Positive Liberty

My second attempt at the academic job market recently came up short. No, I’m not grousing about my unhappy fate below the fold.

Instead, this post will be the first in a series of things I have to say now that I’ve gotten some critical distance from the academy. It’s not that I couldn’t say them while I was still a graduate student. On the contrary, I’ve cribbed a lot of this stuff from class writings, e-mails to colleagues, and discussions over drinks at various conferences. I just never quite put it all together before. I never imagined it as a unified call to action — a manifesto — before. But by now I’m sounding pompous. On with the show, and let’s just see any university dare to hire me when it’s over. If the blog didn’t scare them away already, then this will surely finish the job.

First Things First: Above all, never write like this:

[T]he medieval “theories” which bolster much of the self-consciously avant-garde theory of postwar France serve “less as detached objects for the fetishist’s sterile delectation than as productive sacraments of creative ingenuity, partial remains from an unknowable past invested nevertheless with a transformative capacity in the critical present” [From Bruce Holsinger, The Premodern Condition: Medievalism and the Making of Theory, p 5.]

This is dreadful writing. I certainly understand what he’s saying — but it’s dreadful all the same. It would be better to write as follows: “Avant-garde theorists of postwar France learned many practical lessons from medieval intellectuals, even despite problems of interpretation.” Same work, half the time.

Want to know why the average man in the street doesn’t care for academics? It’s not our politics. It’s our prose, which makes our politics and everything else about us laughable. (But then, the average man in the street might just inhabit the “uncritical present,” that part of “right now” whose criticisms are not, uh, transformative enough to matter. File them under “sterile delectations,” perhaps.) Write simply, and if you cannot express your ideas in simple prose, then there is a good chance that they weren’t worth expressing in the first place.

Historians should read much less theory and many more primary sources. Look, people, theory has eaten you all for lunch. It’s not only spoiled your writing and made you look foolish to general public, but I’d even say that it’s actively impaired your understanding of the past. It’s supplied you with silly, unhelpful ways of writing — and devoured much time that would have been better spent in mastering the primary sources.

It is truly appalling to me how little historians and would-be historians of eighteenth century France have read of Rousseau, Voltaire, Mercier, or Mairobert — the bestsellers of the era that they claim to study. The first two are relatively well known — albeit far too often unread. The third and fourth are known only among specialists — and most often, even the specialists aren’t reading them. But modern editions of their works are easy to obtain, and most are neither long nor difficult reading. (Mercier in particular is some of the most fun you’ll ever have in the French language, so there goes that excuse.)

How many historians of early modern France have read the plays of Racine or even the eminently approachable Molière? How many of them have actually sat down to read Pascal or Descartes? How many have read their Bibles? The Bible, after all, was the single most widely read and widely cited book of the era. Read the whole thing, cover to cover — and then go back and rewrite the history of the eighteenth century.

Nor did I pick these examples lightly. I mentioned each one not only for its importance, but because on at least one occasion, a historian in the field has actually confessed to me that he or she had not read the author or work in question. These are the experts, mind you — the experts.

Yet we can be sure that all of the experts, down to the very last, has read Foucault and Derrida and LaCapra. They’ve probably read Blanchot, Irigary, Barthes, Baudrillard, and a host of others. They’ve even read an embarrassingly large number of articles proposing to elaborate upon or critique the theories of each of them. I know, because I read them too. Yet a single page of Rousseau says more about the eighteenth century than an entire volume of reconsiderations on Foucault. (If you didn’t immediately flag that last sentence as a characteristically Rousseauan turn of phrase, then you really need to go back and read more Rousseau.)

And what do we buy with our indulgence in theory? Carol Lloyd’s classic piece from Salon still says it best:

My friends now fall into two categories: ex-Theory nerds (like me) making a living off their late-learned pragmatism, and those who still live and breathe by Theory’s fragrant vapors — political theorists, literary critics, historians, eternal graduate students. I love talking to them and often I covet the little thrones their ideas get to perch on. Yet when I come away from a conversation that has swooped from the racist implications of early French embalming techniques to the “revolutionary interventions” in the margins of “Tristram Shandy” and ended with the appalling hypocrisy of the right wing, I often feel a strange discomfort. Because these are some of the smartest, kindest and most energetic people I know, I cannot resist the question: Is this the best way for them to spend their lives? If they acknowledged that they were largely engaged in the amoral endeavor of pure intellectual play, that would be one thing, but each of these people considers their work deeply, emphatically political.

