Civil society and the academic Left
Keith Windschuttle
Quadrant
July-August 1999

For the essence of totalitarianism is contained in the great helmsman's injunction to "put politics in command". This is not just Communist Chinese baby talk. What it means is this: that you are to take over every institution, whatever it may be, and empty out everything which distinguishes it from other institutions, and turn it into yet another loudspeaker for repeating "the general line". Destroy the specific institutional fabric of - a university, a trade union, a sporting body, a church - and give them all the same institutional content, viz. a political one. Contrapositively, the essence of resistance to this process by liberal-democrats must consist in trying to maintain the specific institutional integrity of different institutions. -- David Stove, 1970

At the end of the Cold War, while the newly-liberated peoples of central and eastern Europe were toppling their former Communist dictators, they were at the same time elevating a new ideal to take their place, that of civil society. This was a concept they had found in the West where it denoted a society in which the polity and the economy were distinct, where the state relied upon economic growth which itself depended upon commercial and intellectual freedom from the state. In eastern Europe, which had long endured a single political-economic hierarchy that maintained an ideological monopoly and tolerated neither rivals nor dissent, civil society became a concept loaded with popular appeal. According to its most recent and most eloquent celebrant, Ernest Gellner in Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society and its Rivals (1994), what the phrase represented was absent in all totalitarian countries. This lack came to be strongly felt and bitterly resented: eventually it turned into an aching void that compelled those inflicted to revolt.

At the same time in the West, however, the notion of civil society was not something that was celebrated or even widely recognised. It was little discussed outside courses and books on political philosophy and the history of ideas. This was despite the fact that, as Gellner demonstrates, a plausible case can be made that the existence of civil society has been one of the keys to the success of the West over all its rivals. The concept goes back to John Locke's Second Treatise of Government of 1689 but was particularly influential during the Enlightenment, where the philosophes of the pre-Revolutionary salons used it in their campaign against monarchical and religious absolutism. They argued that the examples of England and the Netherlands in the eighteenth century demonstrated that societies that were freer and more tolerant became both richer and stronger than those in which oppression and dogmatism prevailed. By the late twentieth century, civil society was such an accepted part of the backdrop to Western political life that it was largely taken for granted among the population at large.

There was one political tradition in the West, however, that had never lost sight of the concept. This was Marxism, but in this case the aim had always been to disparage the notion. Marxism had long argued that civil society was a fraud. The idea that capitalist societies contained a plurality of institutions, which were both opposed to and balanced the state, yet at the same time were controlled by and protected by the state, has been dismissed by Marxists as a façade. Its role was no more than ideological: to conceal the actual dominance of both state and society by the bourgeoisie. One might have expected the fall of European Communism in 1989 to discredit this idea, just as by default it discredited the rest of Marxist theory. At the very least, one might have expected some of the new enthusiasm for civil society in the East to rub off onto Leftist thinking in the West.

However, the opposite has occurred. Those Western political movements that have succeeded Marxism have preserved intact the claim that the apparent neutrality and plurality of Western institutions are simply masks for the powerful. As one of America's best-known leftist intellectuals, Frederic Jameson, has put it: "Everything is 'in the last analysis' political." The main difference today is that, instead of this conclusion being deduced solely from an economic model of society, as in Marxist theory, it now derives from a wider range of approaches. Although their underlying ideas are similar, these new theories are labelled by a nomenclature that shifts as rapidly and as regularly as the fashion industry: postmodernism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism, radical environmentalism, radical feminism, queer theory, critical theory, cultural studies.

Moreover, the professed political constituency of this theory has duly expanded as well. The blue collar proletariat, in whose name the revolution was once to be made, has been replaced by just about anyone or anything that can be claimed to be oppressed by the institutions of Western society. Depending on who is speaking, this can include women, blacks, indigenes, homosexuals, people of any ethnic background except Anglo-Saxon, inhabitants of all Third World countries, the welfare poor, the insane, the disabled, prisoners, drug addicts, children, adolescents, students, not to mention many species of animals, the environment, the atmosphere, and the Earth itself.

