The new Arab public sphere also offers potentially revolutionary opportunities to scholars of the Arab world, who were suddenly presented with an avalanche of potentially usable data about the attitudes, relationships, opinions and actions of millions of citizens increasingly living their lives online. If a scholar found a dozen diaries discussing the ‘Urabi revolt of the 1890s or the personal correspondence of two early Muslim Brotherhood leaders in the 1940s in a dusty attic in Cairo, entire dissertations would follow. Today, on Facebook and Twitter we have millions of such real time diaries and correspondence which are fundamentally transforming how we can and should study the region’s politics and societies. Information, images, documents and semi-public discussions from everything from disaffected Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood youth to activists in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province which once would have been found only through arduous fieldwork (if at all) is now easily available online. Most Middle East experts are poorly equipped to exploit such information, however.

The new Arab public sphere is more than a driver of change on the ground or a source of new information for scholars, however. It also offers profound new opportunities to engage with scholars, activists, and ordinary citizens from the Arab world, allowing them to enter into Western public spheres on their own terms. This should profoundly undermine traditions of privileged Western academic or journalistic interlocutors speaking on behalf of their subjects. These Arab voices are actively debating their own political identities and strategies, not only on Facebook but in an ever more diverse and contentious political press (online and offline), on satellite television, and in proliferating sites of political and social contention. Those encounters may prove unsettling, as they expose deep resentments of Western privilege, deep political critiques and challenges to claimed expertise. What do American scholars uniquely contribute to the study of Arab politics compared with Arab scholars and political analysts?

In short, the rise of the new Arab public sphere is transforming not only the politics of the Arab world but also the ways in which scholars must understand and engage with the region. As Lisa Anderson recently argued in this forum, scholars who opt out of social media or who don’t keep up with local press and media debates will be missing something fundamentally important about the new politics. In this brief essay, I will touch briefly on each of these three levels of change – and argue that it must fundamentally change how we as academics do our jobs.

The New Arab Public as a Driver of Change

The New Arab Public Sphere has been emerging for over a decade, gradually but palpably changing the very stuff of politics. During the heyday of Arab authoritarianism in the 1970s and 1980s, regimes were able to impose stifling conformity upon almost all national media and public debate. This control over the flow of information and ideas represented an essential, but underappreciated, component of their authoritarian domination. It is difficult to exaggerate how much of a black hole most Arab media had become in this period, with almost all national media tightly controlled by regimes and the slightly freer transnational newspapers read only by elites and financed by oil-rich states for political ends. By the early 2000s this overwhelming control had been largely – and incredibly rapidly – eroded in many Arab countries.

The rise of a new Arab public sphere was facilitated by new technologies, but the new media only became a public sphere through the emergence of new kinds of debates, identity claims, and political trends which evolved within those new spaces. Technology, in other words, was a necessary but not sufficient condition for the creation of a new public sphere. Satellite television had become increasingly prevalent across the region (as in much of the world) over the course of the 1990s, but most of its content remained primarily entertainment-oriented along with tame, tightly limited news. It was only with the rise of the Qatari station al-Jazeera towards the end of the 1990s that the technological potential of satellite television was converted into a political significant regional public sphere.

Al-Jazeera, as I argued in my 2006 book Voices of the New Arab Public, helped to create a genuinely Arab public sphere through its choices of coverage, framing, and content. Al-Jazeera approached news coverage through an explicit lens of shared Arab identity, framing developments around the region within a common narrative of Arab concerns and shared interests. Regional issues such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the war in Iraq were naturally treated as areas of concern to all Arabs, which was nothing new. More novel was a narrative of regional discontent with authoritarian rule which tied together dissent and protests across the Arab world, with events in Morocco treated as naturally related to similar protests in Yemen. Its professional, taboo-shattering news coverage shattered the ability of any regime to conceal sensitive information from its own people, or to prevent them from hearing critical discussion of its meaning. The powerful framing of these popular struggles as a common Arab battle over the course of a decade then manifested itself in the early Arab spring, as protest repertoires rapidly moved from one Arab country to another. The five way al-Jazeera split screen showing simultaneous, nearly identical protests in multiple Arab capitals is the iconic image of the Arab spring.

Rather than simply imposing a single master narrative, however, al-Jazeera privileged argument and contentious debate about those shared interests. Its talk shows turned an Arab narrative into a common Arab public sphere through argument. It helped that al-Jazeera was by the early 2000s viewed almost universally across the region, creating a sort of common knowledge and shared platform. When carried out in a shared forum, rather than in a balkanized information environment of partisan media, the act of argument and acrimonious debate reinforces a sense of common identity and shared fate.

That unified focal point could not easily survive the pressures of market and political competition. Over the course of the 2000s a parade of imitators and competitors emerged, creating a fragmented public sphere which cumulatively created the expectation of the availability of such media. During periods of ordinary politics, Arab viewers increasingly switched between a dizzying variety of television stations, some local and some regional. But they generally turned back to al-Jazeera en masse during moments of regional crisis, whether the 2006 Israeli war with Hezbollah or the 2011 Arab spring.

The rapid rise of internet penetration and social media layered additional opportunities for the dissemination of information and ideas onto this top-down broadcasting model. Originally concentrated in urban elite youth, the internet and SMS texting or sharing of videos over mobile phones rapidly became accessible to growing sectors of society. Social media allowed for connections across society, the rapid sharing of information, the coordination of activism, and the expression of political beliefs – even through actions as cheap as the adoption of a revolutionary Twitter avatar. Social media had both unifying and fragmenting effects on the new Arab public. It turbocharged the evolution of a public sphere sensibility, as hundreds of thousands of individual Arabs joined into public arguments and debates on these new forums. Social media could also push towards localization and polarization, however, as the like-minded sought each other out in what seems to be close to an iron law of online behavior.

The new Arab public sphere played an absolutely vital role in building the networks among activists themselves, both inside of countries (i.e. Egyptian protest organizers were veterans of a decade of experiments with protest and information activism) and across the region (i.e. key protest organizers came to know each other personally and virtually and cooperated in sharing information and ideas). This new public sphere supported wide ranging debates and generated new ideas, forged new relationships, framed the rush of events within a coherent shared narrative and manifestly drove the regional and international political agenda. It is simply not possible to account for the intensity and speed of the spread of protests, their immediate absorption into a common Arab identity frame, or their rapid regional dissemination without this new public. Protestors across the region chanted identical slogans and held up identical posters, shared Twitter hashtags, and hung on every twist and curve in any Arab country. Arab social media users eagerly shared user-generated videos mocking Moammar Qaddafi’s “Zenga Zenga” speech or mashing up Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh with a Katy Perry song.

But this newly mobilized Arab public sphere also proved vulnerable.

First, the ownership of the key regional satellite television stations al-Jazeera (Qatar) and al-Arabiya (Saudi Arabia) proved to be a liability. Those stations increasingly shaped their coverage to fit the interests of their owners, with badly distorting effects. Thus, the uprising in Bahrain, which at its height had more than half the citizen population in the streets, largely disappeared from the television screens as Qatar and Saudi Arabia moved to help the monarchy crush its opponents. The leaders of those Gulf countries used their television stations in increasingly blatant ways in supporting military intervention and fomenting protest against governments in Libya and Syria – a self-defeating exercise of power, as those stations lost credibility through their propaganda efforts. The instrumentalization of television stations wholly owned by wealthy Gulf leaders had always been a potential problem for the new Arab public, and now it became real.

The decline of al-Jazeera as a seemingly independent voice of the Arab street is not on its own the lethal blow to a new Arab public sphere which it might have been a decade earlier. The Arab public sphere has long since transcended reliance on any one forum. But the degraded status of the one site viewed by virtually all politically attuned Arabs eliminated a unique source of common knowledge and unified attention. The intense, often furious arguments which dominated al-Jazeera’s talk shows during its glory days highlighted disagreement and diversity of views, but unified the public around shared concern about the issues being debated. The shift towards more overtly partisan media, where viewers tend to seek out like-minded sources, promotes the polarization of Arab discourse into increasingly entrenched, mutually hostile camps. This privileges ever more extreme and exclusionary rhetoric over efforts to find middle ground, reducing both common identification and the prospect for meaningful public debate.

Second, the crushing of the uprising in Bahrain and then the turn to violent civil war in Syria helped to spread an increasingly nasty sectarianism through the region, dividing a once unified narrative and giving lie to any notion that the new Arab public sphere would be uniquely supportive of inclusive or non-violent discourses. It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of Bahrain’s ability with military support from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Cooperation Council to crush a massively mobilized popular protest movement (as mentioned, at its height, more than half the citizen population was estimated to have been on the streets). Bahrain did not only rely on force, or even on the shocking wave of sectarian repression which followed. It also fully invaded the public sphere. Saudi and Qatari television stations (including al-Jazeera) largely ignored Bahrain in order to remove that struggle from the popular regional narrative, while the Bahraini regime launched a massive public relations campaign designed to tarnish peaceful human rights protestors as radical Iranian proxies. Bahraini regime supporters flooded social media sites to promote the regime narrative and relentlessly hound anyone expressing support for the opposition.

The sectarian Sunni-Shi’a dynamic and the vicious colonization of the public sphere by regime counter-protest forces unleashed by Bahrain were magnified a thousand-fold by the struggle for Syria. More than any other Arab arena, Syria proved extraordinarily divisive along both sectarian and political lines as many Arabs who valued the anti-Israeli “resistance” of the regime in Damascus pushed back against opposition narratives. The Syrian opposition relied heavily on the media, as with the promotion of videos of protests, fighting and alleged regime atrocities uploaded to YouTube. The Syrian regime pushed back with relentless propaganda of its own and a fiercely cultivated narrative of foreign conspiracy. The public sphere became a scorched-earth battlefield of arguments over the credibility of information and competing accusations of complicity in conspiracies against one side or the other. As the conflict ground on and the body count grew, many grew skeptical of almost all information about events in Syria disseminated by either the regime or the opposition, while discourse about the crisis divided and polarized sharply. If the early days of the Arab spring represented the best in a mobilized regional public sphere, the struggle for Syria manifested the worst.

Finally, Egypt’s troubled transition exposed the limitations of the mechanisms which allowed new political forces to punch above their weight in contentious politics when the action shifted to electoral politics. While the Egyptian public sphere became a vibrant arena of new voices, with active and deeply thoughtful debates about the constitution, elections, reform and revolutionary action, this did not easily translate into successfully navigating the democratic game. Elections privileged the choices of mass publics, not the efforts of empowered individual voices. Liberal and revolutionary groups found themselves unable to translate their self-declared revolutionary legitimacy into electoral success and increasingly found themselves back on the streets protesting a profoundly unsatisfying transition. The fault did not lie exclusively with the machinations of the military leadership. Too often, the allure of online presence and the thrill of street protest distracted from the tedious, plebian work of forming political parties or building civil society. Meanwhile, existing well-organized and popular movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood proved far better adapted to quickly preparing for election campaigns and institutional politics.

The emergence of a public sphere is a systemic transformation driven by powerful technological, demographic and political forces, not a fragile moment rooted in the success of any particular movement. It is unlikely that any Arab country will be able to avoid its insistent pressures. Perhaps the Saudi regime can repress and co-opt protestors in the short term, but there is no way it can avoid the contradictions between a young, deeply media-saturated public and a ruthless policing of public space. Its effects will not be uniformly positive, however, nor will the pace of change be even. As Syria has shown, the public sphere can all too easily be overwhelmed by sectarian and partisan passions or transformed into a zone of naked political warfare. Any public sphere detached from meaningfully democratic institutions, whether a transnational one with no authoritative actor to make decisions on its behalf or a domestically repressive one unwilling to do so will remain a weak public. If systematically frustrated, such publics can easily turn ugly.

These notes of caution should not lead us to miss the deeper significance of the structural transformation taking place. Empowered publics and new flows of information are fundamentally rewriting the rules of regional politics. What today seems natural and obvious – Facebook groups devoted to mocking kings, television talk show hosts grilling military leaders or top Muslim Brotherhood figures, electoral choices being openly debated everywhere from online to taxicabs – was unthinkable two decades ago. Authoritarian regimes will adapt, as will Islamist movements and liberal civil society actors, and no specific political outcome is preordained. But the new public sphere has already radically changed the basic stuff of political life across the region and its disruptive effects have only begun.

New Arab Public Sphere as a Source of Data

The discussion thus far has focused on what the new Arab public sphere is doing to Arab politics. But it also has to change the study of Arab politics. The wealth of new evidence available on the internet should not only transform Arab media studies, it should be integrated into almost all political science research programs. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other social media platforms offer enormous quantities of publicly available data which can be accessed to varying degrees. There are many live-blogs and daily Storify collections, along with YouTube videos and Flickr images, which collect useful content which could be used to illustrate arguments or test hypotheses. Almost all Arabic newspapers now maintain online archives of news coverage and op-eds which eliminate the need for back-breaking hours with microfiche.

These data present unprecendented opportunities – but also dangers. This data has been most often used to track information flows, for instance through linking and retweeting patterns or through analysis of the quantity and rhythms of particular phrases and hashtags. These can be used to test propositions about everything from collective action to political polarization to regional diffusion effects to the impact of videos revealing graphic violence on international intervention. Other important potential uses remain less developed, such as sentiment analysis of Facebook or Twitter postings and comments (which might be used to evaluate expectations or attitudes in real time) and linkages between online social media and mass media content. Facebook postings, blogs and other social media could be used in historiographical fashion as online diaries rather than as large-n data sources.

But in all forms, researchers must be extremely careful about systematic bias in the data sources. Twitter, for instance, is likely the best suited data set for Big Data analysis since it is a self-contained universe in a research friendly format, but is among the least-often used social media platforms in countries such as Egypt (only 0.26% of Egyptians and 0.04% of Syrians use Twitter, according to a recent survey). Facebook is far more popular across the region, with Egypt’s 10 million accounts not even placing it in the top ten per capita among Arab countries, but it is less amenable to the needs of systematic research. Individual Facebook accounts are harder to access systematically for research purposes due to privacy concerns, although politically-oriented Facebook groups have become essential for research and for political action alike. Broadcast media tends to be less amenable to systematic quantitative analysis, and after all this time we still lack for the most part even rudimentary systematic content analysis, audience research, or careful tracing of impact on political attitudes or behavior.

In short, methodology matters. We do not want to become the proverbial drunks looking for keys under the streetlight because that’s the only illuminated place. This is not necessarily a fatal flaw, since the relevant population is defined by the question: if one’s question is about online activism, then online activists are a legitimate population to study. But if the goal is to generalize to mass publics, then caveat emptor. Unfortunately, the tendency to date is for researchers to acknowledge these limitations… and then to proceed with the data analysis nevertheless. If everybody interviews the same ten Egyptian activists because they are easily found tweeting in English, then we may end up knowing less about Egyptian politics than we did before.

New Publics, New Forms of Engagement

The new Arab publics should not be treated only as causal variables or sources of data, of course. They have brought forward a deluge of new voices who must be heeded, engaged, and incorporated into everything which scholars of the region do. Could anyone really attempt to discuss the Egyptian revolution without listening to the readily available accounts, thoughts, and beliefs of the many individuals who helped to create it? What, if anything, do American scholars uniquely contribute to the analysis of Arab politics now that the Arab public sphere has brought forward so many eloquent, informed and often brilliant local voices? The case can be made that they do… but the case must more than ever be made.

The participants in the Arab public sphere should be seen as fully equal partners in the production of knowledge about the region. This can not simply be the exploitation of these new voices as native informants, or the idolization of celebrity activists – two habits of which we have seen far too much already. Nor does it mean simply accepting what the locals say as gospel. Instead, it should mean the regular incorporation of Arab scholars, activists, writers, political figures and ordinary people into all stages of the production and dissemination of knowledge. It means treating them as fully equal actors, not simply objects to be analyzed. Their ideas, like ours, should be challenged, discussed, debated and vetted… but they must be included. I find myself unable to look approvingly these days at manuscripts which do not generously cite Arab editorials and online discussions of the relevant issues.

Scholars also will need to be on guard against abusing their own role in the process. It is all too easy to over-identify with one faction in a local struggle, to adopt their language and biases and blindspots and to promote rather than critically analyze their political projects. Such over-identification, whether with leftist Egyptian activists, the Syrian opposition, or one side of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, is deeply problematic for the academic mission. In a recent essay (PDF) in Public Culture, outgoing SSRC President Craig Calhoun brilliantly laid out the problems, some real and some imagined, with the engagement by Western academics with Qaddafi’s Libya. The problem for individual scholars (as opposed to institutions seeking financial support), Calhoun concludes, was not the decision to travel to Libya or take part in dialogue with Qaddafi – both perfectly legitimate actions for the engaged academic. Instead, the distinction lay in how the scholar approached the encounter: “Critical public engagement and making scholarly, research-based knowledge available to inform public discussions are both different from being drawn into the efforts of public actors to manage their public relations or reputations. The boundary is of course not always clear.” Can, and should, academics apply that same standard to interactions with like-minded Arab activists?

Engaging with this new Arab public sphere will not necessarily be easy for academics. The need to keep up with dozens of online newspapers, to say nothing of Facebook groups, blogs and Twitter feeds, imposes a significant burden on already overworked scholars. So does the urgent need to publish in online venues such as ForeignPolicy.com and to maintain an online social media presence for those who hope to actually influence public debate. This public sphere moves quickly, has its own internal language and references, and has little regard for formal credentials. It demands relentless, inexhaustible attention which may cut against the instinct of many academics to retreat from the immediate and look at the longer view. For some, this will prove wise. But for those academics who hope to be relevant in the contemporary public sphere, Lisa Anderson is right that there is really no choice other than to recognize and adapt to these new structural realities about how information flows and ideas change.

→ Initiative on Academia & the Public Sphere

The origins of what colleague Mark Thoma refers to as the “Great Disconnect” between professional economics and the public sphere can be better understood by taking a closer look at Hayek’s propositions. Observing the economics profession over time, it indeed appears to be subject to cycles of fashion as Hayek suggests: apparent theoretical success overshoots the scientific fashion into error and irrelevance.

Other economists have contributed, from different angles, to describing this ‘overshooting’ phenomenon. Norwegian-American economist Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929) suggests that knowledge exists on two different levels. Highly abstract and esoteric knowledge, like that of high priests, carries much prestige, but is – in practice – often fairly useless. On the other hand there is exoteric knowledge – useful knowledge – based on facts and experience, that carries little prestige. Using Veblen’s terminology, we can argue that Hayek’s overshooting of scientific fashion corresponds to Veblen’s idea that irrelevant education may contaminate healthy instincts of useful and exoteric knowledge.

In this paper I shall provide examples of historical instances where esoteric knowledge has created crises, and how these crises were only solved by resurrecting alternative, sometimes near-defunct, paradigms of knowledge. The paper identifies four different periods (1848, 1890s, 1930s – and neoliberalism today) where the same tendencies recur: a rise of academic monoculture (of esoteric knowledge), refeudalization (tendencies towards a Plutocracy), crisis and renewal. These sequences and their recurrence define the changing relationship between economics and the public sphere, and it is only through activities in the public sphere that any renewal will take place.

Déformation professionnelle of the Economic Mainstream

Craig Calhoun importantly describes “a social science turned in on itself.” Francis Bacon (1561-1626) describes this process of science turning in on itself very well, and also how such an inward-looking science may lead to the decay of sound knowledge: “Surely as many substances in nature which are solid, do putrefy and corrupt into worms, so is the propriety of good and solid knowledge to putrefy into a number of subtle, idle, and unwholesome questions with no soundness or goodness of quality. This kind of degenerate learning did chiefly reign amongst the schoolmen (i.e. Scholastics), who, being shut up in the cells of monasteries and colleges, and knowing little history, did, with no great quantity of matter, spin out unto us laborious cobwebs of learning that are admirable for their fineness of thread and work, but of no substance or profit.”[3]

Canadian economist Harold Innis (1894-1952) suggests that scientific fashions of what Veblen called esoteric and exoteric knowledge follow a pattern, and in his scheme it becomes clear that scientific fashions may be driven by what Veblen dubbed “vested interests.” I shall argue that sectors of the economies may actually be collecting rents from irrelevant economic theories. Without reference to Veblen, Innis sees that abstract science, communicated in Latin, gets more and more abstract, monopolizes knowledge and enters into alliances with the political elites (with Veblen’s vested interests).[4] Today’s Latin would be mathematics, and today a de facto alliance exists between mainstream (neo-classical) economics and the financial sector.

Since mainstream economics is so abstract that it does not distinguish between the real economy and the financial sector – tending to see the financial sector merely as a mirror image of the real economy – this theory does not perceive the destructive forces that can be created when the financial sector rather than being in a constructive symbiosis with the real economy – to a mutual benefit – becomes a parasite eating away at the real economy as we see for example with the deepening crisis in Greece today.[5] Previously economic theories from left to right saw the need to keep the financial sector under control. In volume three of Das Kapital Karl Marx explains financial crises, Lenin was of the opinion that the financial sector taking over the economy would be the last stage of capitalism, conservative economists like John Maynard Keynes and Joseph Schumpeter had theories of finance and crises, and Hitler’s economists distinguished between schaffendes Kapital, capital that created wealth, and raffendes Kapital, capital that only grabbed value without creating it. The best theory of the role of financial capital was written by Rudolf Hilferding, a social democrat and Austrian Jew who was killed by the Gestapo.[6] Today we are in the extraordinary situation that these economic theories – covering the whole political spectrum – have virtually disappeared from practical use. The West has failed to make theoretical sense of the horror chambers of the 1930s and 40s: that fascism, communism, and social democracy in effect produced a collusion to strengthen the real economy by bringing the financial sector under control. If we just see this as ‘evil men’ without further analysis, something important is lost. The relationship between economics and the public sector is so poor at the moment because the diversity of economic theories that once existed – and competed for attention – has virtually disappeared. In practice there seem to be no alternatives to mainstream theory, one which no longer differentiates the financial economy from the real economy as was once common practice.

As I see it, the financial sector is presently collecting huge rents from this situation, i.e. from a type of economic theory which is not able to distinguish the financial sector sufficiently from the real economy. In the same way corporations may collect huge rents when natural monopolies – like telephone companies in some countries – are privatized in the name of “perfect competition.” Assumptions in general, and assumption-based rents in particular, are rarely discussed in economics. But, contrary to its own ideals, mainstream economics has become an important tool for rent-seeking.

In Harold Innis’ scheme, resistance to the alliance between the ruling economic paradigm and the elites builds up among the Vernacular, i.e. those who do not read or write Latin. A great disconnect is slowly created by a perceived misfit between the Latin theory of the ruling class and their high priests and reality as perceived by common people, by the Vernacular. A simultaneous overthrow of power and of science (of the vested interests and their overly abstract Latin science) may take place after a shock to the system, e.g. a financial crisis.

A fascinating aspect of Innis’ vision of the cyclicality of science is that he sees Western Civilization again and again being saved by knowledge that for a time only survives in the periphery, by near-defunct theoretical paradigms. To take an example from today’s financial crisis: US economist Hyman Minsky (1919-1996) was for a long time a lonely voice when he claimed that “it” – a severe financial crisis – could happen again. However, at the April 2012 Minsky conference held in New York, economists Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman and the main regulators from both the United States and Europe were present attempting to learn from Minsky’s insights. As Innis would have predicted, Minsky’s economics had only survived in the academic periphery: at the University of Missouri – Kansas City, and at the Levy Institute at Bard College in New York State.

The Innis pattern of scientific cyclicality has a parallel in Hyman Minsky’s “destabilizing stability,” one of the mechanisms that lead up to a financial crisis. As economic booms and good times last for long periods, bank routines – and the routines of economists – become less and less cautious, until one day the loans that should not have been granted – and the extremely abstract theories that should not have been produced – default in large numbers and – in the case of economics – important real life economic factors that have been assumed away from the theoretical edifice return with a vengeance and produce economic crises that could not be foreseen by the tools employed by the mainstream of the profession.

In my view one important result of the mono-high-level of abstraction, although guised as “scientific,” is that the economics profession fails to perform its public function. Contrary to what is generally assumed, presently economics is in practice far from apolitical, its set of assumptions are in practice sources of large rents. Examples of sectors which receive assumption-based rents are the financial sector and privatized firms that are close to natural monopolies.

Two final introductory remarks will refer to Hayek’s hint about “economics as a special case” of science: The Law of the Instrument and a Whig conception of the profession’s own history.

Craig Calhoun correctly claims that “problem choice is fundamental” to how a social science develops. But behind explaining the choice of problems lies the choice of tools, and economics today is to a large extent driven by the choice of mathematical tools and models rather than by the choice of problems. The Law of the Instrument – that if all you have is a hammer, you will spend your career looking for things that resemble nails – is certainly at work in economics, severely limiting the professional horizon.

A further important complication in economics is how a Whig Conception of History rules in the history of economic thought. The Physiocrats are, for example, seen as the exclusive forerunner of the science, whereas as a historical fact Anti-Physiocrat thinking won most, if not all, of the battles for economic policy.[7] One observation of the Whiggish nature of the history of economic thought even precedes Herbert Butterfield’s 1931 volume[8] on the subject. English historical economist William Ashley wrote in 1920 that: “…any idea – instead of being judged by its relevance in a given context – is either hailed as a surprising early anticipation of a healthy neoclassical economic principle, or as an example of hopelessly ill-conceived theories.”[9]

These two proclivities of economics – the Law of the Instrument and the Whiggish Conception of the history of economic thought – today combine into a strong déformation professionnelle of the economic mainstream. This makes it exceedingly difficult for alternative theories – the importance of which is so crucial to Innis’ conception of how science repairs itself cyclically – to survive, even in the academic periphery. Society has rightly made huge investments in genetic banks for plant seeds that may once become useful, however similar seed banks of intellectual history of economics are sorely neglected.

Conceiving of Economics as a Problem-Solver

One way to attempt to make economics more useful to the public sphere would be to compare this relationship to the relationship between the pharmaceutical profession, the medical profession, and the patient. The pharmaceutical industry produces remedies for a wide variety of conditions, and the medical profession provides diagnosis matching the medication with the need of the patient. Sophisticated modern medicine distinguishes between a wide variety of illnesses, conditions and syndromes, and there is an implicit understanding that the interplay between the three agents – pharmaceutical industry, doctor and patient – is a complex one. Most of us consider the present state of affairs a great progress from the cure-all or “patent medicines” that a free and unregulated market allowed to flourish in 19^th century United States.

Politicians and medical doctors are both professions which we trust to make decisions on our behalf, and in a democracy we tend to have a degree of choice with politicians as well as medical doctors. Different people trust different medical doctors and different politicians, and we tend to see the presence of a choice as part and parcel of a free and democratic society. The quality of society depends on the quality of its politicians, but also the other way around: “Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people,” as the 2^nd U.S. President John Adams wisely said. Quacks selling “patent medicine,” on the other hand, could only succeed with an uneducated people.

The task of the economics profession can be seen as that of providing options to our politicians much in the same way the pharmaceutical profession provides options to the medical profession. In both cases, it is possible to apply, with due care, Hippocrates’ saying that “the one who cures is right.” The Great Depression provided a battle of ideas, and for the next fifty years there was no doubt in anybody’s mind that John Maynard Keynes – and those with similar ideas – had cured the world economy during the Great Depression. Today individual economists – like Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman – provide ideas that are alternative to those of the mainstream, but no critical mass seems to be created in opposition to what both Stiglitz and Krugman have referred to as the economic suicide of Europe.

In this essay I shall argue that the public interest is best preserved by methodological diversity, by having a variety of economic methodologies, offering alternative and competing approaches, at its disposal. I shall use 19^th century trade policy in the United States as an example illustrating how two competing economic theories – two alternative world views – provided American politicians with different options, and how the democratic process produced a near-perfect timing of the switch from protecting the infant US industry to a regime of free trade. I shall further argue that the present lack of theoretical diversity – a theoretical monoculture in economics – is an important obstacle making it very difficult to solve the crises looming today. In the 19^th century US functional theoretical diversity produced wealth, while today’s nonperforming academic monoculture produces shrinking wealth.

But first it is necessary to look at the different types of economic theory the modern world has had at its disposal.

Types of Economic Theory: Cyclicality and the Revolts of 1848, the 1890s, and (perhaps) now

Physiocracy vs. Anti-Physiocracy

US economist Wesley Clair Mitchell (1874-1948) – long time Research Director of the National Bureau of Economic Research and one of its founders – published a two-volume work with the title Types of Economic Theory.[10] In Europe, the best-selling book in the history of economic thought was for a long time that of Austrian economist Othmar Spann (1878-1950), where the English (rather than the US) edition also carried the title Types of Economic Theory.[11] This idea that economics came in different types – with different filiations, to use Schumpeter’s term – hails back to 1782 when a book grouped the economics profession into either Physiocrats or Anti-Physiocrats.[12]

In order to better understand the relationship between economics and the public sphere, I find the distinction between Physiocrats and Anti-Physiocrats still extremely useful. The interplay between the two types of theory – one assuming markets and nature fix all problems, while the other sees the need for policy and activism – and their timing and sequencing is crucial in order to understand our economic past, present, and future. Usually valid arguments can be found in favour of both approaches, the passivistic laissez-faire Physiocracy and activistic Anti-Physiocracy. Latecomer nations have all typically resorted to Anti-Physiocratic, hands on, economic policies, while the economic hegemone may, for a while, live with Physiocratic values. However, as economic decay sets in, it can only be countered with new Anti-Physiocratic and anti-oligarchic measures. In a dialogue between the two approaches – where context becomes a key variable – optimal political solutions may be found. A main problem here is – as already mentioned – that today’s textbooks in the history of economic thought virtually unanimously trace the lineage of the profession back to the Physiocrats, while a as matter of historical record the Physiocrats lost all major historical battles except the one in today’s economics textbooks.

In the history of US economic policy Thomas Jefferson represents the Physiocratic tradition, while Alexander Hamilton represents the activistic Anti-Physiocratic tradition. Until well into the 20^th century, however, US academic economic theory traditionally stood firmly in the Anti-Physiocratic, non-mechanistic tradition which I refer to as The Other Canon of economics.[13] In the American Civil War the South typifies the Physiocratic tradition, a rural base in favour of free trade, whereas the North represents the more urban-based tradition, with republican values, in favour of temporary industrial protectionism. Abraham Lincoln’s economic views were those of a typical Anti-Physiocrat.

I would argue that today’s economic theory has lost key features of what built Western civilization, both of the Renaissance and of the Enlightenment. The core of the Renaissance was innovation: the magna facere that created great innovations in art and in the production of everything from weaponry to irrigation canals was a way of thinking big that went far beyond profit-making. What came to characterize the Western economy from those of the rest of the world was that building organizations did not stop when the owner had enough money to feed his family. Renaissance magna facere was a virtue that went far beyond greed, and already in the 1200s the wealth of Florence was seen as emerging from a ben commune, a synergic common weal that was in itself a unit of analysis.[14] Today society as a unit of analysis has largely been lost in economics.

Renaissance Florence also understood the need to prevent speculation, a skill which is obviously lost today. In Florence transporting food out of the city was prohibited, as this could feed speculation. Indeed, the spark that created the French Revolution was precisely the lack of such a typical Anti-Physiocratic legislation, which led to food shortage in Paris.[15] Renaissance cities also managed to create what John Kenneth Galbraith dubbed a balance of countervailing power. The Florentine government – the signoría – consisted of nine members, representing different professions, and only one of them represented the financial sector. Renaissance cities also frequently rotated their elected administrators to prevent corruption, and Florence specifically cultivated its urban culture – of manufacturing and trading – by keeping the producers of raw materials, the big land owners, away from any political power. In the world of today we still see how the absence of a manufacturing sector is part of a pattern of undemocratic governments, even if the raw material is as valuable as oil.

Two key features of the Enlightenment are also lost in today’s economics: the ability to build classification systems, as Linnaeus did, and to understand the limits that need to be set for private greed. As I argue in my 2007 book, a key feature of mainstream economics is its inability to qualitatively distinguish between economic activities. The accuracy of neo-classical economics is a direct result of its failure to make qualitative distinctions. We all understand that if all medical doctors of New York are put in one country and all the people who wash the floors of New York hospitals in another, we get one rich country of medical doctors and one poor country of cleaning ladies. This common-sense proposition is unfathomable in Ricardian trade theory, because world trade is modelled as the bartering of labour hours, all assumed to be of the same quality. This was the English way of trying to convince the colonies to stay with their comparative advantage in being poor and ignorant, a bluff the Unites States never accepted. Now this same theory is boomeranging and making the West poorer and Asia richer.

With the coming of neoliberalism the key Enlightenment debate on the limits of self-interest – a debate which lasted virtually through the whole of the 18th century – was lost. Having unlearned the wisdom that came out of this debate, the present discussion more often than not totally misses the point by discussing greed per se as an evil. The conclusion of the Enlightenment debate was boiled down to one sentence by Milanese economist Pietro Verri in 1771: “…the private interest of each individual, when it coincides with the public interests, is always the safest guarantor of public happiness.” In other words, greed – or magna facere for any reason – is good as long as the end effect contributes to making the economic pie larger. With neoclassical economics the public interest – society – ceased to exist as a unit of analysis. This opened up for today’s view that all greed is good, even the present greed of the financial sector which creates huge private wealth while shrinking the real economy to the detriment of the public interest.

If we compare the Physiocratic side of Adam Smith’s view of the nature of Mankind with Abraham Lincoln’s, we get an important contrast between Physiocrats and Anti-Physiocrats, a focus on barter (Physiocracy) or on innovation (Anti-Physiocracy):

“The division of labour arises from a propensity in human nature to… truck, barter and exchange one thing for another..It is common to all men, and to be found in no other race of animals, which seem to know neither this nor any other species of con­tracts…Nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog.” Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, (1776).

