authority, especially if they judge them to be deviants. If this happens often enough, it can frustrate and even stymie a promising line of research. For ideas and theories in science, no matter how brilliant or true, do not make their own way in the academic world but must be promoted and pushed by powerful guardians; this is especially so if they are original and bound to have a disruptive effect on the accepted ideas and theories on the basis of which the careers of those in power have been established. Alan Turing, despite his genius as a logician and scientist, failed to grasp these cardinal facts of academic life, according to his biographer Andrew Hodges, and so fell victim to those working against him: In another sense it was that very bridge between the world of logic and the world of human action, that Alan Turing found so difficult. It was one thing to have ideas, but quite another to impress them upon the world. The processes involved were entirely different. Whether Alan liked it or not, his brain was embodied in a specific academic system, which like any human organization, responded best to those who pulled the strings and made connections. But as his contemporaries observed him, he was in this respect the least “political” person.3 In other words, ideas without authority pursued by those without standing in a field of enquiry, invariably fall flat and can only rise when someone with sufficient power takes them up. It is sad and tragic when this happens to someone of Turing’s ability. On the other hand, extraordinary results can be achieved by those with scientific ability who also have the authority and savoir faire about how to

From the University to the Multiversity – and beyond 127 work the system to their advantage. How this is done is described by L.F. Cavalieri: To ‘win’ the [Nobel Prize] one needs, in addition to scientific achievement, a modicum of political manoeuvring and good public relations. The scientist may start by moving to a well-known university with a bustling department filled by members of the national Academy of Science and a few Nobel laureates thrown in for good measure. Here the Big Scientist has all the opportunities for becoming a science potentate, for the power exercised by Nobel laureates and science academicians is legendary. The Big Scientist can now enter the politics of science.4 All this is now normal and does not matter provided there is “scientific achievement” there in the first place. But what if there were no scientific achievements behind it? This is as yet rarely the case in science; outright charlatans do not win Nobel Prizes in science, though the charge is often heard that some of those who do win are far less deserving than others who miss out. However, in literature, this has already become a serious issue, at least since Bob Dylan won the prize for his supposed contribution to poetry. This is not simply a matter of judgements in the humanities being “subjective” and those in the sciences being based on apparently fool-proof objective tests and results. As we have learned from the history of science, it is just as easy for misjudgements to occur in the sciences as in the humanities. It is now possible to imagine a whole scientific field in which extensive research is carried on becoming so thoroughly corrupted that it no longer produces worthwhile or true results. In some cases, especially in some social sciences, we can no longer be sure that this is not happening already. Where the exercise of scientific authority is not in accord with real achievement as determined by standards of truth and integrity, then this kind of wholesale corruption is likely to take place. In science and the intellectual domain in general, power does not guarantee truth. The Baconian dictum that “truth is power” must not be taken literally and read as an identity, for power is one thing and truth quite another. As long as we are alert to that difference, science and academia, in general, will be proof against the debasement of truth in the name of power. Unfortunately, postmodernist sociologies and philosophies of science are now active in muddying the waters and obfuscating that basic logical dichotomy. We have studied elsewhere how these modish theories operate and what effect they might have so we will not repeat this here.5 Thus far the natural sciences have escaped the worst of the cultural depredations of the postmodernist deconstructivist currents that have shown themselves to be so devastating in the humanities and social sciences. However, the natural sciences are now subject to a danger that in its own way is equally threatening, resulting from what Philip Mirowski has called the commercialization of science.6 This is part of a general process which involves the commodification of education and the university in general.

128  From the University to the Multiversity – and beyond This is perhaps the ultimate stage in the destruction of the traditional European university, following its transformation into the multiversity and the subsequent emergence of a global network of such competing institutions. This process began around 1980 when a number of developments arose that now threaten to completely break with the traditional “idea of the university” and transform the university into another kind of institution that has almost nothing in common with the old university except for its name and the ceremonial trappings of graduations. In other words, we are now confronted with the end of the university as this has existed for the past eight centuries as the premier institution of higher education, scholarship and research in the West. A set of three fundamental changes are largely responsible for the destruction of the old university: the commercialization of research, the globalization of education as a commodity, and the gradual transference of both research and education to other institutions. These three ever-growing trends usurp the unique functions of the university and threaten to dissolve its identity through its merger with other corporate bodies of all kinds, most of which are commercial in nature. The appalling irony of this whole process of the evisceration of the university, so that only the outer shell now remains, is that it has been undertaken with the active participation of its administrative and professorial personnel, or at least those among them that stand most to benefit. The outcome of this self-destruction of the university is now amply apparent, and there are numerous works on this subject. The following comment by Steven Shapin sums it up: The American research university has become frankly corporate in its institutional structure, its scale, its financial routines, and many of its ways of recognizing merit. At the same time much of what counts as “industry” has become more like “the idea of a university” and even more like academic realities, partly as a result of a shift in the theory and practical management of skilled personnel and more importantly through the rise of the knowledge economy: the recognition that economic growth depends crucially on science-driven technological innovation and that firms’ economic advantages flow from the intellectual capital they command.7 This answers to the first and partly the third of the three trends previously set out: the commercialization of research and its transfer to autonomous commercial companies with which universities are closely connected, even to the point of investing in them. The biotechnology sciences and the industries founded on that basis exemplify such relations to perfection. The foundation of the pharmaceutical company Genentech as a commercial undertaking by the Nobel Prize-winning geneticists Herbert Boyer and Stanley Cohen in partnership with the venture capitalist Robert Swanson

From the University to the Multiversity – and beyond 129 shows how the transfer of knowledge from the university to the commercial enterprise takes place. Most universities throughout the world dream of similar success in commercializing their research and many have succeeded in achieving this kind of outcome to some degree. According to Philip Mirowski, there are a number of initiating causes responsible for the onset of such developments. He particularly tends to blame neoclassical liberal economists: “I argue that much of the modern commercialization of science and commodification of the university has followed a script promulgated by neoliberal thinkers”.8 And there is certainly much truth in that since the commodification of the university began at the same time, around 1980, when neoclassical monetarist economics came to the fore with the accession of Reagan in America and Thatcher in Britain. Thatcher undertook a veritable purge of the universities to make them more accountable, that is, more mindful of providing economic returns on taxpayer money invested in them. Education, scholarship and research were no longer seen as worth anything in themselves or as a public good, and even less so as cultural mainstays of our civilization. Similar developments in America took place with the passing of the Bayh-Dole Act by the United States Congress in 1980 and other such measures, the results of which were “just a plethora of lower-grade patents by universities which had never before sought them out”,9 as Mirowski remarks. Certainly, neoclassical monetarist economics was the theoretical underpinning of all such measures. It is not for nothing that Hayek was Thatcher’s favourite economist and Friedman played a similar role in Reagan’s administration. But to place so much weight on “neoliberal thinkers”, as Mirowski does, is perhaps to place a too great emphasis on ideas in the causation of such large-scale social changes. Mirowski is perhaps closer to the mark when he describes the changing role of the state in relation to scientific research and the universities in general. In the aftermath of the Second World War, during the period from 1950 to 1975 or thereabouts, state funding made possible the huge expansion of the universities, which we have previously described as the rise of the multiversity. The state provided universities with funds, both through direct grants and through research grants for specific projects, predominantly in the natural sciences, from which universities extracted overhead costs with which they were able to subsidize other faculties, such as the humanities. The Cold War and the resultant arms race made such funding resources seemingly inexhaustible and endless, as hardly anybody assumed that the Cold War would ever be over. What arose during this period is what Mirowski calls the Cold War regime in science, but it was also the golden age for all faculties in the ever-multiplying and expanding universities. However, from around 1975 state finance for universities began to shrivel and to contract. In America, the Vietnam war drained government resources and the oil crisis following the 1973 Yom Kippur war in the Middle East provoked stagflation and an economic downturn which was particularly severe in Britain. Direct state funding to universities gradually began to

130  From the University to the Multiversity – and beyond decline and even scientific research suffered from reductions. According to Mirowski: The percentage of national R&D expenditure provided by the US federal government has been falling since roughly 1967, while that emanating from private industry has been rising. Federal budgets for R&D have been essentially flat in real terms since the 1980s … 10 This reduction became more pronounced during the 1980s, particularly so after the end of the Cold War around 1990. Universities were faced with debilitating shortages of funds which they were forced to meet by cutting back expenditure and by looking for alternative sources of finance in private industry. Invariably it was the humanities and social sciences that suffered the most. It was at that point, starting around 1980, that the commodification of science and the commercialization of the university, as Mirowski puts it, began. The universities began to cultivate close commercial relations with business corporations and to found their own spin-off companies through the research work their scientists were doing which lent itself to commercial exploitation. Many of the cutting-edge sciences had reached a stage of maturation where they could give rise to useful technologies and products. This was particularly the case with biotechnologies, pharmaceuticals, computer and information technologies, nanotechnologies and many others. Following this incentive to commercialization, most university funding went in the direction of these commercially profitable sciences, less so to unprofitable ones, and least of all to the apparently “useless” humanities and social sciences, which then began to decline precipitously. In the era of “greed is good” student numbers in such faculties were also falling and this doubled the blow they suffered both from above and below. Literature, languages and sociology were particularly affected as fewer students enrolled and no finance came in from the outside into disciplines with no market potential. However, universities saw another source of income in rising student numbers both for practical professional and business studies courses and from students into such faculties from the Asian countries, where rapid economic development and growing prosperity, particularly among the upper classes, made prestigious foreign degrees for their children both desirable and affordable. This was particularly the case after 1990 when China began to send students to the West and when after 2000 India, too, joined the market for education. During this period of globalization, when international trading networks and production outsourcing became the norm, education, too, became an export industry, especially so for the English-speaking countries, primarily America, Britain and the older Commonwealth countries such as Australia and Canada; but Western Europe also benefited from the intake of Asian students. Globalization affected not only education but research as well. For scientists and other sought-after academic professionals, the world became

From the University to the Multiversity – and beyond 131 an open market where they could freely move about to trade their knowledge and expertise for the most advantageous grants, facilities, positions and salaries. Thereby arose the figure of the itinerant academic mercenary, usually a scientist, who was available for hire to the highest bidding university anywhere in the world. Another such was the transhumance peripatetic academic who seasonally moved from one university to another and one country to another; usually across the Atlantic, though other commuting routes of shorter or longer duration were also common. The availability of cheap air transport and the rise of the internet made all such movements possible for they allowed contact to be maintained and collaborative work to go on even in absentia. The universities sought to capitalize on all these features of globalization in education and research. They built up their intake of high fee-paying foreign students in order to acquire the finance for research. With those funds, they were then able to recruit top-gun academics with international reputations. And the more such academics they acquired for their faculties, the more foreign students they would attract, thereby gaining greater finance and being able to afford still more academics of high repute – and so on in a virtuous circle, or so they believed. It became an explicit policy directive for university administrators to set this circle spinning as rapidly as possible. And the faster it spun, the bigger and better their universities grew, and consequently the status, power and salaries they accrued increased accordingly. The key to this spin was academic ranking and metric evaluation, for without this, students, especially those from Asia, had no clear way of telling in which universities they should seek to be enrolled and administrators of such universities had no explicit way of deciding which academics they should hire in order to increase the standing of their universities. It was predictable, therefore, that the first international ranking system should emerge from China, the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) established in 2003. Since then, others were founded to serve a similar purpose. It is not our concern to determine which of these is better or a truer rendition of the real quality of universities for all these are highly contested and ultimately undecidable matters, or at least they cannot be settled on the basis of numerical measures alone. Nor can numerical measures alone determine the quality of academics or the worth and worthwhileness of research in the sciences. But this is precisely what metric evaluations seek to do and they have been accepted as such by government funding agencies and by universities themselves. It is understandable that this should have happened as bureaucrats have been granted the power to decide whose research project should be funded or who should be hired or promoted. Having a metric statistic in hand gives bureaucrats the confidence to make far-reaching decisions about research projects, even though they may know almost nothing about the subject at hand. In this way, a truly byzantine bureaucratic system of metrics has evolved, generally based on the citation index. Each paper has its citation number

132  From the University to the Multiversity – and beyond and so has each author. For the latter, the most sophisticated is the h-index: the number of papers X, each of which has been cited X times. There is a citation number of journals called the impact factor: the average number of citations each of its articles receives per year. The most prestigious journal in science Nature received the number 43.07 and the second-ranking Science had 41.063 in 2020.11 Unfortunately, as Stuart Ritchie points out, all such citation counts are open to gaming and all kinds of other corrupt practices which we shall examine in the next chapter.12 Metric evaluations on the individual level and academic ranking on the university level, now operative throughout the world, have had drastic and often bizarre consequences on academic life. What is researched and the very nature of how research is done have been affected. The standing of disciplines in relation to each other has also altered as a result. Universities have been forced to transform themselves, sometimes against their will, to meet the new standards and international requirements. Nothing of the old traditional system or traditional university culture has remained intact. How this has happened and what effects it has had we will go on to consider next.

Section II – University ranking It is remarkable that the ARWU of 2003, the very first of the academic rankings, came from Shanghai, for until then China had not figured on the world academic stage. But at that point, China declared itself a new contestant in the academic stakes, determined to catch up with the best, mainly the American universities, while conceding, however, that it was coming from far behind. But that ARWU publication also made the best European universities aware that they had also fallen behind; for apart from Oxford and Cambridge, recognized world leaders, the others had been resting on their laurels and were no longer anywhere near the top. Visibility from Shanghai became the new standard and led to calls for reforms from the academic players, the politicians and the public. What did this mean, what did it amount to, and why did it matter? What it meant is that the values by which European universities and their overseas extensions or duplicates had functioned for centuries had become obsolete. What it amounted to was the introduction of new standard measures by which universities, disciplines, departments and individual academics were judged; and even more importantly, how they judged themselves. This mattered because almost inevitably these judgements went against those that were more intellectually and humanistically oriented, and in favour of those that were more empirically and practically directed. The Shanghai ARWU was the Chinese writing on the wall for the older-style European university and the favoured disciplines, departments and individuals within its walls. The old European universities, as well as the American ones in their earlier incarnations, had lived by a largely tacit mode of evaluation and ranking

From the University to the Multiversity – and beyond 133 based on reputation. Those who were themselves of good repute could assess the reputations of all others and their verdict was generally accepted by all, academics and public alike. They went by almost unspoken and certainly uncontested notions of what was worthwhile or worthless, and of how to judge the extent to which universities, disciplines, departments and individuals lived up to these time-honoured and honed requirements. Reputation, like honour and other such old-world notions, was best understood by those who exemplified it and not very well by outsiders; and not at all by those who did not subscribe to it, such as foreigners. As Catherine Paradeise and JeanClaude Thoenig put it, a university’s reputation was formed by “the consolidation of informal and socially contextual judgements about its part in producing worthwhile outcomes: an education developing students’ culture, open-mindedness, curiosity, citizenship, awareness of up-to-date science”. Most of this was rendered inoperative and was displaced once reputation gave way to evaluation based on a “rationalization perspective, which has boomed since the turn of the Millennium, and has developed a new quality regime we name the regime of excellence, and which changes the relation between how universities operate internally and how external audiences consider them”.13 The regime of excellence based on metrics introduces a new numerical measure of academic performance and no longer leaves this to be determined by the refined judgement of reputed academic authorities and, therefore, open to the vagaries of their often conflicting sense of things. By contrast, metrics always provides an exact measure of what anything is worth: The new quality regime brought about by the search for accountability is predicated on the specific performance of an institution, a department, a school, a research institute, and so on, as measured using a set of objectives and acontextual indicators that cross all kinds of frontiers. As far as these indicators are considered to be accurate by their audiences, whoever they are, quality is proven using scores on objective variables that plot the position of this entity relative to any other of the same type.14 Necessarily, of course, this kind of regime of excellence favours some kinds of products over others; it places a premium on those that can easily be measured and derogates others where this is much more difficult or even impossible. And this goes for producers as well, whether they be universities, disciplines, departments or individual researchers. But this is precisely what makes it so appealing to outsiders who would rather have a set of figures than none at all. This goes especially for politicians who have to make policy decisions about education and research, for the journalists of the media who report on all this, and ultimately for the general public whose children have to choose where to invest their talents, in both the old and new senses of that word.

134  From the University to the Multiversity – and beyond But for more than anyone else, this is a system of evaluation that is particularly appealing to university administrators for it enables them to apply a business model of quality control to production in universities, just like that utilized in factories. Many of these administrators have themselves been to business management schools and the topmost among them think of themselves as managers and chief executive officers. They now constitute a new stratum of cadres who have taken over the running of universities from the professors. Previously in the old European model, it was the professors who ruled by constituting councils and sitting on committees; now professional administrators have taken over. They are themselves mostly academics with PhDs who have taken a very different career route to that of the teaching and research faculty. In his book on the contemporary university, one of the very few scholars who take a critical view of what the university has become, Peter Murphy has made a thorough study of the process of bureaucratization that has ensued.15 Murphy reveals the extent of the bureaucratization of the university by reference to a simple economic fact: For most of the history of the modern university, universities spent 20 cents in the dollar on administration. This is the figure that still prevailed at the University of California in 1960. Today [2015] it is 60 cents in the dollar.16 In other words, administrative costs have grown threefold and with it came a commensurate increase in the number of administrative personnel who now outnumber the faculty. Thus, for example, “by 1996 the ratio of administrative to academic staff in Australia had reached 1.3:1, where it has remained ever since. The story is a familiar one across much of the OECD”.17 In America “employment of university administrators increased 60 percent between 1993 and 2009”.18 The corollary of this development, as Murphy spells it out, is that as the bureaucrats take over the university, they transform it in their own image and proceed to run it as a bureaucratic enterprise, which is why metrics and ratings take on such a disproportionate role. The upshot is that “as the bureaucratic component of the unipolis has expanded, the creative capacity of the university has declined”.19 In part this is simply the inevitable consequence of the process of bureaucratization that Weber depicted well over a century ago as the “iron cage” in which all social functions become immured. But it has specific features that are peculiar to academia, especially to those universities that have turned education into a commodity and students into customers. Where these customers are foreign students and a policy of education for export is pursued, there is little to distinguish universities from other export industries and their managerial practices are practically interchangeable. University managers could not manage without a regime of excellence which, in lieu of profits, gives them a ready overview of how everyone within their purview

From the University to the Multiversity – and beyond 135 is performing. But this kind of accountability is really accounting, and has predictable consequences as Paradiese and Thoenig point out: Quantitative metrics based on some uni-dimensional scale yield quick comparative returns in a competitive environment. The bean-counting approach makes it easier to post performance results every year or so, thereby prioritising the production of articles, while books are rightly or wrongly classified as long-term endeavours. Past faculty performance counts much more for evaluation purposes than the quality of any new projects that may be proposed by candidates under evaluation, because it can be referred to more plausibly in public relations campaigns.20 As we shall soon see, these built-in biases have devasting long-term consequences for what global universities produce and these no longer measure up to the products of the old universities, as Murphy and others have shown. From the administrators’ point of view, the great benefit that the regime of excellence affords them is that it puts constant pressure on faculty to produce and keep on producing, especially the academic articles in terms of which everything else is measured. And in turn, this productive output is a measure of the administrators’ own performance and achievement in lifting the rankings of their university from one level to a slightly higher one in the ARWU. Their own career prospects are closely tied to such gains or losses. Instead of profits or share prices, output serves as their performance indicator. Hence, we must examine what has resulted from this drive for output and what the ARWU listing in fact reveals about the universities of the world. There are altogether somewhere between 14,500 and 15,000 institutions that call themselves universities or some such designation. (We will take the higher figure for that makes calculation easier.) These can be graded in a hierarchical pyramid with fewer going up to the apex and more going down to the base, just like income distribution statistics. At the top are the 1%, considered the best universities, representing around 150 in total which, following Paradeise and Thoenig, we can designate as Top of the Pile or ToP. Around 3% are those that are firmly within the 500 considered by the ARWU or visible from Shanghai; and perhaps up to 4% are those who have over the years featured at least once in that ranking. About half of these are American universities; and of the ToP 150 more than half, 82, are also American. The proportion is even greater as the list approaches the very tip of the top, the 15 universities that are at the 0.1 percentile mark that lies at the apex of the pyramid, for these are all American, except for Oxford and Cambridge. At the utmost peak of the top, the 0.01 percentile, that most elevated height is permanently occupied by two American universities, Harvard and MIT in that order. Some of the other ‘tip of the top’ American universities are Stanford, Berkeley, Caltech, Princeton, Yale, Chicago and Columbia, usually in approximately that order, though this can vary slightly from year to year.

136  From the University to the Multiversity – and beyond Despite occasional changes, these American universities, together with Oxford and Cambridge, are always there at the tip of the top. It is only when the 0.2 percentile is considered, or the first 30 universities, that other universities, European, Canadian and Japanese, begin to come into play, specifically Imperial College London, the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, University of Toronto, Tokyo University and Kyoto University. American dominance is thus only gradually weakened at the 50, 100, 150, 300 and 500 levels. The lower the ranking and the more universities that are in play, the greater the possibility of variation as to who is in and who is out year by year. When the numbers are small, as at the tip of the top, there is very little change or mobility from year to year: between 2003 and 2014 the same nine universities were in the top ten at all times, and altogether only 11 universities occupied one of the top ten places. As the table supplied by Paradiese and Thoenig shows, the rate of change only gradually increases as we go from the top 20 (where 17 were permanent and 24 occupied a place in that ranking during one or another year) to the top 30 (26 permanents and 33 who occupied a place) till we reach the top 500 (where 366 were permanents and altogether only 646 were ever present at sometime within that overall ranking).21 The 646 mark approximates the 4% or 5% level of all universities that are worthy of being ranked. The remaining 95% or so are in the ruck, falling outside international consideration. The closer a university gets to the top, the harder it becomes to go further up and displace those who are already there, for mobility decreases. Thus, it is inconceivable that Harvard and MIT should ever be removed from their pre-eminence over the whole global system as it functions at present and for the foreseeable future. They have an unassailable commanding lead in all the fields where one or the other predominates. In general, Harvard takes precedence in many social sciences and humanities and MIT in many natural science and technological domains. All their departments in these fields rank very highly when compared to those in all other universities. Overall, Harvard maintains a better balance in all fields, whereas MIT is comparatively weak in some of the humanities, such as literature, for example, but stronger in the sciences. To maintain their universities at these levels of achievement, their academics have to work prodigiously hard, generally in the production of papers. The Harvard faculty outperforms those of any other in the world with an astonishing rate of output. According to the Leiden Research Rankings covering the years 2003 to 2007, Harvard with 2107 continuing staff FTEs produced altogether 57124 published items over those years, which averages out at a publication output per head per year of 5.4.22 The next major producer was Tokyo University with 2429 FTEs generating 35622 items at an annual average of 2.9 each. Such an outstanding university as Chicago with 2168 FTEs only managed 13368 items at an average of 1.2, less than a quarter that of Harvard.

