Been reading Lord Acton over winter break, something I have wanted to do since grad school. He is one of those ancient nineteenth-century British historians who always seem to have a clever quote. You still find him cited in mid-twentieth-century histories of Europe and his principles clearly continue to influence senior historians today, the ones who eschew all reference to theory.
Acton explains why historians so wish to avoid methods that require some sort of moral judgment. He explains the need for autonomy in scholarship with a clarity and vigor I had no seen before. In reviewing German schools of history, he credits Leopold von Ranke with writing as a dispassionate, detached, apolitical story teller.
Now Ranke, and his brand of historicism, is often denounced in a few swift, familiar moves. A quote from Benjamin here and a few "don't you know" statements about Prussian nationalism, then he is finished.
On the question of autonomy, however, Acton explains what an innovation it was for an historian to write with automatically being in the service of the state, politics, or church theology. Ranke was different from his predecessors for they wrote history as "applied politics, fluid law, religion exemplified, or [in] the school of patriotism." Today we would add the free market to the list of institutions which demand obedience in writing history. Write history so that it will sell well, reads the injunction.
Now impartiality is often an excuse for allowing prejudices to remain unchallenged, and surprisingly Lord Acton acknowledges just that--Ranke refrained from judging history so as to not disturb German patriotic allegiances to historical figures, such as Martin Luther or Frederick the Great, who clearly could be subject to moral criticism.
Autonomy in historical scholarship is sometimes open to political critique, but really these days it is much more challenged by market forces. How many times have we sat on committees where we discussed whether a potential dissertation topic was saleable? The job market and the reading market and the dean's market shape our conversations much more than any supposed drive to know.
Surely this was true for Ranke, as well. He sold gobs of books to the general audience. Acton does not mention the importance of this market, it is still invisible to his academic eyes, yet his argument for autonomy, for writing without serving an immediate end, applies brilliantly to our own neo-liberal institution.
History departments jettison fields because they don't want to hire faculty to teach in them. European history no longer matters in a global, post-colonial world, it is sometimes said, so some departments stop teaching in it. Surely there is no scholarly justification for tossing out entire fields of history, but in a budget driven, enrollment-oriented university, it takes just a few meetings to put an end to an entire field of knowledge.
This is the new threat to autonomy, far more serious a concern than the intrusion of theory into history. It is an entirely different pressure on scholarship than the ones Acton and Ranke recognized.
source: Acton, Lord, "German Schools of History," English Historical Review, 1 (1886): 7-42.
I share your concerns about the increasing commercialization of academia and university life. But I wonder if you don't paint this all too starkly, owing to the fact that you begin by assuming an all too abstract ideal of autonomy. Surely, no historian – or artist or literary scholar or scientist, etc – has every enjoyed autonomy in the sense that seems to be implied as an ideal in the last paragraph. The constraints on autonomy are always already there and operate on multiple dimensions and come from multiple sources – intellectual (e.g., prevailing discussions and vocabulary), institutional (sites for research, writing, teaching and their purposes), social and political (demographic changes, political and economic priorities), and so on. I wonder, then, if one can speak of "threat(s) to autonomy" as such.
ReplyDeleteI don't think you make this argument, but many today seem to take the position that the commercial trends in academia today are more pernicious than earlier forces. There's a lot of scholarly nostalgia out there, and I am skeptical (as I always am about nostalgia) about whether and when the "good old times" ever really exited. What makes the market constraints of today so much more dangerous or nasty than ones earlier (outside of the fact, of course, that they affect ME in the here and now)? Historians in the 19th century worked within in a market as well, though one that produced, distributed, and consumed information differently from today. You could make the argument that that market was even more "closed" or restriced/restricting than the one today.
In the end, however, you are raising a set of issues with which I am still trying to make my peace. My intuitive response to the shift in academic priorities is to see it as short-sighted and neglectful of important regions and issues. I am genuinely frustrated with and angered by the myopic institutional reactions you describe that are going on on both sides of the Atlantic. Yet, my response surely is self-serving, given my status as an historian of Europe/Germany/the western world. Haven't we who work in German studies been benefiting from the realpolitische and economic contingencies of America's Cold war interest in Germany (ones that also tended to marginalize the study of other parts of the world)? Is it ever possible to write or teach free from "demand" (in the market sense)? Does the key to scholarly creativity and innovation, then, lie more in how one – to be Obamaesque/Freudian about this – compromises with prevailing trends in novel ways, rather than in how one simply rejects them out of hand?
My first response is to agree with much that you say, Greg, and then I am concerned that one does not compromise too quickly with the prevailing trends. You invoke Obama as the figure for compromise, and this is then the trouble, that a willingness to compromise with the market pressure appears too soon, too quickly, so that one gets the impression, at the very least, that too much has been sold away.
ReplyDeleteThe Cold War definitely defined European national studies, and transnational pressures, etc, are defining it anew. Europeanists have to bend to the present by defining Europe as part of a global network, rather than a Cold War polarity
I'm wondering, Dan, if what you are lamenting here is not so much the blunt instrument of economic pressure being used to cull the academic flock but, rather, the absence of any unassailable standard for assessing the value of one academic project over another. There's no religious, political, or philosophical grand narrative that we can apply to justify the allocation of resources (since that's what's "determinate in the last instance" here) to this project rather than that. And "saleability," being anecdotal, provides no narrative at all.
ReplyDeleteAnd, sadly, in the humanities you just can't make the same argument that might be made to justify the allocation of funds to this or that scientific project: "This will save lives!"
Or can you?