“…Beavers build houses; but they build them nowise differently, or better, now than they did five thousand years ago..Man is not the only animal who labours; but he is the only one who improves his workmanship. These improvements he effects by Discoveries and Inventions…” Abraham Lincoln, Speech of the 1860 Presidential Campaign.

At its nucleus, mainstream economics still essentially describes Adam Smith’s view of Mankind as savages who have learned to barter, not Lincoln’s and Schumpeter’s view of savages who has learned to innovate. The tools the profession has decided to use in large part explains why this is so. Today, in an increasingly complicated setting, the world is mostly ruled by the crudest of economic models.

In his 1899 article “The Preconceptions of Economic Science” Thorstein Veblen uses Physiocracy as “the point of departure in an attempt to trace that shifting of aims and norms of procedure that comes into view in the work of later economists when compared with earlier writers.”[16] Veblen describes Physiocracy as being animistic and hedonistic, dominated by a belief in ordre naturel, and contrasts it with his own evolutionary approach. While our 1782 taxonomist of economists placed Adam Smith among the Anti-Physiocrats, to Veblen “In Adam Smith the two (types of economics) are happily combined, not to say blended; but the animistic habit still holds the primacy…”[17] A prime example of the animistic side of Adam Smith that Veblen refers to, is of course a belief in an “invisible hand” that will order economic life harmoniously if only Mankind would entrust its fate to it. But this term was only mentioned once in Smith’s Wealth of Nations, and then only coming into force after a massive dose of policy intervention, The Navigation Acts, of which Adam Smith greatly approves, had led the English to prefer English goods to foreign imports. So Adam Smith is indeed a blend of the two types as Veblen says.

Werner Sombart, the important economist of the German Historical School, describes this fault line between the two types of economics in different terms, as static passivistic-materialistic (Physiocracy) vs. dynamic activistic-idealistic economics (Anti-Physiocracy).[18] Originating with the ordre naturel of the Physiocrats the former – today founding economics on the metaphor of equilibrium – is individualistic, focuses on trade rather than on production, and dismisses institutions and social synergies such as in the concept of “society.” The latter focuses on production of knowledge, goods and services, on production rather than trade, and anchors its analysis of economic development in institutions and social synergies, sometimes using the human body as the basic metaphor for society. One fundamental problem of today’s economic debate is that the vast majority of participants come from the passivistic-materialistic tradition which – since Adam Smith – has largely exogenized production and unlearned Werner Sombart’s definition of capitalism as consisting of 1) the entrepreneur, 2) the modern state, and 3) the industrial system. The practical consequences of the disappearance of this Other Canon of economics are, I would argue, highly dramatic, both in the Third World and for the crises the West now faces.

German economist Gustav Cohn’s Finanzwissenschaft provides an example of Sombart’s activistic-idealistic approach to economics. Cohn develops a theory of stages of development of the state. In his work human welfare is clearly a product of conscious human will, not of any invisible hand of Providence as in Physiocracy. “The delusion that security of life and property, the productivity of labor, and the consequent possibility of acquisition and enjoyment, and even the elevation of the spiritual and the ennobling of the moral nature – that these goods came to Man in the gift of gratuities, is itself a proof of the advanced stage of culture which the greater part of Europe at present occupies. As the grown man has long since forgotten the pains it cost him to learn to speak, so have the peoples, in the days of their mature growth of the State, forgotten what was required in order to free them from their primitive brutal savagery.”

“In point of fact, how significant was the involuntary testimony which the eighteenth century, with its repudiation of the historic State and its yearning after the primordial state of nature, bore to the blessings of the inherited culture which it ungratefully enjoyed.”[19] This description – written well over 100 years ago – also fits the neoliberal zeitgeist that came to dominate the world after the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall. The West ungratefully enjoys the result of centuries of wise economic policies, and now – in the spirit of the ordre naturel of markets – does its best to undo much of it, including the welfare. Again today a “repudiation of the State” and “the end of the nation-state” – based on English classical and neo-classical economics – are mixed with a “yearning after the primordial state of nature.” “If we just managed to get rid of the state…” appears to be a Tea Party credo.

The Revolt of 1848

Ben B. Seligman’s Main Currents in Modern Economics [20] is an unusual text in the history of economic thought in that it is not organized around the history of mainstream economics – normally a requirement for books that aim at high sales – but rather traces the history and fate of the dissenters, among them the American traditions. This may be the reason why John Kenneth Galbraith in his foreword to the second edition of Seligman’s book recognizes that – in spite of its “enormous scholarship, wholly acceptable to the diligent layman” – it is “the most overlooked book in the last ten or twenty or fifty years”[21].

Seligman’s history of economics begins in the 1870s with the revolt of the German and English historical schools against the rigidities of the classical school, which peaks in the late 1890s (Volume 1: The Revolt Against Formalism in the paperback edition), a movement which is countered by The Reaffirmation of Tradition (the title of volume 2) through marginalism – which ends up reinforcing the classical school – and further developed into The Trust Toward Technique (title of volume 3). In volume 2, where the first section starts with a chapter entitled “From Marginalism to Libertarianism,” Seligman shows his ability to recognize the long lines of history, where the qualitative understanding in the Austrian economics of Karl Menger degenerated into Mises’ “libertarianism in extremis.”[22]

On Seligman’s huge intellectual canvas, US economist Thorstein Veblen – who today is seen as a lone figure in economics – becomes a participant in a fundamental intellectual revolt against the formalism and sterility of the classical school of economics and its Physiocratic roots. Smith and Ricardo’s individualistic teachings, focusing on markets and human bartering, yielded to new approaches emphasizing human creativity and production where the individual is imbedded in a society. For the members of the German historical school, as well as for Veblen, economic theory was anthropocentric in that it placed Mankind – both as individuals and as society – at centre stage of economics. In today’s theory market equilibrium is at the core, while human beings are reduced merely to a factor of production. “The plasticity of the human personality was acknowledged, and Man became the creative factor in both the physical and social environments. A relationship of complete interpenetration between man, society and the environment was seen as the basis for change and growth,” as Seligman puts it in his analysis of Veblen.[23] In this sense, Veblen’s economic dynamics is, at its very core, closely related to that of Joseph Schumpeter.

Seeing this in a larger context it seems reasonable to trace the movement for change in economics back to the events following the massive financial crisis of 1847 and the political events of 1848, with revolutions in all large European countries with the exception of England and Russia. This marked the end of a period of growing influence of David Ricardo’s 1817 Principles of Economics and Taxation. With hindsight it can be argued that Ricardo’s influence, the first time around, peaked with the 1846 Repeal of the Corn Laws. John Stuart Mill’s 1848 Principles of Economics [24] – the canonical textbook which took over after Ricardo’s Principles – opened for a much broader and philosophical base of economics than what Ricardo had given his pupils. Mill’s recanting on free trade as a universal principle, opening up for “infant industry protection,” and his call for virtually confiscatory inheritance taxes are but two sometimes ignored aspects of the economics of the great liberal Mill.

In addition to Mill’s canonical Principles of Economics in England, the revolutionary year 1848 also gave birth to two trend-breaking books by Continental European economists, and with them also to two schools of economic thought. Bruno Hildebrand (1812-1878) published Die Nationalökonomie der Gegenwart und Zukunft [25] (“Economics of the Present and the Future”), which came to be the founding work of the German Historical School of Economics,[26] and in the same year Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published The Communist Manifesto, the founding work of Marxism. To illustrate the diversity of the persons involved in this theoretical revolt, Hildebrand – not at all a revolutionary – had to flee Germany for Switzerland, while Marx was so radical that he had to flee to England.

During the 19^th century German and US economics were in close affinity in opposition to English theory, forming an important root of the old American Institutional School. Two influential pairs of US-German thinkers were Friedrich List (1789-1846) and his less well-known but almost equally important US inspirer Daniel Raymond (1786-1849) [27], and Henry Carey (1793-1879) and Eugen Dühring (1833-1921) who vocally supported each other’s work.

The activities and publications (188 volumes) of the Verein für Sozialpolitik (“Association for Social Policy”), active from 1872 to 1932, were a focal point of the theoretical revolt. The association included both politically conservative and radical economists working together towards a united goal of “civilizing capitalism.”

The Revolt of the 1890s

The 1890s saw what perhaps are the three peak performances of the revolt against economic formalism, one each in Germany, England, and the United States. First out was the Verein’s founder Gustav Schmoller’s in his 1897 inaugural speech as Rector of the University of Berlin [28], which laments that “the human idealism of Adam Smith’ had degenerated into “the hard mammonism of the Manchester School” [29] and decries the naiveté of both laissez-faire and communism as “twins of an ahistorical rationalism.” Schmoller was the most influential German economist at the time.

The second work of revolt in the 1890s, Cambridge economist Herbert Foxwell’s 110 page introduction to a book by Anton Menger [30], also distances itself from both political utopias, holding David Ricardo’s work responsible for the political ills both to the political right and to the political left. Thorstein Veblen ironically mocks Ricardian context-free economics: “A gang of Aleutian Islanders slashing about in the wrack and surf with rakes and magical incantations for the capture of shell-fish are held, in point of taxonomic reality, to be engaged in a feat of hedonistic equilibration in rent, wages, and interest.” Foxwell’s criticism of abstract Ricardian theory has Veblen’s punch, but in a more polished form: “Ricardo, and still more those who popularized him, may stand as an example for all time of the extreme danger which may arise from the unscientific use of hypothesis and social speculations, from the failure to appreciate the limited application to actual affairs of highly artificial and arbitrary analysis.”[31] These are words that are more relevant today than they have been for a long time.   

The third key element in this theoretical revolt of the 1890s – in addition to Schmoller (1897) and Foxwell (1899) – was Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) in the United States.

Also less rebellious economists were clearly influenced by the changing paradigm of the 1890s, towards a less abstract and more dynamic type of economics. The next canonical textbook in economics after Mill’s was Alfred Marshall’s Principles of Economics, first published in 1890. There is no mention of Smith and Ricardo, nor of Mill, when Marshall – the founder of neo-classical economics – lists his main influences. The two kinds of influences that have affected the book “more than any other,” says Marshall in his introduction to his magnum opus, “are those of biology, as represented by the writings of Herbert Spencer, and “of history and philosophy, as represented by Hegel’s Philosophy of History…”[32] In the same year, 1890, Marshall’s Cambridge colleague John Neville Keynes – father of John Maynard Keynes – published his Scope and Method of Political Economy, a book also very much influenced by continental European and evolutionary thinking.[33] Under the heading The conception of political economy as an ethical, realistic, and inductive science Keynes senior comments that this school originated in Germany, but that “a rising school of economists in the United States … expressly repudiate the assertion that the new movement is exclusively a German movement,” and that this type of theory also finds its “very forcible expression” there.[34] I have argued that from their inceptions in the late 19^th century, both Austrian and neo-classical economics have lost their original evolutionary dynamics, becoming increasingly static and increasingly irrelevant with increasingly higher levels of abstraction.[35]

It is difficult to appreciate the enormous influence the evolutionary thinking of English philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) had both in England and the United States during his lifetime. Writing on the subject of evolution before Charles Darwin, but later also influenced by him, Spencer saw the evolutionary process as a universal law, applying to the stars and the galaxies as much as to biological organisms, and to human society as much as to the human mind.[36] He is now most famously associated with the term “the survival of the fittest.” However, it is important to note that it was entirely possible to agree with Spencer’s evolutionary view without subscribing to “the survival of the fittest.” Andrew Carnegie was a great admirer of Spencer, but gave away fortunes to constructing public libraries across the United States in an effort to counteract this tendency. Veblen was, of course, in the same camp: a tendency to survival of the fittest needs to be met by policy.

It should be noted, however, that as with Mill, and in contrast with today’s mainstream economics, Spencer’s evolutionary utilitarianism was a moral – but in Spencer’s case dismal – science.[37] Spencer’s biology was strongly adaptationist, making use of both inheritance and acquired characteristics, along the lines of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. In this, but not in his social Darwinism, Spencer’s influence lingers on in today’s evolutionary economics.

To sum up: The science of economics may be seen as being subject to the same mechanism of “destabilizing stability” as Hyman Minsky describes as a cause for financial crisis. In the case of financial crisis, long periods of economic stability produce easy credit, which with time creates instability and systemic risk, even with a small economic downturn. In the case of economics, long periods of economic stability create a belief that a Physiocratic approach of deregulated market – which may work well for a while – will forever solve all problems. Both the French Revolution and the European Revolutions of 1848 were results of an overdose of Physiocratic thinking, and both cases produced a return to Anti-Physiocratic – active – economic policies. The present financial crisis falls in the same category of an overdose of Physiocratic de-regulation, the famous “flaw” that Alan Greenspan discovered was a typical Physiocratic flaw: the market, if left alone, did not produce automatic harmony, but financial collapse. It remains to be seen if – and how fast – Anti-Physiocratic regulatory measures can be put back. Strong vested interests wish to prevent it.

Economics as Functional Diversity: The Case of 19th Century US Trade Policy

The science of economics traditionally has provided a wide range of different theories which have yielded very different recommendations. For example, as regards the question of free trade, at least since 1776, two different theories, or remedies, have been offered to nations that wanted to get rich, instant free trade based on comparative advantage (let us call this Adam Smith) vs. industrialization and then gradually opening up for free trade (we could call this Alexander Hamilton).

Both these theories have been present since US Independence, an event which coincided with the publication of Adam Smith’s magnum opus The Wealth of Nations. The first US Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton – who has already been mentioned and whose portrait adorns the 10 dollar bills – set the direction for US trade policy in his 1791 Report on the Manufactures. Hamilton had read Adam Smith, but he still disagreed with him. He thought a) that there were certain factors that Adam Smith’s theories did not consider, e.g. that economic activities are qualitatively different, and b) that Adam Smith’s England was in a different position than the United States: i.e. that context mattered in the choice of economic policy. England could take industrial economic activities for granted – included the increasing returns, technological change, and synergies they produced – and until the United States itself had secured such industrial activities, it would be in its interest to nourish and protect them.

Particularly after 1820, with the publication of very important but now forgotten works by US economists Daniel Raymond and Mathew Carey in Hamilton’s tradition, both theories (Hamilton and Smith) were taught in the United States, and it is interesting to observe how, in this case, the democratic process provided a good policy choice for the US.

The split between the two schools of thought – for and against industrial protection – was a highly interesting one. As a general rule the Ivy League universities were in for free trade, while the Land Grant universities were for temporary protection. Cornell University – the only land grant university which was also Ivy League – actually had its economics department split into two.

The US debate for or against free trade is very well illustrated in the 1918 cartoon – inserted at the beginning of this paper – where the cartoonist has written “the same old statesmanship, or hundred years of up and down.” The men with top hats (industrialists) want tariffs to go up, and the men with the bowler hats (the financial sector) want the tariffs to go down. The end result was, I would argue, near perfect in terms of economic policy.

The industrialization of the United States was carried out consciously sacrificing the interests of US consumers (because tariffs made imported goods more expensive) in the interest of the same human beings, the consumers, but in their different role of producers who saw their wages increasing very rapidly. The idea was that by changing the US economic structure from being purely agricultural to being a mix of manufacturing industry and agriculture, the country would be much richer. Important politicians who preached this point successfully were Henry Clay and Abraham Lincoln.

US industry grew strong under protection, but the industrialists were always facing the threat of free trade and thus kept on their toes. An important underlying argument through all of US industrial policy was that of technology.[38] Protection was instituted in order to make it profitable to establish new technologies in the US, but the same type of technology argument was later – towards the end of the 19^th century – used in order to argue for free trade: US manufacturers were now so skilled and operated at such a large scale that they needed access to foreign markets in order to grow. In the democratic process the technology arguments won, both when favoring protectionism (Hamilton) and free trade (Smith).

Economics as a Nonperforming Academic Monoculture: The Post-Cold War West

The Cold War gave us the kind of fashion-based economic development that Friedrich von Hayek feared. And at one level Hayek himself contributed. His 1944 book The Road to Serfdom represented a timely warning against the horrors of totalitarian communism. 1948, the year The Berlin Blockade started, gave us Paul Samuelson’s ‘proof’ that under the standard assumptions of neo-classical economics free trade would tend to equalize the prices of the factor of production, e.g. wages, across the world. These two theoretical contributions became important building blocks for Cold War Economics.

Another 1944 book, Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, gave us a very different angle to capitalism, rooted in anthropological understanding of pre-capitalist societies. Polanyi’s first title planned for the volume, “Liberal Utopia,” was discarded because of the nearly opposite connotations in English on each side of the Atlantic, meaning ‘leftist’ in the US and ‘rightist’ in England.

Equilibrium gave a sense of normality to the Post-War II economic order; there were more cars, more refrigerators, and more welfare in the West, while the rest generally stayed poor. But equilibrium was a treacherous metaphor. Sheltered from non-equilibrium mechanisms – like cumulative causations – the ignorance of the economics profession as to the blind spots of their theories grew behind increasing barriers to entry created by mathematical sophistication. With new technologies and new power relationships, a new financial crisis broke out in various steps starting in 1999 and 2000. The West was theoretically utterly unprepared for the present combined challenge of financial crises, environmental challenges, and the growth of China. These were all processes where the equilibrium paradigm – that had come to form the core of economic analysis – was at best unsatisfactory as a guide.

As Thomas Kuhn puts it: “A paradigm can, for that matter, even insulate the community from those socially important problems that are not reducible to the puzzle form, because they cannot be stated in terms of the conceptual and instrumental tools that the paradigm supplies.” This is precisely what happened to the neo-classical paradigm in economics.

In July 1998 The New Yorker carried an insightful article – on Harvard economist Larry Summers – entitled “The Triumphalist.”[39] Indeed, triumphalism can serve as a label for the period starting with the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall. The Cold War – an ideological fight between “the planned economy” and “the free market” – had dominated the world during the forty-one years between two Berlin events: the start of the Berlin Blockade in 1948 and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The planned economy had failed, and the free market triumphed.

During the Cold War Western economic theory had built up an increasingly idealized picture of the market economy. The economics profession was pushed towards a hard paradigm: mathematics became the language, and equilibrium became the dominating metaphor. At the same time, as part of the same process, experience-based economics – that had been centered in Continental Europe – slowly died out. This happened also because the vanquished Germans allowed their own history-based economic tradition to be thrown out with the bathing water. Indeed, as Financial Times economist Martin Wolf characterized Werner Sombart, the main German economist of the first half of the 20^th century: he was both a fascist and a communist.[40] It was as if economics based on experience would produce fascism and communism, only the purity of mathematics would be able to produce a science of a pure market economy. The important fact that the economics tradition of the United States – from the founding fathers to the institutional school of economics which dominated until after World War II – had been based on the same experience-based premises as the discredited German School was disregarded. Experience-based – as opposed to mathematics-based – economics had not only produced fascism and communism, it had also produced the US as the world power.

Social sciences generally operate on several levels of abstraction. A key problem of mathematized neo-classical economics that came into fashion during the Cold War was that it only came with one very high level of abstraction: the tools used automatically disregarded any and all real-life nuances and differences. By disregarding all differences between economic activities, between human beings, and between cultures, economics became a science depicting markets as producing automatic harmony. Economists proved, not very surprisingly, that a standardized humanity in a world where all economic activities were identical, would produce equality. When communism promised “from each according to ability and to each according needs,” this became an unnecessary complication of things: the market would also produce equality. That the apparent equality of outcome that the models produced was simply a result of the assumptions on which the theory was based – how could a model where everything is identical and equal produce anything but equality as an outcome? – was simply not listened to. The West sorely needed models supporting the perfection of the market system, and we got it.

But conversion to this belief – to neoclassical and later neoliberal economics as an Ersatz religion on which politics came to be based – was not instant. When, at the height of the Berlin Blockade, Paul Samuelson proved that under the standard assumptions of neo-classical economics, global free trade would tend to equalize the incomes of all people in all nations – the so-called factor-prize equalization theorem – this was treated more as a mathematical curiosity. Experience-based economics – as that of Gunnar Myrdal – was still of the opposite opinion: that free trade could work in the opposite direction, enlarging already existing differences between nations. However, with near extinction of non-mathematized (i.e. experience-based) economics in Western universities, what was once a mathematical curiosity became the firm belief on which triumphalist globalization was founded.

As the Cold War advanced, what were once merely assumptions needed in order to fit mathematical tools to economic realities gradually became accepted ‘truths’. Economists adopted economic individualism, i.e. they abstracted from studying societies. When Margaret Thatcher famously said “there is no such thing as society” she was merely stating a fundamental assumption of ruling economic theory. Assuming no difference between economic activities and a frictionless economy, economists modeled a world where a coordinating nation-state was no longer needed. So Ronald Reagan’s statement that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem”[41] was completely in line with ruling economic theory at the time. The society modeled in neo-classical economics did not need governments, only centuries of experience would contrast what had become the mathematically obvious fact expressed by Reagan. Economic theory modeled a world with no voluntary unemployment, and it therefore became legitimate to label all the unemployed of the world as “lazy.” Neo-classical economic modeling produced that blend of wishful thinking, ignorance, and intolerance which we call neoliberalism.

In order to understand the workings of the world economy, I find it crucially important to distinguish neoliberalism as an economic theory from other types of politics that are traditionally associated with the political right: from conservatism and fascism. Two main features separate neoliberalism from other economic policies left and right: 1) the insistence, also in practical policy, that all economic activities are qualitatively alike, so that free trade – under any and all circumstances – is always the best solution, and 2) this type of theory does not separate the financial economy from the real economy. Not only is the financial economy seen as a mirror image of the real economy, a disproportionate and exponential growth in the financial sector, as the West now experiences, tends to be seen as being no different from a similar growth, say, in the steel industry, car industry, or the ICT sector.

That by abstracting from key agents and key phenomena economics had also abdicated from studying reality only became evident much later. Under a guise that the magic of the market would create factor-prize equalization, the opposite movement – towards a polarization of incomes – is taking place. In the meantime vested interests took over increasingly larger slices of the economy. Under the assumption that the financial sector can be treated as any other sector in the economy, and under the assumption that no regulation of the financial sector was necessary (the abandonment of the Glass-Steagall Act), individuals and nations are increasingly becoming debt slaves to the financial sector. Under the assumption of perfect competition, what used to be called natural monopolies – the opposite of perfect competition – have been privatized, and long-lasting monopolies and quasi-monopolies have been created. All in all, the economics profession became a useful tool (and fool) for the vested interests of a ‘plutocracy’. Under the assumption that markets would create automatic harmony, the West – particularly the United States – is embarking on a process of Darwinian survival of the fittest, a movement that previously had been stopped starting in the 1890s and again in the 1930s. The distribution of wealth and income is moving in the direction of a post-industrial feudalism, but a new type of feudalism, where power is not narrowly based on land ownership but on financial ownership in general.

It is worth mentioning that twice in its history the United States has faced a similar development, once in the 1890s and once in the 1930s. Towards the end of the 19^th century, English philosopher Herbert Spencer, who was very influential in the United States, preached a Darwinian survival of the fittest philosophy that had enormous appeal to recent wealth in the United States. The influence of Spencerian philosophy among the wealthy classes can be compared with the influence of neoliberalism today. However, a combination of alternative economic theory and investigative journalism reversed this tendency, and economic democracy was restored.

Anti-trust was a key element that prevented the rise of ‘industrial feudalism’ in the United States. The Sherman Act of 1890 attempted to stop the monopolization of economic power by outlawing cartelization (every “contract, combination . . . or conspiracy” that was “in restraint of trade”) and monopolization (including attempts to monopolize). However, the law failed to define these terms well. The second antitrust law, the Clayton Act, passed in 1914, filled in these gaps.

The founders of the American Economic Association – founded in 1885 – all had an educational background in Germany, and were on the side of the reformers. In his 1899 Theory of the Leisure Class, Thorstein Veblen ridiculed and fought against the emergence of a feudal-type industry-based upper class: just the type of class society that the majority of migrants had left Europe in order to escape. The most influential US economist at the time was Richard Ely, described as a “Christian Socialist.”

Investigative journalism and literature at the time pulled in the same direction as did the majority of the economics profession: against the enormously powerful market forces producing a concentration of wealth. Ida Tarbell’s 1904 book The History of the Standard Oil Company – listed as No. 5 in a 1999 list of the top 100 works of 20th-century American journalism – started a new trend of investigative journalism that came to be called muckraking. President Theodore Roosevelt was not pleased with the radical views of novelist Upton Sinclair, but worried enough about him to acquire and read an advance copy of Sinclair’s 1906 novel The Jungle. No doubt this literature – in tandem with institutional and evolutionary theory – was important in preventing the US from becoming ‘feudalized’ around the last turn of the century, and again in the 1930s with books like John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. The question is if today’s fight against post-industrial financial ‘feudalism’ will be as successful as the previous ones.

Conclusion

In addition to missing the mechanisms behind financial crises, today’s economic theory also misses the diversity of Man’s production, and the relationship between this diversity and the diversity of growth and welfare between nations. Neo-classical trade theory – originally a tool that prevented colonies from industrializing – fails to recognise qualitative differences between economic activities, not recognising that growing wealth always has been a product of innovations, increasing returns, and synergies which are products of an extensive division of labor. This standard theory has long hurt the colonies of the West, but it is now hurting the West itself in its own competition with Asia. The theory has boomeranged, and it is time for the West to shift theory.

On previous occasions – during the French Revolution, in 1848 and in the 1930s – the flow of economic thought has changed course. On these occasions the world has woken up to the harmful irrelevance of ruling theory of a type that is incommunicable to the interested layperson. I have referred to these moments as “1848 moments.” John Stuart Mill comments on this type of situation:

“It often happens that the universal beliefs of one age of mankind – a belief from which no one was, nor without an extraordinary effort of genius and courage could at the time be free – becomes to a subsequent age so palpable an absurdity, that the only difficulty then is to imagine how such a thing can ever have appeared credible…It looks like one of the crude fancies of childhood, instantly corrected by a word from any grown person.”[42]

The world is again in a situation as Mill describes, where the need to reconstruct an alternative theory is urgent. Mill sees the need for courage and genius, but other qualities could also prove to be important. In the fairy-tale of the Emperor’s New Clothes the naïveté of a young boy substituted for courage, and the systematic observations of complexities in the real world coupled with ordinary common sense may well substitute for theoretical genius in the traditional sense. What needs to be reconstructed is a science of practice: a theory based on human observations of facts. This contrasts with today’s standard economics, where observations of reality tend to be filtered through a set of arbitrary and – from the point of view of observable reality – mostly totally inappropriate assumptions. This theory produces accuracy, but at the expense of relevance.

Margaret Thatcher famously said “there is no alternative,” and in this tradition capitalism is often presented as one solid block of theory to which there is no alternative. Hyman Minsky, on the other hand, argued that there are fifty-seven varieties of capitalism.[43] To explore and reconstruct the many alternative versions of capitalism, we need to resurrect the methodology of the historical schools: creating new knowledge by connecting previously unconnected facts. Present mainstream theory cannot for ever explain away important phenomena as “market failure” rather than recognize them for what they really are: theory failure.

1848 moments serve to reconnect economics with the public sphere. Esoteric theoretical constructions – where common sense is rare – are demolished in order to make room for more pragmatic theories that become tools for democratic policy-making; abstract patent medicines are substituted by concrete analysis and policy measures in different contexts; and the language of communications changes, in this case, from Latin (mathematics) also to using the Vernacular (English and other languages).

It is possible to end the great disconnect, but we are facing formidable obstacles in the vested interests that collect huge rents from the present state of economic theory.

→ Initiative on Academia & the Public Sphere

→ Economics & the Public Sphere: Teaching and Research Resources

FOOTNOTES
1.  Friedrich August von Hayek’s speech at the Nobel Banquet in Stockholm, December 10, 1974: http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/1974/hayek-speech.html ↑
2.   Hayek, Friedrich von, The Counterrevolution of Science. Studies on the Abuse of Reason, Glencoe, Ill: The Free Press, 1952.↑
3.  Francis Bacon, On the Advancement of Learning, 1605.↑
4.   Innis, Harold, The Bias of Communication, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1951.↑
5.  For a discussion of this, see Reinert, Erik S, “Mechanisms of Financial Crises in Growth and Collapse: Hammurabi, Schumpeter, Perez, and Minsky,” The Other Canon Foundation and Tallinn University of Technology Working Papers in Technology Governance and Economic Dynamics, No 39, 2012. Downloadable on http://hum.ttu.ee/tg/ ↑
6.  For an extensive bibliography of the relationship between financial capital and the real economy, see Reinert Erik S. and Arno Daastøl, “Production Capitalism vs. Financial Capitalism – Symbiosis and Parasitism. An Evolutionary Perspective and Bibliography,” The Other Canon Foundation and Tallinn University of Technology Working Papers in Technology Governance and Economic Dynamics, No 36, 2011. Downloadable on http://hum.ttu.ee/tg/ ↑
7.  For an anti-whiggish view of the history of economic policy, see Reinert, Sophus, Translating Empire. Emulation and the Origins of Political Economy, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2011.↑
8.   Butterfield, Herbert, The Whig Interpretation of History, New York: Norton, 1965.↑
9.  William Ashley, An Introduction to English Economic History and Theory. New York, Putnam, 1920.↑
10.   Wesley C. Mitchell, Types of Economic Theory from Mercantilism to Institutionalism, ed. Joseph Dorfman, 2 vols. New York: Augustus M. Kelly, 1967. Originally published as Lecture Notes on Types of Economic Theory: as delivered by Professor Wesley C. Mitchell. 2 vols. New York: Turtle Bay Bookshop, 1949.↑
11.   London: Eden Paul and Cedar, 1929.↑
12.   Will, Georg Andreas, Versuch über die Physiocratie, deren Geschichte, Literatur, Inhalt und Werth, Nürnberg: G.N. Raspe, 1782. The international comparative table on pp. 71-72 lists Adam Smith as an Anti-Physiocrat.↑
13.  For a discussion of the fundamentally different attitudes and methodology underlying these two different approaches to economics, see Wolfgang Drechsler, “Natural versus Social Sciences: On Understanding in Economics,” in Erik S. Reinert (ed.), Globalization, Economic Development and Inequality. An Alternative Perspective, Cheltenham: Elgar, 2004, pp. 71-87. See also www.othercanon.org ↑
14.  Reinert, Erik, How Rich Countries got rich…and why Poor Countries stay Poor, London: Constable, 2007. U.S. paperback edition: PublicAffairs Press, 2008.↑
15.  For a discussion on the role of Physiocracy and Anti-Physiocracy in the French Revolution, see Kaplan, Steven, Bread, Politics and Political Economy in the Reign of Louis XV, 2^nd ed. with a new foreword, London: Anthem, forthcoming 2012.↑
16.  Veblen, The Place of Science in Modern Civilization, New York: Huebsch, 1919, p 87.↑
17.   Ibid., p. 98.↑
18.   Sombart, Werner, Die Drei Nationalökonomien, Munich: Duncker & Humblot, 1930. The issue raised here is thoroughly discussed in Reinert, Erik S. and Arno Daastøl, “The Other Canon: the History of Renaissance Economics,” in Erik S. Reinert (ed.), Globalization, Economic Development and Inequality. An Alternative Perspective, Cheltenham: Elgar, 2004, pp. 21- 70.↑
19.   Cohn, Gustav, The Science of Finance, translated by Thorstein Veblen, Economic Studies of the University of Chicago, No. 1, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1895, p. 73.↑
20.  Glencoe, Illinois: Free Press, 1962, one volume, Paperback edition, Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1971, three volumes with continuous pagination.↑
21.  Seligman 1971, Vol. 1, p. vii.↑
22.  Seligman, 1971, Vol. 2, pp. 328-42.↑
23.  Seligman, 1971, Vol. 1, p. 137.↑
24.  London: C.C. Little & J. Brown, 1848.↑
25.  Frankfurt: Literarische Anstalt, 1848.↑
26.  It is reasonable to classify Friedrich List as representing a proto-historical school of economics.↑
27.  Viano, Francesca (ed.), Daniel Raymond’s Thoughts on Political Economy (1820): A Theory of Productive Power, London: Anthem, forthcoming 2012.↑
28.  Schmoller, Gustav, Wechslende Theorien und faststehende Wahrheiten im Gebiete der Staats- und Socialwissenschaften und die heutige deutsche Volkswirtschaftslehre, Berlin: W. Büxenstein, 1897.  Downloadable on www.othercanon.org.↑
29.  On the Manchester School, see Grampp, William D, The Manchester School of Economics, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1960.↑
30.  The Right to the whole Produce of Labour, London: Macmillan, 1899. Foxwell’s introduction is downloadable on www.othercanon.org ↑
31.  Foxwell in Menger, p. xli.↑
32.  Marshall, Alfred, Principles of Economics, London: Macmillan, 1890.↑
33.  Keynes, John Neville, The Scope and Method of Political Economy, London: Macmillan, 1890. Colleagues Marshall and Keynes’ acknowledgements to each other in the two books suggest a close professional relationship.↑
34.  J.N. Keynes, page 21.↑
35.  “Austrians Economics and ‘The Other Canon’”, in Backhaus, Jürgen (ed.), Modern Applications of Austrian Thought, Milton Park, Routledge, 2005, pp. 253-298.↑
36.  For a study of Spencer’s influence on the social sciences in the United States, see Breslau, Daniel, “The American Spencerians: Theorizing a New Science”, in Calhoun, Craig, Sociology in America. A History, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.↑
37.  For a classical evaluation of Spencerian thought and the American character, see Hofstadter, Richard, Social Darwinism in American Thought (1944), Boston: Beacon Press, 1959.↑
38.  Hudson, Michael, “Technical Progress and Obsolescence of Capital and Skills: Theoretical Foundations of 19^th Century US Industrial and Trade Policy”, in Erik S. Reinert (ed.), Globalization, Economic Development and Inequality. An Alternative Perspective, Cheltenham: Elgar, 2004, pp. 100-111.↑
39.  Cassidy, John, “The Triumphalist”, New Yorker, 07/06/98, Vol. 74, Issue 18, p. 54.↑
40.  Quoted in Reinert 2007, p. 123.↑
41.  First Inaugural Address, January  20, 1981.↑
42.  Mill, John Stuart, Principles of Political Economy, (1848), London: Longmans, Green, 1929, p. 3.↑
43.  As with Heinz ketchup there are 57 varieties.↑

In an article with the suggestive title “Courage, Sympathy, and a Good Eye,” Michael Walzer energetically sets the debate about social criticism on the track of virtue ethics.[1] The argument with which he grounds this reorientation initially sounds as plausible as it is timely. Since social theory can provide neither necessary nor sufficient grounds for successful social criticism, its quality cannot be measured primarily by the merits of its theoretical content but, rather, more urgently by the qualities of the critic. According to Walzer, he or she must have developed a capacity for sympathy and finally a sense of proportion when applying it.