From the University to the Multiversity – and beyond 137 How do Harvard academics manage to be so productive? With a wealth of endowments exceeding many times that of any other university, Harvard can provide optimal conditions and finances for any kind of research. This is, of course, also an inducement for the best and keenest minds, especially among the young, to gravitate there if they receive the call. Hence, Harvard can recruit almost anyone it desires to have, and over the years it has amassed a remarkable collection of minds. Furthermore, once they are employed at Harvard, such people are not just left to their own devices, particularly if they are young and enter at the bottom of the tenure ladder as most are bound to do. Senior faculty members take charge of them and gently lead and coach them in how to become collegial, cooperative and productive members of their departments and of the university as a whole. For Harvard functions as a well-coordinated team in which every part, individual or department, has to pull its weight in order to ensure the success of the whole. If some part begins to weaken or slacken this is soon brought to the attention of the administrators and steps are taken to rectify the situation and, where there is damage, to repair it. This is how such high rates of productivity are maintained across the board year in and year out. Another crucial factor that enjoins and facilitates productivity is the tradition of accomplishment that both Harvard and MIT have established over the years, especially since the Second World War. Both of these outstanding universities were the sources of most of the leading scientific and intellectual movements during those times. Harvard gave rise to Parson’s Functionalist sociology, Skinner’s Behaviourism, Miller’s Cognitivism and Quine’s Logicism. MIT was even more prolific, generating Wiener’s Cybernetics, Shannon’s Information Theory, Chomsky’s linguistics, Fodor’s modularity, Minky’s Artificial Intelligence, Samuelson’s mathematical economics and Kuhn’s paradigms. All in all, for better or worse, MIT was the dominant scientific and intellectual influence throughout the late twentieth century period, so much so that we have elsewhere dubbed its model of mind the MIT-Mind.23 Being the inheritors of such an illustrious past makes it all that much easier for the current incumbents to maintain their perch at the very top of the academic ladder. Any editor of a journal or a university press would think twice before rejecting a submission coming with a Harvard or MIT letterhead. But as well as that reputational advantage, Harvard and MIT have journals and presses of their own where their alumni figure very prominently and which very naturally favour their own people. This is true for most of the tip of the top universities. For example, it has been calculated that around a quarter of the books issued by the Chicago University press come from its own faculty; and it is likely that similar high figures feature in the over 50 journals that Chicago publishes. This does not necessarily entail any kind of corruption, for it is simply the inevitable outcome of the

138  From the University to the Multiversity – and beyond reputational system where one’s own products are bound to be deemed best, especially at such high places. It so happens that Harvard and MIT are both located in Boston on opposite sides of the Charles River. One can thus not inappropriately refer to them as the university equivalents of Boston Brahmins. And since they are so closely in touch with each other and communicate and commute between themselves, it is perhaps also apt to apply to them the lines of the famous verses about Boston: “where the Lodges talk only to the Cabots, and the Cabots talk only to God”. We leave it to God to decide which of the universities corresponds to the Lodges and which to the Cabots. With a certain degree of poetic license, we might take up the conceit and refer to the other Top of the Pile (ToP) universities also as the Brahmins among universities, namely, a caste apart. Indeed, we can extend the caste metaphor to the whole academic system and classify all the universities according to the Indian classical division of the four castes – Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas and Shudras – together with the Chandala or outcasts now called Dalits. At present this might be more appropriate than status ranking according to a meritocratic class system since, as we have shown, mobility from one level to another is becoming increasingly more difficult. In the period of great growth and expansion following the Second World War it was possible for universities to rise from almost nowhere to near the top and for academics to move upwards from almost any starting point and gain high positions through sheer determination and achievement. Now this is becoming less and less possible. One has to be born a Brahmin, one cannot become one. This has its near equivalent for academics now in that one has to have graduated or at least obtained a PhD from a top or even a tip of the top university to stand any chance of ever gaining tenure in any other such institution. As Paradeise and Thoenig report, hiring practice among these universities is that “applicants who carry degrees from other prestigious universities and departments are more likely to be short-listed and subsequently appointed”.24 There are, of course, exceptions to this rule, but these are so rare as to confirm the rule. And as we have previously shown, the same lack of mobility holds for universities themselves, for it is also extremely rare for any university to rise much above its allotted ranking level, especially as it seeks to come nearer to the top. The whole academic system is becoming rigid and frozen; hence the caste metaphor is more appropriate than the class one. Though they do not avail themselves of this metaphor, Paradeise and Thoenig in fact divide universities into four categories: Top of the Pile (ToP), Venerables, Wannabes and Missionaries. This requires but a slight adjustment to make it fit in better with the four classical Indian castes. Firstly, it is necessary to group the ToP and the Venerables together as two types of Brahmins; or, to be terminologically precise, as two Jatis within the one varna. Secondly, it is necessary to subdivide the Missionaries, who make up the bulk of 95% of universities, into two separate castes. And thirdly, it is

From the University to the Multiversity – and beyond 139 necessary to make some allowance for the outcasts, the Chandala or Dalits, which Paradeise and Thoenig do not mention. With these three changes, we can now apply the caste metaphor to the classification that Paradeise and Thoenig supply. What Paradeise and Thoenig call the Venerables are the most prestigious of the old European universities, such as in France the Grandes Écoles, especially the École Normal Supérieure in Paris, École Polytechnique and École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. They judge these adversely compared to the ToP universities, which, apart from Oxford and Cambridge, are mainly American especially at the tip of the top, the foremost 15 universities. The Venerables they judge are living off their past achievements and no longer contributing very much to the present store of knowledge. Unfortunately, they are too blinded by their own sense of exclusivity to see that the international environment has turned against them: “This unreadiness to face change means that the Venerables run a serious risk of crippling vulnerability whenever outside development challenges their processes and values head-on … ”.25 Clearly, the American ToPs and the whole ARWU system that they have inspired constitutes the outside environment in which the Venerables will be hard put to maintain their traditional status. Although the Venerables together with the ToPs are both top universities, they reflect historical differences as they represent the older and newer stages in the transition from the older-style European university to the newerstyle, largely American university. Prior to the Second World War, the top American universities also comported themselves as Venerables just like their present European counterparts. But subsequently, they underwent a number of crucial changes that the Europeans, especially on the Continent, have been unwilling to follow. But now, somewhat belatedly, even they are realizing that they will have to change in order to remain the same, namely, to maintain their top positions. The work of Paradeise and Thoenig is itself a reflection of this fact. If the Venerables do succeed in transforming themselves, then they might succeed in maintaining their place among the Brahmins, though it is unlikely that any of them will ever be in a position to challenge the tip of the top Americans and certainly not the Boston Brahmins. What Paradeise and Thoenig call the Wannabe universities we might liken to the Kshatriya caste, the warriors and rulers or politicians who might be compared to errant knights in the European feudal context or the samurai in the Japanese. Paradeise and Thoenig characterize the faculty such universities depend on as academic top-guns for hire: Wannabe faculty members behave like mercenaries, who can sell their personal production and reputation to whatever institution offers a good return on investment in terms of revenues and the resources they need to reach individual excellence, namely time and rewards for their research performance. They will defect opportunistically if other institutions offer them a better deal.26

140  From the University to the Multiversity – and beyond Loyalty to their university of choice is quite conditional on it supplying them with what they need and also on it improving or at least maintaining its current status ranking, for “they might be tempted to withdraw or defect to another ToP institution if the current one was unable to sustain its high status”.27 But if they have the resources and the administrative will, Wannabe universities can lift their game and status ranking to some considerable degree. Thus, for example, Manchester University utilized its so-called 2012 Diamond Operation to hire 150 top researchers and raise its ranking by 51 places; other universities both in America and Continental Europe have followed suit to a similar extent through such extraordinary exertions. Such gains are, of course, very insecure, for these universities can fall back rapidly if they prove unable to keep on rewarding their mercenary Kshatriyas. Australian universities greatly increased their rankings by attracting high fee-paying Chinese students and using the proceeds to hire high-producing researchers, mainly scientists, from all over the world. This improved their ARWU scores, which in turn attracted more Chinese students and led to the further hiring of top researchers, and so on. This apparently virtuous circle continued till the COVID-19 epidemic and political problems meant that many Chinese students stopped coming, a situation which has brought the whole Australian university system into crisis. It is worth mentioning that a few Australian universities are among the ToPs (the top 1% or within the top 150 rankings), though none are within reach of the tip of the top (the 0.1% or tip of the top 15 rankings). Many would like to act as Wannabes, though they are severely restricted in this ambition by being unable to offer outstanding research or salary incentives to top-gun performers, either internationally or locally. Hence, there is very little mobility as between universities, and all the administrators can do to increase productivity is apply carrot-and-stick incentives of small rewards and punishments. In general, they cannot retain very talented or productive people, especially among the young, for these will almost invariably drift overseas where conditions are so much better. They become the Kshatriyas of the international arena. If Kshatriyas can escape their universities for better pastures, the lower castes found in the so-called Missionary universities cannot do so for they “are trapped in their university, since their research activity is too modest to give them any value on the external job market. If external promotions are lacking, they are likely to withdraw within their institution” and become all the less productive.28 Somewhat incongruously, the Missionaries are so called, not because they go out to perform a mission or to proselytize a message, but because they stay put to serve their local mission of fulfilling whatever it is their universities are designed to do. Generally, these universities are meant to produce graduates to serve pre-designated social ends of the professional variety, and in general to educate young people to take their place in the economy and in society. Some also undertake to carry out research and some forgo this opportunity and concentrate solely on

From the University to the Multiversity – and beyond 141 teaching, both at the degree and the diploma levels. And this is where a distinction needs to be drawn that corresponds to the two lower castes, the Vaishyas and Shudras. The Vaishya universities are called research universities, those that have PhD programs and whose faculty are fully engaged in research activity. These academics correspond to the yeoman farmers, traders and merchants of the caste system. Their productivity is usually limited and restricted since they cannot hope to advance much beyond their station by publication alone; they are trapped within the caste into which they were educated, no matter how much they might later produce. This, of course, removes any incentive to produce more than is strictly necessary for promotion within the Missionary system. Once in it, it is very difficult to get out of it. The Shudra caste of universities corresponds to the menial labourers, those who toil in the academic vineyards and are largely restricted to teaching functions. Many of these institutions were formerly considered colleges of advanced education or polytechnics and have now been ennobled by a stroke of the legislative pen, but as Murphy points out: But these ‘universities’ often are universities in name only. This is because exploration leading to the discovery of new knowledge is beyond them. They are status institutions not adventive institutions. The highest purpose of a university is the creation of knowledge.29 Hence in order to live up to their title of universities, the Shudra caste faculty will attempt or pretend to do research but little, if any, of this can count as the creation of knowledge. To complete and conclude our caste analogy, it is worth pointing out that there is also a fifth group of outcasts or Chandalas who perform the most menial work of all. They are there throughout all the universities but are usually invisible, so much so that most studies omit even to mention them. These are the numerous types of personnel who function as servants, all the non-tenured and not tenure-track assistants, part-timers, technicians, postdoc demonstrators and tutors, and many others essential to the functioning of the academic enterprise in the universities of the world. Their numbers have increased dramatically in the period of the transition from the European-style to the global-style university. They now constitute more than half of the staff and do at least half of all the teaching and hands-on research in most universities, work that was previously done mostly by full-time faculty. It is now part of the reward system that senior faculty should be free of such drudgery to devote themselves exclusively to research and publication. Perhaps the real reason for the great increase in the numbers of these outcasts is that the administrators favour them over full-time faculty. They cost a fraction of the salary and are so much easier to handle. They can be hired and fired as need arises and need only be paid low piece-work rates with no other benefits or overheads. Also, they are far less likely to challenge

142  From the University to the Multiversity – and beyond the administrators’ bureaucratic prerogatives than full professors. They are without union protection and so are an easily manipulable and exploitable workforce. They constitute an intellectual proletariat in the proper Marxist sense. At the same time, they can be treated as untouchables for the regular faculty need take no notice of them or communicate with them beyond the requirements of work or politeness. Why so many, usually young people, allow themselves to be used and exploited in this way is a mystery of academia that only those in that position understand. The caste metaphor that we have deployed must, of course, not be taken literally. But it is now much more appropriate than the meritocratic class metaphor that held currency previously and that most academics still believe in. The assumption was that one could rise to any degree and attain any position due solely to one’s own talents and achievements. This was always a delusion for caste features were always present, especially so at the highest levels. Thus, in the English system, it was extremely difficult to get into Oxford or Cambridge and almost impossible to attain a faculty position there, namely a fellowship, unless one went to the right schools and graduated from one of these universities themselves or a few other select ones. Thus, neither Oxford nor Cambridge would employ any of the hundreds of brilliant refugees expelled by Hitler. But this was not the case in America where a high degree of mobility and openness prevailed right down to about half a century ago. But this gradually ceased to be the case, ever more so over the succeeding decades as society became more stratified. As might be expected, there is now a close correlation between the caste order of the universities and the status of the students attending them, a status which is no longer that of classes but, given the huge disparities in most respects and the lack of social mobility, is rapidly turning into one approximating to castes or at least to the old estates of medieval Europe. Thomas Piketty provides a great deal of insight into all these issues. This is particularly relevant to America where quality education calls for such a huge investment that only the richest social strata can afford it. One statistic he quotes is particularly revealing: Recent studies of admissions to the best US universities have shown that most of them draw a larger proportion of their students from families in the top centile of the income distribution than from families in the bottom 60 percent, which means that children of the top centile are at least sixty times more likely to be admitted than children of the latter group.30 By the best universities he means “the thirty-eight most selective”, which more or less matches those we call Brahmin. The correlation between family income and university attendance, and invariably also the quality or caste of the university attended, is provided in a graph which shows that “the rate of access to higher education … was barely 30 percent for children of

From the University to the Multiversity – and beyond 143 the poorest 10 percent in the United States and 90 percent for the richest 10 percent”.31 Given that the richest dominate the best universities, it stands to reason that the poorest are consigned to the worst and that the middle strata attend the mediocre ones, which bears out our initial assumption. It is highly significant terminologically that Piketty identifies a segment of the richest as “Brahmin left” and devotes a whole chapter to discussing them.32 These are the people who owe their high incomes to educational qualifications from the best universities. They are complementary to the other segment of the very top people he dubs “merchant right”, which he also calls “Banias” in the caste terminology; these are those who lack high educational qualifications but have high wealth alone. Piketty shows that both segments, which we might also call “Jatis” vote left of centre: in America, they vote for the Democratic Party; the Brahmins in greater proportion than almost any other group. This Brahmin leftist ethos is that which pervades the top American universities where progressive leftism and political correctness is the shibboleth. This is not the view of some hidebound conservative, but of a French intellectual Brahmin academic of the left Socialist disposition. This view is confirmed from the opposite side by such nonintellectual American IT business gurus as Scot Galloway, who writes: “The cruel truth of what pretends to be a meritocracy but is a caste system is that your degree largely indicates or signals your lifetime earnings”.33 In such a caste system, the predicament of academics can be compared to that of the elect in Hindu or Calvinist theology. Election is predestined or predetermined by one’s karma, one cannot attain academic heaven by relying on good works alone. Even the most productive and ambitious of the Kshatriyas, with hundreds of publications, cannot hope to earn a place in the tip of the top Brahmin universities. And no Wannabe university can ever hope to climb to such illustrious heights. Only at a much lower level is there greater mobility and a certain degree of up-and-down movement still occurs. The introduction of rankings based on a regime of excellence is not the cause of this development, only another symptom of it. However, once introduced it has acted as a catalyst to speed up the changes already taking place. The administrators have rapidly latched on to it and now use it to enforce their policies. They now parrot the jargon of accountability by which they really mean accountancy, for the quantitative bottom line is all that matters and what used to be considered quality is no longer of any concern to them. For let there be no illusion about it, metrics is not just a passive instrument of measurement but an active tool to leverage change in a given direction that the administrators favour.

Section III – Metric bias As the system of evaluation based on metrics and ranking is taking hold, everything about the university is changing. Eventually the university as some of us have known it in the past will disappear. The disciplines studied

144  From the University to the Multiversity – and beyond in the past will be no more or remain in name only. Academics will become another species of productive beings and no longer the scientists and scholars of old. This is what is involved in the grand transformation from a European to a global model in the culture of universities. The regime of excellence based on metrics is accelerating all these changes. It is doing so not only by multiplying what it measures but also by eliminating what it does not measure. For that which cannot be counted on standard scales ceases to be registered, and as far as the metric regime is concerned, it ceases to exist. Even that which cannot be easily counted begins to slip away and be discounted. These factors apply to academics as individuals, to universities as a whole, and to the various disciplines that are taught and researched within them. As we shall see, it is the humanities that are most disadvantaged by the metric bias and next to them those social sciences that have a greater intellectual content; but even the natural sciences where theorizing plays a leading role are detrimentally affected. Those natural sciences and social sciences that operate in discrete and specialized empirical fields with practical applications come off best, for such work can be easily subdivided into countless papers. It also lends itself to a division of labour and teamwork which also leads to high publication rates. Any research that cannot be conducted in this specialized way and that requires a broad overview and some deeper intellectual grasp of theoretical matters is consequently rewarded at a much lower rate. Such work is invariably the product of a single individual or of a few working together and tends to appear in book rather than paper format. As a consequence of the metrics bias, books will tend to disappear as the media for major contributions to knowledge or scholarship, as we shall demonstrate in the next chapter. Along with that change, the individual as author will also become obsolete. Ironically the idea of the “death of the author”, already mooted in sophisticated literary and critical circles, has been realized in the sciences. Indeed, we can already glimpse the future in academia by looking at what has happened in the literary arts. The metric of evaluation in commercial publishing has for a long time now almost been exclusively sales: the more copies a book sells, the higher it is regarded and the better it is deemed to be. The upshot of this has been the arrival of the best-seller phenomenon through a winner-takes-all game where numerous titles are published each year, the numbers run into the tens of thousands in each major category, but most of the sales are garnered by the few dozen or so best sellers. Thus, everyone who wants to be an author, or at least to gain a living from writing, must aim to produce a best seller and so must follow the prescribed recipes for achieving this outcome. Original work is a sure loser. Hence, year by year more and more such books are published, the vast majority of which simply disappear without remainder by being in fact remaindered or sent back to the publishers to be pulped. As we shall see, there is a close analogue to this in the publication of scientific papers. All

From the University to the Multiversity – and beyond 145 the rewards go to the few winners; the many losers get nothing. One can rightly consider this an extremely wasteful system; it wastes the energies and talents of potential writers and the economic resources of publishers, not to speak of sheer paper. But once this method of marketing had evolved, there was almost no way of changing it. The biggest waste of all is in literary quality, for the competition to land a best seller on the market is a race to the bottom. A version of Gresham’s law that bad money drives out good money applies to books and in some respect also to papers, as we shall see in the next chapter. In the academic publishing of books there are, of course, no best sellers. Very few copies are sold or distributed, and there is ample evidence that even fewer of these are read. Yet there is no shortage of authors of such books because they are part of the system of accreditation, tenure and promotion at least in the humanities and social sciences. In the natural sciences, books count for almost nothing and young ambitious scientists are discouraged from even attempting such a futile endeavour. Senior scientists long past their prime can indulge themselves by writing books. In the sciences it is the paper which is the coin of the realm with which everyone trades. But because of metrics and regimes of excellence, this is rapidly becoming the currency in the social sciences and humanities as well. A high rate of paper publication earns one research grants which are the means for more papers. And this, too, becomes a kind of race to the bottom, for the more papers one can subdivide out of a single project, the higher one’s reward. This also leads to the selection of short-term projects with assured and rapid results. Paradeise and Thoenig note: “Excellencedriven institutions pay more attention to projects that generate quick wins and returns that are immediately visible in rankings than to long-maturing academic products. Short-term institutional achievements constitute factbased performance. Long-term projects are always a gamble and remain promises”.34 There are a number of well-known techniques for the multiplication of papers from the one body of research. One is the salami-slice method of dividing it into as many publishable segments as possible. The other is to apply the one method or procedure to as many distinct objects as possible. This is a favourite device in many specialized natural and social sciences. In the humanities, it has been found rewarding to rewrite the same idea in as many styles as possible to suit different journals and the predilections of their editors. If the number of papers, rather than any other standard of quality, is what counts according to the regime of excellence then academics, especially the young ones, are more or less compelled to adopt such procedures if they wish to survive. But old habits die hard, so that even wellestablished academics still continued to churn out papers even when the need to do so has long gone. The senior ones among them even proclaim themselves lead authors for papers largely written by their subordinate juniors. At what point this becomes a corrupt practice is difficult to determine, since so

146  From the University to the Multiversity – and beyond much research, especially in the sciences, is now conducted in teams, and one would normally expect the leaders of such teams to take primary credit. Working in teams is another factor conducive to the multiplication of papers. For one thing, there is safety in numbers: editors are far less likely to consider and publish a single-authored paper than a multi-authored one, especially where the lead author is a well-known individual. Group papers that are the outcome of large research grants, the kind that individuals are most unlikely to receive on their own, are also more favoured in the publication stakes. Thus, numerous papers can ensue from team effort in a group project, many more than if the people concerned worked on their own. But what such papers tend to be like can be deduced from the old joke that a camel is a horse designed by a committee. The upshot of all this activity is that the number of papers keeps constantly rising. In the sciences, it follows the power-law discovered by Derek da Solla Price, according to which numbers double every 15 to 40 years depending on the discipline.35 The exact figures of articles in all the sciences published every year at present is not known, but it does not fall far short of three million, with medicine, electronics, biology and chemistry the largest contributors, but aerospace and geology also publish in large numbers. In the social sciences, it is history and economics that are the largest producers. The preponderant bulk of all these publications are at present in English, but the proportion in Chinese is constantly rising. This is also happening in patents, frequently the engineering application of scientific papers, where the number in Chinese exceeds that in English. What happens to this huge yearly avalanche of papers? As with any avalanche the question to ask is “ou sont les neiges d’antan?” Most of them simply melt away and disappear. As Samuel Arbesman reports, “most papers are never cited. And many are cited only once and then forgotten. Others are only cited by their own authors, in their own other papers”.36 Or they are cited by friends in collusion or as a special favour. Of the small proportion that are cited a number of times over a longer period, it is still likely that a greater part are not read, but simply appear on citation lists copied from other citation lists, as Arbesman’s research has shown.37 It is not even certain that editors of the journals that publish them actually read them, for it has been shown by submission trial tests that sometimes the same editors will accept or reject the very papers that they have themselves published a few years earlier without realizing this fact. So, what purpose do all these papers serve? They are simply metrics, numerical measures that enable CVs to be presented for evaluation purposes in job interviews, promotions, and, above all, in applications for grants. They are simply the lubricating oil that enables the academic machine to run smoothly and the regime of excellence to function apparently with great precision and fairness. But what they really assure is the operation of Merton’s Matthew principle: to those that have, more will be given and from those that have not, it will be taken away. In other words, papers are simply

From the University to the Multiversity – and beyond 147 extensions of the evaluation system in academia that begins with the exam papers that students sit. After they have been read, more or less carefully or desultorily depending on the examiner, they are assigned a grade which figures in student CVs. As for the exam-papers themselves, they are quickly disposed of without trace. A similar fate awaits most published papers. But obviously not all, for there are still a few academics who make new discoveries and contribute to knowledge and understanding. An inverse power-law ratio applies to these papers: 0.01% of them make really significant contributions, 0.1% are also highly worthwhile, 1% are still noteworthy and 10% are useful and ancillary to the others. As for the rest, nearly 90%, they might as well not have existed and science might be better off without them. When it comes to serious books – which are still crucial to the humanities and social sciences – the situation might be still grimmer. Such books might completely disappear. This does not mean that published products that have the appearance of books will cease to appear in both paper and e-book format. Indeed, there is and will continue to be a veritable avalanche of these as well, for something like 60,000 new titles appear in America alone every year. Even if one excludes from consideration the commercial presses, which have almost completely given up publishing serious innovatory books, and only takes count of the university presses, the numbers are still staggering. But few of these are books in the old sense. Mostly they are texts published for practical utilitarian or pedagogic purposes or popularizations to satisfy intellectual curiosity. Even the most serious, learned and weighty books are most frequently simply collections of articles by one, two or multiple authors. But no number of articles ever amount to a real book. The situation a hundred years ago was different from that which prevailed 50 years ago and differs even more from that which is current at present. Then there were great authors at work whose books founded whole new disciplines or set them on a new course. Names such as Simmel, Weber, Durkheim, Freud, Malinowski, Keynes, Schumpeter and many others readily spring to mind. Now anyone even attempting such a book is shunned by the editors of the university presses, especially if it is someone who does not derive from their charmed circle of ToPs, or, as in some disciplines, does not descend from Boston Brahmins. The few such books, derisively called door-stoppers, that do still appear are mostly balloons full of hot air that a mere pinprick of criticism can deflate. The sad truth is that for most people it now takes almost suicidal courage even to attempt such a book. For young people at the start of their careers, it has become a complete impossibility and they must be strongly warned against attempting it. The regime of excellence almost completely prohibits it, for in order to get a foot on the academic ladder or to gain tenure young academics must concentrate on a steady flow of articles, all tailor-made for the high-ranking journals. As for books, only in the humanities and some social sciences is it worthwhile to publish a small book, usually a worked-up version of a PhD thesis. It is clear that under this regime few of the old-time

148  From the University to the Multiversity – and beyond authors would have survived or ever had the time to write the works which now redound to their fame and which provide the subject matter on which thousands of academics now build their illustrious careers. What would now happen to Weber, who early in his career broke down and could not continue teaching? Would Keynes survive now on what now looks like mere journalism before he wrote his magnum opus? Could Freud succeed today without any academic backing whatever? This holds not only for the social sciences and humanities, but for the natural sciences as well. Only very recently, just prior to his own death in 2019, the outstanding molecular biologist and Nobel Prize winner Sydney Brenner wrote an obituary tribute to his friend Fred Sanger, an even more exceptional scientist who gained two Nobel Prizes, an almost unheard-of accomplishment, in which he stated: A Fred Sanger would not survive in today’s world of science. With continuous reporting and appraisals, some committee would note that he published little of importance between insulin of 1952 and his first paper on RNA sequencing in 1967, with another long gap until DNA sequencing in 1977. He would be labelled as unproductive and his modest personal support would be denied. We no longer have a culture that allows individuals to embark on long-term – and what would be considered today extremely risky – projects.38 Peter Higgs – the theoretician responsible for the boson that now bears his name and which recently has been experimentally confirmed by CERN – is of a similar view, stating in an interview in The Guardian that “he doubts a similar breakthrough could be achieved in today’s academic culture because of the expectation to collaborate and keep churning out papers”.39 It is possible to speculate that Einstein could not have started a career in physics in today’s academic environment, given his poor results at the Zurich Polytechnic and his employment in a patent office. Would any journal of physics today publish a paper coming from such a source? A similar fate would undoubtedly now befall many of the great pioneers of science. If Julius Axelrod, a Nobel Prize biochemist, is correct that “ninety-nine percent of discoveries are made by one percent of the scientists”40 then what is the effect on science when that 1% of really creative scientists cannot come to fruition? According to Murphy, this is, indeed, what is taking place at present; for despite the ever-increasing sums being spent the scientific payback is scant. He concludes in general that “after 1970 OECD countries spent a large amount of money, yet achieved only a minimum amount of advancement in the arts and sciences”.41 The arts and sciences will not disappear in the future academic system; the sciences certainly not and the humanities and social sciences will also remain, though in a highly reduced form. Dwarfism is a well-known evolutionary response of a species under great environmental stress, such as the

From the University to the Multiversity – and beyond 149 mammoths in their last stages when a dwarf variety survived a little longer on isolated islands. Something similar might ensue for what once were the mammoths of the European university. A few stunted specimens will survive in the island isolation of the better-off and more tradition-minded universities and almost certainly among the ToPs. As for all the others, the huge influx of barely literate and uncultured students from all parts of the world will see to it that such disciplines remain unattractive and fit for elimination as far as the cost-cutting administrators are concerned.