The other big difference is the source of sustenance of these politics. Communism and socialism were political tendencies funded by and housed within the labour movement of trade unions and radical political parties. The post Cold War Left, on the other hand, is sustained partly by people employed by government bureaucracies, the media and some of the churches but is institutionalised primarily within Western universities. Indeed, if the university did not exist as an autonomous institution providing employment, office space, computer facilities, funds for research and publication, a platform of authority and a captive audience, this new Left would very likely not exist at all.

The most incisive analysis of this phenomenon remains Roger Kimball's book Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education. It was originally published in 1990 but a new, revised and updated edition has now appeared (Elephant Paperbacks, Ivan R. Dee, Chicago). Though it is an account of the politicisation of the American higher education system, it contains little that is not relevant to the equally afflicted Australian scene. At the end of the 1990s, Kimball observes, all the tendencies he originally recorded at the start of the decade have become magnified. What were once emerging trends have now become thoroughly entrenched.

Though its focus is on the corruption of education in the humanities, Tenured Radicals deserves to be read as a book about the wider contemporary culture. It discusses specifically how the Left has come to set the agenda in literary criticism, art criticism and architectural theory but shows how these particular fields have influenced more widely-accepted cultural mores. It is a book that manages to illuminate the origins of political correctness and the politics of victimhood, as well as demonstrate how the votaries of the new Left have come to regard the cultural heritage and political traditions of their societies with such hostility.

It is worth noting that Kimball is one of the most stylish essayists writing in America today. Anyone who reads the New York journal of which he is managing editor, The New Criterion, or his art criticism that appears regularly in London Spectator and Times Literary Supplement, can confirm this. In this book, his prose is the antithesis of that of its subject matter by being fast-paced, pithy, often witty and sometimes very funny - a pleasure to read. Rather than attempt to summarise his whole case, let me focus here on what seems to me the most far-reaching political and intellectual issue -- the challenge to the notion of civil society.

"From the Marxist literary critic, Frederic Jameson, to the poststructuralist philosopher Michel Foucault, from Jacques Derrida to the legions of lesser-known feminist 'theorizers', devotees of 'cultural studies', and all-purpose academic radicals," Kimball writes, "you'll find slightly different arrangements of the same old song: All cultural and intellectual life is 'really' a coefficient of power relations." This is part of what many academics mean, he says, when they say that all art and literature, indeed all "discourse" including science and sexuality, is "socially constructed". To call something "socially constructed" is another way of saying that it is the product of indoctrination by the white, capitalist patriarchy.

From the premise that everything is already politicised, the academic Left conclude that this gives them the right to subject all social, artistic and intellectual life to their own battery of political tests. The value or truth of a work is not determined by its intrinsic qualities (many deny that "intrinsic qualities" even exist) but by the degree to which it supports a political line. Every product of the human intellect is thus judged in terms of its political value, and this political value is determined beforehand by whatever sexual, Marxist, racial or ethnic agenda is endorsed by the critic concerned.

Hence, Princeton University's Elaine Showalter calls for a "complete revolution" in the teaching of literature in order to enfranchise "gender as a fundamental category of literary analysis". Or Houston Baker of the University of Pennsylvania touts the writings of the black power movement of the 1960s as a desirable alternative to the "white Western" culture he sees enshrined in the established literary canon. The University of Virginia philosopher Richard Rorty wants to see the disciplinary boundaries of his own field broken down so that it merges with literature. Rorty applauds the emergence of (in his own words) "a new American cultural Left … [which] would like to use the English, French and Comparative Literature Departments of the universities as staging areas for political action."

The immediate outcomes of calls of this kind are now fairly well known. They have lead, for example, to The Tempest being widely read as an allegory about imperial conquest; and Paradise Lost being regarded as a feminist tragedy, not to mention a whole range of other major works, such as Mansfield Park, Great Expectations, and Aida, being identified as complicit in furthering the white, male, Western imperialist hegemony. Kimball argues that what is involved is not just the interpretation of particular texts, but an undermining of the cultural position of literature and art:

What threatens to be lost is not only the integrity of the individual text - bad enough though that is - but the whole idea of literature as a distinctive realm of expression and experience with its own concerns, values and goals. … The whole realm of literary-aesthetic experience exercises an important claim on us only to the extent that it transcends the vagaries of contemporary political squabbles.