→ Initiative on Academia & the Public Sphere

[This essay comes from the concluding chapter of the author's most recent translated essay collection Pathologies of Reason, by Axel Honneth, translated by James Ingram. © 2007 Suhrkamp Verlag. English Translation © 2009 Columbia University Press. Reprinted with permission of the publisher.---ed.]

FOOTNOTES
1.  Michael Walzer, “Mut, Mitleid und ein gutes Augen: Tugenden der Sozialkritik und der Nutzen von Gesellschaftstheorie,” Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philo- sophie 48 (2000): 709–18; published in English in The Company of Critics: Social Criticism and Political Commitment in the Twentieth Century, 2nd ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2002), xi–xviii.↑
2.  Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 3rd ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1950), 145–55.↑
3.  Ibid., 143.↑
4.  Walzer, in The Company of Critics.↑
5.  Ralf Dahrendorf, “Theorie ist wichtiger als Tugend,” Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 12 December 2000.↑
6.  Siegfried Kracauer, “Minimalforderung an die Intellektuellen,” in Schriften (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1990), 5: 353.↑
7.  On the idea of an “overlapping consensus,” see John Rawls, Political Liberalism, new ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995).↑
8.  For more, see Bert van den Brink, “Gesellschaftstheorie als Übertreibungskunst: Für eine alternative Lesart der ‘Dialektik der Aufklärung,’” Neue Rundschau 1 (1997): 37–59.↑
9.  I have discussed rhetorical tools of social criticism in more depth in Axel Honneth, “The Possibility of a Disclosing Critique of Society: The Dialectic of Enlightenment in Light of Current Debates in Social Criticism,” in Disrespect: The Normative Foundations of Critical Theory (Cambridge: Polity, 2007).↑
10.  Alex Demirovic, Der nonkonformistische Intellektuelle: Die Entwicklung der Kritische Theorie zur Frankfurter Schule (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1999).↑

Two decades later or so, such reasonable views have already been severely challenged. This was the time of the Dreyfus Affair. True, scholarly expertise and the use of the positive method did play a crucial role on this occasion. They made it possible to historians, then judges, to distinguish true and false and to reveal criminal forgeries. But the Affair had also made clear that professional historians remained exposed to the public sphere. A whiff of suspicion clung to overly contemporary history, which would remain a lasting sensitive point for a longer period. Actually, it could possibly affect any historical enunciation and interpretation. Remote events like the fall of the Roman Empire, the Investiture Controversy or the Wars of Religions in the 16th century could similarly become the stakes of ideological and polemical involvements in the time of the European Kulturkämpfe.

As an academic, scientific discipline, history was therefore required to warrant a critical distance both with the past and with the present or, more precisely, with the past as it could be reenacted in the present, with the present as it might bias our understanding and account of the past. Another distance was demanded from the larger public. History should now be a professional matter, shielded from the passions of time.

Scientific communities exist, no doubt, and they usually manage to organize controlled areas of circulation, exchange and confrontation within their field of expertise. Yet they have never been able to subtract historical topics (or at least some of them) from the public debate. This has obviously to do with what might be called the “porosity” of the discipline. Few people have personal views on the quantum theory, or on molecular biology. Even fewer would dare to express their views on those points. On the reverse, history is seen and experienced as a public matter. No real proof of knowledge is required from its would-be commentators. Professional historians may pretend to live and practice in a separate world, but, on repeated occasions, they are confronted with non-professional protagonists. True, some topics are more appealing than others. Let us keep apart the enduring success of a traditional repertory of famous events, reigning families, great lovers and criminals of the past. The trend of prices and wages in 19th century Britain is usually less attractive than the origins of World War I, the colonial experiences or the nature of totalitarianisms. The more or less technical aspect of the matter certainly explains the difference. But there is more. Non-professional users of history tend to favor historical narratives, which they think to be already constituted and which they think as well to be ready for a personal judgment – whatever the nature of this judgment. In most of the cases, they expect historical precedents to confirm and to reinforce a set of personal convictions and creeds. They approach history from an axiological perspective, which often happens to be a prescriptive perspective as well, which clearly differs and even contradicts what professional historians try to do and to teach.

 *

I would like to suggest that for the last three or four decades, the relationship between history, historians and the public sphere has experienced crucial changes. But it is probably not enough to mention a “public sphere” globally defined. It might be useful to try to specify some of the forms and mediations through which such connections work nowadays.

I will be taking the French situation as an example. I have no intention here to overvalue it, or to deal with it as such, but rather to identify a number of concerns, themes or keywords arising from it as a way to get a better grasp on the present situation within the historical discipline as well as in its relations to a larger context.

Historians are permanently confronted with new questions and, sometimes, with new requirements. They are requested to play (or not to play) new roles. It may be that they might also wish to play or not to play such roles. If we were to use the analytical categories proposed by Reinhart Koselleck, we would focus on the meeting point between a change in experience (Erfahrungswandel) and changes in method (Methodenwechsel) – as well as on the inevitable discrepancies between the two.

A major change, it seems to me, has been the recent, accelerated rise of the categories of “contemporary” and “present” in our collective perception of time.[1] While the grand narratives were questioned and losing their power of conviction, those categories now seem to work as the passwords of time. The present is an imperative. A pressure, at least vague but sometimes very specific and emphatic, is being brought on historians, who are now expected to focus more on the present and to respond better, faster, to a “social demand” that remains loosely defined – or even to anticipate it. In the historical discipline, this shift has been reflected in many and different ways: in courses, syllabi, in the distribution of student numbers and faculty positions. Over the last thirty years, contemporary history has shifted from the margins of the discipline to its very center. The “other” histories – modern, early modern, medieval, ancient – had played a leading role during the postwar decades in terms of methodological innovation. Until the 1970’s, they constituted the face of the discipline in the eyes of larger audiences. They now appear to have retreated as if they were perceived as less meaningful. As if what they have to say or can say found it difficult to permeate the thick layer of the present, as if the questions they were suggesting were by now unfamiliar to a public which now seems to be caught up in the circle of the present.

It is attested as well by the demand for and success of such an expression as “histoire du présent” (the history of present time).[2] Let me also stress the fact that the “present” which is covered by “the history of present time” has been significantly expanded. It works as well with a series of keywords: if not a system, they constitute at the very least a network and maybe a dictionary of received ideas or dominant convictions. One anticipates them, expects people to relate to them: memory, identity, responsibility, witness are probably the most visible and recurrent ones among them.

But the present is by no means an empty place, and in a sense, historians are here latecomers in a sphere, which is already largely settled. They are therefore confronted with a number of protagonists and, to some extent, of challengers. To begin with journalists: nothing new, one might object. Yet we are living in a time of high-speed – almost day-by-day – historicization of the present. So, who is to play what role, what role sharing is to occur, since the respective temporalities in which journalists and historians work and the resulting agenda are not the same? Are historians able to provide the posterity’s point of view on the very day that events happen? Is this something they can refuse to do? In any case, what is the price to be paid?

Such a rise has been accompanied by an intensification of the public use of the past, to quote the formula proposed by Jürgen Habermas at the time of the German Historikerstreit, twenty-five years ago – an actual public controversy played out in the Federal Republic’s main newspapers. Uses of the past? Probably of any past, as I have already mentioned it, but more specifically if not exclusively, of this recent past “that does not pass” (Henry Rousso on the Vichy period) and which therefore remains obstinately present.[3] History is no more the exclusive of professional historians. There are more players in the game now. Among them, eyewitnesses are taking up more and more importance and it has been suggested that we might be living the “eyewitness time”[4] – and reign. Today, an eyewitness is first and foremost the face and the voice of a victim, of a survivor who deserves to be listened to, who is encouraged to speak, recorded and filmed. Let us remember the larger project of the Spielberg Foundation, the explicit goal of which was to collect the testimonies of all Nazi camps survivors and present online a “true” history of the Genocide. Such a project raises a crucial and, in a sense, inescapable question: who is the historian and who actually decides to reopen the files? Is the eyewitness a 
”source,” or a “voice,” which is best heard, without the mediation of the historian? Is he expected to offer a more telling and sincere history? Willy-nilly, historians are now required to take those questions seriously.

Major waves of commemorative events, to begin with the bicentennial of the French Revolution in 1989, now mark the cycles of public life, conjoining memories (forgotten, recalled, triggered, and so forth) and political agendas. Here again, historians are clearly no more in control of the calendar, nor always of the questions or terms of the debates, which are triggered by these celebrations. Yet, it cannot be denied that they have an impact on research directions as well as on publishing programs.[5]

Politicians appear to be protagonists as well. One might object that there is nothing new here as history has traditionally been used and sometimes manipulated for political purposes. Yet new concerns and new practices have recently made their way. Since the 1990’s, the French National Assembly has adopted a series of legal texts, which pretend to fix the qualification, meaning and the very existence of some major historical facts. In 2001, Congressmen decided on their own initiative to pass a bill including one single article: ”France publicly acknowledges the Armenian genocide of 1915.” Having at length been appealed to and entreated by the Armenian activist associations who finally managed to make themselves heard, do the legislators intend to fix history? The preamble begins as follows: “Our country and the world’s democracies have a pressing duty of memory. This memory cannot be restricted to each nation’s history. It must also expand to include the memory of humanity, which has been tragically affected in the course of this century by several genocides.” The transition is made from the specific to the universal via the mandatory “duty of memory”: from the memory of the Armenians to the memory of mankind, via the intermediary of law. The legislators now see themselves as teachers of and responsible for memory, if not as historians. A path has been opened. Since this first try, a series of “memorial laws” have been proposed and voted on, such as in the same year of 2001, a text retrospectively defining slavery and the slave trade as a crime against humanity (remember that slavery has been abolished in France in 1848). Let me be clear at this point: I have no doubt about the reality of the Armenian genocides and no intention to justify the slave trade. But we may doubt that it is up to the political representation to decide on the existence or the qualification of the past. What if they had denied the reality of the genocide? What if, as it almost happened with a different majority in power in 2005, Congressmen had voted on a text in recognition of the merits and values of the French colonial experience? (The text has raised such strong reactions that it has finally been withdrawn). The problem, it seems to me, is not only nor centrally an ideological one. The obstinate claim for the duty of memory is no doubt a symptom of a changing relationship with the past in our societies. I shall get back to this question in a moment.

On this ground of the contemporary, historians are often confronted with further protagonists: more and more frequently, judges, directly or indirectly, actually or metaphorically speaking. This does of course tie in with the striking process of judicialization of the public sphere. Judges may now decide on everything. They are expected to heal public and private ills, past and present, if not future. People now talk of “judicial therapy,” which includes the possibility of noticeable differences between historical truth and judiciary truth. We may no longer refer to or speak in the name of the judgment of history, but, on the other hand, we are facing a proliferation of questions about the respective tasks of judges and historians, whether a judge passing sentence, or, more frequently, an investigating magistrate in the inquisitorial French system, with a reappraisal, in this light, of the status of proof, evidence and the relevance of context. For the last twenty-five years, a number of trials – often on charges of crime against humanity – have worked as moments of memory (it should be possible for the victims’ complaints to be spoken, heard and to receive some kind of reparation), but they were also to work and remain as instruments of history (which is why the proceedings were recorded). Moreover, they posed specific questions about the presence of historians as witnesses, certainly by virtue of their expertise, yet nevertheless as “witnesses” (as defined in the French Code of criminal procedure).

In most of our countries, memory now also mobilizes a growing number of groups who want to ground ethnic, territorial, professional, gender or other identities in the past. Through most of the past century, a powerful historiographical move toward a history of the anonymous, a “history from below,” was generally understood as a more comprehensive approach to the society as a whole. It has given the rise to the History Workshop movement in Britain, later to Alltagsgeschichte in Germany and, to some extent, to the Italian microstoria as well as to a larger outpouring of ignored accounts, giving a voice to the anonymous, forgotten actors, who had until then been silent or silenced: workers, women, migrants, exiles, people on the margins of the past societies. But things have changed and now work quite differently. The current memorial wave appears to be a new and privileged way to capitalize on the past. Every single group claims to be its own historian, to write or word its own history, insisting on what makes it irreducible to other histories and even more to one shared history. This shift, it seems to me, is especially sensitive in the old European countries where the traditional format of a unified/unifying national history had been so powerfully prevailing and compelling for a longer period.

We know that this old pattern has been severely challenged over the past decades, in favor of a multiplicity of particular, diverging histories, which in most of the cases are conceived and work in terms of memory and of singular identity.

 *

Why such an emphasis on the present? Why such an obsession with memory? Both are linked, I think, and they may be understood as symptoms of a deeper change in our relationship to historical time. Since the 18th century, our societies had been sharing a vectorial conception of time. Actually, times could be hard and uncertain. But the conviction was there that they would bring a plus at the end of the process. Implicit or explicit, the trust in progress commanded a view of history. History was not expected any more to provide timeless lessons (as the older conception of Historia magistra vitae had done for many centuries). It now offered milestones, precedents with which the present could be confronted and evaluated. A significant continuity was therefore acknowledged along time.

Is this true any more? We may doubt it, especially in the case of the European countries. Since the 1970’s, a rampant crisis of confidence has been underway which can be understood as a “crisis of the future.”[6] This may seem quite paradoxical: ours is a time of spectacular scientific and technological innovation, of major political transformation as well. But such accelerated changes are not able to warrant the conviction that a better future is ahead of us: this future is blurred; the present is opaque and, consequently, the past itself has turned uncertain. A continuity over time has been shaken. It may explain the unexpected public success of some forms of “anthropological history” during the 1970’s and part of the 1980’s: the many versions of “the world we have lost” were not expected to offer meaningful precedents in history anymore, but, on the reverse, estrangement and exoticism.

But there is more. For a longer period, history had served as an introduction to and a commentary on the nation, that is to the entity which was supposed to bind together the members of a community that was precisely defined as a historical community: people sharing a common destiny. It insisted on the aspects of continuity, even of resilience, of the group and presented it as both natural and obvious. History was also understood as a crucial part of civic education through the schooling system. Historians were on the front lines of this great concern. They were expected to produce the more or less authoritative versions of the past and to address larger audiences. Michelet, Lavisse, Ranke and many others were responsible for the circulation of representations, arguments, and a repertoire of signs and forms, which have been embodied in the common culture since the 19th century.

National histories still exist whenever they offer today less prescriptive and more interrogative views on the past (think of the pioneering Storia d’Italia published by Einaudi in the 1970’s, of the French Lieux de mémoire (1984- 1992) or of their German counterpart, Deutsche Erinnerrungsorte in the early 2000’s). But they don’t play anymore the traditional role. They certainly offer fewer resources of collective identification. At least in Western Europe, history seems to be much less than sports, for instance, the target of nationalistic investments and expectations (things would certainly be quite different in Central and Eastern Europe, in the countries which have been recently emancipated from the communist rule). A sense of exceptionality and of community has been lost underway. In the heyday of the colonial Empire, French primary schoolmasters thought they might teach their African or Vietnamese students that their ancestors had been Gauls who were living in straw huts. So strong was the sense of community that sharing the same history, even in such an absurd way, could appear as a step towards recognition, if not assimilation. No teaching person would dare to do the same nowadays, in any classroom in any suburb within the Hexagon.

It is true that, in the meantime, the way history is conceived has dramatically changed. I have already mentioned that, for a longer period of time, history had been written in the light of the nation. For the last decades, it has tended more and more to be conceived as an introduction to the social. This shift has obviously to do with some major historiographical trends over the last century. As discipline, history has come closer to the social sciences – sociology, economics, and, to a lesser extent, anthropology – and it often thinks of itself as being fully part of them. I am not going to discuss the point here. It remains that a number of historical approaches now borrow concepts, hypotheses, and devices from the social sciences, with the obvious consequence that a larger part of the current historical production is more sophisticated and therefore less accessible to a larger readership. It also offers fewer opportunities of individual and collective identification as it appears to be more technical and sectorial – quite difficult most of the time to associate with a larger, encompassing narrative. Such a shift is currently being duplicated in terms of didactics. High school textbooks now teach how to understand the mechanism of an economic crisis, to compare different social distributions over time and space or to follow the transformations of a system of international relations. They certainly prepare students to get a firmer hold on the world they will live in. But something may have been lost underway: a sense of time and of chronological depth. A series of recent surveys have repeatedly confirmed that students are less and less able to order major historical figures, moments or facts along a time axis. Chronology has never been trendy as it is commonly associated with the boring learning of historical dates. But chronology also and more importantly means access to the differences of time, to its rhythms and productions – which probably is the core of what students and future adults should be able to remember from their school years.

Why so? For two kinds of reasons at least, the effects of which are cumulative. I have already mentioned the major aspects of our changing relation to historical time: an obsession with the present; an absolutization of the past, which is no more conceived as a process from which we might learn something about our present but as distanced from our current experience. A second reason, it seems to me, has to do with the lack of larger integrating narratives. Since the 1970’s (and sometimes even earlier), historians have devoted much time and efforts to the critique of the ruling master narratives – to begin with the critique of the national narrative. Such a critique was mostly welcome. It has made it possible to question a number of certitudes and prejudices, to propose new, fresh views on historical realities that had been obstinately neglected, ignored, or rejected. But we must acknowledge as well that we are currently left with no alternative substitute. Historians are certainly able to do without it, at least for the time being, and to use discontinuity as a heuristic instrument. This is far less probable for the larger public of history, which is now made of many and diverging publics.

Which history could actually match their expectations? The memorial wave has produced strong dismantling and dispersive effects. The multiplication of private memories and histories has seriously challenged the idea that a historical larger community could make any sense. The current globalization, the more modest and difficult European construction are shaking older representations and solidarities; they are responsible as well for new expectations. But they have not yet proposed acceptable and accepted substitutes. Most of us may be convinced that history might help the peoples of Europe to come to terms with their conflicting past and therefore contribute to a livable present. It has proved to be partially true, but we must acknowledge as well that the European experience has revealed gaps and discrepancies. We have discovered that we were not necessarily living in the same temporalities, that we may refer to different sets of historical experiences. Which history will be able to give an account of such discordant times? We know that the historiographical pattern which was associated with the birth and growth of the nation-state does not work any more, but we are still looking for the new narrative – probably narratives, in the plural – which will replace it.

→ Initiative on Academia & the Public Sphere

FOOTNOTES
1.  François Hartog, Régimes d’historicité: présentisme et expériences du temps, Paris, 1983.↑
2.  In 1976, Pierre Nora was appointed at EHESS to a new chair entitled “Histoire du 
présent.” Two years later, the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) set up the Institut d’histoire du temps présent (IHTP).↑
3.  To cite a few examples outside the prolific production related with the German dabate: Henry Rousso, Le Syndrome de Vichy, Paris, 1987; Nicola Gallerano (ed., L’Uso publico della storia, Milano, 1995; Id., La Verità della storia. Sull’uso publico del passato, Roma, 1999.↑
4.  Annette Wieviorka, L’Ère du témoin, Paris, 1998.↑
5.  Steven L. Kaplan, Farewell, Revolution. Disputed Legacies: France, 1789/1989, Ithaca (NY), 1995.↑
6.  K. Pomian, “La crise de l’avenir,” Le Débat, 7, 1980, reprinted in Sur l’histoire, Paris, 1999, p. 233-262.↑

The Great Disconnect: Why Did Economics Retreat from Its Public Mission?

Why did economics retreat from its traditional public role?[4] This section explores potential answers to this question, beginning with the influence of the desire to become more scientific. However, it’s important to note that even though the ties to the public have weakened in recent decades, economists remain active on public policy issues. Michael Bernstein explains:

“The ‘Reagan Revolution’ provided the turning-point. [...] What came subsequently was the disengagement […], a kind of smug assurance that economics matters for the making of public policy coupled with a resolute unwillingness to participate in the genuine, open and democratic disputation that was the essence of the ‘New Economics’ of the post World War II period. […]

[E]conomists today enjoy great amounts of power and influence, even prestige in some circles. But they do so in private, and increasingly in silence. To use the trope I deployed in my book – they have become more ‘privy councillors to private wealth’ than public servants to elected officials. It is then in this respect that they are being ignored — not by the private sector nor by the elite officials of the distinct financial and non-governmental organizations noted above, but rather by the public.”[5]

I share Bernstein’s view that although academic economists remain influential in policy circles, the profession’s ties to the public discourse have weakened, and this section explores why that may have occurred.[6]

But before moving to the reasons for the disconnect, I should note that my view differs from Ben Fine and Dimitris Milonakis.[7] As explained by Geoffrey Hodgson, these authors trace the disconnect to the profession’s turn from “classical and Marxian political economy” to marginalism in the 1870s. However, Keynes and Friedman provide two counterexamples to this thesis – they were certainly engaged with the public – and I view the profession’s turn toward mathematical formalism in recent decades as the more fundamental cause of its disconnect with the public.[8] In addition, Bernstein supports this view with his examples of the ‘New Economics’ between the end of World War II and the Reagan years.

Furthermore, I should note that while formalism has its limits and economists should be open to other modes of analysis, I don’t agree with Tony Lawson and others that abandoning mathematical formalism is the key to reconnecting with public issues,[9] or with Fine and Milonakis who say that the “salvation of economics lies in reversing the ‘marginalist revolution.’“[10] It’s not formalism per se that is the problem, it’s the questions that we ask. That is, mathematics is a tool for economic analysis; it is not the analysis itself. If we ask poor questions and build irrelevant models, as we have done to a large extent in recent years, then the tools are wasted. But when we ask the correct questions and bring these tools along, they can be very helpful in ensuring that the analysis is logical, internally consistent, and stated in a common language. We can certainly debate whether all questions can be handled with this mode of analysis – my view is that some questions cannot be effectively answered with these tools and techniques – but that doesn’t imply they are useless in other contexts.

What is needed is a way to translate these highly formal models into understandable, every day terms, to interpret what these mathematical models say, to explain the important ways in which they provide insight, and so on.[11] That’s where blogs come in, and as emphasized by Henry Farrell and John Sides when they discuss similar issues in political science, “Blogs not only help political scientists participate actively in public debate, but also connect the academic discourse among political scientists with the conversation in the public sphere.”[12] Instead of dropping marginalism and formalism as a means of reconnecting with the public sphere, blogs provide a window into economics that allows the public to understand the important issues without necessarily understanding the technical apparatus that justifies the conclusions.

I believe mathematical formalism is the most important factor in explaining the Great Disconnect,[13] but it is not the only factor at work. The remainder of this section lists and discusses the factors I believe contributed to the withdrawal of economists from the public sphere.

Mathematics and the Desire to be a Scientific Discipline

While mathematical formalism has advanced the analytical capabilities of economics, the diminished connections between academic economists and the outside world can be traced in large part to the desire to make economics a science. This desire has a long history,[14] and the more recent push is due in no small part to Milton Friedman’s Methodology of Positive Economics and the subsequent traditions of the Chicago School. A big part of the attempt to become more scientific was to make the discipline mathematical.

This helped to clarify the assumptions behind the models we use, to force the models to be internally consistent, and to express ideas in a common language. But, and Michael Bernstein makes this point as well,[15] as the discipline became more and more mathematical – the language we speak is increasingly symbolic rather than verbal – it became less accessible to outsiders. The language changed, the models were highly abstract, and it is now hard, if not impossible for an untrained outsider to read academic papers and know what questions were being asked, why they were important, and how they had been answered. Reading the introduction and conclusion might give you some idea of what the main point of the paper was, but for the most part you need be an expert to really understand the degree to which a particular paper contributed to the literature.[16] Thus, the work of economists lost important connections to the outside world. And as those connections dropped away, it was easier for the discipline to drift away from the questions of most interest to society, and for other voices – some with their own agendas – to fill the void.

Positive and Normative Economics

Economists distinguish between positive and normative analysis, and part of the push within the profession to become more scientific involved focusing on positive economics.[17] The result of this push was  that economists have become less willing to take sides in public debates, and more importantly unwilling to wade into public debates when doing so can be perceived as supporting one side over the other. To do so – to actually bring academic knowledge to bear on a piece of legislation or a proposed policy – risks being perceived as stepping over the normative line and incurring the disapproval, tacit or explicit, of colleagues. I don’t mean to imply that this stopped everyone from commenting on proposed policies, it didn’t, but it did inhibit discussion and it ceded ground to all sorts of “charlatans and cranks.”[18] Unlike the prevailing perception of the traditionalists, entering public discourse does not necessarily mean abandoning professional standards. In any case, the move towards insularity and the void it left in the public sphere was not a neutral action, but an implicit normative choice.

Sociological Factors

I believe that the sociology within the profession played a role as well, and that this can also be traced, in part, to the desire to become a science.

As economics has become increasingly mathematical and theoretical, it has also become more cliquish. There are theorists who see themselves at the top of the heap – and their attitude shows it – and there are empiricists and applied economists who are bit further down the list. Even further down in the pecking order are government and business economists. They are largely viewed by academics – theorists in particular – as data grubbers and forecasters with nothing much to offer higher minded academics. As I’ll discuss later, I think this is a mistake, but the increasingly haughty attitude of the mathematical theorists and of academics more generally has helped to cement and widen the divide between those who are inside and those who are outside of the academic community.[19]

Interest in Different Questions

The fact that those inside and outside of academics are interested in different questions may have also play a role in severing the ties of academics to the outside world.

Economics can be used for two things, to understand how the world works and to predict what will happen in the future, i.e. to produce forecasts. To a large extent, academic economists focus on discovering how the economic world works. For example, most of their econometric work is designed to test hypotheses and determine which model of the world is correct. Forecasting is not emphasized. However, economists in business and government are mainly interested in predicting the future of the economy, and their models are designed to forecast optimally rather than to test theoretical hypotheses.[20]

Thus, there is a divide that results from the different ways in which the two communities use economic models, and this discourages communication. That’s not to say that the lines are solid – there are theorists outside of academia and forecasters within – but it does limit the interaction between the two groups. Academics don’t believe they have much to learn from business and government economists,[21] and that sentiment has increased as the profession has turned to more formal, mathematical models. But as I’ll argue below, blogs are changing this attitude and the academics will be improved as a result.

The Costs of Disengagement

For all of these reasons, economics lost ties to the public discourse leaving room for all sorts of “charlatans and cranks” to fill the void. In doing so, academics ceded important ground to think tanks aligned with one party or the other, to self-appointed economic experts, to business economists maximizing profit rather than public knowledge, and to a media that doesn’t always comprehend the economics that underlie a particular issue. Even in cases where there actually was fairly wide agreement among academic economists about a particular policy proposal, the public debate in the media did not convey that economists were largely united on the issue.

This relates to Steve Walt’s description – in this forum – of the two ways that a discipline can abandon its public mission. Academics can become insular, a closed group that mostly talks to itself, or they can become beholden to powerful outside interests.  He uses the phrase “the Scylla of hyper-professionalized irrelevance and the Charybdis of corrupt opportunism” to characterize this distinction.

Which of the two happened in economics? As described above, when academics retreated from the public sphere, powerful interests were able to step in and influence the public dialogue through economists at think tanks and other means.  There were certainly some economists within academia who supported these efforts, but these outside influences were important conduits for special interest politics.  Thus, I view insularity and the void it left in the public sphere rather than subservience to powerful interests within the profession as the more important problem.

There is another cost of disengagement as well. As academic economists severed ties with those who apply economic models to real world problems, the feedback from the users of models to those in academics who create them diminished. Because of this, the questions that academic economists ask drifted away from the questions that the users of the models need to have answered. Thus, lack of communication between the creators and users of economic models and knowledge has lead to economists pursuing a research agenda that fits the interests of insiders, but does not pay enough attention to the questions that are the most important to society more generally. This is an important element of the Great Disconnect.

But blogs and other new forms of communication are changing this, and the Great Reconnect that is now underway is reengaging academic economists with the public.

A Renewed Public Mission in Economics

The development of information technology in recent years has renewed the connections between the academic economists and the world outside the ivory towers.[22] While social media such as Twitter and Facebook have played a role in this development, particularly in spreading and magnifying information, in economics it has been blogs that have driven the renewed public dialogue. Thus, blogs will be the focus of the discussion that follows.[23]

For economists, the rise of economics blogs – which has been quite substantial both inside and outside the academic community – can be explained using our favored and simplest construction, supply and demand.

The demand for the information that blogs offer was always present, but the cost of obtaining the information was prohibitively high. If a reporter or policymaker could quickly read the views of many prominent economists on a particular topic through a few clicks on the computer, i.e. at very low cost except for the time involved, they would be likely to do so – same for members of the business community trying to get a read on the economy so they can forecast sales, and so on. For policymakers, the ability to receive near instant feedback on policy proposals and thus learn about positives and negatives they may have overlooked before the policy is finalized would have been valuable. But prior to blogs, there was no way to quickly find and access this information at a reasonable cost.

However, as digital communications technology developed the cost of supplying this information fell dramatically, and as the econoblogosphere began to develop the ties between academics, the press, policymakers, and the public developed along with it.[24]

The Growth of Economics Blogs

Six or seven years ago there were enough economics blogs in existence to identify it as a class by itself, but the set of actual academics with blogs was quite small.[25] Today, being an academic who contributes to a blog or maintains one of their own is quite common. There is no shortage of views of academic economists about the important issues of the day, and they are available as never before to answer questions from the press and the general public.

Though the growth of economics blogs in recent years has been substantial, the precise numbers are difficult to track over time.[26] But there are still ways to mark the growth. For example, six or seven years ago most newspapers and magazines such as the NY Times, Washington Post, WSJ, and the Atlantic, did not have economics blogs. Today it would be unusual for these news outlets not to have a blog, and some have more than one blog devoted to economics and business. Paul Krugman’s blog at the NY Times is immensely popular and influential. In addition, as an indication of the value of these blogs, it is now possible to make a living as an economics blogger.[27] Finally, think tanks such as the CBPP, Brookings, EPI, CEPR, CATO, The Tax Foundation, etc. didn’t have economics blogs at that time either, at least not universally, but now they do.

Interestingly, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear, economics blogs have grown faster than blogging in other disciplines. For example, as Farrell and Sides point out, political science blogs “are still overshadowed by the economics blogosphere, where … they are beginning to have a real and substantial effect on broader discussion.”[28] Whether this will continue to be the case in the future is unknown, but if other disciplines do catch up it will likely be because they enter blogging in greater numbers rather than a fall-off in the participation of economists in the blogosphere. Economics blogs are here to stay.

The Changing View of Blogs within Economics

One of the important factors in allowing the economics blogoshere to grow, and in the process begin to establish ties with those outside of academia, is the change in how blogs are viewed within the profession and by colleagues within economics departments. As little as five years ago, for example, it was a negative mark for an academic economist to be a blogger. Bloggers were viewed as less than serious, mostly ranting about politics, movies, the subway ride home, and so on when they ought to be conducting basic research. The members of the academic community in economics were aloof and separate, and for the most part unwilling to lower themselves into the realm of pajama clad bloggers.[29]

What caused the attitude to change to the extent that now, even places like the NY Fed have a blog that educates, analyzes policy, presents research findings, and comments on important policy issues? A big factor was that several well-known, serious researchers began their own blogs.  When Greg Mankiw (Harvard) and Jim Hamilton (UCSD) started blogging, and when others like them, e.g. Justin Wolfers (University of Pennsylvania) followed people began to take note. More importantly, they started to think they might learn something instead of just hearing a rant against this or that political foe, or whatever happened to be on the blogger’s mind. That ranting was still there, and Mankiw was in for an awakening that would eventually lead him to turn off comments, but as the big names began entering the blogosphere and as related spaces like Vox EU – essentially a blog where researchers summarize their findings in accessible terms – began to emerge the acceptability of blogging changed. Research was still the currency of the profession, but blogging was no longer a negative mark for an academic – and was perhaps even turning into a positive in some cases.

One factor in the increased acceptance of blogs was the exposure and advertising it gave a Department and the Institution. However, even though attitudes have changed, and are likely to evolve further, blogging still has drawbacks and academics who have not yet received tenure are wise to steer clear of it. Some senior faculty will see it as time that could have been spent on research. But even so, when untenured faculty blog anyway, it’s not the stigma it once was.

However, it would be wrong to assert that all controversy and resistance to economics blogs has eased in the academic community. Blogs have evolved as a place where academic economists can actually bring their knowledge to bear on pressing public issues. That creates great consternation for traditionalists who think bloggers sully the professional reputation of economists when they allegedly abandon the positive-normative distinctions – as if entering public discourse necessarily means abandoning professional standards. They believe that economists should limit themselves to interpretation of theoretical research and to positive analysis. But that’s another argument – for our purposes the willingness of economists to engage in public debate has certainly opened up the conversation with outsiders.