Section IV – The impact of ranking on academia Thus far in this chapter we have been mainly concerned with the ranking of universities themselves. But ranking is far more extensive than this. Ranking is a measure of quality that enters into every aspect of the production of knowledge, from the writing of a book or paper to the reading of a book or paper. No aspect of academic life is any longer unaffected or uncontaminated by issues of ranking. To study how this works, we must explore the whole scale of rankings from the hierarchy of universities to the status order of academics themselves. Universities have always been informally ranked in terms of their relative elite status, based on numerous criteria of public prestige, academic kudos and achievement in respects that academics believe matter. In the older European universities, tradition has always played a large role, so that, for example, Oxford and Cambridge have always ranked as preeminent in the British and indeed the English language status stakes. It was somewhat the same for the French Grandes Écoles in the Continental system. In America, the Ivy League universities were traditionally held to be the best without much questioning of their actual achievements. However, these traditional rankings were challenged after the Second World War, when so many new universities were founded and when the former technological institutes or polytechnics assumed university status. In America, the challenge to the Eastern Ivy League came from the new Californian system of state universities such as those in Berkeley and Los Angeles, as well as from the already established private university in Palo Alto, Stanford. In the technical sector, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology rapidly rose to prominence after the war, largely because of the war, and soon assumed a position next to Harvard, its main rival. Something similar occurred in California with the California Institute of Technology, and it too acquired a high status in the university system. After the war, status and prestige became an all-consuming matter for American universities, and now this is the case for universities all over the globe. There are manifold reasons for why this status game should have become ever more intense and all important. In the postwar era, the number of universities and the number of students grew almost inexorably and so too did the competition for the best students by the universities, and the best places by the students,

150  From the University to the Multiversity – and beyond since their aim was no longer just to get a degree but to get one at a highstatus university. The value of a degree depended almost entirely on where it was obtained, hence the competition for places in the leading universities became ever more intense. At present, it is almost cut-throat as some parents will do almost anything to get their children into the right places. For those students going on to postgraduate PhD degrees, and especially those with academic ambitions, the status of the university becomes more important than any other consideration. For academic appointments move like water, it is very easy for a candidate with a PhD from a high place to flow down to a low place but very difficult for a candidate with a PhD from a low place to rise up against gravity to a high place; in most cases, this is almost impossible, unless extraordinary external pressure is brought to bear to provide an upward thrust. What tends to occur in the great majority of cases is that a candidate moves from the level of the university where the doctorate was conferred to an initial appointment in another university at approximately the same level. From then on, his or her rise or fall in a career will depend on other factors. For faculty the same hydraulic laws of movement apply. Promotion is no longer so much a matter of vertical movement up to a higher position at the very same university, typically from assistant to associate to full professor; it is more often a matter of horizontal movement from a lower status to a higher status university, and this is like going against gravity: it is very difficult to attain and can only be done, if at all, in small incremental stages. If for some reason someone decides to go the other way and come down from a high-status university to a lower one – perhaps to a higher salary or simply to gain promotion to a higher grade – that is much easier. On the whole, however, universities at equal levels trade faculty with one another. The battle for ranking, status and prestige has now become all-consuming, as it is the be-all and the end-all of all academic competition at every level and for all involved in it, students as much as faculty and the universities themselves. It touches on and conditions everything else that takes place within the academic world. What anyone or anything is worth is partly, and frequently wholly, determined by such matters. This determines not just where an academic stands in relation to another academic in a given discipline, but also where that discipline stands in relation to other disciplines. It also partly or wholly determines the value of a book or paper, for in the first place, the standing of its author plays a crucial role in determining the kind of press or journal that will accept it for publication; and, in second place, the standing of the press or journals, in turn, determines who will read it, how widely it will be read, and how seriously it will be taken, and ultimately how influential it will become. Nothing is free of, and untouched by, such considerations, for the very attention that an individual reader devotes to a book or paper is also governed by such factors, since nobody can be bothered wasting time on work deemed second rate because it has not appeared in a first-rate journal or press.

From the University to the Multiversity – and beyond 151 Hence, it is very easy for academics from high-status institutions to publish in very highly ranked presses and journals, and to receive considerable attention and notice; thereby to be taken seriously and become influential. The opposite course is extremely difficult and beyond a certain point impossible. Professors at low-status universities will generally have to resign themselves to publishing in low-status presses and journals, with the predictable consequences for the attention and notice their work will receive, and the influence it will exercise. If, almost per impossibile, such a relatively unknown person does succeed in attaining high-class publication as a kind of stroke of luck, this will carry much less weight than if the same work was published by a high-status person. The workings of ranking and status have a distorting effect on everything that is produced within the academic system. It takes great determination and acuity of judgement to discount it in evaluating publications or people, and only critics or adjudicators of considerable moral integrity and selfpossession are capable of accomplishing it. Obviously, the more secure one feels about one’s own work and oneself in general the better one can judge that of others in an undistorted way and dissociate their work from considerations of status and rank. This kind of judicious person will not commonly be found within the academic environment, where accepting the established estimations is a prime condition of getting on amicably with others. Those who refuse to do so stand out as eccentrics and even come to be considered troublemakers, with grave consequences for themselves and those who support them. The effects of this kind of academic status-bound environment have a considerable effect on all forms of scientific research. It is particularly prominent in the social sciences. There are many social scientists who have learned to use it to their own advantage and play the status game to the hilt. They use status of their university to attract students and followers and thereby build up a clientele, of which they are the patrons, to establish themselves and their “schools”. Such a “school” then begins to act as a collective entity and to assert its influence and power over the discipline as a whole. At this point, we enter the arena of academic politics where such schools do battle with each other for control, which includes oversight over journals and presses so as to keep out competitors. Such battles can become particularly vicious and can split departments. In the social sciences, they have become highly aggravated since the inroads of the radical and postmodernist movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Many disciplines now exist in name only, given that they contain competing non-communicating antagonistic factions. Under such conditions of animosity, any genuine scientific work becomes very difficult and intellectual debate impossible. The formation of schools that practice tactics of exclusivity and wall themselves off from any communication or debate with outsiders is not a new phenomenon, even though at present it takes extreme and almost pathological

152  From the University to the Multiversity – and beyond forms. As early as 1970, radical sociologist Alvin Gouldner charged the then dominant school of Structural Functionalists with having become a selfenclosed and self-perpetuating clique. At the time Talcott Parsons was still alive and could have answered the accusation, which, of course, he did not deign to do. The attack on Parsons and his school came from many quarters and was a reaction against the dominance it had attained in American sociology. This has been an ongoing war of attrition in sociology that has never let up and is partly responsible for the dissipation and fragmentation of the discipline, which we have studied previously. Hence, Gouldner’s blast against Parsons must be looked at in the context of that kind of no-holds-barred rivalry, and not as a judicial assessment. Nevertheless, what Gouldner has to say about the establishment and build-up of the Parsonian Structural Functionalist school is worthy of notice, for it applies also to other such schools that developed within American academia, with highly dubious or at least debatable consequences. According to Gouldner the status and prestige of Harvard was crucial to Parsons’ capacity to establish a school and for it to succeed to the extent that it did. As he puts it: “The central social fact explaining the acceptance and spread of Parsons’ work, despite its considerable intellectual fuzziness and obscure style, remains, in my view, that it was developed at and associated with Harvard”.42 As he goes on to explain: I would like to suggest that Parsons’ obscurity may be related to his being protected by Harvard’s high social position. Like any university, Harvard’s social position tends to have a “halo effect” on the prestige of its faculty members. Commonly, that is, the higher the national repute of a university the higher the prestige of those associated with it. Simply by reason of being at Harvard a man gets a substantial measure of “unearned prestige” … The greater the prestige of the university with which a scholar is associated, the greater the readiness to credit his work and to tolerate departures from the profession’s conventions, including its literary expectations. Stated otherwise, the higher the prestige imputed to a scholar by his associates nationally, whether because of his own contribution or because of his university affiliation, the greater their readiness to grant him “deviance credits”, which, in turn, allow him greater freedom either for creativity or for sheer idiosyncrasy.43 According to Gouldner, Parsons has relied on his “deviance credit” to cultivate far more idiosyncrasy than creativity. This is the root cause of his so-called obscurity, which is not so much a matter of terminological technicality or professional jargon as of a deliberately contrived system of intellectual impenetrability that permeates Structural Functionalism. Within this system, everything becomes linked to everything else through a network of connections, established by means of a multiplicity of terms and

From the University to the Multiversity – and beyond 153 relations, which transforms everything into some variant of “social action”. As Gouldner goes on to argue: Page after page of concepts and their typological combinations gush forth. Distinctions are made between the cultural, social, psychological, and biological levels – the latter being later added, it seems, for the sake of formal completeness – each of which is seen as a distinctive analytical system. Social systems are analysed in terms of their role and status organization, their aggregate character as collectivities, their norms and values, their universal functional exigencies and phases, their adjustment to internal stresses or external boundary exchanges, which are, in turn, combined with the instrumental versus the non-instrumental or consummatory dichotomy to produce four system problems: adaptation, goal attainment, pattern-maintenance, and integration. And so on.44 Obviously, building such an all-embracing inclusive system is a huge undertaking requiring high intellectual acumen. But the value of doing so for scientific purposes is disputable. Gouldner does not believe in its worth, but other sociologists, especially those associated with Parsons will strongly contest this. This debate has proceeded decade after decade till this day and Parsons’ stocks have gone up and down accordingly. After his death, his reputation sharply declined for a long while, but then it started to go up again when students of students – such as Jeffrey Alexander, who was a pupil of Robert Bellah, a pupil of Parsons – undertook his partial rehabilitation. These latter-day Parsonians call themselves neo-Functionalists. Whatever the benefits of Parsons’ system for sociology, there is no doubt that it was highly effective in constituting a school and establishing him as its unquestioned master. The system was not merely impenetrable, it was also irrefutable. No objections could be brought against it and no criticisms made because Parsons had ready answers to everything. His students were given the choice between accepting it holus-bolus or departing in frustration and anger, which very few in fact did. Hence again the “unearned prestige” of Harvard played a central role. Flouting someone as powerfully placed as Parsons at Harvard was unthinkable for most of his students and potentially suicidal for any that might consider it. Conversely, success and brilliant career prospects went with going along with Parsons and his obscure system. Mostly they convinced themselves that the obscurity lay in their own lack of understanding rather than in the system itself and that if one only expended enough time and effort, it would all become clear. But when after long effort and struggle it still remained obscure, then it was too late to abandon it for it “engenders what is, in effect, a vested interest in it”.45 And, as Gouldner adds, “the scholar’s return on his investment may come from discussing Parsons’ ideas publicly, either critically or in a favourable spirit;

154  From the University to the Multiversity – and beyond either course probably results in making them better known”.46 Indeed, this is precisely what has eventuated since. The formation of a school with a reigning master is a common enough phenomenon inside and outside the academic world in Europe as well, particularly so in France. But what is peculiarly American about it is how rapidly and all pervasively such a school can gain dominance and control of a whole discipline within the academic system. This is due to the dominant position that the elite universities, above all Harvard and a handful of others, hold in the American university system. These occupy, as it were, the commanding heights of the American political economy of ideas; they oversee the whole intellectual marketplace of ideas. For just as Marx said that the ideas of the ruling class are the ruling ideas, so the ideas of the elite universities are the elite ideas. And everyone in all the other universities then tends to fall in line and subscribe to these ideas. This makes it very tempting for anyone with the requisite talents and ambitions situated at a top university to constitute a system and create a school that will monopolize a given discipline. This has already happened a number of times in America since the Second World War. Thus, at the same time as Parsons was building his system and establishing his school in sociology, his colleague at Harvard, B.F. Skinner, was doing something similar in psychology. The Behaviourist system was every bit as intricate as that of Structural Functionalism, and it had equally totalistic ambitions to explain all behaviour, both animal and human, with the same set of laws. Skinner did not initiate Behaviourism, which was already a going concern at least since John Watson at Johns Hopkins in the 1920s. There were many distinguished Behaviourists before Skinner and many were coeval with him. However, during the postwar period Skinner gained pre-eminence and was able to dominate the whole psychology establishment in America, for by this time Behaviourism had become almost de riguer for any young psychologist entering the profession. He used the eminence that his base at Harvard gave him to build up a school, with followers such as Richard Herrnstein and C.B. Fester at Harvard and many others elsewhere. That these Skinnerians constitute a closed school is attested by Diana Crane: Many Skinnerians are former students or collaborators of Skinner or students of his former students. Skinnerian psychologists have their own journals that publish only material using Skinner’s theoretical approach to the study of learning. Skinnerians seldom publish in other psychological journals … these findings suggest a group that is closed to external influence and in this sense has some of the characteristics of a school.47 The challenge to Skinner and Behaviourism came from another system builder and founder of a school, the formal linguistics guru Noam

From the University to the Multiversity – and beyond 155 Chomsky. It is indicative and crucial to Chomsky’s success that he was located opposite Harvard in the rival institution MIT. At Harvard, someone with Chomsky’s background, who was not even a properly trained or qualified linguist, would not have got anywhere, as he himself admits.48 At MIT he was able to establish himself because there was no linguistics department and this meant he was free from outside control or interference and impervious to criticism. He soon embarked on building his linguistic system of syntactical analysis that was in keeping with the formalization and technification proceeding at MIT in many fields, as most notably in Artificial Intelligence under the direction of Marvin Minsky, and also in a related way in the mathematization of economics at the hands of Paul Samuelson. At MIT Chomsky was able to recruit many outstanding disciples and found a school which he ruled with an iron rod. Those who refused to toe his line soon found themselves on the outer, expelled and excommunicated, never to be mentioned again. Chomsky was a great libertarian in politics, but an authoritarian in academic politics. The fourth great instance of the formation of a school was the Deconstruction movement in the humanities, which, as we saw previously, also influenced many of the radical factions in the social sciences. This occurred at Yale, another of the elite universities, and was the work not of one master on his own but of a transatlantic partnership between the French philosopher Jacques Derrida and the American critic of European provenance, Paul de Man. As we have already critically discussed its intellectual Theorybabble previously, there is hardly any need to expatiate on it any further. Nevertheless, from an academic political point of view, it presents many interesting characteristics. One of the most peculiar is how bright students and enterprising young academics are fascinated by and attracted to what is obviously incomprehensible to them and how the masters use this to exercise control over them. Impenetrable obscurity is an attractive force for immature minds and they can be easily intimidated and so dominated by this means. There is much more to be said about the political side of academic life and how authority is exercised both legitimately and illegitimately. We began this chapter by outlining the main types of academic authority and how they function to enable the proper pursuit of academic life, both in the sciences and humanities. But we can also see how easily they can be corrupted and misused, as, for example, through the formation of closed schools. This is less possible in the natural sciences where no single individual can gain that kind of control of a discipline. The natural sciences are no less subject to corruption, but invariably they are of a different kind, mainly to do with publication. As the adage “publish or perish” declares, publication is the key factor in academic life, more so than any other. Whether publication in itself any longer guarantees any kind of security might now be doubted, given the multiple media and avenues for publication that are now available.

156  From the University to the Multiversity – and beyond Nevertheless, publication remains a crucial consideration for all academics. It is to this vast subject that we turn next.

Notes 1 Harry Redner, The Ends of Science: An Essay in Scientific Authority (Boulder, CO & London: Westview Press, 1987), ch. 4, 95–121. 2 Richard Whitley, “Changes in the Social and Intellectual Organization of the Sciences”, in The Social Production of Scientific Knowledge, eds. Everett Mendelsohn, Peter Weingart and Richard Whitley, Sociology of the Sciences Yearbook (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1977), 165. 3 Andrews Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma of Intelligence (London: Unwin, 1985), 125–126. 4 Liebe F. Cavalieri, The Double-Edged Helix (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 109. 5 See Harry Redner, Art and Science: A Parallel History (forthcoming), ch. 6. 6 Philip Mirowski, Science-Mart: Privatising American Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). 7 Steven Shapin, The Scientific Life (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2008), 230. 8 Mirowski, Science Mart, op. cit., 7. 9 Ibid., 22. 10 Ibid., 20. 11 Stuart Ritchie, Science Fictions: Exposing Fraud, Bias, Negligence and Hype in Science (London: The Bodley Head, 2020), 191. 12 Ibid., 158–194 13 Catherine Paradeise and Jean-Claude Thoenig, In Search of Academic Quality (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 75. 14 Ibid., 76. 15 Peter Murphy, Universities and the Innovation Economies: The Creative Wasteland of Post-industrial Societies (London: Bloomsbury), 2015. 16 Ibid., 105. 17 Ibid., 99. 18 Ibid., 113. 19 Ibid., 102. 20 Paradeise and Thoenig, op. cit., 94–95. 21 See the table in Paradeise and Thoenig, op. cit. 93. 22 See table in Murphy, op. cit. 183. 23 See Harry Redner, Quintessence of Dust: The Science of Matter and the Philosophy of Mind (Leiden: Brill, 2020). 24 Paradeise and Thoenig, op. cit. 161. 25 Ibid., 206. 26 Ibid., 127. 27 Ibid., 128. 28 Ibid., 127. 29 Ibid. 30 Thomas Piketty, Capital and Ideology, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020), 816. 31 Ibid., 35. 32 Ibid., Chap. 15. 33 Scott Galloway, quoted by James D. Walsh, “The Coming Disruption”, New York Magazine, May 11, 2020. 34 Murphy, op. cit. 185.

From the University to the Multiversity – and beyond 157 3 5 Ibid., 93. 36 Derek da Solla Price, Little Science, Big Science (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963). 37 Samuel Arbesman, The Half-life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiry Date (New York: Current/Penguin, 2012), 31. 38 Ibid., 90. 39 Sydney Brenner, tribute to Fred Sanger in Science, https://www.sciencemag. org/contextd/343/6168/262/oft. 40 Peter Higgs, The Guardian, https://theguardian.com/science/208/dec/06/peterhiggs-boson-academic-system. 41 Quoted in Murphy, op. cit., 199. 42 Alvin Gouldner, The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology (London: Heinemann, 1970), 201. 43 Ibid., 201. 44 Ibid., 206. 45 Ibid., 202. 46 Ibid. 47 Diana Crane, Invisible Colleges (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 87. 48 Noam Chomsky, Language and Responsibility, trans. John Viertel (New York: Pantheon Books, 19779), 134.

Bibliography Arbesman, Samuel. The Half-life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiry Date. New York: Current/Penguin, 2012. Brenner, Sydney. Tribute to Fred Sanger in Science, https://www.Sciencemag.org/ contextd/343/6168/262/oft. Cavalieri, Liebe F. The Double-edged Helix. New York: Columbia University Press, 1981. Chomsky, Noam. Language and Responsibility. Translated by John Viertel. New York: Pantheon Books, 1979. Crane, Diana. Invisible Colleges. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1972. Galloway, Scott. Quoted in James D. Walsh, “The Coming Disruption”. New York Magazine, May 11, 2020. Gouldner, Alvin. The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology. London: Heinemann, 1970. Higgs, Peter. The Guardian, http://theguardian.com/science/208/dec/06/peter-higgsboson-academic-system. Hodges, Andrews. Alan Turing: The Enigma of Intelligence. London: Unwin, 1985. Kerr, Clark. The Uses of the University. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963. Mirowski, Philip. Science-Mart: Privatising American Science. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. Murphy, Peter. Universities and the Innovation Economies: The Creative Wasteland of Post-industrial Societies. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. Paradeise, Catherine and Jean-Claude Thoenig. In Search of Academic Quality. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Piketty, Thomas. Capital and Ideology. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020.

158  From the University to the Multiversity – and beyond Price, Derek da Solla. Little Science, Big Science. New York: Columbia University Press, 1963. Redner, Harry. The Ends of Science: An Essay in Scientific Authority. Boulder, CO & London: Westview Press, 1987, ch. 4. Redner, Harry. Art and Science: A Parallel History, ch. 6 (forthcoming). Ritchie, Stuart. Science Fictions: Exposing Fraud, Bias, Negligence and Hype in Science. London: The Bodley Head, 2020. Shapin, Steven. The Scientific Life. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2008. Whitley, Richard. “Changes in the Social and Intellectual Organization of the Sciences”. In The Social Production of Scientific Knowledge, Sociology of the Sciences Yearbook 1977, edited by Everett Mendelsohn, Peter Weingart and Richard Whitley, 143–169. Dordrecht: Reidel, 1977.