(Notice the marvelous clarity of her prose? “Little thrones their ideas get to perch on!” I’d burn my Foucault to write like that.)

The most grandly absurd thing about historians’ obsession with theory is that — for the most part — we don’t even believe the stuff ourselves. In theory, historians are postmodernists, but in practice, we’re pragmatists, both in our historical writing and in our everyday politics. The rest of the academy has mostly moved on, and it’s high time we did so too. An e-mailer to Andrew Sullivan nailed it a couple of days ago:

People in general, but especially so-called movement conservatives have failed to notice that academia has largely moved on from the post-modern nonsense that was peddled in many elite departments in the 1980s. To take a few examples: political theory and philosophy is overwhelmingly liberal (with a small L). The dominant figure is John Rawls, who was a defender of classical liberal principles drawn from John Locke. These days, I see multicultural critiques of liberalism in retreat. Empirical political science has its share of po-mos, but they are rarely found in elite departments in the US. These are dominated by rational choice theory and neo-positivist methods, preferably with a statistical component. Economics essentially has no post-moderns, while Marxists are rare.

It is true that Anthropology remains a bastion of multi-culti b.s., but they are essentially alone in the social sciences. I know much less about humanities departments, but friends tell me that the French literary criticism wave passed long ago. English is returning to the close analysis of texts. Academic Philosophy is dominated by the Anglo-American school. Professional academics may be somewhat to the left of average Americans, but they are by no means outside the mainstream of liberal-democratic thought.

I quail at calling Rawls a classical liberal, but he’s no Michel Foucault. Nor are most of the people who so avidly push Foucault on their graduate students. There’s a huge disconnect between what historians teach (because they think they have to) and what they actually believe or practice in their own lives (because, one imagines, they are sincerely convinced — but sincere conviction is terribly gauche).

Now, one plausible defense of theory, even of a theory that we don’t really believe in, is that the alternative — call it history by the seat of your pants, perhaps — leads to complacency. It leads to leaving bad ideas unchallenged; it leads straight back to the conventional wisdom by way of habit and assumption. At its best, theory helps us avoid these traps. But there can be too much of a good thing, and some diseases are better than their cures.

Certainly, no one wants to be found writing a self-satisfied, just-so, there-you-have-it history. Yet it seems we’re overly desperate to be provocative, even if it’s to no discernable end. Theory helps us be provocative in all the ways our in-group has already approved. Which, come to think of it, is problematic too.

Consider history as an art, akin to painting, music, or architecture. (I do think that here, rather than among the social sciences, is where the historian finds his truest home.) An architect may have outrageously provocative theories, yet be poor at the craft of making buildings. The same is true of historians in their writing, and I have to say I think that the profession has gone too far in that direction.

The remedy I propose is a return to the primary source, a return to the encyclopedic knowledge of the facts of the past that seemed to characterize the profession for so long — and that now seems to be disappearing.

Isn’t this mere antiquarianism? Perhaps — yet antiquarianism is vastly underrated. For one thing, historians have been feeding on the corpses of the Victorian antiquarians ever since they died. Think about that the next time you’re doing your research. Almost all of the very best tables, indices, compilations, digests, and concordances — the tools we use to do our work — were written before 1930. Where are all the new editions? This ought not to be shameful work for us.

Nor is antiquarian history necessarily just a lot of self-satisfied whiggery. To compile records of the past, patiently, methodically, and as completely as possible, is not to overprivilege the present. As Marguerite Yourcenar once put it, this work builds granaries against the intellectual starvation of the future. She wrote of the libraries of Hadrian and the coming fall of the Roman Empire, but not so far in our own future, intellectual starvation may come of a generation whose greatest literary contribution is the SMS. Years from now, when our descendants rediscover the patient beauty of the sustained narrative, they’re going to wonder what we historians were up to when the intellectual world collapsed, and why we were so busy talking to ourselves about things that we never really believed in the first place.

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