Blogs Enhance the Connections between Academic Economists, the Public, Policymakers, the Press, and Other Academic Disciplines

How have new forms of communication changed the interactions between academics and the outside world?

Ties to the public

More than ever before, the public has direct access to the thoughts of academic economists. On most any important economic topic in the news, it’s possible to find scores of economists writing about it. The arguments for and against a proposal as well as the economics are easy to find, and it is generally written in non-technical language. In addition, as Farrell and Sides note, “Blogs not only help political scientists participate actively in public debate, but also connect the academic discourse among political scientists with the conversation in the public sphere.” And, importantly, “interlocutors in public debate–whether journalists, politicians or policy specialists–… must be able to find relevant political science research and, in many cases, have it explained in ordinary language or through simple but striking graphical presentations of quantitative data.”[30]

In economics this is clearly happening. There are discussions of the latest research in non-technical language accessible to non-specialists (there are technical discussions among economists as well). In addition, there is access to educational materials, even college classroom instruction on YouTube and other video outlets along with supporting course materials. Thus, there is an abundance of analysis, research, and educational materials available to anyone who cares to look for them.

Finally, blogs have increased the visibility of economists and signaled a willingness to engage with the public, and this has led to many more talks to local groups in the community.[31]

Ties to the press

Because of blogs, the number of economists available to journalists has expanded considerably, and journalists are better able to find experts in the particular areas they are writing about. One of the major problems journalists faced in the past was knowing who to call. Who is knowledgeable on a particular issue, who will actually talk to the press, who will say things in an intelligible, straightforward manner rather than technical jargon, and who will give a straight answer instead of a political pitch?[32]

For high profile blogs, another connection to the press comes from conferences where bloggers are invited more as a press representative than an economist (though the economics expertise is part of the reason for the invitations).[33] In these cases, bloggers are in the press pools with business journalists and that allows for a level of interaction that would not otherwise occur. Further, there are blogger’s conferences that bring reporters who also write on blogs at major publications together with academic bloggers, and these gatherings create new connections and new ways in which information can be shared.[34]

There is a perhaps less obvious way in which blogs have increased connections to the press. Because of blogs, professors are more likely to talk to the press than they were before. There are two reasons for this. First, when you have your own blog and the ability to respond in a public forum, you are much, much less worried about being misquoted – a key fear that prevents academics from talking to the press. The cost to your reputation if you are misquoted in the press is much larger than any benefit from an accurate quote in the paper, and it makes academics reluctant to weigh in at all. However, on most topics a blogger will have a long and well known record of their views. If a newspaper story says something different, then pointing to past writings makes it easy to correct the story in a way that doesn’t look like backtracking.

Second, it’s helpful to know what everyone else is saying about a topic before speaking to the press. It’s possible to overlook something or to get the economics wrong. Knowing what your colleagues are saying about an issue and that they think the same as you – or if they differ, you understand why and believe your analysis is better – makes you much less worried that colleagues will read your quotes and wonder how you could have possibly come to such a silly conclusion.

There is a danger of groupthink in this approach – if everyone coordinates on a particular expert and adopts that analysis, it will appear there are many independent views when in fact there is only one and everyone else is simply and lazily signing on to it. However, the joke about economists is generally that we have too many opinions rather than too few, and I don’t think this is a big worry.

Connections to Policymakers

Connections between policymakers and academic economists have always been present, but blogs have increased the connections substantially. For example, there are daily lists of blog posts from economists that circulate at the Treasury and the Fed,[35] and I presume other agencies as well, and blogs are read by Senators, Congressional Representatives, and their staffs.[36] This gives policymakers access to a wider array of views than ever before, including the analytic underpinnings, and it also allows new ideas to percolate up from academic blogs to policy proposals.

Connections to Other Disciplines

One of the benefits of blogging that often goes unrecognized is the ties it forges with other disciplines. These aren’t necessarily ties to the non-academic world, at least not in every case, but economics bloggers come into contact with bloggers from political science, law, sociology and other disciplines. These connections can be valuable. For example, when new regulatory initiatives were being proposed, having access to blogs written by Wall Street lawyers as well as lawyers within academia was very helpful in clarifying the legal issues.

Connections to Business and Government Economists

Finally, blogs have connected academic economists to economists in business and government. As I noted earlier, academic economists have not interacted much with business and government economists because they didn’t think they had much to learn from them. They were interested in different issues, used models in different ways, and so on. But as academic bloggers have started to interact with business and government economists, they are finding that they have quite a bit to offer. For example, business economists – particularly those in the financial industry – knew much more about the institutional features of markets that became problematic during the financial meltdown. This gave them the ability to foresee problems with particular regulatory responses that weren’t always evident to the academics who do not participate in these markets on a daily basis. In addition, because of their strong interest in forecasts, they are often better at interpreting the latest data and what it means for the future of the economy.

Blogs are Changing How Economics is Practiced

This section discusses how blogs are forcing economists to confront questions in real-time rather than the more usual retrospective approach, how blogs are changing the questions economists ask, and the effect of blogs on classroom teaching.

Real-Time Analysis and Policy Prescriptions

Economic research is largely backward looking. After the fact – when all of the data has been collected and the revisions to the data are complete – economists examine data on, say, a financial crisis, and then figure out what caused the economy to become so sick. Once the cause has been determined, which may involve the construction of new theoretical frameworks, they tell us how to avoid it happening again, i.e. the particular set of policies that would have prevented or attenuated the damage.

But the internet and blogs are changing what we do, and to some extent we now act like emergency room physicians rather than pathologists who have the time to carefully examine data from tests, etc., determine what went wrong, and then recommend how to avoid problems in the future. When the financial crisis hit so unexpectedly, it was like a patient showed up at the emergency room very sick and in need of immediate diagnosis and care. We had to reach into our bag of macroeconomic models, choose the one that was correct for this question, and then use it to both diagnose the problems and prescribe policies to fix them. There was no time for a careful retrospective analysis that patiently determined the cause and then went to work on the potential policy responses.

That turned out to be much harder than expected. Our models and cures are not designed for that type of use. What data should we look at to make an immediate diagnosis? What tests should we conduct to give us data on what is wrong with the economy?[37] If we aren’t sure what the cause is but immediate action is needed to save the economy from getting very sick, what is the equivalent of using broad spectrum antibiotics and other drugs to attack unknown problems? The development of blogs puts economists in real-time contact with the public, press, and policymakers, and when a crisis hits, traffic spikes as people come looking for answers.[38]

Blogs are a start to solving the problem of real-time analysis, but we need to do a much better job than we are doing now at providing immediate answers when they are needed. If Lehman is failing and the financial sector is going down with it, or if Europe is in trouble, we need to know what to do right now, it won’t help to figure that out months from now and then publish the findings in a journal article. That means the discipline has to adjust from being backward looking pathologists with plenty of time to determine causes and cures to an emergency room mode where we can offer immediate advice. Blogs are an integral part of that process.

The Effect of Blogs on the Questions Economists Ask

There’s another important aspect of the new connections to the outside world, how it will change economics. Let me quote from my recent op-ed on how academic economics would benefit from increased interaction with those outside of academia:

“How much confidence would you have in the medical profession if the teaching faculty in medical schools had very little experience actually treating patients, and very little connection to – even a lack of respect for – the practitioners in the field? Would your confidence be improved if medical research had little to do with the questions that are important to the doctors trying to serve patients?

Unfortunately, that’s a pretty good description of how economics has been practiced. The questions academic economists are trying to answer have little connection to the problems faced by business economists trying to help their firms make good, profitable decisions (and vice-versa). And though academics pay some attention to government policy, particularly Federal Reserve policy, addressing the problems faced by government economists trying to help policymakers make the best possible choices is not the main focus of this research.”

And, further:

“The failure of academic economists to predict the crisis shows just how costly such insularity and arrogance can be. The patient (the economy) didn’t need to have a heart attack (financial meltdown), because even though the signs were there, the academic community had little interest in learning how to read them, let alone in developing early warning and intervention strategies for bubbles and other problems. [...]

The medical profession would do much worse without connections between the practitioners in the field and the how-it-works types in the labs. The questions researchers ask, for example, are shaped by the needs of the practitioners trying to prevent and cure illness. What types of tests can doctors do in their offices and labs to quickly and reliably indicate the current health of a patient and to forecast future health problems? In economics, if reliable tests for bubbles had been available to business economists, that could have saved the economy from considerable losses.”[39]

The point I’m making is that connections between academics and the consumers of their work can help to shape and improve the questions that economists ask and to focus on the questions that are of the most value to society. For example, prior to the crisis policymakers, investors, and others in the private sector were asking if there was a housing bubble or not. However, not only did we not hear the question, we had no real sense of its importance. And more to the point, we had not done the footwork needed to develop the warning systems that could have answered this question accurately. The medical profession has developed early warning systems for things like heart disease, e.g. good and bad cholesterol readings, and even treatments that prevent problems from occurring once the early warning is tripped. But economists did not have any such apparatus in place prior to the crisis because we didn’t understand the importance of the question. With better connections to the people who were interested in the answer, and there were plenty of people asking if we were in a housing bubble, that might have changed. There’s no guarantee, of course, that even with more connections we would have responded with a set of reliable tests for bubbles and detected this particular instance – we’re certainly working on those now – but it would have improved the chances that we did.

Classroom Teaching

A final and often unrecognized benefit of blogging is that it improves classroom teaching. Blogging forces you to engage with the questions of the day, and this helps to relate economics to its real world applications, something that is often missing in economics courses. When students can see how the things they are learning apply to the real world, it enhances their receptiveness to the material and helps the ideas stick beyond the final exam.

Conclusion

Modern communications technology is forging new connections between academic economists, the public, policymakers, the press, economists outside of academia, and other academic disciplines in ways that were not possible in the past, and there is little doubt that these connections have increased in recent years.  The Great Disconnect is, hopefully, coming to an end.

We are still working out how blogs fit into academic economics, what professional mores ought to apply to blogging, how blogging relates to the academic mission of teaching, research, and service (including serving the public mission), how it should be viewed in tenure and promotion decisions, and so on. But this is a new endeavor for economists, and such questions are expected. We will get these things worked out over time. For now, however, there is plenty of room for optimism that new forms of communication will continue to enhance the public presence of economics in ways that provide mutual benefits to the profession and the public sphere.

→ Initiative on Academia & the Public Sphere

→ Economics & the Public Sphere: Teaching and Research Resources

FOOTNOTES
1.  As discussed below, some authors trace this disconnect with public issues to the turn to marginalism in the 1870s. See Hodgson, Geoffrey M. (2011). “Sickonomics: Diagnoses and Remedies.” Review of Social Economy 69:357-376; Reinert, Erik S. (2000) “Full Circle: Economics from Scholasticism through Innovation and back into Mathematical Scholasticism: Reflections on a 1769 Prize Essay: ‘Why is it that economics so far has gained so few advantages from physics and mathematics?’” Journal of Economic Studies 27:364-376.↑
2.  For example, the claim that tax cuts pay for themselves used to justify tax reductions.↑
3.  The phrase “the Great Disconnect” follows in the tradition within economics of calling any substantial and long-lived event “Great”, e.g. the Great Recession, the Great Moderation, the Great Price Inflation, the Great Depression, and so on.↑
4.  For a book length treatment of this topic, see Bernstein, Michael A. (2001) A Perilous Progress: Economists and Public Purpose in Twentieth-Century America. Princeton (NJ): Princeton University Press.↑
5.  Bernstein, Michael A. (2005) “Reply to Critics.” The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought 12:142-146; Bernstein, Michael A. (2001) A Perilous Progress: Economists and Public Purpose in Twentieth-Century America. Princeton (NJ): Princeton University Press.↑
6.  Even if you don’t believe the ties have weakened in recent decades, i.e. that economists retain the same ties to the public discourse they have always had, it’s still the case that the ties have strengthened recently – we are more engaged with outside groups than ever before – and new information technology has played an essential role in this development. Thus, the main theme of this essay that ties have strengthened recently is not dependent upon whether one agrees or disagrees with the Great Disconnect hypothesis.↑
7.  Fine, Ben and Milonakis, Dimitris (2009) From Economics Imperialism to Freakonomics: The Shifting Boundaries Between Economics and Other Social Sciences, London: Routledge; Milonakis, Dimitris and Fine, Ben (2009) From Political Economy to Economics: Method, the Social and the Historical in the Evolution of Economic Theory, London and New York: Routledge.↑
8.  Thus, I agree with Hodgson (2011, pg. 4) when he says “I would date its full hegemony much later than the 1870s (especially considering the prominence of American institutionalism in the first half of the 20th century).”↑
9.  Lawson, Tony (1997) Economics and Reality, London:  Routledge; Lawson, Tony (2006) ‘‘The Nature of Heterodox Economics,’’ Cambridge Journal of Economics 30(4): 483–505.↑
10.  The quote is from Hodgson (2011, pg. 15).↑
11.  Or, as Farrell and Sides put it, “Blogs can help identify interesting and relevant research. They can explain the basic findings of this research to the public. Finally, they can show how this research applies to contemporary problems.” (pg. 6). Farrell, Henry and Sides, John (2010) “Building a Political Science Public Sphere with Blogs,” The Forum: Vol. 8 : Iss. 3, Article 10.↑
12.  Farrell and Sides (2010).↑
13.  So I agree with Lawson (1997, 2006) on this particular point. See Hodgson (2011, pg. 14). Bernstein (2001, 2005) also views mathematical formalism as a key factor.↑
14.  For example see Reinert (2000).↑
15.  See Bernstein (2001, 2005).↑
16.  And in many cases the questions being asked were purely theoretical in nature – i.e. basic rather than applied science – rather than questions of interest to policymakers and the public.↑
17.  When speaking professionally, economists are trained to make only positive statements. Under the positive approach, an economist can say who the winners and losers of, say, a minimum wage policy might be – it increases the incomes of those with jobs but potentially reduces overall employment – and to give an indication of the relative magnitudes of the costs and benefits (e.g. that the negative employment effects seem small relative to the positive effects on income). But so long as the policy hurts anyone – if one person is hurt slightly but thousands are helped immensely – we avoid saying whether the policy is good or bad. Saying that it’s okay to hurt one person to help others is a value judgment – it’s a normative statement that professional economists shouldn’t be making. The test for us is whether everyone is better off, nobody worse off — if so then the policy can be supported (a concept related to Pareto optimality).↑
18.  As Greg Mankiw explains, he used this phrase in the first edition of his principles textbook. It was intended to describe advisers of the Reagan administration who claimed that tax cuts would increase revenue.↑
19.  This sociology begins in graduate school and is influenced heavily by how different jobs are viewed by faculty, and it’s no surprise that faculty might elevate academics over other choices.↑
20.  For example, sometimes a model will have biased coefficient estimates but predict better out of sample than a model with unbiased estimates. Scientists interested in discovering the truth will prefer to use the model that eliminates bias while forecasters will choose the model that gives the best predictions.↑
21.  With the exception of economists at the Federal Reserve actively engaged in what amounts to academic research.↑
22.  Information technology has also enhanced communication within the profession and made geography much less important. For example, it’s now possible to co-author a paper with a colleague at another institution, or to read working papers of scholars in your area in ways that were not feasible prior to the rise of digital communications.↑
23.  Blogs are far from the only way economists are reengaging. As one example of how the mission to educate has been enhanced, all of my undergraduate courses are recorded and uploaded to YouTube. The videos attract viewers from all over the world, and the interest is particularly acute in developing countries where access to education is difficult.↑
24.  Sometimes, as in my own case, a desire to create ties outside of academia was part of the motivation behind the decision to begin blogging. I was unhappy with how economic issues were presented in the media in the run-up to the Bush reelection, and a desire to try to correct the errors I was hearing in the media is a key reason I started blogging. I was not alone in wanting to weigh in and correct what I was hearing in the press.↑
25.  Brad DeLong’s Semi-Daily Journal, Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabborak at Marginal Revolution, Stephen Gordon at Worthwhile Canadian Initiative, Adam Samwick’s blog, and Kash at Angry Bear followed shortly thereafter by Jim Hamilton and Menzie Chinn at econbrowser and John Whitehead and Tim Haab at Environmental Economics are examples (by no means exhaustive) of academic economics blogs that existed at that time.↑
26.  Economics blogs are not identified by any particular marker, and there is no easy way to tell the blog of an academic from other blogs discussing economics without inspecting each and every one, and even then anonymity creates uncertainty. However, as an active daily participant in the econoblogoshere since February of 2005, I can attest to the robust growth. The demand for information about economics was particularly high during the financial crisis and subsequent recession, and as you would expect this led to the entry of a large number of new academic bloggers.↑
27.  The number of positions is not huge, but they do exist and the number of positions is increasing over time.↑
28.  Farrell and Sides (2010).↑
29.  When I first started, a colleague took me aside and, in essence told me I should stop because I would never get any credit for it within the Department. Fortunately that advice turned out to be wrong, but at the time it was probably the right advice to give.↑
30.  Farrell and Sides (2010, pg. 2).↑
31.  At least, that’s my experience.↑
32.  Many, many of the press inquiries I get now (and I got practically zero before blogging) come as a result of reporters reading what I have to say about a topic on my blog first (often through a search engine such as Google), and then deciding they want to learn more about it. Others are daily visitors who read what is written on the blog to help to stay informed, and follow up with email and phone calls when they have questions.↑
33.  For example, I have been issued press credentials at the Milken Global Conference, the conferences held by The Institute for New Economic Thinking, and the Nobel Laureates Meeting in Lindau, Germany.↑
34.  An example is the Kauffman Foundation’s annual Bloggers Forum.↑
35.  Treasury, White House, and other government agencies now hold blogger conference calls.↑
36.  I have been contacted by several members of Congress for policy advice, and met with their staffs to discuss policy issues. This has happened at the state level as well.↑
37.  For example, bank stress tests were constructed on the fly, and because of that were not as effective as they might have been with more time to think about how to do this type of analysis.↑
38.  During the crisis, my traffic approximately doubled on days when there were new events or new data, and traffic spikes remain a good indication of uncertainty over the latest news about the economy.↑
39.  Thoma, Mark. 2011. “A Great Divide Holds Back the Relevance of Economists.” Reuters. July 26.↑

Sociology and its Public: A Problem of Demand?

Does sociology have a public audience on this side of the Atlantic, on less dramatic subjects? I have not done empirical research on the issue, but, from what I have seen as a participant observer over the years, my impression is this: a very limited one if any. Regularly skimming the science sections of our quality newspapers, for reasons unrelated to this paper, I find psychology, brain research and evolutionary biology far ahead of sociology in coverage. Economics also figures, especially its latest descendants, behavioral and neuro economics. Its real turf, of course, are the economics and politics sections, which are undoubtedly much more influential than the science sections, and here sociology is entirely absent, with very rare exceptions.

Why should this be so? Among the many reasons that come to mind is that sociology corresponds less than other disciplines to what is popularly considered science and what is found interesting about it. What fascinates a lay audience about psychology, behavioral economics, evolutionary biology and the like seems to be that they purport to identify latent causes of actions that we normally believe to be motivated by manifest reasons – causes that secretly control what we do without us knowing about them. Representative for the sort of research that has recently made waves in German science journalism are t‐shirt sniffing experiments, showing that women prefer the smell of men who best fit their genetic make‐up, in the sense of promising more healthy offspring. Another subject that comes back again and again is, I apologize to our American colleagues, adultery among monogamous birds; it turns out to be much more frequent than expected, with females secretly mating with males other than their lifelong partner, in particular if their own fathers had been more than others unfaithful to their mothers, for whatever complicated reasons having to do with, what else, the “fitness” of their offspring.

Not that there was no interest at all in sociological research. A survey on sexual practices would, I am sure, be widely received; but sociologists don’t seem to do sex any more. Instead they do gender, and news items on research findings having to do with the battle of the sexes in whatever of its many versions – unequal pay, the division of housework, the lives of unwed mothers – are eagerly printed and, I presume, as eagerly read by mass audiences. Something similar seems to apply to research on schools and educational success, on social mobility and elite formation, or on immigration and its discontents. Almost always, however, it is just the factual situation that is reported, not the theories explaining it.

Although theory as such is not always spurned. The bestselling German non‐fiction book of the past decade, if not of postwar Germany, is Deutschland schafft sich ab (Germany Abolishes Itself), by Thilo Sarrazin. The book appeared in 2010, and it may be useful to spend a few words on it. Sarrazin was an SPD politician, finance minister of the Land of Berlin from 2002 to 2009, and then became a member of the Executive Board of the Bundesbank, until he was fired as an international liability to the Federal Republic of Germany. Sarrazin is known as a prominent so‐called “Islamkritiker.” The book claims, in short, that immigration from Islamic countries together with low birth rates among educated middle class women of German descent weakens the country’s genetic base, especially by lowering the average IQ, and this will in the long run damage the competitiveness of the German economy. While Sarrazin is a an academically trained economist, the book draws extensively on psychological and demographic research and frequently ventures onto sociological terrain, for example when discussing the relationship between intelligence and religion on the one hand and economic and social achievement on the other. It is probably no exaggeration to characterize the book as a neo‐eugenic manifesto based on a biologistic worldview with strong racist connotations (incest among Arab extended families lowers the intelligence of their children), embedded in an efficiency theory of politics and society in a global economy. While the SPD originally considered expelling Sarrazin from membership, it later changed its mind in light of the enormous public resonance of his book and allowed him to remain a Social Democrat in good standing.

The episode is telling in several respects. One is that there is in fact a public audience in Germany, and not at all a small one, for scholarly books on social issues, even if peppered with statistics and with long, tedious discussions of articles in research journals. Academic sociologists, however, refrain from playing this field, perhaps because they expect that the conclusions they draw from their material will leave people unexcited. It could also be that they are not interested in talking to the Sarrazin readers, although these clearly constitute an important segment of the German middle class. Serious public debate on Sarrazin was conducted almost exclusively by journalists working for quality newspapers, like FAZ and Süddeutsche. A few developmental psychologists came forward to state that intelligence may not entirely be a matter of inheritance, and scholars working on religion in general and Islam in particular pointed out that there are actually many different Islams inside Islam. Little if anything was contributed by sociologists, and, as was to be expected, nothing by economists to whom the book’s rampant economism would naturally appeal.

Why is sociology absent in public debates of this kind? One could also ask: why do sociologists have so little confidence in their work that they talk about it only to each other, rather than to the world at large? One answer is this: they know they have bad cards. Economists, the social gurus of our time, with their machine models of economy and society, still have the boldness to offer exact predictions, with one digit behind the decimal point, and continue to pretend to be in possession of a technology of wealth creation that tells us which levers to pull in order to make everybody better off. Who could afford not to pay attention? Moreover, economics as a discipline perfectly aligns with the dominant scientistic understanding, or misunderstanding, of science. To most people, science is the discovery of general laws that yield parsimonious causal explanations translatable into technical know-how or moral justifications or both, as in the homo oeconomicus model, in evolutionary biology (even the birds do it, and for good reason), or neurological discussions of the “free will.” Sociology, by contrast, deals with historically unique situations in which more causal factors than one are at work, and if it dares to make predictions at all, these are typically highly hedged. Unlike psychology or the natural sciences, sociology can hardly promise to reveal secret material forces underlying and controlling the movements of the visible world. Typically, its findings come with extensive warnings against generalization, pointing to contextual conditions, social, economic or cultural, that interfere with and modify individual causal relations. Some of us consider this to be due to sociology being a young discipline that still has to become really “scientific,” whereas others regard it as reflecting the peculiar ontology of the social world. Be it as it may, what matters is that the sociology that is on offer generally fails to measure up to the scientistic standard model of science and is therefore bound to be found disappointing by a public that believes in that model and that sociologists have failed to educate about the model’s deficiencies.

Another problem faced by sociology, at least in Germany, is a public image that very much dates back to the 1970s. In short, sociology is still widely seen as “soft,” not just as a science, but also politically, and such softness is out of fashion in hard times. In the eyes of many, sociologists are suspect of excessive empathy with their subjects, who frequently are marginal groups like the long‐term unemployed, the criminals, and the “parallel societies” of immigrants and the surplus population sorted out by an ever more demanding Leistungsgesellschaft. Sociology often “explains” their way of life by explicating the meanings, the Sinn, they attribute to themselves and the world. In German, we speak, with Max Weber, of “verstehende Soziologie.” But verstehen is not always appreciated in a society in which a widely known proverb claims that “Alles verstehen heißt alles verzeihen.” Compassion is mostly out these days, and a sociology that dares to explain why people do what they do by pointing out why they think it makes sense for them to do it, is easily considered advocacy in scientific guise, or bleeding heart rhetoric, or Gutmenschentum, which is the enemy number one of the no‐nonsense common sense Sarrazin community.

This leads me to the question of the public to which a renewed public sociology could address itself. If anything, sociologists know that the public sphere is a social and institutional structure, not just a crowd. Is there, then, still an enlightened citizenry out there, a Bildungsbürgertum willing and able to shape a society‐wide “public opinion?” Are there political parties interested in seriously learning about the world, or trade unions looking for insights and arguments that could help their cause? Even without a lot of research, we are all reasonably certain that all of these are much less present today than they were a few decades ago, and clearly they are less interested than they used to be in sociology in particular. And what about the media through which sociology would have to make itself public? Print is declining while television and, recently, the internet are on the rise – less so perhaps than in the United States, but still. The “pictorial turn” that is far from ended is not good for sociology, which mostly deals with subjects that cannot really be photographed; neurology and astronomy are incomparably better in delivering colorful images to newspaper editors and television stations. Moreover, the media seem to be becoming more specialized, making “the public” more segmented than ever. If there was a Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit in the past three or four decades, it was one in the direction of modern niche markets. Today’s consumers of commercialized information can pick what they expect to like, and avoid what they believe they will find boring, without ever taking notice. Of course, users of the newest, internet‐based media are free to compose their news entirely by themselves, with no intervention whatsoever from anyone with authority to decide what a good citizen has to take notice of – which was what public broadcasting was able to do and did only a few years ago. Contemporary information consumers learn only what they want to learn, and nothing else. In a world of increasingly fragmented publics and communities, will public sociology be limited to speaking to those who, for whatever idiosyncratic reasons, happen to be interested in public sociology?

Sociology without Capitalism: A Problem of Supply?

That there are problems, and quite serious ones, on the demand side of a possible public sociology does not by itself mean that everything is in good shape on the supply side – that sociology as a social science actually does have insights to offer that are worth being assigned as required reading to citizens and their political representatives. I am afraid I am not and will never be an elder statesman of the discipline who can claim to overlook its full breadth and confidently point it into new directions. For this my substantive interests are too eclectic and my disciplinary identity is too tenuous – my only excuse being, perhaps, that sociology is as such too diverse to invite identification tout court. Also, like many others, I tend to be obsessed with whatever I happen to be currently working on, which easily makes me overestimate its importance. Still, with all due qualifications, I think a case can be made – and I will in the following make it – that the political‐economic crisis that has for several years now held the world in its grip represents a historical turning point – one that, among many other things, offers a unique opportunity for making sociology once again a truly publicly relevant social science, provided it refocuses itself on what are shaping up to be the crucial issues of our time, all of which have to do with a rapidly changing relationship between economy and society.

At the time, immediately after the crisis erupted, economists were widely reproached for not having seen it coming, not least by sociologists. Up to this day, public confidence in mainstream economics’ ability to explain and help govern the economy is at a low – at a time when there is a widespread realization that, in the words of the German industrialist and liberal politician, Walther Rathenau, “Die Wirtschaft ist unser Schicksal” (our fate depends on the economy). Remarkably, however, the crisis found sociologists by and large as unprepared as mainstream economists. While the latter apparently cannot but cling to their tautological models of self‐stabilizing free markets, superficial modifications notwithstanding, sociologists had for decades more or less eliminated the economy from their agenda, ceding it to the discipline of economics, under a historical peace treaty concluded by Talcott Parsons in the 1950s. If the crisis of 2008 gave rise to a renewed sense of the centrality of the economy for modern society, modern sociology was in a bad position to respond since it has over the years essentially conceived its subject as a society devoid of an economy. In this process, important disciplinary traditions were marginalized or altogether externalized, like political economy which fell into the hands of efficiency‐theoretical economics, whose dominance over the subject is today contested only by a few institutionalist political scientists. Recent attempts to bring the economy back in, by establishing “economic sociology” as a new subdiscipline, all too often limit themselves to suggesting alternative recipes for making economic transactions more efficient, for example by complementing markets with “networks.”

I see the current crisis as a strong signal for our discipline that a theoretical program focused on a society cleansed of its economy is unsustainable, unless we are content with remaining as speechless on the leading social issues of our time as we were before, during and after the events of 2008. Many today feel that the current financial and fiscal crisis is not just an economic but fundamentally a social matter important enough to demand a revised interpretation of modern society – one that takes systematic notice of its being continuously revolutionized by expanding markets; of the fragility of social structures and political institutions that results from this; the growing uncertainty faced by governments and citizens as markets increasingly escape social control; the inherent limits of the market as a site of social integration and a basis of social order, and the like. In principle, sociology with its history as a critical theory of modernity should be able to fill this need and offer “the public” insights that it could reject only at its peril. For this, however, sociology must restore the economy as a central subject of any theory of society worth its name – and not just as a neutral mechanism of wealth creation ruled by esoteric natural laws and governable by scientifically informed technicians. This will not be possible unless, as a discipline, we dispense with our interdisciplinary peace agreement with economics and rediscover the political economy sociology pursued when it was young, which it abandoned in order to specialize on “the society.” There cannot be a more auspicious moment for this than now, when the reputation of standard economics with the public has reached a well‐deserved long‐time low.

Why in the first place was it that sociology conceded the economy to the economists? How did we come to believe that a society without an economy could be a worthwhile subject of study, and that a macrosociology without a macroeconomics could be a viable approach to modern society? Is there enough left for sociology if the social is separated from the economic – and often from the political as well? It may be interesting that in Germany, the exclusion of the economy from the domain of sociology apparently took place earlier than in the United States, and if I am not mistaken, not only or primarily for academic but to a large extent also for obvious political reasons. The story is more than just a little twisted. Max Weber, as we may remember, had a chair in economics (Volkswirtschaftslehre) and originally was a member of the professional association of economists, the Verein für Sozialpolitik. That he left it and founded the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie (DGS; German Sociological Association) was a political act as Weber strongly disapproved of contemporary economics’ public advocacy of a reformist social policy. The DGS was to spare him from having to deal with the hated Kathedersozialisten, which was why it had to pledge itself to Wertfreiheit (value‐free inquiry).[2] But this turned out to be unenforceable, and when the soziale Frage kept reappearing at DGS meetings, Weber, having tried but failed to quell the subject, resigned from organized sociology as well. A few years later he died.

It is remarkable that German sociology after Weber never took up the grand themes of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft that we today associate with Max Weber. They were essentially left to the institutional economists of the Historische Schule, like Werner Sombart, who played no role in Weimar sociology at all. Their demise after the Nazi takeover, not least their attempt at a rapprochement with German nationalism, cleared the ground for the postwar growth of “theoretical” as opposed to historical economics. Sociologists, for their part, in their effort to establish themselves at the German university in the 1920s, took great care not to be taken for socialists or, what was still almost the same then, Marxists. Indeed Horkheimer and the Institut für Sozialforschung in Frankfurt never considered themselves sociologists, and never thought of joining the DGS. Theoretical sociology in Weimar seems to have basically pursued some kind of formalistic theory of social relations of which nothing is left (von Wiese’s Beziehungslehre). Empirical sociology was preoccupied with demographic research, in particular settlement patterns in Germany and, increasingly, Central and Eastern Europe, under the label of Siedlungsforschung. Unlike what the discipline’s postwar mythology suggested, empirical sociology blossomed in the Third Reich and was respected by state and party, in particular in connection with urban and rural planning for the soon‐to‐be‐annexed territories in the East. Capitalism, of course, never figured in what one might with some justification call a particular form of organic public sociology.[3]

In postwar Germany, sociology continued to stay away from the economy, regardless of the fact that economics was simultaneously becoming ever more modellplatonistisch, radically breaking with the tradition of the Historische Schule. Institutional economics disappeared until it came back much later under “modern,” efficiency‐theoretical auspices. Historical economics was marginalized, even in the form of historical econometrics, or “cliometrics.” What was and what was not sociology was increasingly decided in the United States, from where the discipline was reimported as the Weimar and Nazi generations died off or retired. In the 1960s when postwar growth was at its height, the economy seemed no longer of sociological or, for that matter, political concern. Many believed, like Keynes had anticipated in one of his more optimistic moments, that economics had become like dentistry: a skilled trade to be called upon if there was a problem, with a toolkit of proven techniques to painlessly repair whatever there was to be repaired. At Frankfurt, where I was a student in the late 1960s, capitalism had been renamed Tauschgesellschaft (catallactic society) by Adorno, and nobody except for a few Soviet‐Communist sectarians among the students expected “the system” ever again to be vulnerable to economic crisis. (The crisis of the time, of course, being one of legitimation.) The view that the economy had become essentially a technical matter, and had finally and forever been tamed, was by no means limited to Frankfurt, but shared widely, by sociologists no less than by economists. One example among many is the 1968 book by Amitai Etzioni, The Active Society, which was easily the most ambitious attempt ever to spell out the conditions of modern democratic societies determining the direction of their development and governing their own fate. On its 666 pages, it mentions the economy just once, and then only to remark that “Western nations have gained confidence in their capacity to control societal processes with the wide use of Keynesian and other controls for preventing wild inflations and deep depressions and for spurring economic growth” (p.10).