6

Academia and Publishing A fraught relationship

Section I – Publish or perish and what ensues A key factor in the rise of modern science and knowledge, in general, is the system of publication developed by the early scientific academies. Publication does not just record and communicate knowledge; even more crucially it certifies it as knowledge and not just mere information, conjecture, opinion, belief or anything else short of knowledge. Hence, what matters is not the mere fact of something being published, but that it receives imprimatur from an authorized body that confirms it meets the standards and protocols of scientific acceptability. Typically, in scientific publication that role is exercised by the editorial board of a journal and whatever other authorities need to be invoked to assess the soundness of submitted articles. Where that kind of surveillance is lacking or where it has become corrupted science founders in a sea of unreliable publications. This, as we shall see, is the crisis of quality control that confronts much of scientific publication at present, and it constitutes an ever-present danger to the whole course of science as it has proceeded till now. The publication system began together with the first organized bodies for the pursuit of scientific experimentation. The earliest of these by just a few years was the Accademia del Cimento founded in 1657 in Florence by Galileo’s students Giovanni Borelli and Vincenzo Viviani, and its publication the Saggi, a manual of experimental procedure, which might count as the first collective scientific publication. This scientific body lasted scarcely ten years and so it soon ceased publishing. Hence, the really effective start of scientific publication only emerged with the foundation of the Royal Society in 1660, when in 1665 its secretary, Henry Oldenberg, began issuing the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, a journal that still exists to this day. But initially, it was far from being a journal in the modern sense; rather it was a compendium of letters from foreign correspondents, accounts of experiments and reviews of books. There were no fixed protocols of submission at first as these only gradually emerged over the following centuries; nor were papers sent out for review till the middle of the nineteenth century. Only after the Second World War, did peer review by DOI: 10.4324/9781003355748-6

160  Academia and Publishing two referees become standard practice in the numerous successor journals to the Philosophical Transactions that had arisen over the centuries. At present Nature and Science are the two leading journals of scientific publication, but there are more than 30,000 others in English alone. This system of publication proved indispensable to science as an organized body of collective endeavour involving the collaborative effort of hundreds, initially, then thousands, eventually hundreds of thousands of scientists and now there are millions working on common undertakings, without necessarily any direct communication with each other or even knowledge of each other. The journals mediated their work relations as scientists and in this way organized their disparate activities towards a common goal, that of the discovery and elaboration of scientific truth. The journals, sometimes supplemented by books, provided everything scientists needed to continue their work and to coordinate it with the work of others, for each published paper built on the results established by prior papers and itself became the springboard for future papers. It was in this unplanned but coordinated way that the structure of knowledge that is science was constituted. Science, unlike literature or philosophy, is not the creation of single individuals, great authors or great minds, but of many highly capable people working collectively together, among whom there are occasionally great intellects who carry the work further and achieve more than any others. It is as if they were building a great cathedral of knowledge without any architect or plans, but instead working from bottom up with each mason aligning his stones to those preceding; so, analogously, article by article the construction of science proceeded over centuries to constitute the structure of knowledge we now possess. How this might continue in the future is at present in principle unpredictable. We cannot know whether it will grow and develop in the same way or whether it will come to an end or even take some kind of alternative course in another direction. But whatever happens to science, we can be sure that this will be reflected in the system of publication. Hence, any serious problems in that regard that we can now detect are clear indications that science is undergoing some kind of transition, with as yet an undetermined outcome, and this can only arouse apprehensions about its future course. Science as we have known it might not survive; it could transmogrify into something else, for which even now terms like technoscience are being invoked. A large part of the problem with publication is due to its very success. As ever newer sciences and scientific specialities arose, so publications proliferated. This is an issue to which Derek de Solla Price first drew attention, when he established by means of statistical measures that the period of doubling of journals and articles has been getting shorter and shorter over the centuries since the first publications in the mid-seventeenth century, starting with the Philosophical Transactions. In fact, he arrived at this insight by observing the exponentially growing size of bound volumes of that very journal stored in his house in Singapore. Price is now considered

Academia and Publishing 161 the father of scientometrics. But he was much more than just a great statistician, he also foresaw the problems that ever-growing numbers of scientists and scientific publications were bound to cause.1 As he predicted, a situation of superabundance of scientific knowledge has now been reached where around three million articles are published annually in tens of thousands of journals. Trying to locate a piece of knowledge that one needs is like looking for the proverbial needle in the haystack. Hence, for all intents and purposes, most of it is useless. This is even more the case now that some scientometricians are beginning to suspect that most of it is unreliable. In short, the publication system on which science depends has now reached a crisis point, for too many things have gone wrong with it. Before we embark on a closer study of these problems, we shall sum up some of our preliminary findings in the form of six major theses. Each of these identifies an ongoing trend that will most probably extend into the future unless concerted action is taken to deflect it and correct the drift into confusion and corruption. The longer such drastic essential reforms are postponed the worse the crisis will become and the greater and more detrimental will be the damage to science. But before we can look to a reformation, we must first nail our theses to the door of the cathedral of knowledge. Thesis One: The huge increase in publication both of articles and books over the last half-century, since about 1970, and which will continue in the immediate future, has less to do with any large increase in knowledge, that is, any so-called knowledge “explosion”, than with the workings of what we will call the academic publication-industry complex. What we mean by that term is that a convergence of interest between academics and the publishing industry has occurred; both sides of this partnership are bent on output, for this offers to the latter a market of assured and risk-free source of profits and to the former it offers rewards in terms of position, status and prestige. Both are intent on increasing production regardless of the quality of what they are producing. At the same time, consolidation ensued in the publishing industry, so much so that the great proportion of articles is now put out by five major commercial firms: Springer, Elsevier, Taylor and Francis, Wiley and Sage. There are analogous consolidations in book publishing as far as commercial presses are concerned, though there is still a large diversity of university presses. However, Cambridge and Oxford now vastly exceed any of the other university presses and operate more or less as commercial presses. Thesis Two: The most academically rewarding form of publication is that of articles in high-status journals. In every discipline, journals are ranked in terms of status based on a number of different types of factor: impact assessment based on citation counts, reputation as determined by the status of the academics who publish in the given journal, the university location and the composition of editorial boards, the status of reviewers, and so on. As a direct corollary to the huge rise in the importance of article publications, there is the corresponding lowering in the value of book publication.

162  Academia and Publishing This trend is moving towards an outcome where the book as a medium of knowledge conveyance is being rendered obsolete. But, apparently paradoxically, as the academic value of book publication is decreasing, the number of book titles produced is increasing; but this is accompanied by ever lower sales of copies per book, so much so that this number is now one-tenth or less on average than it was in 1970. This paradox can be explained in terms of the continuing role of books in the assessment of academic performance and standing in the humanities and some social sciences. But this, too, is waning as more disciplines move towards articles as the preferred mode of publication. Thesis Three: The fact that books matter almost not at all in the natural sciences and increasingly less so in most social sciences, while they still continue to count in the humanities and the humanistically inclined social sciences, is a clear indication that these latter fields are becoming degraded and might eventually become obsolete, together with books as sources of knowledge. What is increasingly becoming all important and worthy of reward is a scientific paper published in a reputable journal. This alone is believed to constitute knowledge. Those types of the humanities and social sciences that cannot satisfy this requirement will cease to count as knowledge and be eliminated or treated as trivial, if continued. Thesis Four: A symptom that this is taking place in the social sciences and even to some extent in the humanities is the shift from single-authored papers and books, as was the norm before 1970, to multiple-authored ones now, as has long been the case in the natural sciences. As has also been the case in the natural sciences, team research is becoming more prevalent in the social sciences and to some extent even in the humanities as well. This means that fields of research and ways of conducting research more suitable to a group approach are coming to the fore and those more suitable to being pursued by single minds are being repressed, at times quite consciously so, by grant-giving agencies and university administrations. This elimination of the individual in favour of the group is in keeping with developments in general in advanced societies. It will have far-reaching repercussions on the kind of work produced in the humanities and social sciences and has already had consequences in the natural sciences, such as older scientists speak of when they complain about the elimination of genius and original minds. Thesis Five: As a consequence of these practices of group publication, the whole concept of authorship is being compromised. There is now no way of ascertaining whether the lead author of a paper contributed anything to its composition or even which of the other multiple authors had much to do with its content. Philip Mirowski quotes from a study (Yank and Rennie 1999) that found that “a full 44 percent of the names on the by-lines of the papers in the leading medical journal Lancet did not qualify for authorship under the lenient interpretation of the ICMJE (International Committee of Medical Journal Editors) criteria”.2 Mirowski also refers to the growing

Academia and Publishing 163 incidence of “ghost authorship”: “the practice through which researchers agree to put their names on texts that have been composed by unnamed third parties who held final control over the content of the manuscript”.3 It seems that “medical journals are teeming with the ‘non-writing-author/ non-author-writer’ as major persona”.4 Foucault’s thesis on the death of the author is not just a fanciful postmodern whimsy but has taken root in the very heart of science. Thesis Six: At present, there is growing evidence that Gresham’s law is coming into effect in publishing. Gresham’s law states that bad money drives out good money and refers to the effects of the circulation of adulterated coinage. The circulation of adulterated publications has an analogous effect in science. As Stuart Ritchie puts it: The system of science is now set up to reward those who engage in underhand methods. If the more trustworthy researchers – those who are in it for the science, rather that status, money, or other non-scientific goals – can’t compete in the system, they’ll be more likely to drop out of the world of academia and get another job elsewhere. At the very least, they will be less competitive for the top jobs.5 As Ritchie also notes, papers that trumpeted spectacular results or hyped reports with eye-catching titles with a lesser or greater degree of fraudulence are driving out of circulation and citation those that report sober and sound findings. In book publication, similar workings of Gresham’s law are achieved by masses of trivial titles appearing with high-status names from prestigious university presses. As a consequence of these developments outlined in the previous theses, the whole landscape of knowledge is changing. This is an epistemic shift the like of which has never taken place before, a veritable tectonic plate movement in the continents of knowledge whereby some fields are thrust upwards as veritable mountain ranges and others are depressed and submerged beneath the sea. Inevitably, these cataclysmic changes will go against the humanities and social sciences as these have been conducted thus far in their development. The universities, too, will be transformed as knowledge-producing and knowledge-imparting institutions and be replaced by an organization that has little in common with the university of the past. Evidence in support of the six theses is voluminous and has appeared in numerous books. A proper and full exposition of these findings alone would require another book. Hence, we must restrict ourselves to a select few examples. We shall deal more briefly with books first and then continue exclusively with articles, which are by far the more important to consider. We can begin by comparing the situation that obtained around 1970 with that of the present. Fortunately, we have a thorough study of what was then the case in a four-volume publication by the renowned economist Fritz Machlup and Kenneth Leeson, his assistant. For the present situation,

164  Academia and Publishing we will rely on the STM Report (1968–2018), published by Rob Johnson, Anthony Watkinson and Michael Mabe. The crucial information concerning the life-time sales of a book first published in the period 1968–1970 is contained in a summarizing paragraph in Machlup and Leeson, Volume Four: Over the first six years of life, the physical sale of 132 hardbound books of university presses published in the three-year period 1968-1970, averaged 2,052 copies per title. Physical sales of 20 paperbound titles in the same age group averaged 3,560 copies per title …6 As we shall see, these figures are extremely impressive and are on average about ten times higher than comparable figures for copies sold at present by university presses. The figures are even more impressive when commercial publishers of academic books are compared. As Machlup and Leeson report: Physical sales of the hardbound books of commercial publishers, belonging to the same age group as the university presses, averaged 5,737 copies per title in the first six years of life. Physical sales of 26 paperbound titles averaged 9,358 copies per title …7 It can also be noted that in the 1970s period and before, commercial publishers were much more liable to publish academic quality books than now. Conversely, quite a few academic presses have now gone commercial and publish books that are barely distinguishable from those published by commercial presses; they have gone down market. As André Schiffrin reports: Their recent catalogues suggest that many university presses have now devoted a substantial part of their programs to more commercial midlist titles, in the hope of covering their costs. A surprisingly large number have turned to baseball as a subject worth covering; books about movie stars also proliferate.8 He specifically refers to Princeton University Press, which “has been aggressive in trying to replace traditional monographs with more popular, commercially attractive titles”.9 All these findings concerning the paradox of book publication – more titles and fewer copies per title – are confirmed by Cary Nelson and Stephen Watt: As recently as mid-1970s a good university press could count on selling 2,000 hardbound copies of any book it published. Now [in 1999] it can depend on selling 200-300 hardbound copies, almost all to libraries. In 1975 such a press might have had 600 or more standing orders

Academia and Publishing 165 from libraries … We called one such publisher in 1997 to see how many standing orders it had left. The answer? One.10 Nelson and Watt expect the situation to worsen and “predict another 20 percent reduction in library sales over the next several years”, which is indeed what happened. Their overall assessment is still as true now as when they wrote: “The truth is that academic book publishing has been hanging on by a thread for years. The economics of decreasing sales and increasing costs for short publishing runs have been heading for a collision for a decade”.11 One major factor responsible for this crisis of book publication is the shift in library expenditure from books to scientific and technical journals. The paper is displacing the book, and they see this as a threat to the very existence of humanistic disciplines. They note that “literary criticism, once a boom industry, has disappeared from many lists”.12 Yet humanities academics proceed as usual, blind to what is happening to their disciplines: “Faculty members of the humanities at major institutions have maintained their ideological investment in a research culture centred on books without much awareness that the whole economic basis of that culture was disappearing”.13 Today we can in fact say that any such “ideological investment in a research culture centred on books” is also disappearing as fewer truly humanistic academics are left and more and more turn to teaching special interest studies courses, “critical theory” and other escape routes to survive. This paradox of book publication previously outlined was already becoming apparent in the ten-year period from 1966 to 1976 covered by Machlup and Leeson. Perhaps the clearest indication of this is in the table provided in Volume One of two representative university presses over the years 1966 to 1975.14 Over this period the total number of copies sold remained almost constant, increasing just slightly from 138,196 in 1966 to 148,391 in 1975; this flat sales trajectory was made possible by the fact that university presses do not need to show a profit or aim for sales growth. But the number of titles increased from 280 in 1966 to 656 in 1975, greater than doubling; which, of course, does not correspond to any comparable increase in knowledge in this period. By contrast, sales per copy per year on average fell from 496 in 1966 to 226 in 1975, which is less than half. But this is still a healthy number compared to life-time sales for such books at present. From that point on, the academic publication-industry complex has steadily progressed in all three numerical directions: more and more titles; fewer and fewer copies per title; small increases in the total number of copies sold for all titles, especially for university presses. Commercial presses show much better figures in the last two respects but these have been achieved by largely abandoning academic type book publication and going down market, as it were, a process much accelerated by the takeover of book publishing by the big conglomerates, which started in the early 1980s with Rupert Murdoch’s acquisitions and has continued ever since. In this new commercial environment, the accountants gained decisive say over what kinds of

166  Academia and Publishing books would be published. To keep the profit margin high, the accountants decreed ever-rising prices, way above inflation, which make new academic books only affordable by the wealthy. It is not too great an extrapolation from this to conclude that as more and more books are published, each book is read by fewer and fewer people. This conclusion is strengthened by other known facts as to who actually buys books. In the 1970s period and before, the greatest proportion of the large sales per title were books bought by private individuals. It is a fair assumption to make that individuals who buy books are more likely to read them and keep them as part of their private libraries to be reread at later times, especially if they are academics. By contrast, the greatest proportion of the small sales of books at present are being bought by public libraries, especially by university libraries which are constitutionally obligated to buy academic books, regardless of whether they are read. Hence, there is no assurance that books bought by libraries are actually being read, even if they are occasionally borrowed out of curiosity. Also, there is the added factor that in most libraries books that are rarely borrowed are withdrawn from general circulation after some years, and stored in hard-to-access stacks, where they will no longer be sought except by the most avid researchers. Academics who do buy academic books at present, as Nelson and Watt argue, do so largely for career reasons and procure “ones they have to use in their own work. They buy fewer books out of general cultural curiosity”.15 Or alternatively, “the increasingly careerist nature of superstars of the profession has concentrated book buying on the hottest areas of publication like cultural studies”.16 This line of argumentation is confirmed by statistics of survey data as reported in the STM Report previously referred to: The possible decline in the reading (and writing) of books in favour of journal articles, as suggested in the 2005 JISC report, was confirmed in the later RLN study showing a significant decline in the citation of books as distinct from journal articles and other forms of output (RLN 2009a). Another study identified pressures created by assessment exercises as a factor in this change (Adams and Gurney 2014).17 On this last point, the evidence makes it very clear that administrative pressures through assessment exercises are bringing about far-reaching changes in publication practices, generally away from books towards papers, and increasingly so towards journals with high status or high factor impact as measured by citation indexes, rather than those where communication with one’s peers or fellow researchers in a field is most effective. As the STM Report goes on to state: There is clear evidence that research assessment exercises such as REF (UK’s Research Excellence Framework) or ERA (Excellence in

Academia and Publishing 167 Research for Australia) have changed research behaviour. For instance, Adams and Gurney (2014) analysed UK data to show that researchers submit journal articles in preference to the output that elsewhere they say are central to their field [i.e., books or conference papers], they skew their selection to high-impact journals and they cite pieces from such journals even when they are not well cited and, sometimes, not even research papers. The authors suggest that this is because they believe that the brand of a journal known to have high average impact is a better proxy “signal” in place of real evidence of excellence. Submission behaviour was seen to change over successive ERA/REF cycles leading to a progressive over- concentration on journal articles.18 The Report notes particularly that “there was a shift out of conference proceedings in engineering and out of scholarly monographs in the social sciences”.19 All this is clear evidence for our Thesis Three, which states that monographs as media for knowledge presentation, and also therefore the disciplines that continue to depend on books, are gradually becoming obsolete. According to Anthony Wilkinson, in 2016 the American University Presses “collectively published 14,600 books a year; 5000 of these are monographs, defined as books by scholars for other scholars”.20 This means that nearly two-thirds of books from academic presses are no longer scholarly books generally written by single authors, but are written, rather, by two or more authors, as is the norm in the sciences. There was a steady growth in multi-authored texts throughout the second half of the twentieth century and the number of authors per paper or book has also increased, reaching almost absurd levels in fields such as high-energy physics. In general, group research and therefore multi-authored papers are a clear indication of the scientific status of a field. Now it is highly noteworthy, as Wilkinson goes on to point out, that “of these 5,000 monographs, 4,000 are in the humanities, which were defined by BISAC codes”.21 The fact that the humanities still depend on the monograph, now considered a lower-level medium of publication, means that they cannot aspire to the status of the sciences and are, therefore, themselves lower-level disciplines. This in turn is a sign that they are on the way out in the university system – which also supports Thesis Four. It stands to reason, therefore, that books are now being written and published for other reasons than that they are expected to be widely read so as to communicate knowledge or vital understanding to other academics in the field. or to the interested readers in the general public. The former function is now performed by papers; the latter by commercial presses. The main reason that academic books are still being produced in such large numbers is that they are still de rigueur in determining tenure and promotion in the humanities and some social sciences. It is the “publish or perish” syndrome at work. Young academics publish their PhD theses; older academics publish their lecture notes; the oldest and most renowned publish their memoirs

168  Academia and Publishing and recollections. It would be no great loss to knowledge if far fewer of these were to appear. The quality of newly published books is now very difficult to establish, due to the growing scarcity of sound and responsible reviewing. As reviews now tend to carry no academic credit, few are willing to devote their time to it. It has become a thankless chore and as such it is frequently performed by academic apprentices, or as a favour to friends, or to curry favour with high-status authors. Hence, issues of status and prestige now loom very large in determining whose books are published by what press and which are reviewed, discussed and read. For people mostly read only what is recommended by such means. The status of the press, especially if this is a university press, has become all important in this respect; and the status of the academic is in turn crucial in deciding what university press will accept his or her manuscript for publication, or even consider it at all. And only such high-status books will get reviews. It is all an interlocking circuit of publishing, reviewing and reading driven by status factors. In the past, one could rely on the selection processes of reputable presses, especially the academic presses, to act as gate keepers and guardians of quality. But this is no longer the case. As we have already noted, university presses, like their commercial peers, have tended to go down market and publish what is popular and will generate sales. They resort increasingly to academic superstars, those few who have managed to establish a glittering reputation by catering to gullible students, or to their ideological prejudices, or by a carefully cultivated mystique, or by some public relations coup which can command appearances on television. Alternatively, the upper tier of university presses – namely those from the elite universities – largely restrict themselves to publishing the works of their own high-status academics and their peers in allied institutions. In other words, academic Brahmins tend only to publish each other. Thus, Schiffrin remarks: “It was clear that Harvard saw its role as publishing for its faculty only and their peers in the university world”.22 Greco, Milliot and Wharton note that “generally about 25% of Chicago’s current authors are faculty members of the university”.23 One suspects that the other 75% is largely reserved for academics of a comparable status to those of Chicago. As Greco, Milliot and Wharton describe it, the acquisition process of university presses is mostly a matter of reliable contacts, namely, as the old saying has it, it is who you know and not what you know that matters, and who you know depends very much on who you are. Thus, we are told that “Chicago receives manuscripts in a variety of ways, from tireless efforts of acquisition editors, the academic ‘grapevine’, referrals from existing faculty and Chicago authors and ‘over the transom’ (i.e., unsolicited manuscripts)”.24 But as these authors also make clear, “over the transom” submissions, that is, by unrecommended authors have little chance of being considered much less accepted, irrespective of the nature or the quality of their manuscripts. This is generally the case in most major presses:

Academia and Publishing 169 The New York Times once commented that the odds of this type of manuscript being published were 15,000 to 1. So, the odds of a manuscript sent cold to a commercial publisher jetting into print are, at best, remote … Among university presses, the rejection rate for over-the-transom manuscripts is almost certainly higher.25 Thus the “tireless efforts of acquisition editors” in practice amount to considering only what comes into their ken through the authorized route of their reliable networks or recommendation, excluding everything else. This means that any author unable to secure such a recommendation would be best advised not even to attempt to break into the exclusive ring of academic press publication. How one sets about securing a recommendation so as to be even considered, much less published, is a matter of what can be called academic politicking with its murky network relations. The actual quality of the manuscript is usually only a peripheral factor in all this wheeling and dealing. Editors are not themselves competent to exercise any judgement about the quality of the manuscripts they are considering, since by the very nature of their career paths they move from press to press and from almost any field to any other. Few of them, however, forebear to make such judgements, but it’s true that occasionally, an editor of good sense and considerable experience can develop the nous and the nose for scenting sound work and distinguishing it from the unsound. Nevertheless, given the ramshackle nature of the system as a whole it is doubtful whether any gatekeeping functions or quality controls are being maintained in book publishing. It is more than likely that, as stated in Thesis Six, a version of Gresham’s law that bad money drives good money out of circulation is coming into effect. Direct evidence for this is, by the very nature of the case not possible, though indirect evidence shows that it is happening. But what about article publication; is there any indication that Gresham’s law holds there as well? In respect of article publication, over the last fifty years there have also been similar developments to those in book publication. The numbers of both journals and articles have increased at an exponential rate, and the prices asked for them have also gone up and up. This process began in the 1970s when the newspaper magnate, Robert Maxwell, realized that there were large and risk-free profits to be made from bringing out scientific journals.26 The reason for this is that libraries are forced to subscribe to such journal series and can be made to pay ever higher prices for them. Until that time the production of journals was mainly a small-time affair, generally conducted on a not-for-profit basis by professional associations. The statistics provided by Machlup and Leeson bear this out. There were 2459 journals in the United States in 1973 of which only 25% were published by commercial presses. Of these only 40.6% were in the natural sciences, 49.3% were social sciences and humanities, and 3.9% were psychology.27 Publication in the natural sciences was not yet big business.

170  Academia and Publishing At present the picture looks very different. In 1973 the top five science publishers – Reed-Elsevier, Wiley-Blackwell, Springer, Taylor and Francis and Sage – published only 20% of all science papers (natural and medical), whereas in 2018 they published 50%.28 The percentages are even worse in the humanities and social sciences: in 1973 these firms published between 5% and 10% of papers in these disciplines, in 2018 it was 50%. The numbers of journals and articles this involves is truly staggering. In 2018 there were about 33,100 peer-reviewed journals publishing in English, with a further 9,400 non-English language ones. These altogether issue over 3 million articles per year. There has been steady and continuous growth in both journals and articles year by year for two centuries, with journals increasing at 3% and articles by 3.5%. But even faster growth is now on the way, as the STM Report notes: However, growth has accelerated to 4% per year for articles and 5% for journals in recent years. The reason is continuous real-term growth in research and development expenditure, and the rising number of researchers, which now stands at between 7 and 8 million depending on definition, though only 20% of these are repeat authors.29 One can assume, therefore, that only these 20% are serious long-term researchers. One can now speak of an academic publishing industry that employs 110,000 people; and “annual revenues generated from English-language STM publishing are estimated at about $10 billion in 1917”.30 Much of this publication now takes place outside Anglo-Saxon countries; China is now producing 19% of the total, ahead of the United States on 18%, with India coming on at 5%, ahead of Germany, with Britain and Japan on 4% each. With other countries around the world bound to join the research-andpublication process, it is inevitable that the recent rates of increase will be maintained and that the numbers in all respects will keep on growing. Nothing short of a major catastrophe can stop it or even slow it down. But what is the purpose or point to this ever-increasing flood of papers? Who reads them and who makes use of them? What contribution do they actually make to the development of the sciences or the other disciplines? What is clear and beyond dispute is that they enable the present academic system to function and perpetuate itself. But whether this is altogether desirable from either a scientific or humanistic point of view is another matter that needs to be considered independently of any stake one might have in this system as it operates at present. For the individual stake holder, the academic as scientist or researcher, publishing papers serves all kinds of useful ends and is altogether profitable. Publishing a paper is somewhat like taking out a patent, for just as a patent secures one the right to a technical invention, regardless of whether one will actually produce it, so writing a paper gives one priority rights to a piece of

Academia and Publishing 171 knowledge, regardless of what further use it might be for oneself or for others. Thus, a paper can register and secure useless knowledge just as much as useful knowledge. Determining what proportion of papers in fact provides knowledge that is necessary for the further development of its science or field is the crucial issue in considering the annual avalanche of papers descending from the presses. The question is much more serious than that of deciding between useful or useless knowledge, for there are also a great many papers with false findings that do not merit being called knowledge. John Ioannidis has stated that “false findings are the majority or even the bare majority of published research claims” and he estimates that 85% of research funding is wasted.31 Just as with patents, which are not always taken out because one wants to produce a technical device, papers are not always and not only published to communicate a piece of useful knowledge. There are numerous other incentives for publishing papers and these can often exceed any desire to communicate anything. Papers can improve one’s CV and help in securing tenure and promotion. They can also help in securing research grants. They are important in maintaining visibility in the field and contact with one’s peers. They help team leaders to maintain cooperation within the group and enthuse it to further effort. They reward all those whose names appear on it as joint authors. It stands to reason, therefore, that if publication is easy to secure, as it tends to be in the sciences where new journals are being constantly issued, then many will take advantage of that fact and publish as many papers as they can place. And, as we have seen, it is not the prophet but the profit motive that leads to the issuance of many journals. In this, we can see the workings of the academic publication-industry complex, to which we previously referred. There is more than a close analogy between the vast increase in the number of papers and the equally great and growing increase in the number of patents, for they are in fact part of the same process of techno-scientific expansion. Papers and patents fulfil complementary functions in this process: papers point to technical possibilities and patents realize these in working models or inventions. In other words, science and technology work hand in glove with each other. But this only partly explains the ever-rising numbers in patents, for there is also the issue of legal ownership to be considered and the fact that most patents are filed on behalf of capitalist enterprises, which have all kinds of interests in multiplying the patents that they hold. The phenomenal growth in patent applications is noted by Guy Standing: In 2011, over 2 million applications were filed in patent offices around the world, more than double the number in 1995. Over 2.6 million applications were filed in 2013 and 2.7 million in 2014, fuelled by double-digit growth in China. Now the top country for filing, China, accounts for more than a third of global applications.32