If everything "in the last analysis" is political, this raises the question of whether academics can discover objective truths. Most of the gender-race-class cadres recognise that such a position obliges them to deny that truth and objectivity can be universal or absolute concepts. Instead they argue that each culture, and sometimes each oppressed political group, produces its own 'truths' and 'knowledges', even if these happen to be inconsistent with the truths and knowledges of others. Hence, the radical feminist legal academic, Catharine MacKinnon, has declared that feminism's "critique of the objective standpoint as male is a critique of science as a specifically male approach to knowledge. With it we reject male criteria for verification." Views of this kind, Kimball demonstrates, are not confined to some loony fringe but are now present in the work of some of America's most influential academics, such as the philosopher, Richard Rorty, and the literary critic and professor of law, Stanley Fish.

In Tenured Radicals, Fish is the subject of a whole chapter, aptly entitled "The New Sophistry". Kimball gives a detailed analysis of this critic's anti-foundationalist" program for the humanities. Fish maintains that there are no independent criteria to which we might appeal to justify, or to condemn, our beliefs or actions. Indeed, Kimball points out, he is fond of declaring that phrases like "independent criteria", "disinterested judgement" and "intrinsic merit" are self-contradictory. Instead, Fish wants to reduce our concept of reason to that of rhetoric and our concept of truth to persuasion.

Kimball reminds us that such an agenda is nothing new but goes back to the Sophists of ancient Greece. The best-known Sophist, Protagoras, who was the subject of a dialogue by Plato, argued that "man is the measure of all things", that is, there is no objective truth, and the world is for each person as it appears to each person. Socrates made it clear at the time, however, that anything that suggested there was no truth, or that truth was in the eye of the beholder, was antithetical to philosophy. Without truth, there is only power. As Kimball points out, the neo-Sophistry of the 1990s challenges not only philosophy but all intellectual activity. "The traditional ideal of disinterested intellectual enquiry makes sense only to the extent that one believes that truth does not play political favourites."

Fish's arguments are couched within an agenda set by the German hermeneutic theorist, Hans-Georg Gadamer, who has offered one of the most seductive and frequently cited arguments of the academic Left. Because our thoughts are bound by our language, Gadamer says, there is no point outside our culture where we can stand to make objective observations or criticisms of what we do. If we accept this, we have to deny the possibility of discovering knowledge about human affairs through the process of empirical observation. But if we did this, we would be throwing away some of our most powerful intellectual equipment.

Ever since Thucydides wrote the History of the Peloponnesian War, writers in the Western intellectual tradition have been distinguished by their efforts to distance themselves from their own political system and religion and to write from a position outside both. To look down, as it were, upon your society and become a critic of your own practice, is a characteristically Western notion, and, indeed, one of the great strengths of Western culture - possibly even its greatest strength. Without it, the notion of civil society would be literally unthinkable. We now take this notion -- the attempt to be objective and self-critical, rather than subjective and self-defensive -- so much for granted that we assume it is a perfectly natural thing to do, whereas to many other cultures it has long been something shocking. It is the preservation of this ability that is ultimately at stake in the current contest for power in the academy.

For this reason, the title of Kimball's book is doubly ironic. The fact that radicals of this kind are permanently ensconced within public institutions makes a mockery of their claim to any sort of principled radicalism. Moreover, under the protection provided by Western culture's support for an independent civil society, of which academic freedom has long been a pillar, they are cynically working to overthrow the very notion behind which they shelter.

In the United States, critics of the academic Left often use the term "multiculturalism" to summarise what they are against. In Australia, this term usually carries the more benign connotation of helping new migrants settle in by encouraging them to preserve the culture of their former homelands. It is manifest here by little more than a few mosques and temples in the suburbs, the SBS broadcasting system, and a proliferation of ethnic shops and restaurants. In America, on the other hand, the term stands for a rejection of Western culture and mores. This position was adopted by black radicals in the 1960s and has since spread to all the other identity-group political movements.