As indicated, it is my view that sociology’s splendid isolation from the economic world is no longer tenable unless our discipline was prepared to render itself irrelevant for the big issues of our time. In view of the crisis, it would seem to be time to concede that sociology’s bet on the non‐economic in society has not paid off. The good news is that it may still be possible to reverse course. Since sociology is not (yet) as completely sold on rational choice as standard economics, we can more easily break away from an image of the world in which the rational pursuit of individual interests is capable of producing a stable order. Nor are we forever married to functionalist models of social equilibrium – which should in principle enable us to understand the inherent restlessness, the permanent imbalance and the continuing crisis‐proneness of the modern society‐cum‐economy, aka contemporary capitalism. Most importantly, we still have access to older concepts of capitalism as a historical social formation, as a really existing, dynamically moving social structure, rather than an ideal type of economy, or a synonym for market economy, as in economics or in the economistic branch of the “varieties of capitalism” literature. Just remember that as late as the 1970s, someone like Daniel Bell was acutely aware of and represented a tradition of sociological theories of capitalism that reached back to the likes of Marx, Weber, Sombart, Schumpeter and, why not, Keynes, even offering the occasional handshake across the ideological divide to a neo‐Marxist like James O’Connor.

Public Sociology as a Return to Political Economy

What might sociology, aware of its political economy tradition, have to say to a contemporary public that is more worried than it has been for a long time about where contemporary capitalism is going? At a minimum, we should be able to impress on the public consciousness that the present crisis is not an accident – not the unfortunate result result of accidental mismanagement of the American mortgage market – but arises from very basic tensions and contradictions inside the regime of democratic capitalism as we have known it in the Western world since the end of the Second World War. Inflation in the 1970s, rising public debt in the 1980s, the deregulation of private credit in the 1990s in compensation for a first wave of fiscal consolidation, and today’s attempts to restore “sound money” under the pressure of a newly global haute finance are all expressions of a clash between a popular moral economy of social rights of citizenship and a capitalist economic economy insisting on allocation according to market justice and in line with the requirements of “business confidence” (Kalecki). Over the decades, the site of the battle changed, from collective bargaining and the labor market to electoral politics to markets for consumer credit to, as of now, international financial markets for the servicing and refinancing of public debt. While the issue was always the same – in David Lockwood’s terms, how to deal with the conflicting requirements of system integration and social integration in a capitalist society – one cannot but note that the market‐correcting capacity of popular democracy and its collective organizations, like trade unions and political parties, has continuously diminished from crisis to crisis. Today it is international financial diplomacy where the contradictions of democratic capitalism are being negotiated between states and investment banks – an arena almost entirely insulated from popular pressure whose logic is unintelligible to people, apart, perhaps, from a few specialists in the employ of economic and political elites.

Sociologists are not expected to furnish advice as to how to restore sound money and make the economy grow again, and rightly so. But they can help the public understand that this is not the only issue at stake, and that restoring the social compact of democratic capitalism, on which the legitimacy of our social order depends, exceeds the powers of even the most expert economic management. The expectations of capital givers are not the only ones in the game, and certainly not the only legitimate ones. Unlike most economists, sociologists understand that the job of politics is more complex than enforcing on a reluctant society the market justice of distribution by marginal productivity. Some sort of balance must be struck between the needs of people and the needs of capital. If providing for business confidence results in erosion of citizen confidence, nothing will in the end be gained for social stability. While political and economic elites may be tempted to use the crisis as an opportunity to insulate capitalism from democracy once and for all, sociologists are well‐placed and well‐advised to draw public attention to the risks that such a strategy inevitably involves.

That we are in fact facing a severe crisis of democracy and not just of the economy should be obvious by now. In Europe, under the pressure of financial markets, national leaders are systematically transferring decision‐making power to international organizations, taking authority away from national parliaments and, by extension, electorates. Debtor countries have no choice but to accept the dictates of their creditors, with national elections rendered meaningless for decades to come. Creditor countries, for their part, are driven by “the markets” to respond rapidly and flexibly to the latter’s fluctuating needs and capricious demands, which leaves little time for their parliaments to exercise their democratic prerogatives. Firmly institutionalized austerity policies radically narrow the range of political alternatives in all countries, rendering political participation increasingly inconsequential. Remarkably turnout in elections, at all levels, from local communities to Europe as a whole, has been steadily declining everywhere since the 1990s, and most steeply in areas with high rates of poverty, immigration, broken families and the like, where political mobilization would be most needed. As sociologists we know, and are competent to let others know that, where legitimate outlets of political expression are shut down, illegitimate ones may take their place, at potentially very high social and economic cost.

To add one more point, it has now become almost commonplace that the present crisis is to a large extent a crisis of trust – in the value of money, the willingness and ability of debtors to pay back their debt, the capacity of political leaders to resist the pressures of “the market,” and the capacity of markets to provide for an efficient, not to speak of fair, allocation of resources. Not only is there not much confidence that our governments and international organizations will be capable of preventing another crisis. There is also a rapid decline in trust among market actors themselves, in particular among banks dependent upon borrowing from one another. The result is that states and central banks may once again have to come in as trustees of last resort, which may force them to take over bad debt and extend guarantees of a dimension that may finally bring them to their knees. It is not so long ago that transaction cost economics has maintained that institutions are best built by market actors “from below,” looking after their own interests in efficient trading relations. Rational choice institutionalism in political science and sociology was eager to absorb the message and followed suit by replacing public government controlled by the state by private governance constructed by market participants. The crisis has shown that private ordering can go only so far and is easily overburdened with the task of providing for social order. When it breaks down, public authority needs to be brought back for repair work. There is no reason not to draw public attention to what is an obvious bankruptcy of liberal theories of institutions and, at the same time, a resounding confirmation of the Durkheimian sociological legacy.

Drawing on the sociological tradition, we are able to see that what is at the bottom of our current predicament is the well‐known tendency inherent in the capitalist social formation for markets to expand dynamically into other spheres of social life, typically disrupting them and often leaving them in disarray. That tendency today meets with a secular weakness of social countermovements against marketization, of the protective‐conservationist as well as the progressive‐reconstructionist kind, in a historical period when global capital is about to superimpose itself on local, regional, national social structures and ways of life. Unlike contemporary economists, sociologists, informed not least by some of the great economists of the past, like Sombart and Schumpeter, possess in principle the conceptual tools to understand that the capitalist system is one that grows from within, in a way that continuously tends to turn social relations upside down. Rather than proceeding in harmony with the rest of society, capitalist development continuously causes frictions and contractions that demand and call forth ever new collective efforts at social stabilization, aimed at establishing some kind of – ever precarious – balance between economy and society.

Karl Polanyi, whose work a growing number of sociologists find inspiring, did not seek membership in the sociological profession of the 1950s and 1960s. He was content to be an economist, an economic historian, and a social anthropologist. It says something about our discipline, and something not very complimentary, that he was discovered by sociology only in the 1990s when neoliberalism was rampant and financialization was ushering in yet another revolutionary transformation of the capitalist economy. I believe there is no better summary account of our current predicaments than one drawing on the Polanyian notion of the three fictitious commodities, money, nature, and labor, and the inherent limits to their commodification. Many believe that these limits may now be about to be reached, and with them the limits of further capitalist growth, at least of the sort that can still be made more or less compatible with existential human needs. The private‐industrial manufacturing of money in the wake of the deregulation of the “financial industry” has imposed unprecedented uncertainty on entire societies, exacerbating distributional conflict within and between them and raising as yet utterly unresolved problems of global re‐regulation. As to nature, or land, we have slowly been learning that the fundamental characteristic of a fictitious commodity – that its supply is not and cannot be governed by the demand for it – applies to nature with full force. Indeed indications are that unless we find ways to protect our global commons from further commodification, the very basis of life on earth as we know it may soon be consumed in the service of unbridled progress of capital accumulation. Finally, ever‐increasing flexibility of labor markets and work organization has subjected individuals and families to relentless pressures to organize their lives in line with the unpredictable demands of increasingly competitive markets. Among other things, the result is growing polarization between an impoverished surplus population of losers; overworked middle‐class families living an absurdly busy life and putting in ever more, and ever more intense, working hours in spite of unprecedented prosperity; and a small elite of winner‐take‐all superrich whose greed knows no limits while their bonuses and dividends have long ceased to serve any useful function for society as a whole.

What, if not the political economy of contemporary capitalism, as anticipated in Polanyi’s conception of critical limits to commodification, could be the subject of a renewed public sociology? A lot of work, of course, awaits. Sociologists have contributed little if anything to money and finance, pace Georg Simmel and apart from a few entertaining but politically irrelevant ethnographic accounts of life at Wall Street trading desks, written before disaster struck. On the natural environment, sociologists have produced an endless number of studies on when and why people are willing to separate their garbage or make other low‐cost sacrifices. But the question what it is that makes our societies so dependent on capitalist growth, even at the risk of destruction of their economic, natural and human foundations, we have left, strangely enough, to heterodox economists. The same applies to reflections on how a society compelled to grow might possibly be turned into one at peace with nature and itself. That economists turn to psychologists for advice on alternative, non‐economic sources of human happiness cannot really be held against them, given that sociology has so carefully avoided the subject – although it could have reasonably insisted that the issue is a social and political one rather than a psychological one. Relatively well, finally, are we doing on labor markets, family structures, and the conflicts between participation in the intensifying rat race for income and advanced consumption on the one hand and social life, including the raising of children, on the other, as described by, well, public sociologists such as Arlie Hochschild and Richard Sennett.

The Demand Side Again

This brings me back to the old question: would anyone listen? Of course one should not be optimistic these days. But it seems that these are not normal times, or that normal times may well be coming to an end. Clearly a sense of crisis is building among elites as well as citizens, and not least in the academy, that goes far beyond what we have seen in decades. Perhaps we are approaching another Sattelzeit (Reinhard Koselleck): a period of accelerated change with uncertain event that will be of formative importance for a long time. An interesting symptom is how clueless standard economics presents itself when it comes to handling the post‐2007 global economic disaster. Never were the world’s leading economists as divided as today over what is to be done – something that even the trade press, like the Economist and the Financial Times, cannot but notice. Perhaps the explanation is simply that capitalist democracy has run out of technical fixes, as a result of which economic theory as we know it is losing its grip on the public discourse. Political leaders seem already to have lost faith, on both sides of the Atlantic. It is interesting that even inside economics itself doubts are emerging about, for example, the way we measure growth and prosperity, or the prospects for continued maximization of material prosperity in general.

Hauling the economy back into society, and indeed into sociology, may be a program for which one could find allies today. It may resonate even among political elites, in a world in which states are about to be turned into something like public corporations having to earn the confidence of capital givers; in which international organizations function as deposit insurance or debt collection agencies on behalf of private investors; and governments begin to resemble corporate managements pressed to extract “creditor value” from citizens turned effectively into workforces disciplined by capital markets. Perhaps there may also be demand for a renewed critical theory of political economy among the young who no longer join the political parties, avoid trade unions, and refuse to vote in elections. Of course we cannot know who may in the end pick up on a renewed sociological critique of capitalism, one that refuses to share the assumptions of an obsolete model of political economy which less and less people can trust. But as with all “basic research,” the fact that we initially cannot say who will use it and how can be no reason for not doing it.

For sociology to become truly public sociology, I believe it must get ready for the moment in which the foundations of modern society will again have to be rethought, like they were in the New Deal and after the Second World War. That moment, I am convinced, is approaching, and when it is here sociologists should have the intellectual tools at hand for society to understand what is at stake. Even if our only audience was, at first, in the academy, this would not necessarily render our efforts futile. In the final chapter of the General Theory, Keynes expounded on the power of “ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong.” The world, he claimed, “is ruled by little else,” even though new ideas do not take hold immediately:

[F]or in the field of economic and political philosophy there are not many who are influenced by new theories after they are twenty‐five or thirty years of age, so that the ideas which civil servants and politicians and even agitators apply to current events are not likely to be the newest. But, soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil (Keynes 1967 [1936], Ch. 24).

There is no way of knowing, and perhaps good reason to doubt, if there will be enough time for the general trickle‐down model of ideational change to come to our relief – the “gradual encroachment of ideas,” as Keynes calls it, which has worked so well for himself. Our need for a less suicidal political economy may be more urgent. But this can only mean that we cannot begin early enough to challenge the intellectual hegemony of contemporary economics over contemporary understandings of economy and society. The first public for public sociology, I suggest, is the academy, with its unprecedented numbers of students in economics and business administration where they are being taught, in essence, that society exists only as a grandiose opportunity for utility maximization by those capable of making the most rational choices. If we can’t sow the seeds of doubt here, where then? The Parsonian peace treaty between sociology and economics has silenced the Kantian “contest of faculties” (Streit der Fakultäten) where we would most need it today. Sociologists and political scientists, in alliance with heterodox economists of different stripes, have begun working on a new political economy of a new sort, a socio‐economics that would again make the economic subservient to the social rather than vice versa, first as a theoretical and then, hopefully, as a political project. It is high time for the mainstream of the discipline to remember its roots and join the battle, even though we know that the capitalist reorganization of the university that is under way, in particular in England but by far not only there, is not least designed precisely to eliminate critical reflection, of course for no other purpose than economic efficiency. But then, if public sociology cannot make itself heard in this public, how can it hope ever to be noticed in the world of YouTube, Facebook, Fox TV and the BILD‐Zeitung?

→ Initiative on Academia & the Public Sphere

FOOTNOTES
1.  First draft. Paper presented at a conference organized by the SSRC and the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin, The Public Mission of the Social Sciences and Humanities: Transformation and Renewal, September 16‐17, 2011.↑
2.  Weber’s own social science was anything but wertfrei. His passionate rejection of the social policy advocacy of the economists of his time was that of a liberal nationalist for whom – what he thought were – the coming struggles for national survival and international supremacy, in particular with Britain, were of paramount importance. Social policy, just as democracy, was not for making people happy, but to help the newly formed German Reich to brace itself for an anarchic, conflict‐ridden international world. That Weber could consider his position to be wertfrei was due to his conviction that Realpolitik was an objective fact and not something one was free to choose.↑
3.  With a little bad luck, sociology as it had developed by the end of the Weimar Republic might have become a publicly recognized pillar of the regime. In 1934 the DGS met for the first time after the Nazi takeover. The issue on the agenda was whether to continue under new pro‐Nazi leadership or dissolve in protest against it. A number of those present suggested electing as president Reinhard Höhn, to succeed Ferdinand Tönnies. Höhn, a lawyer who worked as an assistant to the sociologist Franz Wilhelm Jerusalem in Jena, later became a professor of public law and a leading figure at the SS headquarters, where he headed a department at the Reichssicherheitshauptamt. While Höhn did not get enough votes, the members, in order not to antagonize the new government, decided to suspend the association for the time being rather than dissolving it. It was revived only after 1945. In the 1950s, Höhn reemerged to set up and run, well into the 1970s, the leading management school of the Federal Republic.↑

Even though the struggle has been largely won, and professional sociology is now a well established and thriving academic discipline, it still behaves as though it were in gestation, defensive about its scientific credentials, insistent on separating itself from lay sociology, wary of showing a public face for fear it would be discredited. This sense of inadequacy has often been a self-fulfilling prophecy, encouraging others to wonder whether the emperor has any clothes, while prompting sociologists to underplay their public role. This essay aims to show that sociology’s recent return to its publics takes place in circumstances very different from those in which the discipline originated: within the framework of an advanced discipline that can only benefit from an invigorating and open interaction with the worlds it studies.

Just as individual sociologists repress their early zeal for social transformation under the compulsions of a normalizing career, with the possibility of returning to the past in the reflective security of maturity, so the discipline as a whole can now safely recover the inspiration that was so central to its origins — origins that it repressed a century ago in order to build a professional infrastructure, knowledge and experience. Today our disciplinary edifice supplies the foundations for an expansive public sociology – a sociology that contributes to public debate and discussion.

A Century of Professionalism

The road to professionalism, with its accoutrements of journals, peer review, research programs, distinctive theories, method and concepts, text books, as well as the definition of the undergraduate major and the carefully regulated doctoral program — in other words the autonomization of its disciplinary field — was built through the promotion of policy sociology. The philanthropic foundations, including such representatives of capitalist enterprise as Rockefeller and Carnegie, supported the fledgling science’s investigation of a plethora of social problems that beset America in the early decades of the 20th century. Rockefeller was especially active, supporting the research for Robert and Helen Lynd’s Middletown [3] as well as sponsoring leading research communities at the University of Chicago (under Robert Park) and at the University of North Carolina (under Howard Odum).

Support from the private foundations required that sociology shed its political radicalism. The resulting neutered professionalism became attractive to the Federal Government as early as the 1920s when it incorporated rural sociology into its Department of Agriculture.[4] During the depression, the federal government actively promoted policy-relevant sociology, epitomized by the President’s Research Committee Recent Social Trends in the United States, headed by William Ogburn.[5] This was followed by wartime research on the effectiveness of propaganda and Samuel Stouffer’s famous study of military morale, The American Soldier.[6] In the postwar years federal funds poured into sociology, both directly from state agencies and through such relatively autonomous bodies as the National Science Foundation.

If the first phase of the discipline’s autonomization (before World War One), sprung from a dialogue with publics, and the second phase, from the 1920s to the 1960s, was marked by an increasing separation of professional sociology from publics and a continuing dialogue with the policy world, the third phase was marked by an internal critique of professional sociology – the questioning of policy sociology through the vehicle of critical sociology. This third phase had antecedents as early as the 1930s in the work of Robert Lynd[7], but it crystallized in C. Wright Mills’s The Sociological Imagination which called into question sociology’s connection to the corporate world through the development of “abstracted empiricism” (survey research devoid of context or theory) as well as the abstruse architectonics of what Mills called “grand theory”.[8] Alvin Gouldner and others carried the critical mantle forward into the 1960s and 1970s drawing attention to the ideological bases of grand theory, and specifically the structural functionalism of Talcott Parsons and his students, that celebrated the essential harmony and progressiveness of American society.[9] Like Mills, Gouldner also exposed and criticized sociology’s hidden connections to the welfare state.[10] His writings appeared just as a wave of social movements engulfed the university – movements that indicted liberal academia, including sociology, for closing its doors to minorities, even as it celebrated the supposed openness and pluralism of American society. It was not simply the under-representation of African Americans, Chicanos, Native Americans, Asian Americans and women within the academy, but also the absence of corresponding sociologies, views from the margins, that made mainstream sociology suddenly seem so anachronistic to so many in these turbulent years.

In the 1970s professional sociology moved to accommodate critical perspectives, absorbing the blows directed its way by becoming more open to political pressures. Subfield after subfield thus moved to the left: stratification and education became the study of social inequality; the sociology of culture incorporated ideology; industrial sociology became the study of domination in the labor process; the sociology of the family refocused around patterns of male domination and commodification; political sociology turned to the state and its relation to class; social movements were reconceived not as irrational responses to social change but as its rational promoters; the sociology of development moved from modernization to theories of underdevelopment, dependency and world systems theory. At the same time the sociology of race, gender and sexuality became ever more popular. Throughout this period American sociology became less parochial, questioning its earlier assumptions and embracing historical and comparative perspectives.

As the tide of social movements ebbed (or, as in the case of the labor movement was forcibly repressed), as national politics reacted against the liberal hangover of the 1970s and the very idea of the social was called into question, as attacks on public welfare and state regulation mounted, and as the market panacea gained credence, sociology was pushed back on the defensive and the field moved rightward. Economic sociology now became more focused on markets and their social preconditions, neo-institutionalism traced the adoption of American institutions globally (a reincarnation of modernization theory), and for some the family became once more a haven in a heartless world. The shift was discernible but was modest relative to the rightward turn in the national political and cultural scene, which became increasingly hostile to the defining ethos of sociology — its opposition to social inequality and its valorization of the social. This broader shift against sociology is today both an inspiration for and the greatest obstacle to a new (fourth phase) of sociology – a renewed dialogue between professional and public sociology.

A century ago sociology was all too easily identified with a primitive public sociology, what some have called “charity sociology” or “social movement sociology,” closely tied to good works and social reform. The founders of American sociology – Sumner, Giddings, Ward and Small — broke with this early public sociology by assuming an academic pose, drawing on Spencer’s evolutionary theory and Comte’s positivism. Today’s public sociology, bolstered by a century of advances in professional, policy and critical sociology, can be far more sophisticated. We are now sufficiently secure in our science to engage with publics, to promote a deeper and broader understanding of our endangered world and, thereby, reinvigorate sociology with the pressing issues of our times. But to stride forward in this direction requires rethinking the foundations of our discipline and how we conceive of the public sphere. We begin with the meaning of public sociology and the challenges it faces.

What is Public Sociology?

What is “public sociology” today? Most simply, it is taking sociology to publics beyond the university, engaging them in dialogue about public issues that have been studied by sociologists. Indeed, it is a triple dialogue – a dialogue among sociologists, between sociologists and publics, and most importantly within publics themselves. The balance among these three types of dialogue varies, giving rise to a distinction between traditional and organic public sociologies.

Traditional public sociology is the conventional portrait of public sociology – conveying sociology to a wide lay audience through sociological interventions that set a new agenda for the discussion of public issues. It can be an op-ed in a national newspaper or a widely read book, such as W.E.B. Du Bois’s (1903) The Souls of Black Folk, William Foot Whyte’s (1943) Street Corner Society, Gunnar Myrdal’s (1944) An American Dilemma, David Riesman’s (1950) The Lonely Crowd, Daniel Bell’s (1973) The Coming of Post-industrial Society, Robert Bellah et al.’s (1985) Habits of the Heart, Arlie Hochschild’s (1989), The Second Shift or Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher’s (2000) The Case for Marriage.[11] All these books have stimulated public debate in such areas as race, gender, class, individualism, family values, the new economy and so forth. Traditional public sociologists, then, bring sociological expertise on issues of public concern to wider audiences, generating dialogue within and between publics. Here the sociologist is a catalyst of public debate and discussion.

In focusing on the celebrated works of sociology, written by academics at elite departments with the space and time, the research support, and the connections to make their work visible, we too easily overlook the everyday work of what I call the organic public sociologist, who is intimately and directly connected to publics themselves, often articulating and representing issues that publics are already struggling with. There are myriads of unpublicized projects of this kind, involving labor organizations, community groups, communities of faith, environmental groups, neighborhood associations, and so forth. In contrast to the publics of traditional public sociology, here publics are local rather than national, thick (bound by a dense set of relations) rather than thin, active rather than passive, often counter-publics rather than mainstream. Here we find such projects as Boston College’s Movement/Media Research and Action Program that brings sociologists together with community organizers to discover how best they can present social issues to the media. This collaboration between academia and community is based on the theory of “framing” developed by William Gamson and Charlotte Ryan.[12] The UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment offers a different umbrella for organic public sociology. It has worked closely with different labor unions to develop research on family leave, contracts in the construction industry, conditions for successful organizing, the resurgence of immigrant unions, and organized a union census. There may be no tangible product of organic public sociology — dialogues that are not recorded but nevertheless mold and shift people’s understanding and civic practices. If there is a tangible product it is likely to be framed in terms of locally defined issues. Indeed, in the celebrated terms of Robert Merton, we may say that the traditional public sociologists are “cosmopolitans” while the organic public sociologists are “locals”.[13]

The public sociologist, whether traditional or organic, engages in a relation of reciprocity in which neither side unilaterally sets the terrain for the other. In this regard public sociology is very different from policy sociology where a client hires the sociologist to solve a particular problem or justify an already formulated solution. James Coleman, for example, was hired to conduct his famous studies of schooling and inequality, showing that school desegregation would enhance educational outcomes, and thus advocating the policy of busing.[14] No less controversially, he reversed himself a decade later, after studying busing’s effects on white flight to the suburbs.[15] As often happens in large-scale policy research, Coleman’s work was widely debated, and thus entered the domain of traditional public sociology.

Equally public sociology can feed public debate and cause policy changes and so indirectly becomes policy sociology. Diane Vaughan’s analysis of the Challenger shuttle disaster of 1986 began as (traditional) public sociology with an indictment of the organizational culture of NASA as “normalizing deviance,”[16] but after the Columbia shuttle disaster of 2003 it became policy sociology as her work was adopted by the government body that investigated the causes of the accident.[17] The distinction between public and policy sociology is analytical – the one a conversation about values and goals and the second concerned with the means to solve well-defined problems – but in practice the two are often closely connected.

Whether it be the policy sociology of James Coleman or the public sociology of Diane Vaughan, both are dependent upon professional sociology – the genesis, expansion, reconstruction, degeneration of intersecting and multiplying research programs. Each research program has its distinctive set of assumptions, conceptual frameworks, more or less developed theories, methods of investigation as well as contradictions and anomalies that drive it forward. Professional sociology is primarily consumed – read, evaluated, and discussed — by fellow sociologists. It is, as we say, subject to peer review whereas public sociology is also responsive to publics just as policy sociology is also accountable to clients. There is, however, a fourth type of sociology – critical sociology – that exposes and engages the assumptions, often the normative assumptions, of professional sociology. Above I referred to Robert Lynd, C. Wright Mills, and Alvin Gouldner as pioneers of critical sociology. The audience for their work is largely composed of academic sociologists, although the values they espouse often permeate public sociology.

Our four sociologies can be placed in a two-by-two matrix as in Table 1. One dimension defines the audience: academic or extra-academic. That is to say professional and critical sociologies speak primarily to peers whereas policy and public sociologies speak to audiences beyond the academy. The second dimension is not “knowledge for whom?” but “knowledge for what?” On the one hand, we have a sociology that is concerned with instrumental rationality, solving puzzles within research programs or solving problems for clients. The values and ends are given and the sociologist is concerned with means. On the other hand, there is reflexive knowledge that is concerned with elucidating foundational values themselves, what Max Weber called value discussion.

Here I can only hint at the ramifications of this reclassification of sociological labor.[18] Suffice it to say, at any one time a given sociologist may occupy more than one quadrant within this matrix, while sociological careers become paths among the categories. The four sociologies are mutually interdependent and invigorating. As such they not only represent a vision and division of sociological labor but they also form a field of power in which, at least in the United States, instrumental knowledge dominates reflexive knowledge. The relations among the four sociologies that define the discipline vary historically within any given country, as we have seen for the United States, but also from country to country. Beyond the nation, one can also discern a global division of sociological labor, with professional sociology ever more concentrated in the United States. A similar analysis can be extended to other disciplines: the natural sciences are dominated by instrumental knowledge, the humanities by reflexive knowledge, and the social sciences reveal their complexity in different combinations of instrumental and reflexive knowledge. Here I am concerned especially with the implications for public sociology in the United States.

Challenges to Public Sociology

Within our discipline, public sociology is caught in a contradictory position between on the one side professional sociology’s concern to develop a monopoly of abstract, specialized knowledge, evaluated by peers and, on the other side, publics that demand accessible knowledge devoted to concrete issues. Let me first deal with the relation of sociology to its publics before turning to the relation of public sociology and professional sociology.

The symmetrical exchange between sociology and its publics, what Jürgen Habermas has called “communicative action”[19], is hard to achieve, let alone sustain. On the one hand, public sociology easily veers toward a more instrumental relation in which sociologists become hostage to their publics — traditional public sociologists pandering to their publics or organic public sociologists going “native.” For their part publics want to turn public sociologists into their own policy sociologists! On the other hand, sociologists may seek to subjugate publics, demanding moral conformity to their edicts, as when traditional public sociologists turn science into sermons or when organic public sociologists ply their trade like a vanguard party. That the balance between sociologist and public is hard to maintain makes the regulatory ideal of a symmetrical reciprocity more rather than less important.

Public sociology is not only challenged from the outside, by the very publics it addresses, but also from within the discipline, by professional sociology. From the beginning professional sociology has deployed the mantle of science to distinguish itself from common sense, to distinguish its analytical theory from folk theory, and to distinguish its systematic methods of data collection from random and incoherent experiences of everyday life. It has developed bodies of knowledge, subject to peer review and all too often rendered inaccessible to wider publics. Professional sociology is intended first and foremost for fellow sociologists.

This insular orientation was first driven by sociologists’ need to establish their legitimacy within the wider academic field, to justify its existence as a latecomer discipline and to distinguish itself from philosophy, psychology, and even closer enterprises like economics, political science and anthropology. Not only in its efforts to establish its separate identity on the borderlands of competing disciplines, but also within sociology the quest for recognition, whether by individuals or departments, has led to intense competition, especially among those with the greatest concentration of academic capital. The competition is defined by the terms of science, whose meaning is itself a stake in the struggle, but which is conventionally marked by the use of statistical models, and by publication in journals regulated by professional gatekeepers. The evolution of sociology has led its dominant institutions to foster a language and practice at odds with the needs of public sociology – knowledge that would be available to publics and evaluated on the basis of its relevance to public issues.

Professional sociologists often fear that public sociology not only threatens the “reputation” of sociology within the world of competing disciplines but also in the political realm beyond the university. In this view, a public display of the findings and theories of sociology, especially in these conservative times, risks delegitimating the discipline in the eyes of foundations, government agencies and others who provide the funds that support the leading departments of sociology. The guardians of professional sociology, thus, often see public sociology as partisan sociology — as if their own professional sociology carried no political stakes of its own. This is the metaphysical pathos of cognoscenti, found in such collections as Terence Halliday and Morris Janowitz’s (1987) Sociology and Its Publics or Stephen Cole’s (2001) What is Wrong with Sociology? Irving Louis Horowitz’s (1993) The Decomposition of Sociology, similarly, is an unrelenting lament about the politicization of sociology in the 1960s and 1970s.[20]

If sociology is politicized, it is most often at the hands of politicians, and irrespective of its public character. Thus, sociological research (but not just sociological research) has come under attack in the US Congress, threatening federal programs that support, for example, research in the area of sexual behavior — so essential to the understanding of sexually transmitted diseases. Increasingly, politicians are directly intruding on the academic prerogative to decide what research is worth carrying out. The multiple attacks on the academy are forcing sociology, but again not just sociology, to undertake a far more public defense of what they do. In these circumstances, public sociology can become a defense against politicization thrust upon it from without.

Indeed, one may argue that privatization (diminishing public funds), corporatization (the turn to private donors), and marketization (appealing to the most vulgar instincts to boost student admissions and justify escalating fees), call for a new alliance of the university and its lay publics. Rather than capitulate to the reigning orthodoxies of privatization and regulation that emanate, ironically, from the neighboring disciplines of economics and political science, sociology should be at the forefront of defending the public domain against the encroachment of markets and states, and in so doing it must acquire a public face.

Rethinking the Discipline

Today’s arguments against public sociology are not new, but stretch back to the birth of professional sociology, when it was struggling to establish itself as a discipline, as a new science. But now it is a thriving discipline in the U.S., with over 200 journals, a growing professional membership of over 14,000, an elaborate national labor market for doctorates, over 25,000 majors produced ever year (having overtaken economics and history), ever more coverage in the media, and a significant international influence as well. Its re-entry into the public age was marked recently by the launching of a new magazine, Contexts, designed to bring sociology to a wider audience. Moreover, as the political tide rises against them, sociologists increasingly believe that their critical perspectives should be widely disseminated, even if only as a pebble thrown into the onrushing conservative tide of national politics.

Yet we still train sociologists, and still conduct our discipline as if it were born yesterday. Thus methodology texts and courses promote the conversion of common sense into sociology rather than suggesting the ways sociology can be returned to the publics from which it came and to whom we are ultimately accountable. We have at our command the most sophisticated techniques of research, but they are all focused on the translation of data into theory. It is simply presumed that theory will seep back into society through osmosis. Indeed, it is the case that sociology of today has often become the conventional wisdom of tomorrow. Some have even complained that this gives the impression that sociological knowledge does not accumulate. Still, there is a paucity of thinking on precisely how analytical theory can be turned back into folk theory. We devote ourselves to using the world to change sociology, but how sociology changes the world, that’s more like immaculate conception or, more usually, immaculate miscarriage.

Just like the methodologists, today’s theorists have adopted a defensive posture, building a professional moat around the sociological edifice rather than taking our discipline into the trenches of civil society. Indeed, the latest trends within sociological theory warn against any such advance into society, calling attention, instead, to the nefarious and insidious collaboration of knowledge and power. Michel Foucault warns that to disseminate social science is to extend domination, governmentality, and disciplinary powers, although that did not stop him spreading his texts. He had no theory of his own practice. Influenced by Foucault, Zygmunt Bauman proposed that in this age of postmodernity the intellectual-as-legislator is being replaced by the more modest role of intellectual as interpreter, so we might as well abandon the aspirations of social science as we know it.[21] Such are the bleak prognoses of our theories of knowledge.

Even such a devout defender of the enlightenment as Pierre Bourdieu, the leading public sociologist of the late 20th century, never ceased insisting on the decisive separation of scientific sociology from what he called spontaneous sociology, the everyday understandings we have of the world. This separation is both inevitable and necessary as the viability of everyday existence depends upon “misrecognition,” deeply rooted in habitus, that cannot be altered by intellectual bombardment. Yet this never stopped Bourdieu transmitting his own science of sociology back to the people, seeking to denaturalize and defatalize the world. In popularizing his theory he became a celebrated exception to his own rule that subaltern classes are beyond redemption. For all his reflexivity he had no theory of what he did! He failed to analyze the conditions of his own practice of public sociology.

In short, theory and methodology are stuck in the originating impulses of social science, its desperate struggle to make a place for itself. Sociology’s self-understanding now needs to catch up with its silent and embarrassed practices, with the ubiquity of small and large-scale public sociologies, unrecognized as such. We need to replace theories of impossibility with theories of the possibility of public sociology, consonant with the impulsive practice of the greatest theorists and methodologists themselves.