172  Academia and Publishing China is now in the lead with patent filings ahead of the United States. However, when it comes to actual patents held, the United States is still far ahead: “Of the 102 million patents in force globally in 2014, the US still held the most (25 percent of the total), followed by Japan (19 percent). But, at 12 percent China was catching up”.33 However, it is worth noting that of the Chinese filings, “the majority of applications are filed only with Chinese patent offices and many are for utility models (minor changes) and designs rather than inventions”.34 This fact prompts the wider question: how many of the total patents held are in fact for real inventions and is this number keeping pace with the explosive growth of patents or is it lagging behind? That the latter is in fact the case is strongly argued by Standish: The claim that patents stimulate innovation can be challenged. For one thing, patent filings are unreliable indications of the rate of innovation. A Carnegie Institute survey of why firms chose to patent showed that only 10 per cent of patents had real economic value; the rest were filed to ensure a monopoly or to block potential litigation, that is, rent-seeking purposes. Other studies have found that 40 to 90 percent of patents are neither exploited nor licensed out. Meanwhile data from the European Patent Office analysed by OECD in 2015 suggests that the average technological and economic value of patents has been falling, probably reflecting growing defensive filings.35 In other words, a considerable proportion of patents do not reflect real inventions; and among those that do, a still considerable proportion are only minor improvements or design changes. Patents and inventions do not correlate very closely. We can apply similar conclusions to scientific papers. The vast proportion does not represent any significant new knowledge. A still considerable proportion represents knowledge that is only the application of what is already known about some things to other related things, or the extension of known laws to a wider range of phenomena. The remainder of the papers are very likely false or based on falsified data. Only a small number of scientists, around 290, admit to having falsified results at least once, but a much larger number, around 14%, claim they know other scientists who have done so. The rising number of papers that have to be retracted, even from the most prestigious journals, is a worrying sign. These have increased from 30 a year in the early 2000s to 400 in 2011.36 In 2017, the journal Tumor Biology retracted 107 articles, all from Chinese researchers.37 Fakery is clearly on the increase. The replication crisis, the fact that so few attempts at repeating experimental studies have actually succeeded, points to the multiple effects of all such failings. A high proportion of papers are strictly speaking useless for other scientists, not only because they are false, but because in anticipation of that

Academia and Publishing 173 possibility, they are never cited or more likely never read. An Elsevier study of 2013 revealed that 32% of papers were never cited.38 How many are never read at all, or even cited and never read, or cited only by their authors or friends, is very difficult to establish and can only be inferred from circumstantial evidence. But there is clear evidence of citation inflation as the number of citations is increasing faster than the number of articles published.39 As for reading practices, a recent study (Tenopir et al. 2019) revealed that only a third of scientists claimed they read “with great care”.40 As for reading in the digital environment, a study done by the CIBER research group has “demonstrated that few users of scholarly websites spend any significant time reading in the digital environment … Session times are short, only 1–3 pages are viewed, and half of the visitors never come back … at least half the articles downloaded were never read (and this is likely to be an optimistic estimate)”.41 And what reading is done is frequently done with very little attention, “bouncing, flicking or skittering, rather than reading deeply”.42 The habit of citing papers that are not actually read is also quite common, as Samuel Arbesman reports: Too often a popular paper isn’t actually read by a scientist and then cited in her own work. Sometimes scientists just look at the bibliographies of other papers and copy the citations to their paper …43 He quotes from a mathematical assessment by Simkin and Roychowdhury that “only about 20 percent of scientists who cite an article have actually read it”. Nevertheless, a proportion of the vast output of papers does matter and makes a difference to knowledge. What percentage of papers really matters is hard to establish. Perhaps there are as few as 10% of papers in high impact journals or even the 20% of papers to which 80% of all citations are addressed, or perhaps as many as the 42% of articles whose authors are the stars who publish an article per year. A recent study of the most productive authors over the period 1996–2011 made the following finding: [There was] a total of 15.2 million published scientists of which 50,608 (or less than 1%) managed to publish a paper every year. This active core was responsible for 42% of papers and 87% of the very highly cited papers.44 But one might go on to ask even of these elite authors, do they really need to publish a paper a year? However, it is still a further matter to establish how significant for knowledge even these elite authors and their papers have been during the past few decades or even over the last half-century. A field of which so much was expected during this period is medical science. Huge amounts of public and private money were spent on research in the so-called wars on cancer,

174  Academia and Publishing campaigns against mental illness, the development of drugs and much else besides, even the indefinite postponement of death. And, indeed, the results have been highly rewarding – at least in terms of the ever-increasing numbers of papers being published and the awards to the medical researchers who bring out these papers. In 2016 there were 657,000 medical articles published in academic journals, twice as many as papers in engineering.45 But what startling benefits have all these medical papers brought towards curing diseases? Undeniably there have been small incremental improvements in every respect, and these are still continuing. But there is still no cure for cancer, or for most of the mental maladies, and many of those in other medical fields. There has been nothing like the huge medical advance made in the first half of the twentieth century down to about 1970. As Peter Murphy reports, “Le Fanu (2012) identifies the period between 1940 and 1975 as the era of major clinical discovery”.46 By contrast, there have been only marginal improvements since about 1970, as Murphy goes on to quote the relevant researchers: Charlton and Andras (2005) and Wurman and Botticker (1995) observe that the big developments in bio-medical science took place between 1935 and 1965 with key big advances occurring in antibiotics, glucocorticoid steroids, hormone replacement therapies, psychiatric drugs, surgical technique, anaesthetics, and DNA.47 Charlton and Andras go on to state that “available therapies typically offer only modest or marginal benefit, detectable only in very large clinical trials, and usually at the cost of severe side-effects”.48 Clearly, the law of diminishing returns seems to be at work in medical research: as the funding has kept on increasing and the number of researchers and papers growing, the actual benefits have diminished. In some medical fields the multiplication of papers and the huge expansion of the amount of data this provides has been counter-productive to real progress in the field. One such is the burgeoning area of brain research to which vast sums are being devoted all over the world, with the predictable outcome in paper production but dubious prospects in unlocking the secrets of the working of the brain. A leading researcher in the field, Matthew Cobb, quotes the outstanding French neuroscientist Yves Frégnac as stating that the superflux of data is a hindrance to progress: Only 20 to 30 years ago, neuroanatomical and neurophysiological information was relatively scarce, while understanding mind-related processes seemed within reach. Nowadays, we are drowning in a flood of information. Paradoxically, all sense of global understanding is in acute danger of getting washed away. Each overcoming of a technological barrier opens a Pandora’s box by revealing hidden variables, mechanisms and nonlinearities, adding new levels of complexity.49

Academia and Publishing 175 Cobb concludes, “Frégnac focused on the current fashion for collecting massive amounts of data in expensive, large-scale projects and argued that the tsunami of data they are producing is leading to major bottlenecks in progress, partly because, as he put it pithily ‘big data is not knowledge’”.50 This apophthegm ought to be taken to heart by many researchers, both in the natural and social sciences. One field closely related to medicine, to which Frégnac’s admonition is obviously relevant, is that of pharmacopoeia, as James Bridle reports: One of the places in which it has become increasingly evident that the relevance of vast amounts of data alone is harmful to the scientific method is pharmacological research. Over the past sixty years, despite the huge growth of the pharmacological industry, the rate at which new drugs are made available has actually fallen when compared to the amount of money spent on research – and it has fallen consistently and measurably. The number of new drugs approved per billion US dollars spent on research and development has halved every nine years since 1950. The downward trend is so clear that researchers have coined a term for it: Eroom’s law – that is, Moore’s Law backwards.51 Bridle concludes that this kind of problem is now pervasive over the whole extent of all the sciences. Knowledge is growing, but at an ever-decreasing rate, while the media for communicating knowledge, papers and increasingly so books, are multiplying at a great rate: Eroom’s law exemplifies a growing awareness across the sciences that something is deeply and widely wrong with scientific research. The number of new results is not only falling, but those results are becoming less trustworthy, thanks to a combination of different mechanisms.52 Bridle points to such factors as we previously mentioned, the ever-increasing rate of retractions despite the fact that findings are very rarely checked by duplicating experiments or field trials, as well as the sheer exposure of fraud and other misconduct. The greater the pressure on scientists to produce grows, the more likely it is that the amount of fraud will grow as well. And even without any conscious desire to deceive, error creeps into scientific publications at a disturbing rate, as the work of John Ioannidis and Samuel Arbesman has revealed.53 Arbesman lists six key factors that are most likely to lead to erroneous results: 1 The smaller the studies conducted in a scientific field, the less likely the research findings are to be true. 2 The smaller the effect in findings of a scientific field, the less likely the research findings are to be true.

176  Academia and Publishing 3 The greater the number and the lesser the selection of tested relationships in a scientific field, the less likely the research findings are to be true. 4 The greater the flexibility of design, definitions, outcomes and analytical modes in a scientific field, the less likely the research findings are true. 5 The greater the financial and other interests and prejudices in a scientific field, the less likely the research interests are to be true. 6 The hotter a scientific field (with more scientific teams involved), the less likely the research findings are to be true.54 The ever-increasing prevalence of erroneous findings in article publication leads us to suspect that Gresham’s law is beginning to take hold there as well as in book publication, which we previously discussed. There are many problems with article publication that lend credence to that conclusion, which we can briefly outline in point form. Essentially the same kind of work is repeated time and time again, usually in different fields where previous results are unknown due to oversight. Work on problems that generate a whole series of papers is preferred to that in which there is a clear answer, even though the latter might be more significant. Work involving teams brings greater rewards than that of individuals. The biggest rewards are those of Big Science requiring large teams and large funds, which militates against small science work requiring ingenuity. Invisible colleges of mutually reinforcing practitioners develop from which outsiders are kept out. Elite circles of scientists who only communicate with each other and only trust each other’s findings foreclose the possibility that any other ideas will be considered. Good ideas thereby go to waste. Science administrators and grant-giving bodies go with the strength, as it were, and also exclude anyone who is not part of the established networks. As a result, many potentially creative scientists drop out before they can even begin serious work. Science administrators are now inclined to rely on econometric measures to determine quality, which is a self-defeating process. Thus, for example, the more citations count, the more citations will be used as a tactic for self-advancement. The prime object of publication will be to secure citations. The measuring device will itself become the object that it is intended to measure. We can now see these processes at work both in papers and books. Relying on citation counts as a measure of quality is extremely unreliable for the reasons that Nelson and Watt give: The protocols of responsible and thorough scholarly citation have begun to disappear. Citation now adds glitter to scholarship … Citation is frequently for the rub-off effect of proximity to superstar glamour, rather than recording a collaborative enterprise.55 Relying on citations also leads to group collusion, such that networking arrangements develop in circles of people who only cite each other. Such networks are usually based on the elite universities and laboratories. This

Academia and Publishing 177 means that anyone who does not work in such an environment or who cannot secure support within one such group is effectively frozen out, regardless of the nature and quality of his or her work. Thus, relying on citations is just one more way of killing the individual in favour of the group and promoting the elite status of elites. A scientist like Einstein would now be completely ignored. Peter Murphy quotes from a paper in Nature (2013) by D.K. Simonton with the title “Scientific Genius is Extinct”: “Science at the margins where great discoveries are made is a total mess”, says Don Braben, a physicist and honorary professor at UCL, he fears that even the established scientific nations, including the UK, have drastically undermined their ability to conduct blue-sky research, the kind of free-wheeling activity with the potential to make genuine scientific leaps, thanks to the introduction of the peer-review grant applications … “Until the 1970s good scientists were guaranteed some money just to think. Not any more”.56 The reliance on citation index counts and impact factors only aggravates this problem, because “these encourage researchers to research a popular topic not because the concept is interesting but because it will enhance a career – on the grounds that work in a popular area is more likely to be cited”.57 But any popular topic is one that follows an already well-established route rather than opening up a hitherto untrodden path. As Simonton goes on to point out by reference to Braben: Braben’s group objected to the use of impact statements in the assessment of grant applications. Braben provided the Minister with a list of 11 ground breaking but unpredictable discoveries that he believed would not have attracted funding if impact assessment had been made at the project formulation stage.58 As we have already seen, there are many other distinguished scientists in many fields, such as Sydney Brenner previously quoted, who hold similar negative views of such numerical measures. Ultimately there is no substitute for responsible and sound judgement from those in a given field to assess the quality of proposals. Where that is lacking, science falls into disarray. The sciences are facing a crisis of confidence in all matters to do with the assessment of quality. The old standards have either fallen completely or are failing; the new ways of quality control inspire no trust because they are so easily gamed or corrupted. The people in positions of authority who were formerly relied on to exercise disinterested judgement about what is worthwhile or worthless can no longer be unquestionably trusted because so many among them tend to pursue their own interests, no matter how these conflict with the interest of all or the institution of the university as such.

178  Academia and Publishing Since people in authority can be less and less relied on to deliver unbiased and unbending judgements, resort is had to objective measures, such as metric measures based on publication numbers, citation counts and other such quanta, or rankings based on multiple criteria and other apparently non-subjective deliverances. But there are innumerable ways that unscrupulous operators have found to exploit such systems, and those who begin with no such intentions soon find that in order to compete they must fall into line and adopt these or similar techniques. As Stuart Ritchie puts it, “evidence that quantity overrides quality for at least some scientists can be found in the cunning ways many have found to exploit the system”.59 Ritchie lists numerous tactics for gaming no matter what objective measure one cares to examine, since ultimately no such numerical standard can substitute for proper quality control exercised by impeccable authorities. Quantity can never take the place of quality, since according to Goodhart’s Law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”. As Ritchie interprets this, “Once you begin to chase the numbers themselves rather than the principles they stand for – in this case, the principle of finding research that makes a big contribution to our knowledge – you’ve completely lost your way”.60 It is now becoming harder to find people who have not lost their way.

Section II – The crisis of quality We began this book with an assessment of the failure of criticism, which is the means of exercising quality control in literary and other humanistic matters, and now we end it by examining how similar failures are also pervasive in the sciences. Ultimately both of these are symptomatic of still larger failings due to the downfall of culture in a rapidly degenerating civilization. This is a huge topic which we have already addressed in many earlier works, and we cannot do more than refer to them here at the very end of a book on the university, one of the mainstays of Western civilization.61 Once the traditional university is hollowed out and inwardly collapses and another type of institution takes its place, then the very basis of intellectual authority in society goes down with it. There ceases to be any reliable and uncorrupted way of judging anything except by means of numerical measures of the type we have already found wanting. Marketplace success is one such measure, another is democratic choice exercised through elections or polling, a third is media attention, a fourth now coming into favour is social media following, or many other such Internet-mediated indices of approval. We are now experiencing the effects that result when judgements of quality in any field whatever are exercised in these so-called populist ways. Any relation between real quality as assessed by competent judges and these popular measures of quality is purely coincidental. We can clearly see this in book publication, especially of literary works. There is no relation whatever between the best-seller lists and anything one can by any stretch of definition consider literary quality. The same kind

Academia and Publishing 179 of disjunction occurs in the universities between what students like, conditioned as they are by immersion in the media since infancy, and what they ought to study. Any teaching that is governed by such popular appeal is bound to be corrupted unless it is the study of what makes for such corruption itself. This is now an extremely difficult direction to follow in the humanities, and anyone who attempts it is likely to be without an audience. Hence, compromising with popular appeal to some degree is almost inevitable. Whether one chooses to or not, anyone who wishes to survive must to some extent collude with corruption under these debased conditions in the humanities. The situation in the sciences is not yet as dire as in the humanities, for curricular requirements of what has to be taught are still firmly in place and not left to popular choice. Frequently professional requirements policed by outside bodies make it mandatory that science students possess basic foundational knowledge of their fields and mostly also a competence in mathematics. Fashionable postmodernist sociologies of science have not yet succeeded in determining that science is whatever anyone or any group chooses to call science. There is still a body of basic truths in every science, regardless of how truth is interpreted by the sociologists or philosophers of science. The sciences are not threatened, in the way the humanities are, with total abnegation of any responsibility for truth or for other such fundamental values. Nevertheless, the position of the sciences cannot be considered secure if all around them the humanities are going under and a general cultural collapse ensues. For ultimately all these fields of cultural endeavour are intertwined at a deep level so that the fall of the one threatens to bring down many of the others. As we have seen, the failure of criticism or quality control in the humanities is bound to be followed by correlative failings in quality control in the sciences. Like dry rot in a building, corruption in the university spreads from bottom up, from the foundational departments where basic literacy and critical thinking is taught right up to the superstructures where theoretical understanding is cultivated. In a recent article in the Guardian Jerome Ravetz sounds the alarm as well as striking a note of reassurance about the crisis of quality in science: There is no lack of initiatives to tackle science’s crisis in all its respects, from reproducibility to the abuse of metrics, to the problem of peer review. This gives good grounds for hope that the crisis will eventually be resolved, and that it will not become a general crisis of trust in science. Should that occur, and science ceases to be a key cultural symbol of truth and probity, along with material beneficence, then the consequences could be far-reaching.62 Reproducibility, the abuse of metrics and the problem of peer review are indeed three critical areas to which we shall presently return. Ravetz’s

180  Academia and Publishing sanguine grounds for hope that the crisis will eventually be resolved are perhaps not as firmly grounded as he optimistically presents them to the general public, if his account of the cause of the crisis is taken with full seriousness. As he himself realizes, deep structural changes are required to cope with these problems: Our present problems can be explained partly by the transformation from the ‘little science’ of the past to the ‘big science’ or ‘industrialized science’ of the present. But this explanation raises a problem: if the corrupting pressures are the result of the structural conditions of contemporary science, can they be nullified in the absence of a significant change in these conditions?63 The main structural change that Ravetz alludes to is the “steady quantitative growth of the scientific enterprise” of which he identifies “two familiar qualitative aspects”: The first is the loss of “Gemeinschaft”, where all communities and sub-communities have become so large that personal acquaintance no longer dominates in the professional relationships. The old informal rewards and sanctions are no longer effective. Under the new “Gesellschaft” conditions, such intimate tasks of governance must be made “objective”. Ironically, applying a ‘scientific’ methodology to the task of governance of science leads directly to corruption, since any such system can be gamed. Allied to that development is a second one, the hugely increased capital-intensity of science, so that the typical context of discovery is no longer the scientist with his test-tube, but a large lab with division of labour on an industrial scale. In the absence of the discipline of customers for a product (however corrupted that might be), there is nothing to ensure quality control except those informal systems that are already obsolete.64 The two factors that Ravetz describes seem to go against his own initial premise “that the crisis will eventually be resolved, and that it will not become a general crisis of trust in science”, for what he labels as “crisis” begins to look like the permanent condition of science now and in the foreseeable future. The two fundamental features of science, which he had previously implied were responsible for the “crisis” have now become settled and unalterable states of science, hence it follows that the “crisis” is not something that can be overcome or resolved; it, too, is here to stay. What Ravetz calls a “crisis” is merely the transition to this new scientific environment, and “under these harsh conditions, quality becomes instrumentalized. To strive for ‘excellence’ may be impractical: ‘impact’ is the name of the game”.65 So when he goes on to say “the scene is by no means gloomy” we might begin to think that he is merely whistling in the dark to keep his courage up and keep our hopes alive.

Academia and Publishing 181 The scene is, indeed, very gloomy if we take seriously his diagnosis of what has brought it about and any thought that it might be remedied or reformed is just so much wishful thinking. Perhaps marginal improvements and corrections of obvious abuses might be effected by the measures that Ravetz and others propose, but that is about as far as it can go. For what does it mean that Gemeinschaft has given way to Gesellschaft, to refer to Tönnies’ now hackneyed dichotomy that Ravetz invokes? It means all we have previously described as the passing of the old European university and the rise first of the American multiversity and then ultimately of the globalized university, covered by the Shanghai ARWU ranking system. And what does it mean that “the typical context of discovery is no longer the scientist with his test-tube, but a large lab with a division of labour on an industrial scale”? It means what we have described in our historical account of the transition from the small science of pre-war Europe to the Big Science of postwar America and then the commercial science of the present day. This is a historical course that is not reversible. And whatever problems it brings are permanent features which cannot be elided or abrogated but must be endured and coped with as best one can. We can never return to the old university of scholars or the old highminded science because the kinds of people who inhabited these higher regions of the intellect have gone with the passing of the institutions and cultures that nurtured them. We can trace their disappearance in a sequence of three phases each with its own characteristic figures. During the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth century, the university professor was a scholar gentleman, that is, a scholar who behaved like a gentleman; during most of the twentieth century he (still very rarely she) was a career professional academic; during the latter part of the twentieth century, he or she (women had entered in force) became a career entrepreneur. These three character-types function in different academic settings; they typically behave in different ways and are bound by quite different ethical selfconceptions governed by alternative ethics. In this respect, we may view the scholar gentleman and the career entrepreneur as opposite types, with the career professionals as intermediate types mediating the transition from the one to the other. It is to be understood that the transition from the one type to the other is not a sudden revolution but a slow evolution and that therefore the types overlap with each other for long periods. Such changes take generations, so that whereas the younger cohorts might have already undergone a transformation, the older ones are still bound to the old forms and continue to behave accordingly. Parallel to these types there are four professorial roles, or historically evolving attitudes to the practice of science: science as a vocation, science as profession, science as a job and science as an enterprise. Science as a vocation is what Weber describes in his famous essay of that title, where he sets out the philosophical, artistic and religious motivation of the vocational scientist at different periods of history and in different cultures when

182  Academia and Publishing the scientist was known successively as the natural philosopher, virtuoso, searcher into God’s providential design and so on. Science as a profession only began to arise when professional venues for regular and systematic scientific research began to be established in laboratories in universities, or under governmental or industrial aegis, which only started to happen in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Science as a job arose around the same time in the context of industrial science with its task force of laboratory workers. Science as an enterprise, or to put it bluntly, as a business, has its precursors in the inventors, prospectors and other entrepreneurs of the industrial age. But it did not begin to feature in the universities till sometime after the Second World War, and by now it has become commonplace. These four approaches to science which we will set out in more detail are, of course, Ideal Types in Weber’s sense, conceptual extremes that are rarely completely instantiated. In reality, they are to some degree always mixed. Even Einstein was not purely a vocational scientist; he was also an academic professional at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute; he dabbled at odd times with instrumental inventions for commercial firms and took out numerous patents in his own name and together with Leo Szilard, and during the war advised the US Navy’s Bureau of Ordnance on underwater explosions. The scholar gentleman was the typical nineteenth-century professor, a subspecies of which was the gentleman scientist. A renowned example of the latter was Charles Darwin, a gentleman scientist pursuing his own autonomous researches in his own country home and utilizing his own funds for this purpose. His whole behaviour, attitude to his work and relations with fellow researchers were governed by these facts. He followed a long tradition of such gentlemen scientists, starting with Robert Boyle, Henry Cavendish, Humphrey Davey, Joseph Banks and many others. In the first place, he was an English gentleman before he was a scientist. His research work was not done to generate a steady stream of publications; but on the contrary, he had to be urged to publish and only did so once, precipitated by the letter from Alfred Wallace which anticipated his own findings. The whole matter of priority, in this case, was handled as an affair among gentlemen in which due credit had to be judiciously apportioned among the two deserving claimants. Of course, not all gentlemen scientists, who still carried much of the aura of natural philosophers, behaved with such due propriety as Darwin and his friends, but this was the ideal to which they all aspired. Hence, ethical issues such as bedevil science at present never arose and were inconceivable to such people. The scholar gentleman as professor was mostly a humanist of some kind, but the gentlemen scientists also bore themselves accordingly. In England, before the foundation of the new universities, such people were fellows of the Oxford and Cambridge colleges, and lived a semi-monastic life, or at least pretended to do so. In this kind of traditionalist environment, the scholar gentleman ideal persevered till well after the Second World War, though by that stage it was mostly a sham for academics had become career