Kimball points out that some partisans of American multiculturalism claim that in placing issues of gender, class and race at the centre of the humanities they are merely following a time-honoured procedure for enriching their disciplines by asking novel questions. When challenged in public forums, they say they are simply doing what humanists have always done: interpreting texts with the categories that seem most pertinent to contemporary experience. However, Kimball says their rejection of both the methods and content of Western culture demonstrates the opposite:

Implicit in the politicizing mandate of multiculturalism is an attack on the idea of a common culture, the idea that, despite our many differences, we hold in common an intellectual, artistic, and moral legacy, descending largely from the Greeks and the Bible, supplemented and modified over the centuries by innumerable contributions from diverse hands and peoples. It is this legacy that has given us our science, our political institutions, and the rich and various monuments of artistic and cultural achievement that define us as a civilization. … And it is precisely this legacy that the multiculturalist wishes to dispense with. Either he claims that the Western tradition is merely one heritage among many -- and therefore that it deserves no special allegiance inside the classroom or out of it -- or he denies the achievements of the West altogether.

In place of the Western legacy, the academic Left offers the revival of a form of tribalism. "We are now witnessing," Kimball argues, "what some have called the retribalization of the world: a violent turn against Western liberalism and its tradition of rationality, respect for individual rights, and recognition of a common good that transcends the accidents of ethnic and racial identity." Given this, he says that it is all the more imperative that we educate our students in the Western tradition, that we teach them about the virtues of our society and its democratic institutions. "Such education is the staunchest bulwark against the forces of disintegration we are facing."

The start of this review has a quotation from the Sydney philosopher, the late David Stove. His comment was made in the context of the radical student movement of the Vietnam War era. Stove maintained his critique of academic politics throughout the rise on the campus of the successive movements of feminists, ethnic activists, postmodernists and neo-Marxists. Several of his statements figure prominently in the second edition of Kimball's book. The 1990 edition had carried a defence of the sociologist of science, Thomas Kuhn, whose work had been used by several radical theorists to undermine the claims of science and of what they termed Western "ways of knowing". In the interim, Kimball has read Stove's book, Popper and After (recently republished under the title Anything Goes) which persuaded him that Kuhn's work did, in fact, lead to the radical conclusions claimed for it. So, in the new edition of Tenured Radicals, Kuhn is out and Stove is in. Kimball, in fact, has been so taken with Stove's writings that he is editing a reader of his works to be published in the US later this year.

Although Kimball is no doubt right to argue that the academic Left is now more entrenched than ever, there are also signs today of a fight back in defence of traditional values. A sizeable number of books have been published in recent years analysing the phenomenon within different academic fields and providing persuasive counter arguments. There are now several of these books on English literature and others on philosophy, feminism, history, science, anthropology and the law. In 1995 defenders of traditional literary criticism formed a new body in the US, the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics, to counter the dominance of the radically controlled Modern Languages Association. In 1998 the same occurred in history where The Historical Society was formed in response to the Left takeover of the American Historical Association. The National Association of Scholars is another body that sponsors conferences and a journal to defend standards in academic life across the board.

In Australia, however, there are too few responses of this kind. Those academics in the humanities who have been appalled by what is going on have at the same time been faced with the Commonwealth government's de facto reduction of universities to the status of technical colleges. Many of them have found it all too hard, have given up the fight and taken early retirement.

Kimball concludes his book with a lengthy quotation from a 1938 essay of Evelyn Waugh. Reflecting on the appeal of Communism for many of the intellectuals of his own generation, Waugh wrote:

There is no more agreeable position than that of a dissident from a stable society. Theirs are all the solid advantages of other people's creation and preservation, and all the fun of detecting hypocrisies and inconsistencies.

Waugh also noted that no matter how stable and successful a society might appear it always remained susceptible to barbarism. The more elaborate the society, the more vulnerable it was to attack. This was especially so in the realm of ideas. "Once the prisons of the mind have been opened, the orgy is on."

Kimball has demonstrated the same kind of prescience for our own times. He has pointed out clearly from which direction, and over which terrain, the barbarians are now coming, and provided us with some very useful armour to help fight them off.