Rethinking the Public Sphere

It is not enough to rethink our discipline, that is to develop methodologies and theories of the back-translation of sociology to publics; it is also necessary to use our discipline to rethink the meaning and potentiality of publics. Here our forefathers are of limited help. Max Weber, after all, saw the citizenry as an “inarticulate mass,” subject to manipulation by dishonorable leaders. Emile Durkheim pinned his hopes on occupational associations but was dismissive of social movements — the very soil from which associations spring – as confused responses to anomie. Theories of fascism and communism as well as of mass society, playing heavily on the notion of the atomized individual bent by irrational forces, dominated the sociology of the 1950s, influenced by the pessimism of the Frankfurt School and ranging from Hannah Arendt’s (1951) The Origins of Totalitarianism and David Riesman’s (1950) The Lonely Crowd to Neil Smelser’s (1971) Collective Behavior.[22] Similarly, theorists of the public sphere, from Walter Lippmann (1922) to Hannah Arendt (1958) and Jürgen Habermas (1962), present it as atomized and colonized by mass media, consumer markets, and meaningless politics.[23] In order to think of the public sphere as accessible to sociology we need to reconceptualize it.[24]

What better place to begin our revisions than with the 1960s social movements, which instigated a revolution in the way we regard the political competence of citizenry. New theories developed by Charles Tilly, William Gamson, Doug McAdam, Alain Touraine, as well as Edward Thompson’s hugely influential The Making of the English Working Class [25] all replaced a thinly veiled contempt for the “masses” as hapless victims swayed by irrational sentiments, with an articulate populace, facing institutional obstacles to the realization of group-based interests. Social movements were no longer pathological responses to structural change subject to the propaganda of unprincipled leaders but now were understood as competent, rational actors, mobilizing available resources to realize interests denied or even unrecognized by electoral and machine politics. More recently social movement theory has taken a cultural turn, endowing publics with the capacity to generate their own identities through oppositional discourses. The contributors to this literature, not coincidentally, were often ex-participants in the movements of the 1960s and were therefore disposed to seeing its self-constituting moments.

From the standpoint of the development of publics, this literature not only illuminates the political competence of citizenries but also reveals the ways in which participation (virtual or real) in social movements dislodges folk theories that spring from and govern the inertial pressures of daily life, leading to a more reflective engagement with the world. A contemporary theory of publics, similarly, must make a sharp break with theories of mass society and highlight the reflective disposition provoked by movement between contexts. Sociology has always attracted students from immigrant backgrounds, perhaps because it offers reflective understandings of new contexts. Indeed, those from immigrant backgrounds have often been pioneers of new directions in sociology, from Pitirim Sorokin to Reinhard Bendix, from Herb Gans to Alejandro Portes. Today, globalization recruits ever-wider populations into flows between different contexts, intensifying autonomous patterns of communication and creating the basis of more vibrant, rational and reflective publics – publics of a local, regional, national but also transnational scope.

The mass society hypothesis provided a convenient justification for the autonomy of professional sociology. If there are no publics to reach then we can justifiably focus inwards on developing a professional community, which could convey its enlightened perspectives to policy makers, with the added benefit of funds for more research and education. This became a self-fulfilling prophecy, driving a wedge between publics and professionals. But once the fruits of critical theory (and critical practice) had led theorists of collective behavior to abandon the notion of mass society and to replace it with civil society, a complex of associations, movements and publics, there was no longer any excuse to overlook our connections and responsibilities to publics.

The Public in the Profession, the Profession as Public

Re-enchanting the world of publics beyond the university inevitably reverberates back into the university, causing us to rethink our relation to the publics on our own door-step. Take the public, or potential public, closest to home – the students we teach. The last century has seen an academic revolution with over half the population exposed to higher education at some point in their life. The university cannot be conceived of as simply a place for the inculcation of specialized knowledge and skills. Although it is certainly that, it is also an arena for the development of national (and increasingly global) citizenship as the movement for service learning has made us aware. Insofar as education is public, we are in the business of producing publics as well as being accountable to public interests. In the humanities and social sciences, but also in professional schools, students are the first and most immediate public. To constitute students as a public is to tie their lived experience to the broader context that shapes it, to link micro processes to macro forces, to expose the structural forces that limit the way society can be changed, to recognize that what exists is not natural and inevitable but subject to human control. These are eminently sociological tasks.

But constituting students as a public means more than imparting a particular contextualized and historicized understanding of the world they inhabit, it also involves a particular way of interacting. For traditional public sociology, students are empty vessels to fill with sociological knowledge that they then carry forth into the world. In the organic model, however, sociology begins not with teachers and their certified sociology but with students and their spontaneous sociology, which, through pedagogy, is transformed into an understanding of the social contexts that shape it. The organic model conceives of pedagogy as a reciprocal relation in which the educator too is educated, through another triple conversation, this time between teacher and student, among students themselves, and finally between students and a series of secondary publics – a conversation that, to use C Wright Mills’ oft quoted phrase, converts private troubles into public issues.[26] This model is fraught with all the tensions and dilemmas of public sociology more generally – the dangers of pandering to students and of faddishness as well as of a certain vanguardism that exploits the charisma of the teaching relation.

There is a second sense in which the discipline contains its own public, namely when we constitute ourselves as an institutional participant in the broader democratic process. If a century ago the American Sociological Society had to abstain from political engagement, today the accumulated wisdom of sociology and its theory of civil society propel it into the public arena, beyond the defense of professional privilege. Indeed, the American Sociological Association (ASA), which is what the American Sociological Society became in 1959, has made a number of such forays in recent years. One example involved making public the results of a century of research into race — its existence, its antecedents and its consequences, advancing the claim that race exists as a socially constructed category, irrespective of any biological basis, with crucial consequences of discrimination and adversity. Relatedly, the ASA filed an Amicus Curiae Brief with the Supreme Court in 2003, defending Affirmative Action in admissions to University of Michigan’s Law School. In 2005, the ASA issued a statement about the social science evidence for social and institutional bases of differential achievement of men and women in science and mathematics, criticizing the view that women are less suited to certain disciplines.

More controversially, the ASA declared itself against the Iraq War in 2003 and against any constitutional amendment that would outlaw same-sex marriage in 2004. Instead of basing their resolutions on direct research evidence, sociologists were expressing the value presuppositions that underlie both their research programs and their assessment of world events. On both occasions the resolutions were passed by a majority vote of the membership of the ASA. To declare its position in this way, it is important that the ASA provide venues for public discussion – or value discussion, as Weber would call it. The ASA constitution is open and democratic both in terms of the way issues can be brought before the membership but also in the way they are discussed. Thus, a resolution need only garner the support of 3% of the members (some 400 members), for it to come before the Executive Council, which can either accept it or pass it on to the membership at large for a vote. Unlike other professional associations there is no limitation on the types of issues that can be the subject of resolutions.

With the help of electronic media the ASA has developed the infrastructure for open discussion, especially through its various committees and its 43 self-governing sections, which mirror both publics and interests in the wider civil society and subfields within the discipline. Over the last half-century the influence and importance of these sections has grown exponentially, a counterweight to the expansion of the administrative office. In making statements on behalf of its members the ASA has constituted itself as a discursive and deliberating public. The reflexivity with which its theories have endowed the organs of civil society is thus turned back on itself. As a result the association has become a more vital organization, and membership has grown. It has become a public unto itself.

Sociology among the Social Sciences

How new are these outward moves of sociology and are they any different from moves in the other social sciences? Recall that at the inception of the American Sociological Society a century ago, it was a part of the American Economics Association from which it split. Then, during the first half of the 20th century, sociology fought to secure its boundaries with economics, psychology, and anthropology. This effort was so successful that by the postwar years sociology advanced an imperial project, seeking to subordinate economics, political science, psychology, and even anthropology in a much broader interdisciplinary matrix. This was the project of structural functionalism, led by Talcott Parsons at Harvard’s Department of Social Relations. Although it had the support of eminent Harvard social scientists it made limited headway outside sociology, and even within sociology its dominance has been exaggerated. It would crumble under the assault from critical sociology of the 1960s.

In the postwar period there were other moves toward interdisciplinarity, reflecting the new global role of the United States. Now state-promoted area studies brought the social sciences together in programs usually dominated by political science and economics. Still later, reflecting the influence of the social movements of the 1960s, a range of interdisciplinary programs were created to respond to the specific interests and perspectives of hitherto excluded and marginalized groups – Women’s Studies, African American Studies, Ethnic Studies, Native American Studies. Although their scholarship and vision became influential within sociology, these programs developed quite separately and their existence has often been precarious in an academic world dominated by disciplines.

Whether inspired by developments in the biological and natural sciences or by arguments about the anachronism of disciplines created in the 19th century, calls for interdisciplinarity have fallen on deaf ears, largely because the different social sciences are rooted in specific interests not just within the academic hierarchy but also beyond the university. To put it crudely, the standpoint of economics is the expansion of the market; the standpoint of political science is the maintenance of political stability, focusing on the state; while the standpoint of sociology is the expansion of civil society. The collapse of laissez faire capitalism in the first decades of the 20th century, and the rise of fascism, communism, and social democracy all helped blur the boundaries between state, economy and society, thereby creating a basis for interdisciplinary projects after world War Two. However, the last quarter of the 20th century saw the recreation of these separate spheres, culminating in the historic transformations of the 1990s. The collapse of communism, the financial crises of the 1990s, the increasing role of the World Bank and IMF abroad and the deregulation of the domestic economy have contributed to the ascendancy of economic models in policy making, just as the world policing role of the United States, struggles against terrorism, and rhetorical support for constitutional democracy have given a boost to political science. For its part, sociology finds itself upholding civil society and the public sphere against the corrosive effects of market resurgence and state authoritarianism. This investment in civil society manifests itself in the development of public sociologies.

Three qualifications are in order. First, although the standpoint of economics is the market that does not mean economists have nothing to say about the political or the social. Indeed, economists have notoriously tried to reduce the social to a set of utilitarian exchanges. The currency of social capital and rational choice models reflects the power of economic modes of thought in both political science and sociology. Political scientists, similarly, have never confined their analysis to the state or even politics. They study the terrain of the social, for example, but from the standpoint of the stability of democracy, and today they find themselves reenacting theories of mass society like those of the 1950s, as in Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone or Theda Skocpol’s Diminished Democracy.[27] Likewise sociologists have never been shy about venturing into the study of the economy, underlining the social foundations and consequences of markets, just as they have studied the state from the standpoint of its consequences for civil society, whether these be social movements or patterns of inequality. What distinguishes these social sciences, and others, is the standpoint they adopt with respect to the social phenomena they study, standpoints that have become ever more sharply delineated with the redivision of the spheres.

However, and this is the second qualification, disciplines are heterogeneous fields with dominant and subordinate tendencies. Even in economics, a paradigmatic social science, dissident voices can be heard from institutionalists, radical political economists, and more recently the network for Post-Autistic Economics. Political science, always balkanized into different subfields, has generated its own opposition in the form of the Perestroika Movement. Sociology is a more pluralistic — some would say fragmented — discipline, the result of its absorption of oppositional tendencies in the 1970s. Given the array of different political positions within disciplinary fields there is ample scope for alliances and collaborations across disciplinary boundaries.

The third qualification involves the international dimension. US social science has taken up a dominant, some would say imperial, position in the global context, reflecting its political and economic domination. Not surprisingly this is most strongly accentuated in the field of economics but US sociology also commands an impressive concentration of resources and research facilities, and it is by far the largest source of PhDs, in terms of training both foreign and national students. Domination in terms of content – theory and methodology – follows from the concentration of material and institutional resources. US social science is used by national governments to bench mark and evaluate their own social scientists, so that jobs and careers are dependent on publications in Western and particularly US journals. The effect is to pull national sociologies, especially in the Global South, away from questions of national urgency, and away from the public sociologies in which they had often hitherto specialized. Thus, valorizing public sociology in the United States is an important counterweight to US worldwide professional hegemony, giving more space to national public sociologies and revisioning the global division of sociological labor. The development of public sociology cultivates local, national and international publics that are an important bulwark to the tyranny of markets and the despotism of states.

Conclusion

Individual and discipline follow analogous life cycles. Just as the sociologist, who begins graduate school fired by visions of social transformation or reform, soon encounters the normalizing practices of a total institution, so the early fervor of social movement sociology was diverted into and suppressed by professionalization and the disciplined accumulation of scientific knowledge. Just as the individual sociologist, on gaining tenure, often seeks to recover the energy of a repressed adolescence, so our collective discipline on reaching adulthood also asks what it was all for, and returns to the publics it has forsaken, much the wiser for the intervening years. Building on a secure foundation of theory, methodology and research, engaging publics is no longer threatening but invigorating, not discrediting but ennobling, not a choice but a necessity. The turn to sociology, and public sociology in particular, is a pent-up response to unpropitious times and a hostile environment. The more publics are endangered, the more degraded the very idea of the public becomes, the more challenged and yet the more urgent the task of public sociology.

→ Initiative on Academia & the Public Sphere

FOOTNOTES
1.  An earlier version of this paper was published in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 600 (2005). Thanks to Jennifer Chun, Hwa-Jen Liu, Jeff Sallaz, Ofer Sharone, Cinzia Solari, Michelle Williams, and Kerry Woodward for their comments.↑
2.  Nonetheless the American Sociological Society was run by a coterie of white men, and marginalized the participation of women, including these three celebrated figures. It would not be until 1948 that the ASS would have an African American President (E. Franklin Frazier) and not until 1952 that it would have a woman President (Dorothy Swaine Thomas).↑
3.  Lynd, Robert and Helen Lynd. 1929. Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company.↑
4.  Larson, Olaf and Julie Zimmerman. 2003. Sociology in Government: The Galpin-Taylor Years in the U.S. Department of Agriculture 1919–1953. University Park, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.↑
5.  President’s Research Committee on Search Trends. 1933. Recent Social Trends in the United States. New York: McGraw-Hill.↑
6.  Stouffer, Samuel et al. 1949. The American Soldier. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.↑
7.  Lynd, Robert. 1939. Knowledge for What? The Place of Social Sciences in American Culture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.↑
8.  Mills, C. Wright. 1959. The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press.↑
9.  Gouldner, Alvin. 1970. The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology. New York: Basic Books.↑
10.  Gouldner, Alvin. 1968. “The Sociologist as Partisan: Sociology and the Welfare State.” American Sociologist 3:103–16.↑
11.  Du Bois, W.E.B. 1903. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: A.C. McClurg; Whyte, William Foot. 1943. Street Corner Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Myrdal, Gunnar. 1944. An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. New York: Harper and Row; Riesman, David. 1950. The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press; Bell, Daniel. 1973. The Coming of Post-Industrial Society. New York: Basic Books; Bellah, Robert, Richard Madsen, William Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven Tipton. 1985. Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press; Hochschild, Arlene. 1989. The Second Shift. New York: Avon Books; Waite, Linda and Maggie Gallagher. 2000. The Case for Marriage. New York: Doubleday.↑
12.  Gamson, William. 1992. Talking Politics. New York: Cambridge University Press; Ryan, Charlotte. 1991. Prime Time Activism: Media Strategies for Grassroots Organizing. Boston: South End Press.↑
13.  Merton, Robert. 1949. Social Theory and Social Structure. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.↑
14. Coleman, James. 1966. Equality of Educational Opportunity. Washington, DC: United States Department of Health, Education and Welfare.↑
15.  Coleman, James. 1975. Trends in School Segregation, 1968-1973. Washington, DC: Urban Institute.↑
16.  Vaughan, Diane. 1996. The Challenger Launch Decision. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.↑
17.  Vaughan, Diane. 2004. “Public Sociologist by Accident.” Social Problems 51:115–18.↑
18.  For further elaboration see Burawoy, Michael. 2005. “For Public Sociology.” American Sociological Review 70(1):4-28. ↑
19.  Habermas, Jürgen. 1984. The Theory of Communicative Action. (Two Volumes). Boston: Beacon Press.↑
20.  Halliday, Terence and Morris Janowitiz. 1987. Sociology and Its Publics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Cole, Stephen (ed). 2001. What’s Wrong with Sociology? New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers; Horowitz, Irving Louis. 1993. The Decomposition of Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press.↑
21.  Bauman, Zygmunt. 1987. Legislators and Interpreters. Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press.↑
22.  Arendt, Hannah. 1951. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company; Riesman, David. 1950. The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press; Smelser, Neil. 1971. The Theory of Collective Behavior. New York: Free Press.↑
23.  Lippmann, Walter. 1922. Public Opinion. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company; Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press; Habermas, Jürgen. 1991 [1962]. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.↑
24.  Here I stress the sociological underpinnings of such a revisioning but it has also been advanced in other disciplines by such commentators as Nancy Fraser and Michael Warner. See Fraser, Nancy. 1997. Justice Interruptus. New York: Routledge; Warner, Michael. 2002. Publics and Counterpublics. New York: Zone Books.↑
25.  Thompson, Edward. 1963. The Making of the English Working Class. London: Victor Gollancz.↑
26.  Mills, C. Wright. 1959. The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press.↑
27.  Putnam, Robert. 2001. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon and Schuster; Skocpol, Theda. 2003. Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civic Life. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press.↑

Not only are academics worrying this point. Indeed a recent and long article on the front page of the new “Sunday Review” section of The New York Times portrayed something of a crisis. The author, Neal Gabler, a movie critic and historian of popular culture, is an unlikely author for such a piece, but he made a vigorous if sometimes wandering case for the decline of an academic presence in the public culture. Offering up a rather miscellaneous group of academic scholars who brought “big ideas” into the public sphere in the decades after World War II, he contrasted the present low visibility of academic intellect in public discourse. He targets university intellectuals, more or less accurately, for their narrow, often technical, contributions to the “literature” of particular disciplinary sub-fields. But he also links the diminishing presence of academics or their work to a growing obsession for information rather than ideas in the hyper-commercialized mass communication and digital world of our time. What he seems to be describing is Sesame Street for adults. There is no connecting narrative, just a parade of fascinating particulars.

Once upon a time, Gabler argues, information was the foundation of ideas; now information (often of questionable validity) competes with ideas—and ideas are being routed. The public sphere is cluttered with “opinion and orthodoxy” posing as ideas. No large narratives are on offer that might orient the public to the physical and social worlds of our time or to ourselves.[1] The absence of such narratives weakens our capacity to understand the causes of our situation and possible points of political intervention.

In the same week, the Economist announced on its cover and in a 14 page “special report” the end of the public sphere and media-scape as we have known it since World War II. Embracing a change that surely has consequences for the Economist, Tom Standage declared the era of the mass media to be at an end.[2] He explained that we are returning to a digital equivalent of the age of the eighteenth century coffee house and nineteenth century local newspapers. It is not clear that Standage recognizes that these two forms of the public sphere belong to different eras, but his point is that we are returning to a public sphere akin to what existed before the rise of mass communications in the late nineteenth century. Instead of having authoritative news brought by dedicated reporters and national media (Walter Cronkite), he argues that the public sphere of the future, as in that distant past, will be populated by “gossip, opinion and ideas within particular circles of communities, with little distinction between producers and consumers of information.” We will have a genuinely “social media.”[3]

I am not nearly as confident as either of these writers that I have a handle on the present or a clear vision of the future, but I do think that their speculations oblige me to frame my inquiry in a way that simultaneously addresses the public sphere and academic intellect. We cannot address only the latter, which I was initially inclined to do. We must get a handle on two moving targets—both academic knowledge and the changing public sphere. How has each changed? What have been the relations between academe and the public sphere? What might they be in the near future, if they survive at all in any significant way?[4]

While it is true that the “public” in the London coffee house, which typically extended into the street as well as into the halls of royal administration, was local and miscellaneous and open to all voices, its ideas were given public form and extension by a fairly elite press managed by such writers as Addison and Steele, themselves models for a contemporary budding journalist in Philadelphia named Benjamin Franklin.[5] Franklin, of course, was invested in an inclusive public sphere, including those who wore a leather-apron as well as the governing elite. Yet while the public discourse of the coffee house was open and various, there was hierarchy. The gist of the ideas floated were effectively codified and distributed by literary figures who possessed significant cultural and, perhaps, political capital. The result was a public culture that was at once open and hierarchical—and credible because it possessed both of those qualities.

Modern democracy—defined here as universal white male suffrage—was invented in the middle third of the nineteenth century in the United States, and this expansion of the political community had consequences for the role of intellect in public life. The dilemma for trained intellect in Jacksonian America and beyond was that between quantity (majority vote) as a measure of public truth and quality as represented by education and intellectual accomplishment.[6] This concern runs through the commentary of Alexis de Tocqueville.[7] The public sphere, the world of culture as well as politics, was even more open than the suffrage. James Fenimore Cooper lamented in a letter for the sculptor Horatio Greenough: “You are in a country in which every man swaggers and talks; knowledge or no knowledge; brains or no brains, taste or no taste. They are all ex nato connoisseurs . . . and everyman’s equal.”[8] Whether one speaks of politics or culture, it was a remarkably free-wheeling public sphere. Indeed, for the intellectual elite, who felt marginalized by the shouts of the half-educated and the voter mobilization managed by political machines, it was all too open.

The creation of modern American research universities and their organization of more or less self-regulating intellectual communities (emerging academic disciplines) was a response to this condition.[9] The educated elite who wished to reform this chaotic and splintered public culture identified it with the rather different charlatanisms of P.T. Barnum and his museum and the fatuous theology and preaching of Henry Ward Beecher.[10] E.L. Godkin, founding editor of The Nation and the moral and political guide to the educated classes, complained that “a large body” of badly educated persons, who think that they possess “in the matter of social, mental, and moral culture, all that is attainable or desirable,” presume to “tackle all the problems of the day.” The result, he declared, is “a kind of moral and mental chaos.” Lamenting the “disintegration of public opinion,” he called for professional organizations, research universities, and authoritative institutions, like the newly founded Metropolitan Museum of Art, to produce a “greater concentration of instructed opinion.”[11]

It was in this spirit that Johns Hopkins was founded in 1876 and that Columbia created the graduate Faculty of Political Science in 1881. In 1883, with the founding of the Modern Language Association, the American Historical Association in 1884, and the American Economic Association in 1885 (all organized by Johns Hopkins Professors) the modern American structure of the academic human sciences was born.

Two things are important to keep in mind about this moment. First, the impulse was elitist. Indeed, it was an elitist withdrawal from competition in a wide open public sphere.[12] Godkin and the first university leaders, who with no self-consciousness referred to themselves as “the best men,” wanted a platform of organized authority from which to achieve influence over the direction of both culture and politics. Second, the purpose of the Ph.D. was not understood to prepare young men for a career in academe. Rather it was intended to instill in them “the mental culture” that would serve them in careers in “civil service,” “public journalists” or, more generally, the “duties of public life.”[13] It was precisely for this reason that Woodrow Wilson became one of the first students to enroll in the doctoral program at Johns Hopkins and that Theodore Roosevelt studied Public Law in the Faculty of Political Science at Columbia.[14] Only in the 1890s, as the claims of the classical curriculum gave way to modern subjects, including the new social sciences and modern languages, did this change. Graduate professors then began training clones of themselves to staff the rapid expansion of higher education.

But this transformation did not mean withdrawal from public life. The American Historical Association and the American Economic Association in particular assumed their professional activities to be as much civic as academic. Recent studies of the progressive movement, from its roots in the 1890s onward, show that these new social scientists with Ph.D.s, whether in university positions, public service, or reform organizations, dominated the transformation of laissez faire liberalism into “social liberalism” in Western Europe, Latin America, Japan, and the United States.[15] On a global scale, this was, I would argue, the most public moment for the social sciences ever, exceeding the 1950s and 1960s.

This public aspect continued, but gradually at the cost of a commitment to the teaching mission. Between 1940 and 1990, federal funds for higher education increased by a factor of twenty-five, enrollment by ten, and average teaching loads were reduced by half.[16] The system was also nationalized during this period, weakening faculty identification with the institution and cutting them off from the local community.[17] In the 1890s, an AHA committee of leading historians established what still remains the basic national framework for the teaching of history in the schools, and at the same time these historians (and their colleagues) established strong local ties to schools, historical societies, and other civic institutions. For example, Frederick Jackson Turner’s most profound reflections on history as a discipline were presented to a meeting of Wisconsin teachers two years before his famous address on the significance of the frontier at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. This role for academic intellect owed something to the continuing place of the educated elite in the public sphere, but it also had local institutional roots. The later disconnect from locality that was central the to the post-1945 triumph of the modern research university raised the stakes for civic involvement. It seemed that one must reach for national audiences and visibility or not bother. The national stage brought greater recognition and impact, but it was more difficult to ascend.

Location still counted. For some the local was national. The national public sphere was shaped by mass communications—which were editorially centered in New York City. Such was the circumstance that enabled the emergence of what became known as the “New York Intellectuals,” some of whom were academics, some of whom were high end journalists.[18] They not only benefitted from the political moment as liberal anti-communists, but they also wrote about politics in the common language of contemporary politics and significantly shaped that language. This public sphere was managed by the liberal elite that held editorial sway in both the print and broadcast media. There was a continuum, as ideas moved from narrow research, to synthesis within academe, to extension into the public culture by academics who wrote well and mostly in a narrative form. Such was the path of the work of Daniel Bell, David Riesman (who appeared on the cover of Time), Richard Hofstadter, Arthur Schlesinger, C. Vann Woodward, Irving Howe and Lionel Trilling, among others, including even the more radical C. Wright Mills. Christopher Lasch, of the generation following this group, is a particularly significant case. From college he aspired to be a writer. He had little regard for the professional aspect of the field, but he saw in the discipline of history a resource for addressing contemporary problems in culture and politics. Although he did contribute to the “literature” of history, that was not at all the point of his scholarship.[19]

Since the 1970s, however, there has been a profound change in the research and career strategies in the humanities and social sciences.[20] And, as well shall see, in the public sphere as well. A variety of influences, mostly the vast expansion of research universities, the disappointments of academic activism in public life, the souring of the academic job market after 1971 in most fields combined with an accelerating academic marketplace for “stars,” and the intellectual joy of theorizing and puzzle-solving are all important elements for explaining the change. Together these factors encouraged production over reflection and theoretical and/or technical cleverness over large narratives, scorned on the left as “master” narratives.

Postmodernism and its close cousin Post-Structuralism have played their role as well. Their rejection of the Enlightenment legacy of knowledge as liberating and their suspicion of grand narratives reinforced the impact of hyper-professionalism and worries about career prospects. The move from macro- to micro-analysis and rational choice theory, which we identify with economics and political science, implicitly–and presumably unintentionally– undercuts the notion of a public or social connection because of its emphasis on individual choice. While scholars in history mock such moves in the social sciences and see themselves as far from those intellectual agendas, there is more similarity and more similar consequences for the notion of a public or society in many recent moves in historiography. The wholesale move away from the study of institutions and particularly institutions of power—namely the state and the economic institutions, particularly corporations—presumes a world of individual actors—or oppressed persons with individual agency. The recovery of the ordinary individual as agent and the oppressed individual—a great accomplishment of the social and cultural history in the past generation—has paid a price: the eclipse of institutions and the social in historiography. And the focus on parts has come at the cost of losing a strong sense of the whole and how large social processes (structures) work.[21]

There is also a scale question.[22] Micro history, which has greatly enriched historical writing, nonetheless also is representative of the move from grand themes and narratives to individual, small cases. Its finest examples are not only fascinating for the richness of the detail of ordinary life but also for their access to the subjective meanings larger historical phenomena hold for ordinary people. But commonly the larger institutions of power and of culture are not critically examined–nor are questions of causation.[23] The weakening of the examination of causation beyond the level of the individual has had serious consequences for the usefulness of academic history.

One of the major contributions of history to the understanding of collective experience has historically been its inclusive (or aspiration to an inclusive narrative) approach to explaining how things work, and holding all of that complexity together depended upon a teleology of progress.[24] Traditional historical narrative has always been teleological, whether or not it was intended or acknowledged. But the actual history of the twentieth century has completely undermined the notion of the progressiveness of history or even of any direction at all. The loss of a teleological underpinning has produced a narrative challenge, one that undermines a focus on causation. Adaptations to this crisis in narration has taken various forms: the writing and teaching of history is now as often synchronic as diachronic, is as likely to explore subjective meaning more often than developing interpretations of causation, tends to emphasize the difference of the past more than its premonitory connection to the present and future, ruptures more than continuities, and context more than narrative.[25]

The problem of academic history is deeper than excessive specialization. Specialization is not new, and it does not require the avoidance of large themes or the embrace of jargon. It is the questions historians examine and their level of explanation. This has weakened academe’s place in the public sphere. The problem is the narrow questions asked, or the big questions examined in the smallest possible way, resulting in minutiae rather than ideas with consequences. And that happens because the questions asked are taken from the literature of the field, not from the world around us.[26] The postwar intellectuals who have counted, whether within academe or beyond, framed expansive questions: the liberal tradition in the U.S., the post-industrial economy, the meaning of economic abundance, the transformation of the family, the dynamics of power in a pluralistic society.

They were focused on issues related to our common culture and common life. The results of such a framing can inspire public discussion and disciplinary advance.[27] Of course, most historians and social scientists were not as bold, and we must always acknowledge that the whole structure of disciplinary scholarship depends upon what Thomas Kuhn called “normal science.” But the paradigms are at once more pluralized and much looser in history than in any other social science. And puzzle-solving ought not take up the whole of the discipline, and it need not take up the whole scholarship of any single scholar. Historians can be ambidextrous, technical and bold. When exciting core questions of disciplinary challenge and those of public life converge on a big question, that is the moment to think big in public. Going big can be exciting, just as technical virtuosity can be. Not everyone can be or need be an Arthur Schlesinger or a Richard Hofstadter, who after his dissertation never touched an archival document. But neither should everyone shy away from their boldness, their courage to articulate and embrace a large interpretive narrative intended at once for colleagues and the public.

There is another route to engaging the public—expertise. Such expertise as historians acquire, except in area studies, tends not to be what is usually understood as expertise serving public good. In a moment I will address the development of “public history” as a particular form of historical practice, which cumulatively brings history to more people than university press books and class room teaching combined. But first I want to engage the question of whether the academy rewards historians in public. I think that the fear of non-reward or even reprisal for speaking to and writing for the public is exaggerated.[28] Surely if a scholar at the research university published only in non-professional publications, it would be a serious negative. But so long as it does not replace or seriously reduce significant academic publication, I doubt very much that it would do any harm to a career. There is also the “crossover” book; they not only reach a larger public, but they are often particularly important interventions within the profession. In fact, university administrators often value faculty engagement with the community for public relations reasons. In short, I think that institutional disapproval is a lame excuse.

I am more worried about the devaluing of undergraduate teaching at research universities than the risk academics take by being a voice in public.[29] And my concern is not entirely focused on the consequences for undergraduates. Devaluing undergraduate teaching marginalizes one of the principal training grounds for finding the concepts and languages by which to connect with the larger culture. It would be a mistake to underestimate value of undergraduate teaching as both a connection with the larger public and its concerns and as a means of teaching us to write or speak beyond the discipline. And if we do our teaching well, we educate students to think about public life and seek out serious magazines, books, and websites—and know how to critique them.

There is an area where access to a public audience is increasingly limited. To put it bluntly, there is, I think, contest (if not a war) mounted by journalists against academics in general, but mostly against historians, for whom the cross over is easier and thus closer in practice to journalism and literary culture. Journalists, who control access to the media, have become competitors rather than collaborators. Or, as they would phrase it, they saw the vacuum created by the inward turn of historians into professional self-enclosure, and they filled it.[30] The ratio of academics to journalists published in leading print media has dramatically declined in the past half century.[31] And leading journalism schools now have graduate programs in non-fiction writing intended to make journalist-historians.

But this is an issue of the dying of the older public sphere; such editorial control of access is weakening if not wholly dissolving. The new public sphere is still in formation, and I have no clear ideas about how it will develop. But let me play out a couple of generalizations. It is important to note that television is still important. It is a more potent source of public information than the internet. The internet has far more information, but contemporary news programs, as I have already suggested, carry more wallop than most digital sites. That will change, but it should not be written off just yet.

Television is, however, much different than it was in 1960, when there were three networks. I am willing to argue that the public sphere, with television, was in 1960 more like the time when the American Historical Association was formed than it is to the present media-scape. The aspirations of the founders of the American Historical Association in 1884 envisioned a public role in what was a limited public culture that was managed and populated by persons like themselves. They saw themselves as a national elite, even if mostly from the Northeast, and as such they sought and obtained a charter by act of Congress. They located their organization in Washington, D.C., where AHA’s offices are now maintained on Capitol Hill. The charter and location are meaningful: the founders intended to influence national history as well as record it. A hundred years ago the comfortable, even unconscious, elitism of even the most democratic academics gave them at once a position of authority in public life and an identifiable audience was in fact the small minority of Americans who were college-educated and those who managed state affairs.[32] It is no surprise that the same people who founded the AHA were also leaders in the movement for Civil Service Reform, which would secure power to their students and comrades.

The influence of historians was not so direct as they had imagined it might be, but over the decades historians greatly affected civic life by finding wide readership and the incorporation of their interpretations of American history into the schools and popular thought. Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis is still a part of public life more than a century after it was published, and Charles Beard’s economic interpretation of the Constitution and American politics generally is not dead. By the 1940s, there was very little change in the demographics of the historical profession; their audience was larger but ethnically and regionally similar to the historians, and the level of cultural sophistication was roughly equivalent. This generation of historians had a powerful influence on civic life and the interpretation of American politics in the 1940s and 1950s through their major books with big themes—Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. on the liberal tradition, C. Vann Woodward on race relations, and Richard Hofstadter on the limits of liberalism and the danger of rightwing populism. And the culture industry elite based in New York were easy collaborators. This held until about 1960.