Academia and Publishing 183 professionals. In Germany, similar kinds of ideals were cultivated by the university professors as state-appointed officials who pursued the Humboldtian principle of the unity of teaching and research. The German Herr Professor was an august and mighty figure of high standing, not only in academia but in society as a whole. The scientist as Herr Professor supervised research in his own laboratory which was part of his chair, where work was undertaken mostly by himself with the assistance of his own students and the occasional Privatdozent. The transition from the gentleman scientist to the scientist as professional is what Weber studies in his speech “Wissenschaft als Beruf”, which is translated as “Science as a Vocation”. But the German term Beruf carries a double meaning of both vocation and profession, which has been largely elided and lost in the English term “vocation”. In fact, Weber’s whole essay can be seen as a sociological commentary on how science as an activity that began as a pure vocation eventually turned into a profession. It is a study in the secularization of religious or philosophical vocations in the sense of a calling into a Beruf, the pursuit of a systematic routine of work, which is what professionalism amounts to. Thus, the transition from vocation to profession in science is seen by Weber as part and parcel of that shift from the religious sense of Beruf, as a calling to work in one’s chosen vocation, to the secular sense of Beruf, as exercising one’s professional competence, which is the fundamental thesis of his first major work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. But the secularization of a vocation still retains something of its religious meaning, for as Weber remarks “the idea of duty in one’s calling [Beruf] prowls about in our lives like the ghost of dead religious beliefs”.66 This is as true for professional science as it is for all the other professional activities current at the time when Weber wrote. The professionalization of science was the great accomplishment of the nineteenth century following the French Revolution. It had barely started at the beginning of the century with the French revolutionary idea of carrière ouverte aux talents and was complete by the end of the century when “scientist” became the explicit designation of career professionals in many scientific fields. This was capped off at the start of the twentieth century with the foundation of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Germany with its numerous branches dedicated to the wholesale pursuit of scientific research without the burden of teaching. This professionalization of science during the nineteenth century is, of course, coeval with all the other professionalization processes taking place in so many other fields of work, such as above all the civil service and the military, and similar attempts, more or less pursued in many other occupations: most successfully in medicine and law, least successfully in industrial work where unionism prevailed and where even the professionalization of engineering was retarded.67 How science was professionalized in the various major European countries, Germany, France and Britain, is a complex story for it was by no means a uniform process in all three. Though France initiated it, Germany, that is, Prussia, soon

184  Academia and Publishing took the lead with the foundation of Berlin University in which the model of graduate research as part of learning was developed, which proved so fruitful for science and became the basis of the PhD degree. On the whole, Germany surged ahead with the professionalization of science and France and Britain, in that order, sought to follow it. As with any occupation, the fundamental aim of the professionalization of science is to prevent it from falling to the level of a mere job, that is, being completely subject to the market forces of supply and demand like any other labour. In order to separate a profession from a mere job there are a number of key characteristics that are cultivated, according to Charles McClelland: Highly specialized and advanced education; a special code of conduct (“ethics”); altruism/public service; rigorous competency tests, examinations, licensing; high social prestige; high economic rewards; occupational career pattern or ladder; monopolization of markets in services; autonomy.68 These are, in fact, the kinds of claims made on behalf of the early scientific professional associations. Among the very first to do so were the chemists who found themselves most in danger of being relegated to a technical labour force in the newly developing chemical industry, especially in Germany. The Verein Deutscher Chemiker was an early professional association and consequently “the chemical profession was given its shape through the interactions in the Verein Deutscher Chemiker (VDC) of captains of chemical industry such as Carl Duisberg (who became head of the VDC for several crucial years) and the leading academic chemists of late Imperial Germany”.69 Other scientific professional associations followed suit, including the physicists. The social forces that made for the professionalization of science are the same ones that Weber identifies as leading to professionalization in many other spheres. In the first place, there is the expropriation of the means of production from the autonomous researcher or scientist and their concentration in a centralized organization that is bureaucratically managed. Typically, this is the university or industrial laboratory in science. No scientist could any longer proceed as Darwin did from the security of his own home, growing his own barnacles, or as many scientists were still doing within their own university laboratories with string-and-sealing wax experiments. As the resources to do science became ever larger, both in terms of instrumentation and funds, so the work of scientific research had to become more organized, and so the scientist became increasingly a career professional. And the way that the scientists went determined that of all other academics as science became the driving force of the university. The age of the scholar gentleman even in the humanities was past, regretful as this might have been to some of them, and the gentleman scientist vanished as well. The professor as career professional conceived of himself (still mostly a male), of his role and of the ethic governing his behaviour, quite differently

Academia and Publishing 185 from the scholar gentleman. The career professional, like any other professional in any other field, made it his main ambition to gain promotion or career advancement. If in doing so, he can also achieve other more ideal ends, well and good, but promotion to higher levels is usually a prerequisite for ideal achievements since it makes available the resources for that end, and must therefore be attained first of all before reaching for any higher vocational goals. In that way career always trumps vocation. The career professional in academia, especially the scientist, is governed by a professional ethic appropriate to that kind of work. In science, this ethic is embraced by the Mertonian principles of communitarianism, universality, disinterestedness and organized scepticism. This is an ethics of professional duty that is very different from the ethics of honour of the scholar gentleman. Honour governs everything in a gentleman’s life; professional duty only governs that part that concerns his or her professional role and work. Apart from and outside their work nobody expects the professionals to be any better than any other people. Thus, the scientist is required to be absolutely truthful and scrupulously honest in his or her research work, but cannot be expected to be so in any other respect. Steven Shapin calls this the principle of “moral equivalence”, but, as we shall show, he has misconstrued this to mean that there is no ethical difference whatsoever between scientists and ordinary folk, and that is taking “equivalence” far too far.70 By the term “moral equivalence” Shapin means that “scientists are morally no different from anybody else”.71 And he prefixes this by saying that “it has now become an official commonplace in need of no special evidence or argument …”72 However, all the evidence is clearly against any such “moral equivalence” in the case of vocationally driven scientists who pursue scientific knowledge as an end in itself, frequently against their own material interests and in the face of fierce opposition from others. Such people are clearly moral heroes, despite their moral failings in other respects or other such imperfections of character, for not even saints are saintly in all their dealings. It is true that no man is a hero to his own valet, but from this, it does not follow that there are no heroes. Heroes in science are obviously morally different from other people and there is no “moral equivalence” in their case. However, Shapin’s argument for moral equivalence might nevertheless apply to the run-of-the-mill scientists, the great majority, for whom science is just a job and who are not vocationally inspired but take to science for no more idealistic or uplifting motives. Moral equivalence might indeed be true in Shapin’s sense for such people for whom science is simply a convenient occupation, not preferable to any other with the same pay, conditions and perks. But it is still far from true for those for whom science is a dedicated profession. For being a true professional scientist means being encultured in a specific “ethics” and sense of duty that is peculiar to science, just as professionals in other walks of life, be it doctors, lawyers, civil servants or military officers, too, have their own special code of conduct in respect of their work. In science this requires approaching scientific issues with particular

186  Academia and Publishing attention to exact truth, objectivity, rationality and all other such values that govern work in science. It follows from this that at least as far as scientific matters are concerned the professional scientist is duty bound in these respects and above the level of ordinary people. So once again there is no moral equivalence in Shapin’s sense in such cases. This is not to deny moral equivalence on all issues outside the specifics of science, for, as with all other professionals, outside their field of competence scientists behave as well or as badly as any other people. The kind of moral equivalence that Shapin invokes applies only when science is practised not as a profession, a Beruf in Weber’s sense, but only as a job with no ethical responsibilities or duties above those that govern any other job. When science has been reduced to a job, then, indeed, the scientist is not better than any other person. And this is what Shapin implicitly assumes has happened to science through a process that he calls “the transition from science as a calling to science as a job”, a formula he repeats numerous times throughout his book.72 According to Shapin, prior to the twentieth-century “science was a calling and not a job”, but after that, it began to become a job73: So, at the beginning of the twentieth century the identity of the scientist was radically unstable. To be a scientist was still something of a calling but it was becoming something of a job, it was still associated with the idea of social disengagement but increasingly recognized as a source of civically valued power and wealth; it was still associated with the notion of special personal virtue but it was on the cusp of moral ordinariness.74 It is clear that in his account of the transition from science as a calling to science as a job Shapin has completely left out of account the intermediate phase of science as a profession. Despite the fact that he quotes copiously from Weber’s essay “Science as a Vocation” he has failed to note that the aim of Weber’s argument is to trace the transition from calling to profession and not from calling to job. To do so, Weber makes ample use of the ambiguity of the German term Beruf, which, more so than the English “vocation”, still retains the sense of “calling” even while in its modern usage it means “profession”. This etymological link is the key to Weber’s whole case that “profession” derives from “vocation” and still carries the imprint of its religious origins. This is an application of the more general thesis first asserted in his book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. His essay “Wissenschaft als Beruf” is simply the extension of this general case to science, which begins as a religious vocation: “Here I bring you the proof of God’s providence in the anatomy of a louse”, as Weber’s quotation from Swammerdam puts it – and ends up as a secular profession where the idea of duty in one’s Beruf still “prowls round in our lives like the ghost of dead religious beliefs”.75 Weber was not concerned with science as a job but he points in that direction when discussing American conditions. He contrasts the demeaning

Academia and Publishing 187 way in which the American professor is regarded by his students to the high respect accorded to his German counterpart: The American conception of the teacher who faces him is: he sells me his knowledge and his methods for my father’s money just as the greengrocer sells my mother cabbage. And that is all. To be sure, if the teacher happens to be a football coach, then, in this field, he is a leader. But if he is not this (or something similar in a different field of sport), he is simply a teacher and nothing more.76 This is as much as to say that in America the teacher or professor is simply doing a job and nothing more. If the professor happens to be a scientist, then a fortiori, he too is simply doing a job and science might be seen as no more than a highly skilled technical occupation. Weber, like most other Germans at the time, was aghast at this kind of utilitarian attitude to science that, not altogether correctly, he believed prevailed in America. But he was already prepared to consider that this is the way the winds of change were blowing: “But the question is whether there is not a grain of truth contained in this feeling which I have stated with some exaggeration”.77 Weber might have been exaggerating, but he was not completely off the mark for there was already considerable apprehension at the time about what was called “Americanisation”, which in fact did eventually come to German science, but only after the catastrophe of the Second World War. The condition of science in America during the late nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth was, indeed, very different from that in Germany or the other great scientific powers. Professionalization had not as yet gone very far, science was still divided between being an inspired calling or being a mere job, with the latter by far predominating in the industrial sectors of scientific work. It is in this context that Shapin’s rather extreme dichotomy of science as a calling or science as a job does apply. American industry did tend to treat the scientist as a technical expert or skilled worker just like the engineer. He was not well regarded except in so far as he proved himself through his achievements, like Weber’s image of the sporting coach. Neither the great industrialists, like Ford, nor the great inventors, like Edison, had any high regard for science or those who practised it, whom they viewed as no more than skilled drudges. By and large, in egalitarian and democratic America no profession was esteemed nor did it command appropriate remuneration. Hence, professionalism was much less developed as compared to Europe: not even doctors or lawyers and certainly not civil servants, some of whom were elected office holders, were treated with the appropriate respect due to professionals. However, in time by fits and starts professionalization did come to America and especially to science. By gradual stages science as a pure vocation, still largely the case in the nineteenth century, gave way to science as a profession in the twentieth century. The foundation of scientific associations, starting

188  Academia and Publishing with chemistry in 1848, and the professionalization of neighbouring fields such as medicine during the nineteenth century played an initiating role in this process, as did the establishment of the postgraduate training regimen based on German models later in that century. The professional bearing was consolidated during the early twentieth century when some of the big industrial firms established in-house laboratories dedicated purely to scientific research, and some even to pure science. However, the scientist’s status, standing and commensurate pay rose quickly and precipitously to extraordinary heights only after the Second World War, following the war-winning triumphs in weapons research. But that, unfortunately, was achieved at the expense of the sense of duty and ethical standards of the scientific profession prior to that time. For even as the professionalization of science was being consolidated, it was at the same time being ethically undermined and destroyed due to the militarization of science that ensued during the Cold War and the commercialization of science that followed, as we shall soon see. Science during the Cold War saw the introduction of a new academic type, the professor as grant entrepreneur. Once again it was scientists who led the way for science was fast becoming a large-scale enterprise. In the postwar climate of Big Science, the key role of a head scientist was to solicit the funds and the personnel and the materiel for large-scale experimental work. To do so he (and it was still almost exclusively a male) had to become an efficient grant entrepreneur. The whole system of applying for funds from government agencies was tailor-made for scientific grantsmanship, as typified by Daniel Greenberg’s eponymous character Dr Grant Swinger.78 The whole persona of the ambitious scientist was transformed; he became of necessity more of a go-getter than an experimentalist or theoretician. His main aim became to acquire a government contract rather than to discover anything. As President Eisenhower himself put it in his Farewell Address: Today, the solitary inventor tinkering in his shop has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity.79 But grant entrepreneurship was only a preparatory stage for the full-fledged entrepreneurship of commercial science that began to come into force from the late 1970s onwards. The scientist as a commercial entrepreneur that arose as a consequence of the new opportunities opening up through mixing science and business was a new type, who went totally against any notion of science as a vocation even in its professional sense. It is only at this point in the evolution of the scientific role that Shapin’s work has its point, and that his thesis of “moral equivalence” becomes true. The morals of the scientific entrepreneur need be no different from and no better than that

Academia and Publishing 189 of any other businessman. This is the reason that such scientists are quite happy collaborating and working with venture capitalists. Science was opened up for investment by venture capitalists in partnership with scientific entrepreneurs as a result of three major structural changes in the relationship between the universities, government and business. From 1968 when Congress allowed the National Science Foundation to fund applied science and encouraged universities to compete for such funds the way was open for universities to enter into partnership with corporations and to sponsor corporations of their own, based on the work of their scientists. This became all the easier when Congress passed the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 which allowed for much more exclusive intellectual property (IP) utilization and patenting rights. At the same time, businesses became much more open to funding scientific research in the universities where there were strong prospects of commercial products emerging. This was particularly the case in the new biotechnology, electronics and computing sciences. What arose out of this was a close merger between university scientists and venture capitalists. The initiating instance of this kind of partnership was the foundation of Genentech through the collaboration between the Nobel Prize-winning scientists Herbert Boyer and Stanley Cohen with the venture capitalist Robert Swanson. Many other partnerships followed suit and took the same kind of course. The scientists who were amenable to this kind of deal were a new breed that Shapin calls the “scientific entrepreneur”: “Defined as one who is both a qualified scientist, and, like all commercial entrepreneurs, a risk taker … [who] takes risks to commercialize knowledge that they themselves or others have produced”.80 Risk, according to this definition and in this context, must be taken to its full extent, involving moral hazard in respect of both science and business. For if the main aim in commercial science is “to turn knowledge into profitable goods or services”, as Shapin puts it, then all such risky ventures are worth taking. As long as the grant entrepreneur had to solicit funds from government agencies staffed by competent scientists, it was difficult to get away with shoddy science or sharp practices and almost impossible to perpetrate fraud. But all such restraints were lifted when the scientific entrepreneur had to deal with businessmen and university administrators, neither of whom were scientists. The results were all too predictable, especially in biotechnology and computer science, at once the most commercial and corrupt of the sciences. A huge ethical gulf had opened up between the “ascetic natural philosopher of the early modern period and the commerce-minded scientific entrepreneur of Silicon Valley, Route 128 and San Diego’s Biotech Beach” of which Shapin is not mindful and which he obfuscates with his talk of “ethical equivalence”.81 Indeed, the ethical distance between the professional scientist who practises science as a Beruf and the contemporary counterpart who practises science as a business has grown so wide as not to have been even anticipated by Weber. Science entrepreneurs such as Craig Venter and

190  Academia and Publishing Kary Mullens, to give but two examples favoured by Shapin, are far beyond the ken of anyone writing about science prior to the 1980s. Venter’s statement about his biotech company Celera Genomics – “It is like Bloomberg’s. We’re selling information about the vast universe of molecular medicine”82 – would have been unthinkable to anyone prior to that date. The idea of science as a commodity, a manufactured article that could be made for sale and sold to the highest bidder, could only be entertained by the most outré of social constructivists, such as Bruno Latour, who began to spin their theories at that time. Scientific entrepreneurs became the new cynosures according to which young aspiring scientists would model themselves. Wheelers and dealers who were in equal parts scientists and businessmen became the new stars of the media as both celebrities and financial wizards. For such people success became the be-all and end-all and winning more important than any consideration of the means by which it was achieved, especially as the principle of winner takes all came into force in science, as elsewhere in business and politics. Science lost its traditional moral bearings and instead the laxer and looser legalism of business and politics came into effect. The Mertonian norms of community, universality, disinterestedness and organized scepticism were more honoured in the breach. This was the start of the crisis of quality controls that has now reached catastrophic proportions. Jerome Ravetz was perhaps the first person to anticipate this, for already in his early work of 1971 he had grasped the full gravity of the ethical problem of quality control for what he called industrialized science, as he puts it: “The condition of industrialized science at present is leaving scientists with problems and temptations for which their inherited ‘scientific ethic’ is totally inadequate”.83 What he refers to concerns the issue of quality control in science and he warns that “if it fails to resolve this problem then the immediate consequences for morale and recruitment will be serious; and those for the survival of science grave”.84 Fifty years have elapsed since that warning was sounded; few heard it and little was done about it, and by now well into the twenty-first century it has all become ever so much worse. Attempts to remedy the corrupt situation have been of the punitive and policing kind, and these never work when ethical inhibitions no longer operate. For as Saltelli and Funtowicz now see it in retrospect, “as Ravetz anticipated, no formal system of imposed penalties and rewards can guarantee the maintenance of quality in the absence of a community of scholars willing to respect and enforce collectively a set of generally unwritten quality standards”.85 But this was clearly a forlorn hope given that with the demise of the gentleman scientist and the decline of the professional scientist, it is no longer possible to resurrect any sense of a scientific community. Everything in the subsequent development of science has gone against it. By now, the career professional, governed by a strong sense of professional duty and responsibility, is becoming an antiquated figure. Everything in the university system as it operates at present favours the career entrepreneur. From rewarding a high rate of publication, regardless of the significance

Academia and Publishing 191 or even quality of what is published, to taking citation metrics, impact factors and other such numerical quanta as the measures of achievement, it is all designed to favour the entrepreneurs who understand the market for academic products and know how to exploit it for their own benefit. This is particularly true for those sciences where securing a research grant, the prerequisite for any work, means having to sell one’s proposal to the investors, the funds providers, who hope to make a market killing by placing their money on the most promising contenders in the race for results. Investing in science and gambling are almost complementary. In the marketplace of ideas, those who wish to succeed need to utilize all the means at their disposal to beat their competitors and rivals. The idea that such scientific entrepreneurs should restrain themselves by anything approaching the Mertonian principles or any such ethical inhibitions is about as plausible as the idea that advertisers should be bound by considerations of truth and fair play.86 Every incentive is there for those who proceed in crooked ways and there are no rewards for those who keep to the right way. As Ritchie writes in conclusion to his book, “the system of science is now set up to reward those who engage in underhand methods”.87 Ritchie has devoted his book to cataloguing the litany of dodges, schemes, tricks and other frauds and misdemeanours whereby science is being systematically abused at present. He sums it up as follows: There are scientists deluded by their own theories, or who desire so strongly to feel they’ve made a difference that they use fraud or p-hacking to vanish any bothersome ambiguities. There are scientists driven by a desire for money, prestige, power or fame, and who care about the truth as little as any charlatan does; scientists who are too busy or stressed to check the errors in their work; scientists who won’t question the way they’ve been trained, and carry on with the same old erroneous practices. Is it right to cast the scientific publication system as some kind of Ur-problem that underlies all the above? Can we truly say that the perverse incentives created by prioritising publications, citations, and grant money have led directly to acts of fraud, bias, negligence, and hype?88 These are surely rhetorical questions given the mass of evidence that Ritchie records in the chapters of his book devoted to fraud, bias, negligence and hype. We have already seen how the publication system is conducive to corruption in multiple ways. Ritchie also concentrates on the three key areas of the corruption of science to which Ravetz previously adverted: reproducibility, the abuse of metrics and the problem of peer review. The failure to replicate published results is of staggering proportions and constitutes a veritable scandal of current science. This is particularly true of the medical field. An attempt “to replicate fifty-three landmark ‘preclinical’ cancer studies that had been published in top scientific journals” revealed that “a mere six of the replication attempts (that is, just 11

192  Academia and Publishing percent) were successful”.89 In other sciences, the figures for replication rate success, though not as dire, were also highly inadequate. In psychology, the replication rate of “100 studies from three top psychology journals” was only 39% successful. Similar studies in “economics were successfully repeated 61 percent of the total attempted”.90 In neuroscience, “a study in 2018 found that standard studies in functional brain imaging … were likely only ‘modestly replicable’”.91 And “in evolutionary biology and ecology, a series of classic findings, repeated in textbooks and taught to generations of students, have fallen to replication attempts and critical reviews”.92 In metrics there is a whole range of unscrupulous practices from salami slicing to citation cartels. Salami slicing is a way of dividing up the one body of research to yield many separate papers. This is done not only to build up the CVs of the researchers concerned but also to “create the impression that there is much greater support for a finding, especially one leading to a commercial product, than is in fact the case”.93 Citation cartels are arrangements made by scientists in collusion to cite each other’s work or the papers in a given journal so as to promote its impact factor. Citation gathering is a particularly rich field of underhand practices that are not strictly illegal but are certainly against the ethos of science, such as presenting results so as to highlight positive findings and discount negative ones. As for peer review, Ritchie writes that “in recent years, it is becoming increasingly, painfully obvious that peer review is far from the guarantee of accuracy and reliability it’s cracked up to be, while the system of publication that’s supposed to be a crucial strength of science has become its Achilles’ heel”.94 Peer review is a relatively recent innovation and it was not till the 1970s that it was widely accepted by editors of journals. It works as well or as badly as those engaged in it; unscrupulous reviewers use it to knock out rivals in their field and even to steal their ideas. Ritchie devotes considerable attention to what is called p-hacking whereby equivocal or even negative results are changed into positive ones. He references the study of Ymkje Anna de Vries and her colleagues who examined 105 different trials of antidepressants that had received approval from the US Food and Drug Administration.95 “The ratio of positive to negative results among these trials happened to be almost fifty/fifty”, but by “literature-laundering” nearly all the negative trials were eliminated so that only the positive ones remained and the drugs received a clean bill of effectiveness. Philip Stark and Andrea Saltelli have devoted an article to such misuses of statistics which they castigate as “cargo-cult statistics”: Practitioners go through the motions of fitting models, computing p-values or confidence intervals, or simulating posterior distribution. They invoke statistical terms and procedures as incantations, with scant understanding of the assumptions or relevance of the calculations, or even the meaning of the terminology. This demotes statistics from a way of thinking about evidence and avoiding self-deception to a formal “blessing” of claims.96

Academia and Publishing 193 They are particularly inclined to resort to standard statistical software which “does not help you know what to compute, nor how to interpret the result”.97 According to Stark and Saltelli, there are whole fields where “consumers may not care whether methods are used appropriately, in part because, in their fields, the norm (including the expectations of editors and referees) is cargo-cult statistics”.98 As a result “peer review can reinforce bad science and statistical practice. Indeed, journals may reject papers that use more reliable or more rigorous methods than the discipline is accustomed to, simply because the methods are unfamiliar”.99 But apart from such ingrained malpractices, journals are unreliable because “many turf battles are fought at the editorial level … [and] journals are reluctant to publish papers critical of work the journal published previously, or of work by scientists who are referees or editors for the journal”.100 So much then for the much vaunted peer-review system, which is only as good as those engaged in administering it, and when these become academic entrepreneurs then it is bound to fail. Like Ravetz, Stark and Saltelli also maintain that all these corruptions of science began with the transition from the Gemeinschaft to the Gesellschaft model of science. Following the Second World War governments entered science in a big way: “This increased the scale of science and the pool of scientific labour: science became ‘Big Science’ conducted by academic professionals”. But as long as scientists remained academic professionals they were governed by the professional ethics and norms of disciplinary science. Hence science could proceed relatively unimpaired, even though it was no longer governed by the “norms and self-regulating aspects of ‘little science’ – communities that valued questioning, craftsmanship, scepticism, self-doubt, critical appraisal of the quality of evidence, and the verifiable, and verifiably replicable, advancement of human knowledge”.101 It was only after another structural turn, when career professionals gave way to career entrepreneurs that “current approaches centring on metrics, funding, publication, and prestige” came into force; and “such approaches may invite and reward ‘gaming’ of the system”.102 The corruption of science was only barely a trickle when Ravetz published his book in 1971, which is perhaps the reason why few took any notice of it at the time. When The Ends of Science was published in 1987 with a chapter entitled “The pathologies of science” it had become a strong current. But then too only a few scientists and philosophers of science took notice of that work.103 It was not till 2005 when John Ioannidis et al. published “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False” that people sat up and took notice of what by then had become a veritable flood.104 The paper was cited over 800 times in the first five years after its publication, yet as Ritchie goes on to state, “but in terms of scientists starting to make the necessary changes to improve the quality of research, its Cassandra-like warnings fell on deaf ears”.105 According to Ritchie, “only since the revelation of the replication crisis … has there been widespread acknowledgement of our problems, and a stark realization that they go to the very heart of how science is practised today”.106