Much of the discussion of the 1960s and academic life focuses on the politics and protest, which is right. But, paradoxically, the disappointments of failed transformation led many of those youthful intellectuals to a turn inward.[33] New, more radical topics were pursued, but, as we have already discussed, in ever narrower ways, methodologically and in the scale of framing. Although it is counter-intuitive, we can see the beginnings of present academic practice in the turn from the 1960s to the 1970s.

The media-scape’s transformation is more recent. First it was the proliferation of channels with the advent of pervasive availability of an an ever growing number of cable channels beginning in the 1980s. Now the channels run into the hundreds. News sources are almost unlimited. While this is potentially enriching of the public sphere, it is so only if there is some conversation among the different audiences. But cable has enabled the targeting of specific audiences, partly for commercial reasons. Individuals tend to select the news they wish to read or hear–likewise, cultural programming. There is a leveling process giving legitimation to all and effectively removing hierarchy. There will always be serious drama and opera available, but it will be for a specific audience, just like there will be one for kick boxing. With the advent of the internet, citizens tend to gravitate to the news sources and opinion makers that reinforces their views, effectively promising not to challenge them. Thus there are audiences, but no public.

Not only is news fractionated, but it has also been converted into a form of entertainment that grabs viewers, much more than reading news on a computer screen. Don Hewitt, who invented 60 Minutes, a news program that was entertainment, realized in retirement that there was a cost to his celebrated achievement. In making news a money-maker, he realized that he ruined television news. Television news was no longer a public service.[34] That means news programming, like other commercial programming, aims mainly to mobilize audiences to ensure ratings. Viewing this scene, the Economist‘s Tom Standage relishes a revitalized democracy. My less rosy lens makes me see this expanded but highly fractionated media-scape undermining rather than sustaining any form of a public sphere or deliberative democracy. If Godkin worried about the influence of Barnum and Beecher on public culture, one can hardly imagine his possible reaction to the blogosphere. Orthodoxy and opinion reign across the political spectrum. How is the formerly authoritative voice of scholarship to find a place in a media world that thrives on opinion? Indeed, the distinction between opinion and knowledge is blurred if not entirely erased.

How do historians enter such a fragmented increasingly digital space? What role does “public history” play? Prompted in large part by the job crisis in academe that emerged in the early 1970s and is now endemic, many graduate programs in history created a public history track or program. But public history represents more than an expanded job market for historians. Public history puts history into the public realm in two ways. The first program, at the University of California, Santa Barbara, was oriented to policy questions (initially environmental ones) because some of the faculty were actively involved in such work. Most programs, however, looked toward historical societies, historical sites, documentary film making, and archival management. All of these contributed to expanding public historical knowledge. For all of the success of this movement, in all too many departments, including some of those with excellent programs, public history employment for a Ph.D. graduate is considered a form of professional failure, for the adviser as well as the student. Apparently, historians have little or no historical memory of the substantial engagement of historians as reformers, journalists, founders of museums and archives, including the National Archives and advising the National Park Service. In fact, a recent survey shows that the public makes a much stronger connection with history at historic sites and museums than in schools or college.[35] A recent American Historical Association Report on Doctoral Education strongly argued for a “big tent” definition of the profession, with multiple career paths, but still the prejudice survives.[36]

When we talk about the public sphere, however, we have something broader in mind than the public history movement. We are focused on a place for democratic discussion of issues that matter, places where political and cultural debates shape opinion and ultimately the direction of national life. Our challenge, as I have tried to indicate, is double: we need to work differently as historians and enter the public sphere in ways that connect with the public, with such relevant knowledge as we may possess. But we also have to figure out a yet more difficult question: where in the world is the public sphere?

Perhaps our aspirations are misplaced. Must we publish an op-ed in the New York Times, be interviewed on CNN or Bloomberg News, or have our books reviewed on scores of channels and blogs? Is there a national public sphere? Is it in material space or is it digital? Is it bounded? Global? National? Local? It may be helpful to go back to John Dewey’s passionate rebuttal to Walter Lippmann’s books on public opinion.[37] Lippmann, having energetically assisted the Wilson administration propaganda efforts during World War I to manipulate public opinion, had after the war lost faith in the public. He wrote two devastating books in the 1920s: Public Opinion (1922) and The Phantom Public (1925). Modern life, he argued, is too complex for ordinary citizens, who might have managed in Jefferson’s America. He proposed a passive public, managed by plebiscites rather than elections, with the work of governance done by “experts” and “insiders,” the latter of which he considered himself. John Dewey called Lippmann’s Public Opinion “perhaps the most effective indictment of democracy as currently conceived ever penned,” and it prompted him to write a counter to it, The Public and Its Problems (1927).[38]

Dewey’s argument in The Public and Its Problems has been criticized for being backward-looking just when mass communication was maturing.[39] But with the collapse of the mass communication model of the public sphere, perhaps Dewey’s ideas warrant a new look, something Bruno Latour has been doing lately.[40] Dewey did not imagine the public to be a sphere; rather he looked to the public as a purposeful act, an act of coming into political being. The public was enacted, he proposed, when injured third parties emerged to make themselves into a public. He imagined such an occasion when two corporations made an agreement or a corporation and the government made one that injured parties not represented in the negotiations that produced the agreement. This is close to what Latour has in mind when he talks about “matters of concern” around which a public emerges.

Dewey understood this kind of event to be local, enacted in a place.[41] Initially, at least, that would a local place. The local politics would educate citizens in democracy, and depending on the issue this discussion might move from the local community to what Dewey called the “Great Community.” In fact, the local act was not the end of the matter for Dewey, nor should it be for historians. The local narrative must be inserted into a national and even global narrative. This links the local, spontaneous public to the formation of a “Great Community” that Dewey assumed would be mobilized on the scale of the national political community—the democratic state. I could elaborate these ideas of Dewey and Latour, but this is enough for our present purposes. If this makes sense, events, inclusive events, not media or intellectuals, make a public sphere. This is not so far from the world of the coffee house and the local newspapers of the Economist writer or, for that matter, Tocqueville’s voluntary associations. It is quite far from the mass communications notion of the public sphere.

With this notion of the public, the historian who wishes to influence the public sphere need not long for acceptance on the op-ed page of the New York Times. She can go on the local radio station or contribute a column to the still remaining local papers, or even start up a local web site addressing the issue that created a public. Richard Rorty complained that in the financial crisis during the 1980s, much good would have been produced if every university economist had provided information and guidance by way of a column in the local newspaper. That may be where the new public sphere begins.

A final point. Dewey had some strong opinions about the appropriate relation of the intellectual, the professor, and such an emergent public. The pursuit of truth and the practice of politics, for him, are both unfinished projects, always unfinished, and both are forms of finding better and better truths for living together in society and democratic polity. The intellectual, academic or otherwise, he argued, was a part of whatever public emerges. The problems intellectuals should address, Dewey argued, were provided by animating concerns deriving from common life and given voice in the public realm.

The scholar, for Dewey, does not approach the public as an expert, but rather as one of the public. But, and this is crucial, he or she is a member of the public with special access to a fund of knowledge and rigorous forms of thought that he or she can bring to matters of concern. After exploring the relevant esoteric knowledge available to him or her, the scholar must bring that knowledge back to the public in the language of the public without claiming the authority of expertise, but rather relying upon persuasion in the public sphere. Intellect in public involves listening as well as speaking. It seems that historians in public fit this ideal; we begin with a common concern, explore the resources our discipline provides for us, and we return with a narrative interpretation, full of interdependent variables and contingencies that implicitly or explicitly point to nodes of possible political intervention. And while able to address the kinds of technical issues other social sciences can engage, the narratives constructed by historians do something different and fundamentally important for political action and cultural self-awareness. It is important that history is a mode of scholarship, thinking, and knowledge that is constituted by narratives. Moreover, historical narratives usually locate citizens in time and place. And it is multi-scalar—from the local to larger narratives extending to national and even global scales.[42] The challenge historians assume (or should) is to bring into the public a narrative explaining why this happened where, when, and in what way things happened. Such a narrative at its best can suggest possible alternatives, but at a minimum it can demonstrate that neither the past, present, nor future are pre-determined. They are the result of collective choices made. That is politically liberating, if not a precise answer to the challenges presented by matters of concern. Much more than historians offer now, that narrative must locate the political community in its full global context, and it must address institutional forms of power, both of the state and of our economic institutions. That is a lot. Yet a future politics may depend on that.

→ Initiative on Academia & the Public Sphere

[This essay has been developed from an earlier short post in this forum.]

FOOTNOTES
1.  Neal Gabler, “The Elusive Big Idea,” New York Times, August 14, 2011, “Sunday Review,” 1, 6-7. The predictable avalanche of denial appeared in the letters column of The New York Times of August 22, 2011, A18.↑
2.  This unexpected endorsement of changes that predict the end of the Economist as it has been known for more than a century may be explained by Standage’s position as digital editor of the Economist.↑
3.  “Back to the Coffee House” (lead story); Tom Standage, “Bulletins from the Future,” Special Report, The Economist (July 9th and 15th, 2011), following page 46, quotes from page 16.↑
4.  A similar point is made by Jürgen Habermas, “An Avantgardistic Instinct for Relevances: Intellectuals and Their Public,” in this SSRC essay series on “Academia & the Public Sphere.”↑
5.  These comments obviously begin with the classic work by Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger with assistance of Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT, 1989). But it also modifies or extends the dimensions of the coffee house world by way of Robert Wuthnow, Communities of Discourse: Ideology and Social Structure in the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and European Societies (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989) and my own manuscript “Cosmopolitan Democracy: Republicanism , Liberalism, and Difference,” chap. 2. [Not forthcoming; it was set aside in 1995, when I became dean for humanities and never subsequently taken out of the box in which it was then stuck.] ↑
6.  See the classic essay by George Bancroft, “The Office of the People in Art, Government, and Religion,” in Joseph Blau, ed. Social Theories of Jacksonian Democracy (New York, 1954), 263-81. Note also that different situation of contemporary British intellectuals circa 1870 is greatly influenced by the different scales of the political community in the two countries. There were more voters in New York City in 1870 than in all of England, even after the passage of the Second Reform Act in 1867.↑
7.  Mainly but not exclusively in the chapter on the tyranny of the majority in his Democracy in America (1835-40).↑
8.  James F. Beard, ed. The Letters and Journals of James Finimore Cooper (6 vols.; Cambridge, 1960-68), III,220.↑
9.  See Thomas L. Haskell, The Emergence of Professional Social Science (Urbana, 1977).↑
10.  See Thomas Bender, Intellect and Public Life: Essays on the Social History of Academic Intellectuals in the United States (Baltimore, 1994), esp. chap. 3.↑
11.  E.L. Godkin, “Professional Guilds,” American Institute of Architects: Proceedings (1870), 192; idem., “The Organization of Culture,” The Nation (June 18, 1868), 486-88.↑
12.  In fact, the intellectuals were seeking to establish “monopolies” that would protect them from the intellectual market place. Godkin once fumed about intellectuals having to market his goods much like the dry-goods merchant.↑
13.  Quotes from Columbia College, Outline of a Plan for the Instruction of Graduate Classes (New York, 1880), 4, 11, 12, 15.↑
14.  A very large number of the first generation of Hopkins Ph.D.s in the social sciences pursued careers in government or full time reform work.↑
15.  See Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA, 1998); Thomas Bender, A Nation Among Nations: America’s Place in World History (New York, 2006), chap. 5. For philosophers, social scientists, and reformers, see James T. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870-1920 (1986).↑
16.  Clark Kerr, The Uses of the University (4^th ed.; Cambridge, 1995), 142.↑
17.  In the case of history, see Thomas Bender, Philip M. Katz, and Colin Palmer, The Education of Historians for the Twenty-first Century (Urbana, 2004), 7-9.↑
18.  Some of these intellectuals moved back and forth between high end journalism and academe. Most notable were Daniel Bell and Nathan Glazer.↑
19.  On Lasch, see Thomas Bender, “The Historian as Public Moralist: The Case of Christopher Lasch,” Modern Intellectual History , forthcoming.↑
20.  On this change, see Thomas Bender and Carl E. Schorske, eds. American Academic Culture in Transformation (Princeton:PUP, 1998). This volume was originally published as an issue of Daedalus, 1997. It has multiple studies of economics, literary studies, philosophy, and political science.↑
21.  See Thomas Bender, “Wholes and Parts: The Need for Synthesis in American History,” Journal of American History, 73 (1986), 120-36; Idem., Wholes and Parts: Continuing the Conversation,” ibid., 74 (1987), 123-30.↑
22.  For a bit more context for this paragraph, see Thomas Bender, Philip M. Katz, and Colin Palmer, The Education of Historians for the Twenty-first Century (Urbana, 2004), 15-17.↑
23.  The first widely praised mircohistory, Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms (1976) translated into English in 1980, remains the best, always keeping in mind the power of a major institution while exploring the particular meanings a single individual gave to the heavens and earth in the face of the Inquisition.↑
24.  The best ever example of this was Charles Beard and Mary Beard, The Rise of American Civilization (2 vols., New York, 1927), but Frederick Jackson Turner’s essay on “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” delivered as a lecture at the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893 still echoes through our popular culture, a myth he may have discovered rather than created. Richard Hofstadter’s challenge to Beard in his The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (New York, 1948) provided another large interpretation of the course of American history and the way it worked.↑
25.  For a larger context for this paragraph, see Thomas Bender, Philip M. Katz, and Colin Palmer, The Education of Historians for the Twenty-First Century (Urbana, 2004), 15-17.↑
26.  I am not proposing an end to engagement with the literature, but I am urging that not all intellectual energies belong there. Our highly developed academic disciplines and the ever growing interdisciplinarity are bigger resources than that—or ought to be.↑
27.  Political theorists are still discussing Louis Hartz’s The Liberal Tradition in America (New York, 1955).↑
28.  I do know of instances where students with exceptionally good and well written dissertations that would appeal to a commercial publisher have been discouraged on the grounds that it may be a deficit in the eyes of some tenure and promotion committees. I find this quite disturbing, but it seems prevalent enough that I have advised such students of my own to go to a press like Harvard University Press, which has a New York office for precisely that purpose, and markets such books as trade under a university press imprint.↑
29.  My own experience is one piece of my evidence. I have for years written as often for newspapers and magazines as for scholarly journals, and I have published about equally with trade publishers and university presses. As many of my public lectures have been at public libraries, meetings of school teachers, and historical societies as at scholarly meetings and conferences. I have also been involved in public positions of reasonable visibility: Chair of the New York Council for the Humanities, Board of the Municipal Art Society, Advisory Committee on Culture and the Arts for a local congressman. I am convinced that I have benefitted within the university for all of the above.↑
30.  One reason for this, of course, is the great expansion of academe; even esoteric subfields have enough historians for an association and conferences; in 1950 the numbers of research historians was vastly smaller, and reaching out to other subfields and the public made for a more lively intellectual life.↑
31.  An limited study (small N) undertaken by Tracy Neumann at my request examined contributors to the New York Times Op Ed page, the New York Times Book Review, and the New York Review of Books, in January, April, July, and October issues in 1988, and 2008. Her data show the number of academics and journalists printed in these years. We also compared the presence of sociologists and political scientists in relation to historians; historians were much more prominent. But that is not the concern here. Comparison of number of articles by academics and journalists for selected issues and years (1988/2008): New York Review of Books: Academics 39/35; Journalists 13/37; New York Times Book Review: Academics 75/26; Journalists 85/99; New York Times Op Ed: Academics 8/13; Journalists 2/10.↑
32.  For a contemporary description of that version of public culture—including a warning that the new “intellectuals” in New York represent a challenge to academe, see William James, “The Social Value of the College Bred” (1908), in William James, Writings, ed. Bruce Kuklick (1987), 1242-49.↑
33.  See Ira Katznelson, “From the Street to the Lecture Hall: the 1960s,” in Bender and Schorske, eds. American Academic Culture in Transformation , 331-52; Thomas Bender, “Politics, Intellect, and the American University, 1945-1995,” in ibid., 17-54.↑
34.  See NY Times obit. ↑
35.  Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New York, 1998), 20, table 1.2.↑
36.  Bender, et. al., The Education of Historians, 65-67.↑
37.  For a fuller account, see Thomas Bender, New York Intellect:  Intellectual Life in New York City, from 1750 to the Beginnings of Our Own Time (New York, 1987), 312-316.↑
38.  John Dewey, “Public Opinion,” The New Republic (May 3, 1922), 286-88.↑
39.  Jean Quandt, From the Small Town to the Great Community: The Social Thought of Progressive Intellectuals (New Brunswick, 1970).↑
40.  Bruno Latour, “From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik, Or How to Make Things Public,” in Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, eds., Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (Cambridge, 2005); Idem., “Why Has Critique Run Out? From Matter of Fact to Matter of Concern,” Critical Inquiry, 30 (2004), 225-48.↑
41.  In his contribution to the SSRC website on the public sphere, Tony Judt makes this important point: place counts in politics.↑
42.  See Thomas Bender, “Introduction:  Historians, the Nation, and the Plenitude of Narratives,” in Thomas Bender, ed. Rethinking American History in a Global Age (Berkeley, 2002), 1-21.↑

Indeed, I have written some of these complaints myself.[1] We political scientists seem to be unusually voluble in sharing our pain at being spurned by policymakers whose heads have been turned by far less deserving pundits and bloggers. I don’t disagree, although sometimes I think we protest too much or, as my children might say, we offer up stories that are all too revealing: “TMI”—too much information! A bit of forbearance might be becoming, since I am not sure we know as much about what we are talking about as we claim. The solutions are usually of the “heal thyself” variety—we should reformulate the incentive systems for our graduate students, we should reward the public intellectuals among us, etc. Yet for all our breast-beating and pained self-examination, few of the high-minded reforms we advocate have ever even been deliberated, less adopted, in any of the high prestige departments in which they might actually make a difference.[2] There seems to be a disconnect between what we (or at least some of us) say and what we do.

It is hard not to notice that this hand-wringing is becoming a feature of modern life. It is not just international affairs, or the social sciences, or even the universities in which they are housed, that seem to be beset by public indifference (not to say contempt) and which therefore exhibit the natural existential anxiety that such disregard ordinarily engenders. So are newspapers,[3] banks,[4] armies,[5] political parties,[6] governments,[7] practically everything.[8] In fact, most of the cornerstone institutions of mid-twentieth century modernity are fretting about their sustainability, indeed, their very viability. This suggests that both the disease and the cure—insofar as there is, or should be a cure—is not in each of the individual patients splayed on the examining table, but in the very environment in which they operate. Perhaps, unbeknownst to most of us, the air we breathe has gotten richer in some element we have not yet measured, the ambient temperature hotter, the water shallower, the daylight brighter—that is, something has changed that is affecting all of these institutions. After all, if we have perceived an infirmity for some time and could heal ourselves, presumably we would have done so. So, either we don’t really think there is a disease or if we do, none of our proposed treatments are effective cures, because we have yet to understand its causes.

To what extent is the inability of political science, international relations, area studies, social science, academia—pick your university problem—to engage effectively with the public sphere a reflection not just of our own foibles, but also of the larger world in which we operate–that is, the public sphere itself? What if our trials are merely a part–a symptom–of a larger environmental change in the way the “public” interacts with authorities like professors, generals, senators, journalists? And insofar as they are, what accounts for that environmental change, that general circumstance, which might contribute to the frailty of all these institutions?

I believe that transformation in the availability of information has eroded authority, undermined hierarchies and upended the organizational mechanisms by which knowledge is developed, collected and disseminated in almost all domains of social life—including science and politics—and that this systemic environmental change accounts for the dramatic decline in interest in and deference to universities and university-based research. Like most senior academics, I can trace the resulting changes in relations between professors and students, not to say research scientists and the public, in my own career.

More Information than We Know What to Do With

When I was starting graduate school, I had a professor who had been born in Eastern Europe before the First World War. Even then he was a bit “old-school” — formal by the standards of the heirs of the student revolutions of the 1960s, but not qualitatively different in his expectations of his students from his fellow professors. He had a trick he used at the beginning of every semester to ensure that we paid attention—he would slowly and carefully draw a detailed map of Europe freehand on the blackboard, all the while berating his (largely American) students for their feeble grasp of geography. We were naturally mesmerized, and after that class, he had us in his thrall—we believed he knew, and would probably always know, more than we did and we could do no better than sit at his feet (metaphorically—he preferred we sat at rapt attention in our rows of desks) and receive his knowledge and wisdom, which were pretty much interchangeable.

I have thought periodically of my late professor as I debate asking my students whether they should switch off their smartphones, tablets, laptops and netbooks in class. On the one hand, of course, these devices are terrific distractions—I myself have received emails from students that were sent during class to listservs of which they had forgotten I was a member. On the other hand, why bring a map to class, much less learn to draw one freehand on a blackboard, when virtually all the maps, recording all the political changes, military campaigns, population fluctuations, GDP figures and crop harvests at any time and place any of us could possibly want to know, are quite literally at our fingertips—just a few redemptive clicks away from the distractions of email and Facebook?

Much of what the great institutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—indeed, probably since the “Age of Discovery,” when empiricism began to triumph over faith and civil institutions began to supersede religious hierarchies in public life—do is essentially trade in information; the universities, the media, the markets, militaries, banks, governments and parties which shape our public life were designed around—to both utilize and transcend and information scarcities and asymmetries. Universities collected and transmitted the accumulating wisdom of the past and periodically discovered “new knowledge,” which was duly stored in great museums and libraries for transmission to future generations. Banks and commercial firms had privileged access to, and sometimes developed, information about market trends; governments collected and elaborated “data” from censuses; political parties aggregated opinions, newspapers disseminated, well, news, selections of information they deemed “fit to print.”

But, as we all know, pretty much anyone with a mobile phone can find out what the price for today’s catch is, what the most popular movie is (and when and where it is playing), who shares his opinion of single-sex marriage, when the Italians invaded Libya, where the Friday protest will gather, if there are any jobs in her field in Cape Town, and how the traffic on the way home will be. Ordinary people do not seem to need facilitators, gatherers, aggregators, interpreters, analysts or—let’s face it—professors, at least as we historically interpreted our role and purpose. What was once a necessity—someone to gather scarce facts, weave a plausible story about how they are related (which we called “the truth”), use that story to explain the world and interpret its significance–has become at best a luxury, at worst a nuisance. Today collecting information is the job of computers and algorithms; compiling it into knowledge—a plausible, perhaps true story about the world—is within the reach of virtually anyone with an internet connection. Facts, or what pass for facts, are hardly a scarce resource, and everyone is equally capable of relating them together in some way, sharing the resulting worldview with millions of other people, and acting together with likeminded people in their neighborhood or across the globe.

From the US Tea Party, to Egypt’s Tahrir Square protestors, to Britain’s rioters, 2011 has seen new anti-authoritarian social organization take on a strength and energy entirely unexpected—and largely misunderstood—by the establishments against which they are raising their voices. Of course, this deployment of facts in the service of a plausible story that seems to explain the world often produces Steven Colbert’s brilliant “truthiness.” Tests of plausibility in this realm of unfettered access to information and free-for-all interpretation are often somewhat flimsy. Unfortunately, however, this is not always as untrue of social science as we may wish—our esteemed colleagues develop intricate theories and run complex regressions to produce a result even they will no longer claim is actually “true”—merely plausible, testable, verifiable, or replicable. The once bright lines dividing the authorities in universities, with their scholarly articles and books, and professionals in think tanks, with their policy memos and op-ed pieces, and the amateur activists on Facebook, with their blogs and tweets, are increasingly blurred. When political scientists assign essays written by students in their own class as authoritative interpretations of contemporary politics, (as happened in classes at the American University in Cairo in the spring of 2011—the students in questions were also political activists and bloggers), the upending of relations of authority and knowledge in the classroom is virtually complete.

But the political science professoriate is not alone in having lost our ability to credibly do what we were supposed to do. Now everyone can be amateur “critical studies” practitioners, unpacking the “real” story behind the front page of the newspapers. We are now all jaded enough to know that banks developed lending and trading policies—all those derivatives and swaps and futures and hedges–even they don’t seem to understand and certainly can’t explain, and that the expensive professional militaries are being trounced by amateurish terrorist networks, and that political parties aren’t representing members, or voters, or even ideological commitments, so much as donors’ interests and candidates’ careers.

Eroding Authority and Professional Anxiety

In this context, all the big public institutions are struggling to find new purposes and identities. The news media ape lifestyle magazines and hire self-referential “public editors” to worry out loud as they lose readership. Political parties compete for the growing numbers of “independents” and look to social movements like the US’s Moveon.org and Tea Party to capture the energy and enthusiasm they once represented. And, although college applications in the US are at an all time high, universities anxiously flaunt fancy food courts and sports complexes to make sure the “college experience” is appealing to prospective students. Universities have become places to pass time and collect credentials, and it is only a small minority of students that actually acquires knowledge and learns skills they could not get elsewhere. Given what most students do while they are students, what they learn is as much how to cook pasta, do a load of laundry and play a variety of elaborate games, on fields, at tables and in front of video screens, as it is to perfect a foreign language, master calculus, or even read deeply. US college students acquire a variety of useful life skills and the experience is probably valuable on balance (if expensive), but it does not typically entail much effort by, or exposure to, faculty.

And most conventional faculty, at least at research universities are quite content with this arrangement, judging from how tight is the inverse correlation between teaching load and status. The widespread worry about the declining proportion of tenured faculty among those who actually teach college students obscures the fact that students spend less of their time studying than they did; in 1961, full-time students allocated 40 hours per week to class and studying while in 2003, they spent about 27 hours per week.[9] The “teaching and learning” that goes on at universities is increasingly unanchored in the formal curricula, as students who are lightly supervised by what has come to be known as the “contingent faculty” (that is, adjuncts, part-timers and graduate students) learn from other students, outside the classroom, while the tenured faculty conduct research.

Here the university may diverge slightly from some others of the big twentieth-century institutions, since while most research faculty seem to aspire to a life without students altogether, most journalists want more bylines rather than fewer, as far as I can tell, and most politicians want more votes than fewer. Still, the faculty aversion to the classroom seems to be mirrored in the decreasing willingness and ability of journalists to get into the field, or of politicians to get out on the hustings. It is so much easier to sit in an air-conditioned office and aggregate news from the web, and read blog posts from constituents than it is to grab the steno pad or climb onto the stump. The heroic war correspondent, the sweat-soaked political orator, and indeed, the chalk-covered professor and the white-coated lab scientist are iconic historical figures, and they are all disappearing into a world of nostalgia. Like vinyl records, “hardcopy” books and newspapers, and unscripted political appearances at state fairs, the blackboards and wet labs of university life may soon be artifacts for collectors and roles for reenactors.

All of this suggests that university-based research faculty now work at institutions where what they do is increasingly irrelevant to the financial health of the institution, to the “learning outcomes” of the students, or to the accumulation and transmission of knowledge in society. This will not change simply because graduate students are encouraged to spend a year at think tanks, or op-ed pieces are counted towards tenure, however desirable these experiences might be in themselves (and I think they would be).

Research and Engagement in an Open Access World

Perhaps we should think again about the purposes of universities, and of scientific research, and ask whether in our current institutional configurations and professional guises we are serving those purposes. Insofar as universities are actually places devoted to learning of various kinds—both methodological (how to do laundry, make an argument, conduct an experiment or run a regression) and substantive (what is cleanliness, friendship, a lunar eclipse or democracy), then all of what we do in our professional lives should be about learning—our own, as researchers, and that of others, notably our students but also presumably a wider public of policy elites and fellow citizens.

There are many more places and more media in which learning and teaching take place today—classrooms and wet labs are being supplemented and sometimes supplanted by “learning commons” and computer simulations, students are becoming “peer mentors” and teachers are attending summer seminars and professional association workshops on new developments in their field. Just as proliferating research networks are eroding barriers between national scientific establishments (not to say once rival universities), so too is “life-long learning” erasing the categorical distinctions between student and teacher. The hierarchical relationship of deference once accorded those with privileged access to information is fast disappearing, replaced by collaborative learning, crowd-sourcing, social networks, webs of reciprocity.

What is, or should be, unique about university life is its unmitigated devotion to the spirit of inquiry. It is the search for understanding that marks the academy, and which shapes both the opportunities and limits of its influence in the public sphere. The political scientists wishing to “bridge the gap” between academic scholarship and policy debate will need to revitalize the spirit of playful, inventive, open excitement that is, or should be, the hallmark of genuine education—and to do that they will need to remember that, unlike the think tanks and policy shops of the world, their principal line of work is, well, education. This means that they should be vying for undergraduates, not emulating their think tank colleagues in jettisoning teaching and they should approach their audiences in the public sphere—among policymakers and in general public—just as they approach the most inventive of those undergraduates, with provocative ideas, suggestions, tools and instruments and prods to understanding.

Presenting the finished, polished, completed findings from research conducted in a political science department to policymakers today is rather like drawing a map of Europe on a blackboard: it is neither what today’s policymakers want—it takes too long to produce, it is not interactive or mobile, it precludes questions; in short, it does not reflect the needs of the audience, any audience, today–nor is it what a true political scientist is, or should be, really good at, which is the sort of restless questioning, ceaseless learning, generous teaching that provokes novel interpretations and inventive solutions for the challenges of living in and governing human communities. The joy of learning is a spirit that can be reflected and replicated elsewhere—the “campuses” of Google and Microsoft come to mind—but should be the hallmark of university life, and it should be reflected in the interaction of the denizens of university with their communities, whether policymakers, neighborhood communities or, not least, students.

Thus, to return to Professor Walt’s observations, “engagement” may have “pitfalls” but it is the social physics of the twenty-first century—there is no avoiding it and not much point in worrying over it. Efforts to persuade universities and professional associations to change their criteria for hiring, promoting and rewarding our colleagues are certainly harmless, and may be useful, but they are unlikely to be the principal incentives for political scientists to acknowledge and embrace the changing opportunities presented by our new environment.

Our claims to superior authority, and the special protections we assembled to guard it—academic freedom, tenure, university research budgets unsullied by market or government pressures—may once have helped ensure that our work would not be contaminated by the source of its funding or the desires of its intended recipients. But we can no longer rely on being able to intimidate or overawe the less knowledgeable; expecting consumers or citizens to pay for something whose value they do not understand will no longer suffice. Effective, influential political scientists will be those who bring professional standards of rigor and probity to all of what they do, including engagement with the policy community and wider public. A cloistered life is a puny defense against corruption for those who are susceptible; instead a revitalized discussion of academic integrity and professional ethics in this new information-saturated world is essential.

The successful, influential political scientist will embrace opportunities to interact with others, be they students, colleagues, policymakers (all three of whom may be, let us remember, the same individual at different times). Encouraging, conducting and showcasing collaborative research across these fast-fading professional boundaries will be valuable. This should start with undergraduates, the first and often the best place for genuinely collaborative teaching and learning. Today, liberal arts colleges are encouraging student research not merely to provide assistants to their research-active faculty (though that is certainly an element, since faculty at good liberal arts colleges are no longer content to remain in the now devalued role of “merely” teaching faculty) but also because, as the Mark Zuckerbergs and Gigi Ibrahims[10] of the world have again made plain, undergraduates may have very good ideas. And in fact, so do many policymakers, not to say pundits, bloggers, and others whose credentials as classical political scientists may be suspect. As Steve Walt urges, card-carrying political scientists would do well to invest in collaborations with everyone from Washington’s policy pundits to Egypt’s political activists.

The ancient rituals of our guild—our slow and deliberate systems of graduate apprenticeships, of peer review and tenure, our attachment to “science” and its esoteric language as a shield against, as Rogers Smith suggests, the inevitable politics of studying politics—may have been valuable in creating and sustaining a community of scholars in a context in which information was rare. In today’s information-rich world, however, they are fast becoming a sort of debilitating obsessive-compulsive behavior—a sign perhaps of our deep anxiety but, like all such conduct, self-defeating in their inhibition of the open, spontaneous engagement which fosters the spirit of inquiry in the world. In a world in which university professors are teaching less and university students are studying less, we should be worrying less about how many papers should count in a tenure dossier and more about how to embrace, foster and support the lively world of teachers and learners beyond the academy—including our friends, colleagues, representatives and readers, constituents and consumers in the public sphere.

→ Initiative on Academia & the Public Sphere

[This essay has been republished, in an expanded version, in Perspectives on Politics.]

FOOTNOTES
1.  See Pursuing Truth, Exercising Power: Social Science and Public Policy in the Twenty-first Century, Columbia University Press, 2003; “Scholarship, Policy, Debate and Conflict: Why We Study the Middle East and Why It Matters” (2003 MESA Presidential Address) Middle East Studies Association Bulletin, Vol. 38, No. 1 (Summer 2004); “Truth, Authority and Policy in the Twenty-first Century,” Lecture delivered November 23, 2007, International Jubilee Symposium of the Scientific Council for Government Policy, The Hague, Netherlands.↑
2.  In fact, as Rogers Smith’s excellent intervention in this series, “Political Science and the Public Sphere in the 21st Century” suggests, the dilemmas facing American political science and its practitioners may actually have worsened in the last several decades.↑
3.  See Paul Dailing’s satirical “How to become a ‘Death of Newspapers’ Blogger,” Huffington Post, March 25, 2009; and Michael Gerson, “The strange, sad death of journalism,” November 27, 2009, for two examples.↑
4.  Andrew Ross Sorkin, Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System–and Themselves (Viking, 2009); “Survival of the fattest: What, if anything, can be done about banks that are too big to fail?” The Economist, May 12th 2011.↑
5.  Daniel Howden and Leonard Doyle, “Making a killing: how private armies became a $120bn global industry” The Independent, September, 21, 2007.↑
6.  Jeffrey M. Jones, “Support for Third U.S. Party Dips, but Is Still Majority View: Fifty-two percent believe a third political party is needed,” Gallup News, May 9, 2011; Ben McGrath, “The Movement: The rise of Tea Party activism,” The New Yorker, Feb 1, 2010.↑
7.  Jacob S. Hacker And Oona A. Hathaway, “Our Unbalanced Democracy,” The New York Times, July 31, 2011.↑
8.  Fareed Zakaria, “Are America’s Best Days Behind Us?” Time Magazine, Mar. 03, 2011; Joseph S.Nye, Jr, “Zakaria’s World: Are America’s Best Days Really Behind Us?” Foreign Policy, Mar 8, 2011.↑
9.  Philip Babcock and Mindy Marks, “The Falling Time Cost of College: Evidence from Half a Century of Time Use Data,” March 24, 2010.↑
10.  The founder of Facebook and a celebrity blogger of the Egyptian revolution—undergraduates at Harvard and the American University in Cairo, respectively.↑

To preview the results: the analysis of the intellectual challenges facing the discipline that I offered then, focused on the tensions between trying to achieve rigorous science and trying to serve American democracy, seems to have held up well. All that means, however, is that despite real progress on some fronts, those tensions not only remain, they have in some ways become still more debilitating, particularly for the capacities of political science to enrich the public sphere. But the discipline is now also challenged, probably more severely challenged, by changes in modern American higher education that I did not foresee, including declining public support and the increased segregation of higher education faculty members into a small cadre of high-paid researchers who do limited teaching, and a large number of economically insecure teachers who lack time and resources for research.