194  Academia and Publishing Actually, there has been a growing awareness both inside science and in the public media that there is something rotten in the state of science at least for the last decade or two. Saltelli and Funtowicz list a series of publications that record a growing sense of crisis. Quality control has been recognized as a serious issue in “a series of world conferences on research integrity”.107 The uncritical resort to metrics has been challenged by a group of editors and publishers of scholarly journals and taken up in the San Francisco Declaration of 2012. The popular print media have joined the debate with features and reportage in The Economist in 2013, The Atlantic in 2015, New York Times, 2015, The Guardian in 2014 and 2016, and New Scientist in 2016. But it all has about it a sense of shutting the stable gate after the horse has bolted. But if, as Saltelli and Funtowicz maintain, “the root causes of the crisis include profound transformations in society and science’s role in society”, as, indeed, we have laboured to show is the case, then we must accept their conclusion that “a resolution of the crisis is not in sight”.108 If the raison d’etre and very nature of the university has been transformed, and scientists are no longer dedicated career professionals but rather go-getting career entrepreneurs, or opportunists alert to the main chance for success, then one would be hard put to expect them to reform themselves against their own interests; especially as Saltelli and Funtowicz put it, “they have contributed to creating [the problem] in the first place, and have high stakes in the preservation of the status quo”.109 However, that does not preclude the introduction of “some remedies to improve the situation, including important changes in the behaviour and social activity of the scientific community”.110 At the end of their article Saltelli and Funtowicz list a whole raft of practical measures that could be implemented to keep down the rate of malpractice. But as with all cases of policing, the object cannot be to eliminate crime, merely to reduce it to tolerable proportions. Ritchie also lists many sensible proposals to eliminate the worst transgressions against the integrity of science. In order “to deal with statistical bias and p-hacking”, he proposes to “take analysis completely out of researchers’ hands”, and hand it over to “independent statisticians”.111 He reports radical strategies of Open Access publishing to remove it from the grasp of predatory commercial publishers. Funders are demanding that the research they commission should be published with Open Access media. “The most ambitious strategy, named ‘Plan S’, comes from Science Europe, the body that represents the funding agencies of European governments”.112 Another idea is the use of preprints which can be read and criticized prior to publication so that “mistakes, bad ideas and bad papers” can be caught before they appear in print.113 All this and more is well and good but it is not a solution to the crisis for, as he himself admits, “they’re mainly aimed at addressing the symptoms of science’s modern maladies, rather than the causes”.114 The causes are, of course, the way the whole system of science funding and university hiring and firing has been run at least since the Second World War. If scientists have to compete for jobs and funding, they

Academia and Publishing 195 will do everything in their power to bolster their CVs and aim for eye-catching, high-impact publications; they will cite their own work and that of their friends as much as possible in the expectation that they will reciprocate; and they will do everything else necessary to succeed. Some universities make it a condition of employment that they do so, for they make them “sign an agreement about the number of papers they’ll publish, and the impact factors of the journals they’ll be in, as a step to getting tenure”.115 If this is the nature of the problem, then Ritchie’s final pronouncement seems almost delusory: “We clearly see the problem. The solutions are within our grasp. All we need to fix science is to give people the right motivation”.116 In fact, what emerges from his work is that the very opposite is true; we do not know the full extent of the problem because it has such deep roots in the very nature of our culture as this has developed during the twentieth century; any permanent solutions are completely out of sight and might not even exist. “To give people the right motivations” is to turn them into different people, which under present circumstances is a near impossibility. For it is the same people who create the systems that they then have to live under and suffer from in science as elsewhere; just as the systems mould the people who instantiate them. It is not possible to change the one side without the other in that equation. Changing our inherited systems of science and the university as a whole would be an institutional revolution such as has never occurred before. The French revolutionaries tried to change the university system and were only partly successful. No such revolution is now in the offing, especially as science is now global and involves the whole of humanity. Many nations now practise science with no prior traditions of scientific work, and with no cultural resources to sustain the kind of values required for this work. Most of them never experienced any period of Enlightenment, and many of them are quite averse to any such ideas. To expect their scientists to acquire Western norms of scientific openness and the unrestricted pursuit of truth wherever this might lead after a few years of postgraduate education is more than can be hoped for. And in fact, the rate of malfeasance among scientists coming from such backgrounds is far higher than from Western scientists. This does not mean that such countries cannot produce good science, especially in the applied and technological fields, but to expect them to maintain the highest standards of reliability in science is mere wishful thinking or political correctness. We will have to learn to live with science and the university as they have now become throughout the world. We can certainly try to tackle the worst and most obvious of the current abuses, being quite aware that no matter what reform measures we introduce these will improve matters in certain respects for a certain time but that eventually they will be corrupted. This will be especially so if there are strict rules of compliance enforced, for, as Ravetz states, “applying a ‘scientific’ methodology to the task of governance of science leads directly to corruption, since any such system can be gamed”.117 There is no final all-purpose remedy, no solution to the crisis of science, for it is simply an

196  Academia and Publishing endemic condition of how science in the university, and now increasingly also in the extra-mural context, functions in global society. This context is now no longer local; nor is it national, or European, or American, it is global. This is the real significance of university ranking, which as we noted was initiated in China. But it has since been duplicated in Europe as well, and adhered to by universities throughout the world. Ranking is the name of the game for universities everywhere. With ranking come metrics and all the rest of the numerical paraphernalia. None of this is going to change in the foreseeable future. As we have made our beds, so must we now lie in them.

Notes 1 Derek J. de Solla Price, Little Science, Big Science... and beyond (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). 2 Cited in Philip Mirowski, Science-Mart: Privatizing American Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 243. 3 Ibid., 244. 4 Ibid. 5 Stuart Ritchie, Science Fictions: Exposing Fraud, Bias, Negligence and Hype in Science (London: The Bodley Head, 2020). 6 Fritz Machlup and Kenneth Leeson, Information through the Printed Word, The Dissemination of Scholarly and Academic Knowledge, Vol 4: Books, Journals and Bibliographic Services (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1978), 14. 7 Ibid., 14 8 André Schiffrin, The Business of Books (London: Verso, 2000), 139. 9 Ibid., 139. 10 Cary Nelson and Stephen Watt, Academic Keywords: A Devil’s Dictionary for Higher Education (New York, Routledge, 1999), 227. 11 Ibid., 227. 12 Ibid., 230. 13 Ibid., 229. 14 Machlup and Leeson, Information through the Printed Word, Vol. I, Book Publishing, op. cit., 184. 15 Nelson and Watt, Academic Keywords, op. cit., 230. 16 Ibid., 230. 17 Rob Johnson, Anthony Watkinson and Michael Mabe, eds., STM Report (1968–2018), 61. 18 Ibid., 67. 19 Ibid. 20 Anthony Wilkinson, The Academic Book in North America: Report on Attitudes and Initiatives among Publishers, Libraries and Scholars Academic Book of the Future Project, 2016, p. 11, https://academicbookfuture.org/ academic-book-america-Wilkinson/. 21 Ibid., 11. 22 Schiffrin, The Business of Books, op. cit., 141. 23 Albert N. Greco, Jim Milliot and Robert M. Wharton, The Book Publishing Industry (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), 116. 24 Ibid., 110. 25 Ibid., 184.

Academia and Publishing 197 26 Profit margins in academic publishing are extremely high, around 35% for firms such as Springer or Taylor and Francis. See Peter Baldwin, The Copyright Wars: Three Centuries of Trans-Atlantic Battles (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014). 27 Machlup and Leeson, Vol. 2, Journals, op. cit., 42. 28 STM Report, op. cit., 42. 29 Ibid., 5. 30 Ibid. 31 John Ioannidis et al., “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False”, PLOS Medicine 2, no. 8 (2005), 0696–0701. 32 Guy Standing, The Corruption of Capitalism, Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay (London: Biteback Publishing, 2017), 51. 33 Ibid., 59. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid., 54. 36 STM Report, op. cit., 80. 37 Paul Bregler, “Is China Behaving Ethically at the Frontier of Biomedicine? And Might the West Need to Relax Its Rules to Keep Up”, The Age (Melbourne), June 23, 2019. 38 STM Report, op. cit., 65. 39 Ibid., 65. 40 Carol Tenopir, et al. “Seeking, Reading and the Use of Scholarly Articles: An International Study of the Perception and Behavior of Researchers”, Publications, 7, no. 1 (2019): 18. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid. 43 Samuel Arbesman, The Half-life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has An Expiry Date (New York: Current/Penguin, 2012). 44 STM Report, op. cit., 38. 45 Brandon Gaille, “17 Academic Publishing Industry Statistics and Trends”, BrandonGaille.com. 46 Peter Murphy, Universities and the Innovation Economy: The Creative Wasteland of Post-Industrial Societies, (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 18. 47 Ibid., 18. 48 Bruce Charlton and Peter Andras, “Medical Research Funding may have over-expanded and may be due for collapse”, QAJM: In International Journal of Medicine, 98 (2005): 53–55. 49 Matthew Cobb, “Why Your Brain Is Not a Computer”, The Guardian, February, 27, 2020. 50 See Matthew Cobb, The Idea of the Brain: The Past and Future of Neuroscience (New York: Basic Books, 2020), 370. 51 James Bridle, New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future, (London: Verso Books, 2019), 86. 52 Ibid., 86. 53 Ioannidis et al., “Why Most Published Research Findings are False”, op. cit. 54 Arbesman, The Half-life of Facts, op. cit., 160. 55 Nelson and Watt, Academic Keywords, op. cit., 230. 56 Peter Murphy, Universities and the Innovation Economy, 29. 57 Ibid., 30. 58 Ibid. 59 Ritchie, Science Fictions, op. cit. 60 Ibid., 193. 61 See Harry Redner, Beyond Civilization: Society, Culture and the Individual in the Age of Globalisation (New Brunswick, NJ & London: Transaction Publishers, 2013).

198  Academia and Publishing 62 Jerome Ravetz, “How should we treat science growing pains?”, The Guardian, June, 8, 2016. 63 Ibid. 64 Ibid. 65 Ibid. 66 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (London: Allen and Unwin, 1930), 182. 67 See Margali Sarfati Larson, The Rise of Professionalism (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2012). 68 Charles E. McClelland, The German Experience of Professionalization, Modern Learned Professions and Their Organization from the Early Nineteenth Century to the Hitler Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 69 Ibid., 25. 70 Steven Shapin, The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2008), ch. 3. 71 Ibid., 26. 72 Ibid., 44. 73 Ibid., 45. 74 Ibid., 46. 75 Max Weber, “Science as Vocation”, in From Max Weber, eds. Hans H. Gerth and Charles Wright Mills (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951), 142. 76 Ibid., 150. 77 Ibid. 78 Daniel Greenberg, Science for Sale: The Perils, Rewards and Delusions of Campus Capitalism (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2007), Epilogue, 286–295. 79 President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Farewell Address (Washington, DC: Presidential Papers, 1961). 80 Ibid., 210. 81 Ibid., 217. 82 Quoted in Shapin, The Scientific Life, op. cit., 215. 83 Jerome Ravetz, Scientific Knowledge, and Its Social Problems (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 408. 84 Ibid., 72. 85 Andrea Saltelli and Silvio Funtowicz, “What Is Science’s Crisis Really about?” Futures 91 (2017), 9. 86 See Daniel Greenberg, Science for Sale, op. cit., passim. 87 Stuart Ritchie, Science Fictions, op. cit., 294. 88 Ibid., 193. 89 Ibid., 37. 90 Ibid., 33. 91 Ibid. 92 Ibid. 93 Ibid., 183. 94 Ibid., 15. 95 Ibid., 199. 96 Philip B. Stark and Andrea Saltelli, “Cargo-cult Statistics and Scientific Crisis”, Significance Magazine, August 2018, The Royal Statistical Society, 41. 97 Ibid., 42. 98 Ibid. 99 Ibid. 100 Ibid. 101 Ibid., 41. 102 Ibid.

Academia and Publishing 199 103 Harry Redner, The Ends of Science: An Essay in Scientific Authority (Boulder, CO & London: Westview Press, 1987), ch. 6, 166–203. 104 Ioannidis et al., “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False”, op. cit. 105 Stuart Ritchie, Science Fictions, op. cit., 42. 106 Ibid. 107 Saltelli and Funtowicz, “What Is Science’s Crisis Rally about?” op. cit. 7. 108 Ibid., 5. 109 Ibid. 110 Ibid. 111 Stuart Ritchie, Science Fictions, op. cit., 209. 112 Ibid., 219. 113 Ibid., 222. 114 Ibid., 226. 115 Ibid. 116 Ibid., 234. 117 Ravetz, “How should we treat science’s growing pains?”, op. cit.

Bibliography Adams, Jonathan and Karen Gurney. “Evidence for Excellence: Has the Signal Overtaken the Substance? An Analysis of Journal Articles Submitted to RAE 2008”. London: Digital Science.com, 2014. Arbesman, Samuel. The Half-life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiry Date. New York: Current/Penguin, 2012. Bregler, Paul. “Is China Behaving Ethically at the Frontier of Biomedicine? And Might the West Need to Relax Its Rules to Keep up”? The Age (Melbourne), June 23, 2019. Bridle, James. New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future. London: Verso Books, 2019. Charlton, Bruce and Peter Andras. “Medical Research Funding May Have Overexpanded and May Be Due for Collapse”. QAJM: International Journal of Medicine 98 (2005): 53–55. Cobb, Matthew. “Why Your Brain Is Not a Computer”. The Guardian, February, 27, 2020. Cobb, Matthew. The Idea of the Brain: The Past and Future of Neuroscience. New York: Basic Books, 2020. Eisenhower, President Dwight D. Farewell Address. Washington DC: Presidential Papers, 1961. Gaille, Brandon. “17 Academic Publishing Industry Statistics and Trends”, https:// brandongaille.com/17-academic-publishing-industry-statistics-and-trends. Greco, Albert N., Jim Milliot and Robert M. Wharton. The Book Publishing Industry. Abingdon: Routledge, 2014. Greenberg, Daniel. Science for Sale: The Perils, Rewards and Delusions of Campus Capitalism. Epilogue, 286–295. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2007. Ioannidis, John, John Chen, Ralph Kodell, Charles Hauag and Robert Hoey. “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False”. PLOS Medicine 2, no 8 (2005): 0696–0701. Johnson, Rob, Anthony Watkinson and Michael Mabe, eds. STM Report (1968– 2018), 61. Larson, Margali Sarfati. The Rise of Professionalism. Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2012.

200  Academia and Publishing Machlup, Fritz and Kenneth Leeson. Information through the Printed Word, The Dissemination of Scholarly and Academic Knowledge, Vol 4: Books, Journals and Bibliographic Services. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1978, 14. McClelland, Charles E. The German Experience of Professionalization, Modern Learned Professions and Their Organization from the Early Nineteenth Century to the Hitler Era. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Mirowski, Philip. Science-Mart: Privatizing American Science. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. Murphy, Peter. Universities and the Innovation Economies: The Creative Wasteland of Post-Industrial Societies. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. Nelson, Cary and Stephen Watt. Academic Keywords: A Devil’s Dictionary for Higher Education. New York: Routledge, 1999. Price, Derek J. de Solla. Little Science, Big Science … and beyond. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. Ravetz, Jerome. “How Should We Treat Science Growing Pains?”, The Guardian, June 8, 2016. Redner, Harry. The Ends of Science: An Essay in Scientific Authority. Boulder, CO, and London: Westview Press, 1987, ch. 6. Redner, Harry. Beyond Civilization: Society, Culture and the Individual in the Age of Globalization. New Brunswick, NJ, and London: Transaction Publishers, 2013. Ritchie, Stuart. Science Fictions: Exposing Fraud, Bias, Negligence and Hype in Science. London: The Bodley Head, 2020. Saltelli, Andrea and Silvio Funtowicz. “What Is Science’s Crisis Really about?”. Futures 91 (2017): 5–11. Schiffrin, André. The Business of Books. London: Verso, 2000. Shapin, Steven. The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2008, ch. 3. Standing, Guy. The Corruption of Capitalism, Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay. London: Biteback Publishing, 2017. Stark, Philip B. and Andrea Saltelli. “Cargo-cult Statistics and Scientific Crisis”. Significance Magazine, The Royal Statistical Society, August 2018, 41. Tenopir, Carol, Kenneth Levine, Suzie Allard and Jordan Kaufman. “Seeking, Reading and the Use of Scholarly Articles: An International Study of the Perception and Behavior of Researchers” Publications 7, no. 1 (2019): 18. Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by Talcott Parsons. London: Allen and Unwin, 1930. Weber, Max. “Science as a Vocation”. In From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. Translated and edited and with an introduction by Hans H. Gerth and Charles Wright Mills, 129–156. New York: Oxford University Press, 1951. Wilkinson, Anthony. The Academic Book in North America: Report on Attitudes and Initiatives among Publishers, Libraries and Scholars Academic Book of the Future Project, 2016, 11, https://academicbookfuture.org/academic-book-america-Wilkinson/. Yank, Veronica and Drummond Rennie. “Disclosure of Research Contributions: A Study of Original Research Articles in the Lancet”. Psychology: Annals of Internal Medicine 130 (1999): 661–670.

Index

Note: Page numbers followed by “n” refer to endnotes. abstract empiricism 73 academic politics: collegial-elite authority 123, 124; formal-professional authority 123, 124; metric evaluations 132; patronal authority 123, 125; person-to-person tuition 122; postmodernist sociologies and philosophies 127; scientific achievement 127 Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) 131, 132, 135, 139, 140, 181 Actor-Network Theory 77 Adams, Hazard 32n11, 62 Adams, Jonathan 167 Adorno, Theodor 7, 63, 64, 74 aesthetic judgement 3 Alexander, Jeffrey 73, 74 Alsop, Joseph 58n2 Althusser, Louis 21, 43, 64, 74 American Neoclassicism 101 American sociology 40–41, 70–74, 152 “Analyse de structure des récits” (Communications) 26 analysis 3, 4, 13, 14, 17, 18, 21, 25, 26, 29 Andras, P. 174, 197n48 Annales school 36, 39–44, 46, 51, 53, 67 Apollonio, Umbro 32n2 Appiah, Kwame A. 22 Arab historiography 37 Arbesman, Samuel 146, 157n37, 173, 175, 197n43, 197n54 Archives for Social Science and Social Welfare 66 Ariès, Philippe 41 Aristotle 1, 14, 26, 62 Aron, Raymond 41, 67

Arrow, Kenneth 102, 104, 114 art criticism 2, 4, 12 article publication 161, 169, 176 articles vs books 161 Artificial Intelligence 52, 103–104, 137, 155 assessment 25, 98, 152, 161, 162, 165, 166, 173, 177, 178 Auerbach, Erich 7 authority 121, 123–127, 155 autocratic/aristocratic lordship 54 Axelrod, Julius 148 Bakhtin, Mikhail 7 Banks, Joseph 182 Barnes, David 76 Barro, Robert 110 Barthes, Roland 13–15, 17, 24, 26–28, 31, 74 Barthian criticism 25 Baudrillard, Jean 43, 52, 64, 74 Bauman, Zygmunt 53, 55, 56, 59n49 Baumgarten, Eduard 1, 69 Bayh-Dole Act 129 Becker, Carl H. 68, 103 Beck, Ulrich 53 Bedeutung 27 Béguin, Albert 7 Behaviourist system 154 Bellah, Robert 74, 153 Bennett, Tony 32n14, 32n15 Benveniste, Emile 26, 33n34 Bernal, Martin 48, 59n30 Bernasconi, Robert 30, 33n41 Beyond Civilization (Redner) 57 Big Science 52, 70, 120, 122, 176, 180, 181, 188, 193

202  Index Binder, Alan 64, 82n5 BISAC codes 167 The Blackwell Companion to Social Theory (Turner) 64 Bloch, Marc 39–42, 67 Bloor, David 76 bookkeeping 93 Borelli, Giovanni 159 Bottomore, Tom 82n22 Boulding, Kenneth 89, 95, 104, 116n12 Bourdieu, Pierre 41, 64, 65, 74 Boyer, Herbert 128, 189 Boyle, Robert 182 Braben, Don 177 Brahmin leftist ethos 143 Braudel, Fernand 40–43, 48, 67 Bregler, Paul 197n37 Brenner, Sydney 148, 157n39, 177 Breton, André 6 Breysig, Kurt 38, 68 Bridle, James 175, 197n51 British Operations Research 103 Brooks, Cleanth 7 Bruce, Stanley L. 86, 110–112, 116n7, 118n99, 118n102, 118n104 Buchanan, James 112 Bugaddimah (Ibn Khaldūn) 37 Burgess, Ernest W. 70 Burguière, André 42, 43, 46, 47, 58n10, 58n14, 58n17 Burke, Kenneth 50 Burke, Peter 23, 33n32, 50, 52, 58n10, 59n27, 59n41 Butler, Judith 17, 23 byzantine bureaucratic system 131 causality 78 Cavalieri, L.F. 127, 156n4 Cavendish, Henry 182 Chanu, Pierre 41 Charlton, B. 174, 197n48 Chartier, Roger 41 Chicago school 70, 90, 96, 102, 103, 109–111 Chinese historiography 37 Chomsky, Noam 125, 137, 155, 157n48 civilization 37, 39, 42, 43, 48, 54, 55, 57 civilizing processes 54 Cixous, Hélène 17, 22 Coase, Ronald 112, 115, 118n109 Cobb, Matthew 174, 175, 197n49, 197n50 Cohen, Stanley 128, 189

Cold War regime 129 Collective Memory Reader 40 commercialization 121, 127–130 commercial presses 161, 164, 165, 167, 169, 189, 192 Commons, John R. 87 competition 145, 149, 150 Connoisseurship 3, 5, 8, 10 coupure épistemologique 45 COVID-19 epidemic 140 Cowles Commission 96, 99, 101, 102, 104 Cowles economists 102, 104 Crane, Diana 154, 157n47 critic 2–4, 6, 11, 24, 25, 27 critical theory 19, 20, 165 critical writing 7 criticism: academicization of 4–6; aesthetic judgement 3; artistic movements 1; art scholarship 3; competitions and prizes 10; modernism effect on 5–10; enlightenment 1; failure of 7, 12–23, 178; interpretation and evaluation 3; judgement and validation in 25; language and 29–31; literary 23; postmodernism effect on 11–12; professional 5; sine qua non 2; success and failure of 1–12; Theorybabble and 24–32 critique 19, 27, 73, 87, 89, 90, 112 Culler, Jonathan 15 cultural criticism 20 Cultural Marxism 19, 21, 74 cultural studies 13, 14 cultural turn 18, 74 Culture and Society (Williams) 20 curse of Theory 19 Curtius, Ernst R. 7, 69 CIBER research group 173 Darwin, Charles 182, 184 Davey, Humphrey 182 dead white males (DWM) 23 decision theory 104; see also Operations Research De la grammatologie (Derrida) 21 Delanty, Gerard 73, 82n27 Deleuze, Gilles 43, 52, 74 de Man, Paul 15, 75, 155 Derrida, Jacques 14–17, 21, 22, 24, 28–32, 33n43, 43, 44, 64, 65, 75, 155 Der Sturm (magazine) 6 The Destruction of Reason (Lukács) 69

Index 203 Deus Absconditus 30 Diderot, Denis 1, 4 disciplines 12, 21, 32, 38, 40, 44, 47, 51, 66, 77, 78, 85, 97, 104, 124, 130, 132, 133, 143, 144, 147, 149–151, 162, 165, 167, 170; academic 115; in America 124; economic 113; order of 120; Platonic 57 Dosse, François 41, 58n12 Douglas, Mary 74, 112 dubbed Orientalism 47 Duby, Georges 41 Duisberg, Carl 184 Durkheim, Émile 39, 40, 64–67, 72, 73, 125, 147 Dylan, Bob 11, 127 Easthope, Anthony 20, 21, 33n22 economics: academic system 115; advising policy-makers 109; American and British economies 109; attendant circumstances 113; axiomatic discipline 91; Blackett’s Operations Research 103; chaos theory 85; classical economists 107; empirical validity 92; historians of 97; Ideal-Type construct 91, 92; irrationality 88; laws of economics 87, 88; Marginalist Revolution 109; marketplace of ideas 90; materialist approach 38; mathematization of 97, 100, 108; military connection 102; natural sciences 115; neoclassical economics 87; neoclassical monetarist 129; postwar period 103; professionalization of 106–115; professionalized academicism 111; reasoning 97; socialist economists 89 Economics: An Introductory Analysis (Samuelson) 100 economy of discourse 28 Eikhenbaum, Boris 7 Einstein 148, 177, 182 Eisenhower, President Dwight D. 188, 198n79 Eisenstadt, Shmuel 53 Elias, Norbert 43, 53–55, 59n48, 64, 65, 68 Eliot, Anthony 2, 6, 81n3 Eliot, George 50 Eliot, T.S. 1, 2, 6, 7, 11 empirical approaches 95 empirical validity 92 empirical verification 27

empiricism 73 encounter of Marxism and psychoanalysis 21 English, James 8–10, 18, 19, 32n3, 32n15 English-speaking countries 115, 121, 130 enlightenment 1, 4, 29, 47, 55, 62, 63, 65, 195 Ephraim, Gottfried 4 equality and inequality 79, 80 equilibrium theory 86 Essay on the History of Civil Society (Ferguson) 62 ET-phobic [Extra-Textuality] theory 26 European and American criticism 12 European civilization 42, 54, 57 evaluation of projects 177 extrinsic vs intrinsic motivation for research 195 failure of criticism in academia 12–23 Featherstone, Mike 53 features of multiversity: administrative organization 126; bureaucratization 134; commercialization 128, 130; globalization 130; professionalization 121; specialization 121 Felperin, Howard 15 feminism 14, 21, 23 Fester, C.B. 154 Film Theory 20 Finch, Henry A. 81n1, 83n44, 116n17 Finnegan’s Wake (Joyce) 6 Fisher, Irving 98, 99, 107 Fletcher, Ronald 82n7 Ford, Henry 35, 187 Foucaultian discourse 19, 49 Foucault, Michel 14–17. 19, 24, 28, 29, 33n39, 41, 43–53, 58n20, 64, 68, 74, 77, 82n31, 163 The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism 5 Frank, André G. 48 Frankfurt school 19, 20, 43, 69, 73, 74 Frégnac, Yves 174, 175 French History 39, 41, 43 French revolution 120, 183, 195 French Theory 76, 77; in America 44; exponents of 35, 43, 74; postmodernism and 12, 52, 53, 64; related to criticism 14–19, 25–27; in sociology 64–65, 74–77 Freund, Julien 41 Freyer, Hans 69

204  Index Friedman, Milton 90, 96, 103, 109, 113, 118n105, 129 Frisch, Ragnar 99 Frow, John 32n14, 32n15 Fry, Northrop 7, 50 Funtowicz, Silvio 190, 194, 198n85, 199n107 Furet, François 41, 42, 58n16 Gaille, Brandon 197n45 Galbraith, John K. 87, 112 Galloway, Scott 143, 156n33 game theory research 105 Gautier, Théophile 1, 4 gay and lesbian studies 19, 23 Geertz, Clifford 49, 74 Gehring, Frank 10 Gemeinschaft 180, 181, 193 general models of economics: anthropological 89; classical 85; equilibrium 85, 86; historicist 81; institutional 87; interventionist 110; neo-classical 86–90; scientific 85; technological 115 German historicism 70 Gerth, Hans 82n13, 198n75 Giddens, Anthony 53, 64 Giddings, Frank H. 69, 70 globalization 115, 121, 128; in education and research 130–131 Glucksmann, André 42 Goody, Jack 48, 59n31 Goubert, Pierre 41 Gouldner, Alvin 73, 152, 153, 157n42 Grandes Écoles 120, 139, 149 grand narratives 80 The Grand Scribe’s Records (Sima Qian) 37 Grant, Randy R. 86, 110–112, 116n7, 118n99, 118n102, 118n104 The Great Transformation (Polanyi) 88 Greco, Albert N. 168, 196n23 Greek historians 37 Greenberg, Daniel 198n78, 198n86 Greenblatt, Stephen 15, 48 Groden, Martin 33n22 Gruzinski, Serge 41 Gugelberger, Georg 21, 33n27 Guillory, John J. 15, 32n11 Habermas, Jürgen 29, 64, 69, 72, 73 Halbwachs, Maurice 40, 67 Hartman, Geoffrey 25 Hartman, Jeffrey 15

Harvey, David 53 Hayek, Friedrich August von 80, 90, 96, 109–112, 129 Heath, Stephen 20, 21 Hebdige, Dick 17 Henderson, L.J. 72 Herrnstein, Richard 154 Hexter, J.H. 51 Higgs, Peter 148, 157n40 historical sociology 36, 51–54, 55–57, 67, 71 historiography 37, 41, 46, 55 history of mentalities 40 Hobhouse, Leonard, T 66 Hodges, Andrew 126, 156n3 Hogarth, Richard 16 Holmwood, John 73, 82n26, 82n29 Humboldt University 120 ideological agendas 90, 113 ideology 15, 19, 21, 49, 67, 109, 114 Iggers, Georg 44, 58n19 impact of ranking on academia: battle for ranking 150; distorting effect 151; impenetrable obscurity 155; partial rehabilitation 153; publication 155; status-bound environment 151; traditional rankings 149 imperium sine fine 28 influence of metrics on assessment of published works 191 interpretation 3, 4, 14, 25, 29 Intimations of Postmodernity (Bauman) 55 Ioannidis, John 171, 175, 193, 197n31, 197n53, 199n104 irrationalist mysticism 29 Irwin, Robert 47, 59n28 Jackson, Michael 8, 10 Jameson, Frederic 15, 53 Johnson, Barbara 1, 4, 31, 33n44 Johnson, Rob 164, 196n17 Joyce, James 6, 11, 52 Kahn, Richard 101 Kaldor, Nicholas 101 Kathedersozialisten 67 Key Contemporary Social Theorists (Eliot and Ray) 63 Keylor, William J. 38–40, 58n3, 82n8 Keylor, William R. 38–40, 58n3, 82n8 Keynes, John Maynard 80, 101, 107, 109–111, 147, 148 Kippur, Yom 129

Index 205 Klamer, Arjo 82n5, 109, 118n93 Kneale, J. Douglas 21, 33n25 Knies, Carl 87 Koopmans, Tjalling 99, 102, 104 Kreiswirth, Martin 33n22 Kriek, Ernst 69 Kristeva, Julia 17, 22, 43 Kristeva, Julie 17, 22, 43 Krugman, Paul 110 Kuhn, Thomas 63, 76, 82n37 Kula, Witold 88, 89, 116n10 Kutner, Robert 114, 118n107 Labrousse, Ernest 41–43, 67 Labrousse moment 43 Ladurie, Emmanuel Le Roy 41 Lamprecht, Karl 38, 68 languages, literary see literary languages languages of culture 27 L’Année Sociologique 66 Lanson, Gustave 1 Larson, Magali Sarfati 15, 198n67 Lasch, Scott 53 Latour, Bruno 52, 77, 83n41, 190 law of the Signifier 29, 30 Lawrence, D.H. 2, 6, 11 Leavis, F.R. 1, 6, 7, 11, 16 Leeson, Kenneth 163–165, 169, 196n6, 196n14, 197n27 Lefebvre, Lucien 67 Le Figaro (newspaper) 5 Le Goff, Jacques 41 Lentricchia, Frank 48, 59n32 Lepenies, Wolf 67, 82n9 Lessing, Gottfried Ephraim 1, 4, 27 Levinas, Emmanuel 30 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 64, 65, 74 Levy, Bernard-Henri 42 Levy, David 58n8 Leys, Simon 47, 59n29 Lindsay, James 22, 33n30, 51, 59n37 linguistics of literariness 26 List, Friedrich 87 literature: history and 47–58; sportification of 10 literary competitions 9–10 literary criticism 1, 2, 14, 16–19, 24 literary languages 7, 11, 26–27 literary movements 2 Lives of the Poets (Johnson) 4 Lodge, David 13, 32n8 logocentrism 31 Look (magazine) 8

Love, John 80, 81, 83n50, 93–95, 116n16, 116n30, 116n32 Lucas, Robert 103, 109–112 Luhmann, Niklas 64, 69, 73 Lukács, Georg 7, 50, 69, 82n11 Lyotard, Jean-François 24, 43, 52, 53, 58, 59n42, 64, 74 Mabe, Michael 164, 196n17 Machine Dreams (Mirowski) 99 Machlup, Fritz 163–165, 169, 196n6, 196n14, 197n27 Malinowski, Bronislaw 89, 147 Mallarméan poetics 26 Mandalios, John 59n46 Mandrou, Robert 41 Mannheim, Karl 68, 69 Marcuse, Herbert 73, 74 Marginalism 96, 107 Marginalist Revolution 46, 86, 96–98, 109 marginal utility theory 93, 94, 116n26, 118n89 Marinetti, F.T. 5 Markiw, N. Gregory 110 Marshall, Alfred 72, 107, 108 Marshallian theory 100 Marxism 19–21, 67, 74, 96, 113 Marxist theory 80 Materialist Cartesianism 53 Mathematical Investigations into the Theory of Value and Prices (Fisher) 98 Mattheson, Johann 4 Mauss, Marcel 66, 67, 89 Maxwell, Robert 169 Mayakovski, Vladimir 6, 11 Mc Cabe, Colin 20 McClelland, Charles E 184, 198n68 McCloskey, Deirdre 109 McCloskey, Donald N. 51, 59n38, 109 McNeill, William H. 43, 57 McQuillen, Martin 16, 32n13 Mead, George Herbert 64, 66, 73 Megill, Allan 51, 59n38 Mendelsohn, Everett 116n4, 156n2 Menger, Karl 87, 90, 94–96, 98 Merquior, José Guilherme 14, 26, 27, 29, 32n10, 33n35, 45, 46, 58n21 Merton, Robert C. 112, 146 Method-driven research 13 Methodenstreit 81, 87, 90, 91, 94, 95, 112 Metric bias 143–149 Metric evaluations 132 Michelet, Jules 37

206  Index Middlemarch (Eliot) 50 Millet, Kate 17 Milliot, Jim 168, 196n23 Mill, J.S. 62 Mills, C. W. 73, 82n13, 82n25, 198n75 Minsky, Hyman 111, 112, 118n103, 155 Minsky Moment 112 Mirowski and postwar economics 95–106 Mirowski, Philip 85, 86, 90, 93, 95–106, 115, 116n1, 116n5, 116n13, 117n37, 117n38, 117n43, 117n55, 117n58, 117n60, 117n73, 118n91, 118n110, 127, 129, 130, 156n6, 156n8, 162, 196n2 Missionary universities 140 Mitchell, Wesley C. 112 Mitchell, William C. 87 modern history 37 Modernism 2, 5, 11, 52, 55 money reform 44 Montrose, Louis A. 56, 59n51 Moore, Wilbert E. 73, 82n22, 175 Morgenstern, Oscar 103, 117n75 Mullens, Kary 190 multiversity 120–157; American 181; formal-professional authority in 123–127; metric bias and 143–149, overview of 121; university rankings and 123, 132–143; versus university 122 Murphy, Peter 57, 59n52, 134, 135, 141, 148, 156n15, 156n22, 156n34, 157n41, 174, 177, 197n46, 197n56 Musica Critica 4 My Economic Endeavours 99 Nash equilibrium theory 86, 105 Nash model of equilibrium 86 Nazi program of extermination 75 Nazism 42, 54, 65, 69 Nelson, Cary 164–166, 176, 196n10, 196n15, 197n55 Nelson, John S. 59n38 neo-classical 1, 45, 63, 64, 72, 77, 79–81, 85–90, 93–98, 100–108, 110–112, 114, 129 neoclassical liberal economists 129 neoclassical research program 101 neoclassical school 85 Neoclassicism 86, 87, 90, 98, 101, 107, 110 neo-Keynesian 110 neo-liberal 90, 129 Neumann, John 86, 102–106, 117n75

new classical 110 New Historicism 15, 48, 49, 59n32, 59n34, 59n36 New Keynesian 110, 111 Nietzsche, Friedrich 15, 29, 30, 43, 46 Nisbet, Robert 82n22 Nobel Prize-winning geneticists 128 Nora, Pierre 40 North, Douglas 112 objectivity 76, 78 observation 75 Oldenberg, Henry 159 Olick, Jeffrey K. 40, 58n8 Operations Research 100, 103, 106 Orientalism (Said) 21 Paine, Lincoln 58, 59n55 Paradeise, Catherine 133, 135, 138, 139, 145, 156n13, 156n20, 156n24 paradigms 78, 137 paradox 18, 88, 90, 162, 164, 165, 174 Pareto, Vilfredo 66, 72, 114 Park, Robert 70 Parsons, Talcott 41, 64, 69–74, 82n21, 95, 125, 152–154, 198n66 The Passing of an Illusion (Furet) 42 Pearson, Karl 70 phallocentrism 21, 23, 31 Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (Oldenberg) 159 Physics research 124 Pickering, Andrew 83n40 Piketty, Thomas 79, 142, 143, 156n30 Platonic disciplines 57 Pluckrose, Helen 22, 33n30, 51, 59n37 Polanyi, Karl 88, 89, 116n11 The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (Florian and Thomas)70 political unification process 54 Pollock, Jackson 8 Porter, Theodore 97, 107, 108, 117n38, 118n85, 118n88 Positivism 55 positivist history 38 post-colonial studies (PCSs) 17, 21, 22 The Postmodern Condition (Lyotard) 52 Postmodernism 2, 11, 14, 17, 24, 51, 52, 55, 75 Post-Modernism and the Social Sciences (Rosenau) 74 postmodernist 50; deconstructivist 127; “discourse” 50, 51; grand narratives 58

Index 207 Poulet, Georges 7 Praemium Imperiale 10 Pressman, Steven 100, 111, 117n57, 118n100 Price, Derek J. de Solla 146, 157n36, 160, 196n1 Principles of Economics (Marshall) 107 principle of symmetry 76 problems of academic publishing: exponential growth 160; fragmentation and trivialization of subject matter 163; ghost authorship 163; quantity vs quality 178–196 professional critics 5 professionalization 106–115 progress 11, 20, 43, 46, 55, 143, 165, 167, 174, 175 The Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism (Weber) 66 publication system: adulterated publications 163; articles and books 161; group publication 162; journals 161–162; social sciences 162; STM Report 165, 166 quantitative metrics 135 radical Feminist 12, 31 Radkau, Joachim 82n12 ranking 123, 131–143, 145, 149–156 Ransom, John Crow 7 Rapoport, Anatol 105 rational argument 75 rationality 25–29, 31, 46, 50, 51, 56, 91, 97, 98, 105, 106 rationalization 133 Ravetz, Jerome 179–181, 190, 191, 193, 195, 198n62, 198n83, 199n117 Ray, Larry 81n3 Raymond, Mariel 7 Reader on Deconstruction (McQuillen) 16 reading and writing 41 readings 25, 28 reason 3, 5, 12, 18, 19, 22–25, 40, 42, 43, 45, 53, 57, 67, 69, 73, 85, 88, 97, 106, 113, 115, 141, 143, 149, 150, 152, 166, 167, 169–171, 176, 189, 193 Reder, Melvin 108, 114, 118n92, 118n108 Redner, Harry 32n1, 32n9, 33n33, 33n38, 59n43, 59n44, 59n45, 59n47, 59n54, 83n39, 117n72, 156n1, 156n5, 156n23, 197n61, 199n103

Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Greenblatt) 48 research 3, 6, 13, 22, 44, 78, 96, 139–141, 144–146, 151, 162, 163, 191–194; archival 44; assessment exercises 166–167; Cold 101; commercialization of 121, 128–129; economic 92, 114; factual 39; faculty 139; findings 175–176; game theory 105; globalization and 130–131; historical 36–37; medical 173–174; operations 103; opportunities 125–126; pharmacological 175; in physics 124; quantitative methods of 70; scholarship and 128, 129; scientific 57, 70, 100, 102, 121, 129–131, 151, 175, 182–185, 188–189; sociological 71; survey 78; teaching and 121–122; weapons 188 research universities 141 retrospective 104, 190 Revel, Jacques 41 Ricardo, David 45, 62 Rich, Adrienne 23 Richard, Jean-Pierre 7 Ringer, Fritz 83n44 Ritchie, Stuart 132, 156n11, 163, 178, 191, 193, 196n5, 197n29, 198n87, 199n105, 199n111 Ritzer, George 74, 82n29 Rivkin, Julie 33n44 Robinson, Joan 101, 111 Roman historians 37 Roscher, Wilhelm 87 Rose, Jacqueline 20 Rosenau, Pauline Marie 75, 82n33 Ross, Dorothy 58n1, 70, 71, 82n14, 107, 118n86 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 1, 4 Rousset, Jean 7 Ryan, Michael 33n44 The Sage Handbook of Cultural Analysis (Bennett and Frow) 17 Said, Edward 21, 47 Saltelli, Andrea 190, 192–194, 198n85, 198n96, 199n107 Samuelson, Paul 95, 96, 100–102, 112, 113, 155 Sanger, Fred 148, 157n39 Saunders, Philip 117n56 Schelsky, Helmut 69 Schiffrin, André 164, 168, 196n8, 196n22

208  Index Scholes-Black-Merton theorem 112 Scholes, Myron 112 Scholes, Robert 17 schools of history: academic historians 35; Annales 40–42, 53, 67; archaeological history 36; cultural history 36; economic history 36; factual level 41; historical scholarship 38; historical writing 38; linguistic history 36; Modern history 37; new history 41; political history 36; Positivist history 38; process of corruption 51; sociological history 36; writing history 36 Schumpeter, Joseph 80, 81, 87, 90, 94, 95, 99, 117n36, 147 Science-driven technological innovation 128 Science in Action (Latour) 77 scientific legitimation 96 scientization of economics: mathematization 96, 97, 100, 108, 111; physical metaphors 85, 96, 98 Scott, Joan 44 Searle, Leroy 32n11, 73 Second World War 6, 7, 35, 41, 67, 69, 70, 81, 94, 96, 99, 101, 106, 107, 109, 112, 120, 129, 137–139, 149, 154, 159, 182, 187, 188, 193, 194 Seidman, Steven 64, 74, 77, 82n4, 82n32, 83n42 selection by status of author vs substance of product 168 Selvatico, Riccardo 9 Semiotics, defined 26 Serres, Michel 52, 77 Shakespeare, William 23 Shapin, Steven 128, 156n7, 185, 186, 189, 190, 198n70, 198n82 Sheridan, Alan M. 33n39 Shils, Edward A. 81n1, 83n44, 116n17 Shklovsky, Viktor 7 Shubik, Martin 86 Shudra caste of universities 141 Simmel, Georg 41, 43, 55, 64, 66, 67, 69, 70, 147 Simonton, D.K. 177 Skinner, B.F. 125, 137, 154 Smith 45, 62, 80, 85 social sciences 51; causal relations 78; history of 44, 51, 52 sociology: abstract empiricism 73; in America 69–81; bibliometric data 65;

capitalism 80; Critical Theory 74; decisive effect 74; defined 62; Enlightenment 65; in Europe 62–69; experimental approach 78; fragmentation of 73; fragmented state 80; in Germany 68; history and 47–58; institutionalization and professionalization 66; integral discipline 65; intellectual discourse 76; Parsons’ system for 153–154; principle of symmetry 76; role of theory 79; Strong Program 76–77; theoretical paradigm 72; triple crisis 77 Solow, Robert 101 Sombart, Werner 69 special studies 13, 76 Spengler, Oswald 43, 57 The Spirit of the Laws (Montesquieu) 62 Spitzer, Leo 7 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorti. 21, 22, 33n43, 47 sportification of art 7–8 Sputnik scare 121 Stabilizing an Unstable Economy (Minsky) 111 Stalinist regime 42 Standing, Guy 171, 197n32 Stark, Philip 192, 193, 198n96 Starobinski, Jean 7 Stigler, George 90, 103, 108, 118n89 Stiglitz, Joseph 79, 110, 118n98 Stone, Lawrence 41, 58n13 Strong Program (Kuhn) 76–77 Strickland, Geoffrey 26, 33n36 Structuralist paraphernalia 46 success and failure of criticism 1–12 Survey 18, 41, 47, 58, 64, 65, 72, 74, 78, 166, 172 Swanson, Robert 128, 189 Swinger, Grant 188 Szelenyi, Ivan 77–79, 83n43, 83n45 Szilard, Leo 182 Tackett, Timothy 46, 58n10, 58n24 Taine, Hippolyte 38 technological civilization 57 Technology 22, 52, 54, 115, 120, 128, 136, 149, 171, 189 Teggart, Frederick J. 37 Tenopir, Carol 173, 197n40 Thatcher 109, 129 theoretical vs empirical approaches 95 theorist 6, 16, 35

Index 209 theory: abstract theory 93, 97; of academic politics 123; of capitalism 80, 81; catastrophe theory 85; chaos theory 85; complete theory 111; comprehensive theory 62, 80; critical theory 19, 74, 165; decision theory 100, 104; of economic behaviour 62; economic theory 81, 85, 91–93, 96, 100, 101, 104, 110; equating theory 72; equilibrium theory 85, 86, 105; formal theory 97; French theory 12, 14–19, 25–27, 35, 43, 44, 52, 53, 64, 65, 74, 76, 77; game theory 86, 102–106; general theory 54, 80, 81, 97; grand theory 73; information theory 103, 137; Keynesian theory 110; labour theory 80, 87; of marginal utility 94; Marshallian theory 100; Marxist theory 80; Nash’s theory 105; neoclassical theory 98, 101, 104, 114; omnibus theory 73; physical theory 98, 101; postcolonial theory 22; potential theory 97; of professionalization 15; pure theory 86, 97, 99; social theory 64, 71, 73, 74, 77; sociological theory 79–80; type theory 93; utility theory 93, 94 Theorybabble 20, 21, 23–32, 43, 50–52, 155; betrayal of criticism 32; of French Theory 43; history of 24; postmodernist “discourse” 50, 51 Thoenig, Jean-Claude 133, 135, 136, 138, 139, 145, 156n13, 156n20, 156n21, 156n24 Thomas, William J. 70 totalitarianism 42, 47 Touraine, Alain 68 Toynbee, Arnold 43, 57 traditional forms of university: ecclesiastical 120; grandes Écoles 120, 139, 149; humanistic 120; Humboldtian 120; liberal-protestant 120; scholastic 120 traditional models of economics: neo-classical 86–90; neo-Keynesian 110; neo-liberal 90; new classical 110; new Keynesian 110 Treitschke, Heinrich 38 Turing, Alan 126, 156n3 Turner, Brian S. 59n46, 64, 72, 82n6, 82n20, 82n26, 82n30, 82n36 Turner, Stephen 72, 74, 76

Turner, Victor 74 20th Century Criticism (Lodge) 13 types of authority: collegial-elite authority 123, 124; formal-professional authority 123, 124; patronal authority 123, 125 University 120–157; academicization of criticism in 6; commercialization of 127–130; globalization and 130–132; levels of achievement in 136; ranking 123, 132–143; scientific research and 129; see also Multiversity; traditional forms of university Veblen, Thorstein 87, 112 Vaishya universities 141 Veeser, H. Aram 59n32, 59n34, 59n51 Venter, Craig 189, 190 Veyne, Paul 51 Vico, Giambattista 62–63 Vinitzky-Seroussi, Vered 40, 58n8 Viviani, Vincenzo 159 Vogl, Joseph 88, 116n8 Voloshinov, V.W. 7 von Mises, Ludwig 114 von Neumann, John 86, 102–106, 117n75 von Ranke, Leopold 37 Wagner, Richard 5 Waldrop, M. Mitchell 85, 116n2 Wallace, Alfred 182 Wallerstein, Immanuel 48 Walras, Léon 66, 86, 95–98, 96, 97, 116n6 Walsh, James D. 156n33 Walstead, William 117n56 Walter, Benjamin 7, 11 War and Peace (Tolstoy) 50 Ward, Benjamin 114, 118n106 The Wasteland 6 Watkinson, Anthony 164, 196n17 Watt, Steven 164–166, 176, 196n10, 196n15, 197n55 The Wealth of Nations (Smith) 62 Weber, Max 40, 41, 43, 57, 63, 64, 66–73, 78–81, 82n1, 82n13, 83n44, 87, 90–96, 113, 116n17, 116n26, 116n31, 134, 147, 148, 181–184, 186, 187, 189, 198n66, 198n75 Weinberg, Steven 76, 83n38 Weingart, Peter 116n4, 156n2 Western Civilization 21, 37, 55, 65, 178 Wharton, Robert M. 168, 196n23

210  Index Whig historian 38 White, Hayden 49, 59n34, 59n35 Whitley, Richard 86, 116n4, 126, 156n2 Wiener, Norbert 102, 137 Wilkinson, Anthony 167, 196n20 Wilkinson, Richard G. 167, 196n20 Williams, Raymond 13, 16 Wilson, Edmund 7, 11

Winters, Ivor 7 Wislicz, Tomasz 41, 58n11 Woodford, Michael 110 Wood, Nigel 32n8 the Wordsworth of our time 25 Worringer, Wilhelm 6 Zimmermann, Bonnie 23, 33n31 Znaniecki, Florian 70