These transformations in higher education affect all disciplines, but I believe they especially compound the difficulties facing good political science research and teaching, in ways that further diminish the discipline’s capacities to enhance broader public understandings of politics. I do not despair for the future of political science or higher education due to these difficulties; but they do define intellectual and institutional challenges of which all of us involved in these endeavors should be aware. Due to my own limitations, my focus here is on American political science and American higher education. But I will also draw on the broader analyses provided in a recently published European Political Science journal symposium that features the Canadian John Trent’s analysis of various efforts by the International Political Science Association to assess the state of political science around the globe.[4]

The Tensions in American Political Science, Past and Present

The main points concerning political science that I advanced in 1996 were first, that from its inception, the discipline has been shaped by desires to be as rigorous a “science” as possible, on the one hand, and to serve American democracy, on the other.[5] From the profession’s formation in the early 20^th century, most of its leaders have conceived of “science” as involving extensive, accurate data collection used for systematic testing of hypotheses derived from theories that generally have taken one or more of the natural sciences and sometimes economics or psychology as their models. The object of this work has always been in part, as Charles Beard argued in 1908, “to seek the truth” about politics “simply in the spirit of science.”[6] But like most political scientists, Beard also contended that such research would enable the “teacher” of political science to convey “necessary” knowledge that would prepare each pupil “as a citizen of this great nation” to engage in wiser “thought and action.”[7]

In my earlier paper, I argued that historically, these disciplinary goals have often proven to be in conflict. In fact there have been three conflicts: first, scientific “truth” about politics has often appeared to discredit instead of affirming the feasibility and desirability of democracy; second, scientific “truth” has also appeared to challenge many of the claims Americans advance to celebrate their country; and third, some political scientists have concluded that serving democracy and serving America are in many ways two very different, sometimes opposed projects. Most American political scientists, however, have nonetheless still presented themselves as simultaneously seeking to advance science and to serve democratic citizens and institutions in America. Many have resisted the notion that there are any deep incompatibilities in these goals, in part out of sincere conviction, in part because they have wished the discipline to appear valuable in the eyes of the American government agencies, private donors, and mass publics that have provided its material base.

Today, despite its name, the American Political Science Association does not express its aims in overtly American-centered terms; but its basic goals remain the same. Its official “core objectives” begin with “promoting scholarly research and communication, domestically and internationally,” followed by “promoting high quality teaching and education about politics and government,” and the objectives conclude with “serving the public, including disseminating research and preparing citizens to be effective citizens and political participants.”[8] The assumption remains that by discovering and disseminating truth about politics and government, political science research and teaching will in fact serve “the public,” however defined, and equip “citizens” to participate effectively in “politics,” presumably democratic politics, rather than instead discrediting the feasibility and desirability of democratic citizenship. These objectives also rest on the assumption that political science research and teaching basically go hand in hand—a long-fragile belief that has further eroded in the last fifteen years, as I will discuss.

My earlier paper identified two patterns in the discipline’s history related to the tensions between discovering scientific truths about politics and aiding American democracy. On the individual level, many leading American political scientists, including Charles Beard (who was President of the American Political Science Association before becoming President of the American Historical Association), Arthur Bentley, Charles Merriam, Harold Lasswell, David Easton, Gabriel Almond, and Robert Dahl, all stressed making political science more scientific early in their careers; but all came to place greater stress on serving democracy later in their lives.[9] The American discipline as a whole, however, has over time given greater priority to becoming more truly scientific, rather than to contributing to democracy or America—while continuing to seek to minimize the tensions among those goals.[10] That trend, I contended, has continued despite periodic outbursts of resistance, such as the protests of the Caucus for a New Political Science in the late 1960s. The predominance in the discipline of the quest to become a true science contributed to the ascendancy of rational choice theory and more sophisticated quantitative analyses through the 1980s and into the early 1990s.[11] I judged in 1996, however, that rational choice theory was coming to be seen as an important source of “tools and hypotheses” for the discipline, but not as a credible “grand unifying theory” of politics. The profession seemed headed instead into an era of intellectual pluralism in which the strongest emphasis would be on more empirically rigorous testing of hypotheses that were parts of “middle-level” theories of particular political phenomena.[12]

What has happened since then? At the turn of the century, political science experienced another uprising, this time termed the “Perestroika” movement, protesting what its participants, including me, saw as the discipline’s undue privileging of quantitative methods and rational choice theory over other forms of analysis, and its neglect of important political questions not amenable to such methods.[13] By then I saw a further specification of the tension between the discipline’s scientific and its public service aspirations: often the only questions that could be answered at what was taken to be the highest level of scholarly rigor were relatively narrow, technical aspects of the big questions with which I thought we ought to be concerned—so the discipline ended up saying very little of substance about those big questions.[14]

Robert Putnam’s 2002 American Political Science Presidential Address, entitled “The Public Role of Political Science,” best displays the predominant response of the profession to these developments.[15] Putnam insisted that various scholars, including me, had overstated the tensions between “rigor and relevance,” and that “scientific rigor and public relevance” were in fact “mutually supportive,” just as “the founders of the APSA” had believed.[16] But he agreed that “in recent years” the “salience” of the goal of contributing to “public understanding and the vitality of democracy” had “dimmed” in the profession, though he also believed and hoped that political science was “nearing the end of a period in which activism has been de-emphasized and even de-legitimated by our professional norms.”[17] He advised his “more scientific” colleagues, “Better an approximate answer to an important question than an exact answer to a trivial question,” and his “less scientific” colleagues, “More precise is better.”[18] He called for a political science that used many methods, engaged many disciplines, and that ecumenically included both “problem-driven” and “method-driven” work while returning to “a phase of more active engagement in the world.”[19]

Putnam’s positions—early 21^st century political science did need to seek more active engagement with real-world problems and needed to do so in methodologically pluralistic fashion, but all scholars should see the quest for scientific rigor, defined chiefly in terms of “counting and modeling,” as overwhelmingly “supportive” of these goals—capture well what I see as the prevailing sensibilities in American political science today. The discipline’s leaders endorse intellectual pluralism and the need to address substantively important questions more strongly than many did prior to the Perestroika “revolt,” while largely adhering to the view that formal modeling and quantitative methods generally if not always represent the most rigorous forms of political science. Most are skeptical, however, about rational choice theory as a candidate for a grand, unifying theory of all politics, rejecting claims advanced by some leading rational choice scholars from the 1970s through the 1990s.

Notable in this regard is Jon R. Bond’s presidential address to the Southern Political Science Association published in 2007. Bond professed his wholehearted commitment to the scientific method as conventionally understood. But precisely for that reason, he was “not persuaded that rational choice theory will provide the Newtonian breakthrough for political science,” because he saw it as “nonfalsifiable.”[20] Though we can test whether specific actors pursue particular goals rationally, we can also always imagine an alternate rational choice model in which the actors’ goals are defined as doing whatever they are in fact found to have done. So we cannot falsify the theoretical claim that all behavior can be deemed rationally instrumental to the achievement of some goals. At most we can find that some behavior was not rational for the goals we thought, perhaps incorrectly, that the actors held. While that finding may lead us to reconsider our characterization of their goals, it leaves the question of whether we should regard their conduct as rational unanswered. These realities meant that rational choice scholarship provides particular models that are falsifiable, but no testable general theory of politics.

Because many of the most scientifically committed political scientists like Bond have now reached this conclusion, and no alternative grand theory of politics has subsequently emerged, the discipline does now display considerable intellectual pluralism, though as much by default as by conviction. Scholars seeking to achieve a more scientific political science have felt compelled to identify that quest simply with the use of scientific methods, not with any particular substantive or theoretical focus. Those commitments have continued to arouse anxieties that too much modern political science research is purely “method-driven” and so does not illuminate important political problems in ways that can inform and advance debates and deliberation in the public sphere.

In the terms of Michael Burawoy’s 2004 American Sociological Association Presidential Address, “For Public Sociology,” which helped inspire the SSRC’s “Academia & the Public Sphere” essay series, the Perestroika dispute and its aftermath shows that political science today, like sociology, has many practitioners of “professional” political science who seek to develop and test scientific theories systematically. But the discipline also has many proponents of “critical” political science who challenge “professional” normative and descriptive assumptions and who, I would add, often also seek to address the larger substantive concerns of mainstream publics and counter-publics.[21] Yet despite Robert Putnam’s hope for an upsurge in publicly relevant research, and despite general disillusionment with the most sweeping ambitions of rational choice theorists, the different camps are still by no means equal in size or status. In my view along with many others, the historic trend toward the predominance of “professional”-style political science that neither aspires to nor achieves great “relevance” on major aspects of contemporary public issues has continued. There are, at most, a tiny number of contemporary American political scientists who are prominent contributors to public debates because of and by means of the ideas they have advanced in their professional research or teaching (a list that does not include me). The best-known political scientists, such as former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and CIA Director David Patraeus, are famous and influential for what they have done in public service, not for their political science scholarship.

The two closest candidates for “public intellectual” standing due to their “professional” scholarship are probably Nobel Prize Winner Elinor Ostrom and Putnam himself. As a crude measure of their public visibility, Putnam’s most cited work, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, has close to 30,000 citations on Google Scholar (which includes many non-scholarly sources), while Ostrom’s Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, has over 11,000. Yet Bowling Alone primarily addresses the forms of social life that are and are not conducive to the formation of “social capital.” It rarely directly addresses politics or most public issues, though “social capital” is found to be conducive to political engagement.[22] The same is true of Putnam’s more prescriptive subsequent book, Better Together: Restoring the American Community. Its emphasis is overwhelmingly on initiatives by community groups and businesses in civil society, not on government action—not even on why government action would be ineffective or inappropriate—though it cannot avoid discussing government as a sector pertinent to these initiatives.[23] In comparison, though Ostrom’s seminal book has found a wide audience among scholars and policy-makers, and though it does assess government responses to public resource issues among other alternatives, it has not put a signature idea into public circulation in the manner of Putnam’s “bowling alone” and “social capital” concepts. Insofar as it has had a broader impact, the book has conveyed a similar “civil society” message, suggesting that local voluntary associations are often better than national governments or markets for resolving resource development and allocation problems.[24]

There are, to be sure, a few other political scientists whose ideas published in their scholarly works have affected important public debates. Most notable, perhaps, are Samuel P. Huntington, whose Clash of Civilizations book and preceding article together have more than 13,000 Google Scholar citations, and his student Francis Fukuyama, whose End of History book and article have more than 10,000.[25] But unlike the Putnam and Ostrom books, few regard those works as employing the methods of rigorous “professional” political science. And while the New York Times has called Princeton’s Robert P. George “this country’s most influential conservative Christian thinker,” and George’s ideas are laid out in his books, those works, too, are not seen as products of “professional” political science, and in comparison with the writings of Putnam, Ostrom, Huntington, and Fukuyama, they are not read nearly so widely in the profession.[26] George is most influential due to his advisory role with Catholic leaders, government agencies, and the Federalist Society.

Apart from Putnam and Ostrom, the work of “professional” political science that may have had the greatest public impact in the U.S. in recent years is Donald Green and Alan Gerber’s Get Out the Vote: How to Increase Your Voter Turnout, which has become the Bible for contemporary campaign organizations.[27] But this book, with just a bit over 200 Google Scholar citations, has influenced the tactical conduct of political professionals far more than it has public understanding of politics. Even so, by getting campaigners to knock on doors and talk to people instead of running more television ads, it may have done more than most academic work to inspire active participation in democratic self-governance.

Not only is the list of American political scientists whose professional scholarship has had a substantial public impact very short. It also has a political tilt that is in my view understandable but disturbing. Even though the authors of these works are by no means all conservatives or neo-conservatives—only George and at times Fukuyama have been politically active in those circles—their messages have nonetheless been broadly consonant with the conservative tide in American politics over the past generation. These works tend to celebrate many traditional American values and institutions, to express concern about loss of older civic virtues, and most importantly, to favor decentralized, civil society solutions to common problems—not big government, certainly not any radical egalitarian reform agendas. It is not surprising that political science scholarship that is more in keeping with the dominant political mood of an era should attract more attention than work that is out of step. But if one believes that there are at least aspects of that mood that warrant criticism, then it is questionable whether these patterns show that modern professional political science is doing all it ideally would to improve public life.

The patterns I discern in recent American political science fit broadly with the global trends portrayed by John E. Trent in his 2009 presentation to the World Congress of the International Political Science Association held in Santiago, Chile. Trent, a former Secretary General of the IPSA, based his remarks on his work as co-editor of a book series on the state of political science around the world and on papers presented at a 2008 IPSA conference in Montreal devoted to the condition of international political science. Trent argued that 21^st century political science benefits from much better databases and improved quantitative methods, but rather than being entirely devoted to quantitative work, the discipline still displays “an eclectic, pluralistic set of approaches to political analysis.”[28] There is neither methodological nor theoretical consensus. Trent perceived that in particular “rational choice theory was generally condemned” as a candidate to be an overarching theory of all politics, and he also saw “greater appreciation of historical sociology and normative theory.”[29] Nonetheless, Trent reported that more generally, “almost all the political science research paradigms are severely questioned,” and tensions “run deep between ‘scientific’ and ‘political’ orientations,” with a “mainstream/non-mainstream division and deprecation between quantitative (e.g. empirical/scientific) versus qualitative (e.g., philosophical/institutional) practitioners.”[30] Overall, Trent portrayed a fragmented, over-specialized “discipline in search of its soul and out of touch with the real world of politics” and called for political scientists to have a greater sense of responsibility to be relevant to the concerns of “the public and the political class, society and democracy.”[31] He also thought, however, that these difficulties were mainly with “the theory and research side of the discipline, rather than our teaching.”[32]

His presentation drew a sharp response from former IPSA President and leading German political scientist Max Kaase, who noted that “many important scientific inventions were initially made without any concern for any broader social relevance” and that “differentiation and specialization lead to both academic and human progress.”[33] He thought any undue emphasis on quantification was primarily a North American, not a global problem, and he did not see it as a great problem anywhere, because he saw “research specialization” as “a conditio sine qua non for progress in political science knowledge creation,”[34] Yet Kaase also stressed, contrary to Trent, that the growing numbers of university students in many places, combined with the need for specialized research, was “probably increasing the distance between teaching and research.” Specialization, while good for “the development of the field,” was “clearly a challenge to teaching.”[35]

The Trent-Kaase exchange suggests that the trends discernible in American political science–the absence of any reigning grand theory of politics, attendant methodological and substantive pluralism, but with a long-term trend toward, and tensions over, claims that only quantitative political work is truly rigorous and scientific, all accompanied by concerns about declining relevance—are more than simply American phenomena, even though political science varies greatly in different locales globally. I am struck, however, by their differences over whether teaching is endangered by these trends; and though I am in many ways sympathetic with Trent, on this point I think Kaase’s perception is correct. More than I or the other AAAS conference participants recognized fifteen years ago, the development of higher education is producing new challenges in all disciplines to older models of professors as both researchers and teachers. But these developments, I argue, are particularly threatening for the research and teaching contributions of the discipline of political science, in ways that may well be damaging for the profession’s contributions to the public sphere. To understand why, it is useful to first review some of the recent transformations in higher education that are becoming all too familiar.

The Transformations in Higher Education and Implications for Political Science

The most important transformations in the U.S. are, first, the expansion of modern higher education that has fostered increased teaching needs, in America as elsewhere, as Kaase stressed, even as more and more colleges and universities have sought to become research centers, not just teaching institutions.[36] Second is the combination of higher university costs and declining public funding that has produced cutbacks in non-revenue generating programs; much higher tuition; and increased reliance on university-corporate partnerships, as well as corporate managerial styles within universities—as Michael Burawoy stressed in his essay to the SSRC Public Sphere forum this summer, and as political scientist Benjamin Ginsberg has detailed at book length.[37] Third, and resulting from the first two, is the increased reliance on adjuncts, graduate students, and other sorts of non-tenure track faculty members to do the bulk of the teaching in American research universities and even many American teaching institutions, accompanied nonetheless by higher teaching loads for tenured and tenure track faculty in many state universities and community colleges already oriented primarily toward teaching. Meanwhile scholars in more affluent research universities (including me) are being asked to do less teaching than in the past.[38] Such research scholars are, however, often expected to do more to win grants from foundation, corporate, and the shrinking numbers of government research funding programs—devoting their time to income-generating centers rather than to classrooms or to forms of academic research that do not attract large grants.[39]

As Joanna Scott and I have stressed, these transformations are massive in scale: in 1960, three-quarters of college instructors in the U.S. were full-time tenured or tenure-track faculty. By 2009, only 27% were, with adjuncts and graduate students providing most of the rest of the teaching.[40] And in the last 30 years, the costs of four-year public universities in the U.S. has risen almost 500%, while the main source of student financial aid for these institutions, Pell grants, rose much more slowly—so that these grants only cover 33% of public university costs, versus almost 70% in 1980.[41] As student consumers and their families have paid more and more for less and less teaching by senior tenured faculty members, sharp criticisms of the costly scholarship and teaching being provided by modern American colleges and universities and calls for substantial restructuring, including elimination of tenure, have mounted. Strikingly, the authors of many of these critiques are leading university administrators and academics.[42]

These transformations pose major challenges to all disciplines and all institutions of higher education, even though there are important variations: top private universities and a few elite public research universities are faring better than the bulk of public institutions. Scholars in the “STEM”—science, technology, engineering, and math—disciplines, along with health researchers, are faring better than most in the humanities and social sciences, in part because they became accustomed to relying on large-scale external research grants long ago. But throughout higher education, trends are working against maintaining the “symbiosis of multiple purposes” long achieved by having scholars who are both researchers and teachers, with great academic freedom to do both, comprise the bulk of the long-term members of post-secondary institutions.[43]

There are good reasons to think that the trends that are increasing the distance between research and teaching do have real costs, as Kaase suggested. Even in the STEM fields, one recent study found that graduate students who taught displayed greater improvement in their research skills than graduate students who did not teach, as evaluated by how their research proposals improved over time. A qualitative survey of economists produced a similar finding.[44] But many education reformers, including the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a think tank associated with Texas governor and current presidential candidate Rick Perry, are arguing that “transparency and accountability” can be improved by instead “emphasizing teaching and research as separate efforts in higher education.”[45] They are thereby adding political reinforcement to the modern patterns in which more academics are becoming either researchers or teachers but not truly both.

Even so, it is not so much political pressures as the enhanced market competition for top scholars characterizing American universities in the recent decades—competition that education scholar Roger Geiger terms “the arms race”—that has generated the trends toward providing the most prestigious researchers with reduced teaching loads, while the high demands for college-level instruction are met by assigning other scholars teaching loads so great that doing serious research becomes difficult if not impossible.[46] The comparatively light teaching loads at top American research universities are being achieved and preserved through more visible embrace of the ties to wealthy donors, corporate and individuals on which, out of apparent necessity, those universities increasingly rely. For example, the leading public university political science department in the United States at the University of California at Berkeley is now officially the “Charles and Louise Travers Department of Political Science,” named for an alumnus donor who made a fortune in mineral development. A top private university, New York University, houses “The Wilf Family Department of Politics,” named for a family of real estate developers and businessmen that includes several NYU alumni. Of course, both public and private universities in America have always partly depended on gifts from wealthy alumni, often recognized in the naming of buildings and endowed chairs. But the recent overt identification of prominent departments with particular private donors symbolizes how this reliance is becoming a yet more significant part of modern American university life.

And though issues of declining governmental funding, mounting public criticism, increased segregation of research and teaching, greater reliance on teachers who hold less protected and less rewarded non-tenure-track positions, and greater dependence on private, often corporate sources of research funding and other donations are endemic to modern American academia, I submit that they interact with the traditional and still-present tensions in the mission of political science in ways that are distinctively consequential. However its goals may be conceived, political science is the one discipline above all that cannot avoid being “political.” Politics is the profession’s subject matter, and whatever methods its practitioners employ, whatever the particular substantive foci of their research and teaching are, political scientists are always likely, if not indeed certain, to produce results that are controversial from some political point of view—either because they question aspects of the political status quo, or because they affirm aspects of the political status quo, or simply because they emphasize some aspects of politics and neglect others. Even attempting to do “apolitical, pure science” research on politics involves making a highly contested political choice. There is no safe option.

As I discussed in my previous contribution to the SSRC’s “Academia & the Public Sphere” essay series, these realities were dramatized for American political scientists in the fall of 2009 when conservative Republican Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn, who is also a medical doctor, introduced an amendment to eliminate the small amount of National Science Foundation funding that goes to political science research.[47] Journalists perceived the Senator to be motivated by hostility to studies “tainted by left-wing biases.” And he probably was; but his largest target was the University of Michigan’s American National Election Studies, the survey research many regard as the bedrock of “professional” quantitative political science.[48] Coburn believed that even such work had “little, if anything, to do with science,” and he urged that NSF funds go to “finding solutions for people with severe disabilities, or the next generation of bio-fuels, or engineering breakthroughs,” leaving “political science” to “pundits and voters.”[49] Coburn’s amendment was easily defeated, but the incident shows that whenever scholars analyze politics in any way, there is always the inescapable risk of upsetting persons in power. And again, that is a risk that political science, more than any other discipline, cannot avoid without ceasing to exist.

I have also long contended that precisely because governments, major media firms, private corporations and non-profit think tanks of various stripes can and do hire skilled researchers to document and analyze politics, the profession of academic political science should see itself as having special responsibilities that only heighten these risks.[50] The intellectual agendas of all those researchers employed elsewhere inevitably reflect the interests of the government agencies, media outlets, corporations and think tanks that finance them to conduct certain studies. If academic political science is to make a distinctive contribution, its agenda should therefore be different from the work that such non-academic researchers are doing—even as it pursues both “critical” and “professional” forms of research.

In the manner of “critical” sociology and political science, academic political scientists should seek to question the empirical and normative assumptions and the adequacy of the data and analyses offered by these other, often more “public” researchers, along with those of scholarship generated within the discipline. Academics should also seek to identify and explore significant political topics that non-academic researchers neglect because they are irrelevant to or contrary to the interests of their funders. It is likely that many of those neglected topics will focus on the interests of those who are not wealthy, not powerful, and not socially influential, and I believe that promoting understanding of those interests can be a significant contribution to the modern public sphere in America and elsewhere.

Yet I want also to acknowledge, indeed to stress, that many of the subjects that academic political scientists should feel a special responsibility to pursue will be the standard fare of “professional” political science. Some political research topics are neglected because they present technical challenges that are too rarefied for most non-academic researchers to perceive, much less study. Others involve theoretical debates and extensive data collection endeavors that government agencies, corporations, and think tanks may not see as sufficiently connected to their immediate agendas to warrant support. Beginning with my 1996 paper, I have long argued that political scientists should see themselves as called to be “gadflies,” in the Socratic tradition and in keeping with more “critical” modes of research. But it would be wrong to deny that much irreplaceable work is done and must be done by academic political scientists who seek instead to be professional “worker bees,” industriously contributing to the collective project of building up a body of scientific truths about politics. Although some of this research appears to me to succumb to the temptations of over-specialization and disciplinary insularity at the expense of attention to important political questions that can enrich the public sphere, as both Putnam and Trent have also suggested, a great deal of it is undeniably necessary for intellectual progress in the study of politics, and much of it is substantively illuminating as well. The lesson of the Coburn controversy, again, is that these distinctive sorts of “professional” political science contributions, along with “critical” ones, are endangered by current trends in American higher education. When you are in the political arena, it appears, often all the buzzing of all the different types of academic insects around you sounds the same—and so you just start swatting.

Nevertheless, the fact that even “mainstream” quantitative political science is coming under criticism only shows further how the longstanding internal tensions in American political science, and the trends in the discipline’s responses to those tensions, are now interacting with the external developments in American higher education in ways that justify heightened concern for the profession’s intellectual vitality. The contested but still predominant internal trend to give priority to the goal of becoming more rigorously scientific over visible service to American democracy has been bolstered by the external trends separating research from teaching, and by the increasing need to rely on non-governmental funding for research, which goes primarily to what is seen as more “scientific” and “professional” work. But I believe that in fact the scientific rigor of the profession’s research is in important ways undermined by these developments. As scholars perceived to be doing “cutting edge” scientific research on politics are increasingly relieved of many of their teaching responsibilities, many have felt even freer to pursue highly technical, often esoteric dimensions of the discipline’s internal theoretical debates, since those topics are generally not suitable for undergraduate courses. At the same time, however, they are experiencing pressures to focus on dimensions of their research agenda that may have value in the eyes of the private individual and corporate donors on which universities increasingly rely. For those scholars more concerned to achieve what they judge to be scientific rigor than to address any particular substantive topics or to develop knowledge suitable for engaging teaching, the result can be research that is either substantively tied to donor agendas or that is remote from any major substantive political debates, or perhaps even both. This research is not likely to be accessible in form or illuminating in content for most participants in the world’s public spheres, because neither public accessibility nor public relevance rank high among its driving concerns.

And though political science courses remain popular at most American universities, fewer and fewer political science instructors are now having their teaching fueled by the insights gained from designing and executing significant research projects on a continuing basis—even as the work of research scholars in political science is becoming less informed by experiences of learning student concerns, of seeking to have something to say to them, and of learning how to communicate that content effectively. And many of the non-tenured teachers of political science who do the great bulk of modern American university instruction, and indeed many of the tenured faculty members who work at financially stressed public institutions, believe that their positions and their institutions may be endangered if they teach about politics in highly controversial ways. Those anxieties matter, because as is true of political science research, any political science teaching worthy of the name must examine controversial political matters and must present unpopular views concerning those subjects. The more teaching about politics is done by teachers who feel themselves to be in highly vulnerable positions, wary of offending taxpayers, governmental officials, or corporate donors, the more likely it is that political science teaching will be done in ways that simply canvass conventional perspectives, rather than promoting wide-ranging critical reflection and deeper public understanding of important political concerns.

I do not wish to exaggerate these dangers. My perception is that most political scientists in America today still feel very free to pursue the research that, for “professional,” “critical,” or other reasons, they regard as important, while most teachers of political science in modern American higher education classrooms, regardless of rank, still feel they can challenge students with a range of critical perspectives. But I think it is entirely possible that for many of us, these beliefs are already partly a form of denial, because at some level we in fact know that we run risks if our research or teaching goes very far in unpopular directions. It also seems likely that if current trends continue, these pressures on both “professional” and, especially, “critical” political science research and teaching will loom larger. Indeed, literally as I was typing the preceding sentence, the Chronicle of Higher Education published online a report that the University of Texas’ Board of Regents has just adopted a “sweeping plan” that seeks to quell “the bitter disputes that have been raging across Texas over the proper balance of teaching and research and the need to control costs” by creating a “dashboard,” an “interactive, online database,” to give students, parents, and legislators” detailed data on “departments’ and colleges’ productivity and efficiency.”[51]

To be sure, the new Texas accountability plan represents an effort to forestall, not to comply with, the program to separate teaching and research advanced by the aforementioned conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation, which nonetheless applauded it as a positive step forward.[52] And I wish to stress that it is not only politically unrealistic, it is not defensible for political scientists or other academics to seek to be wholly immune from accountability to the governments, private donors, and citizens who supply the resources that enable us to do the research and teaching that we do. Being a professor of political science or anything else is not a matter of divine right. But it also remains true that to study and teach about politics well, political scientists cannot have their agendas or their messages dictated closely by any powers that be, including government officials, wealthy corporations, foundations, or individuals, or even democratic public opinion. The price of excessively heightened vigilance from these sectors may precisely be the academic liberty essential to the profession’s mission. In that case political science’s contribution to the public sphere may become only the provision of an echo chamber for the voices of the powerful, rather than the supplying of valuable new political facts or freshly conceived political ideas.

Yet the road forward cannot simply be a road back. These trends largely are not reversible, nor would many types of reversal be desirable. In regard to the tensions within the discipline, more extensive and reliable databases and more sophisticated quantitative methods cannot be ignored if we are to improve political science research. Instead, their potential must be utilized and they must continue to be improved. Nonetheless, improvement also involves, I continue to maintain, recognizing that scientific rigor is achieved not by systematic data collection and hypothesis testing alone, vital though those endeavors are. Still more fundamentally, rigor requires intellectual honesty about the presumptions that drive our research, about how certain our findings really are, and about what bearing the substance of our research really has on the important substantive political concerns that it is the discipline’s mission to address. The intellectual honesty that is the heart of true science also involves communicating the aims and results of our work, in our scholarship and in our teaching, in terms sufficiently comprehensible to our various audiences so that they can judge whether we are doing work that matters in their eyes. Our research must be presented in ways that at least have the potential to be understood, assessed, and perhaps even utilized productively in the public sphere. For if the reality is that what we are doing, accurately understood, simply does not matter for the public sphere in the eyes of virtually all its participants, it is likely that we are deceiving ourselves about whether the political knowledge we are providing is really worth our efforts, or anyone’s support. That is not good science.

Seeking to insure that our work is communicated effectively risks, of course, intensifying the pressures arising from external trends. Many in the public may be even more dissatisfied with us when they really comprehend the sorts of questions we are pursuing and the sorts of findings we are producing—particularly when our questions and findings are highly relevant to them, well-conceived and executed, and deeply disturbing. The main response of contemporary American academics to these risks, apart from ignoble choices to write on obscure topics in impenetrable fashion, is to seek to protect academic freedom by maintaining the institution of tenure. It appears increasingly likely, however, that we American academics will not be able for too much longer to continue to justify having jobs for life, without even mandatory retirement, when no other sector of the American economy enjoys such privileges. If so, our battle will have to be not for tenure per se but for long-term contracts that can protect academic freedom without appearing to eliminate all accountability.

And then we have to use our professional protections and privileges well. It will be clear that I think this means that we have to do both our “professional” and our “critical” research in ways that address more effectively topics that matter to participants in modern public spheres. But I also believe that in America, perhaps much more than in other nations, political scientists particularly need to resist the pressures and temptations to move further away from the researcher/teacher model of academic life and toward disciplinary segregation into those who are almost exclusively researchers and those who almost exclusively teach. Despite the volley of recent critical studies, the evidence from enrollments is that many parents and teachers still greatly value political science teaching in institutions of higher education, probably more than they value the great bulk of our “professional” and our “critical” research. Many seem unconcerned if our teaching raises serious questions about American institutions, values, and practices, so long as we do it in ways that are informative and thought provoking, not heavily polemical and one-sided. Most value the development of capacities for critical, independent thought, and most recognize that this goal requires challenging inquiries into conventional ways of conducting politics. At the moment, most in the American public are not too happy with the state of contemporary American politics—so many are receptive to hearing at least some critical perspectives. And in an era of declining resources, the discipline of political science sorely needs the public support that teaching helps to generate.

Indeed, given the limited public impact of most late 20^th century and 21^st century American political science scholarship, I submit that it is possible, even likely, that today we American political scientists contribute to the public sphere more extensively and distinctively through our teaching than we do in any other way, just as many in the public appear to believe. As I have suggested, there is also good reason to believe that combining teaching and research, difficult as it can be to do, ultimately strengthens both—meaning that if we in American political science strive harder than we have been doing to resist recent trends and maintain, or indeed strengthen, our commitment to being both active researchers and active teachers, then both our research and our teaching may become more valuable to more people. If for much of the 20^th century, leading U.S. political scientists decided late in their careers that the quest to be more scientific should not in the end take priority over the quest to strengthen democracy in America, then early in the 21^st century, it may be time for modern American political scientists to decide humbly that the best path to strengthening our contributions to the public sphere involves not only doing better, more substantively significant, and more accessible scientific research, but also striving to maintain and strengthen our teaching, seeking to combine both and to do both as well as we possibly can.

→ Initiative on Academia & the Public Sphere

FOOTNOTES
1.  The results were published in Daedalus 126, no. 1 (1997) and in Thomas Bender and Carl E. Schorske, eds. American Academic Culture in Transformation: Fifty Years, Four Disciplines (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).↑
2.  My thanks to Roy White for excellent research assistance and to Anne Norton for helpful discussion of the themes of this essay.↑
3.  My contribution was Rogers M. Smith, “Still Blowing in the Wind: The American Quest for a Democratic, Scientific Political Science,” in American Academic Culture, 271-305.↑
4.  John E. Trent, “Should Political Science Be More Relevant? An Empirical and Critical Analysis of the Discipline,” European Political Science 10: 191-209 (2011).↑
5.  Smith, “Still Blowing,” 271, 273-275.↑
6.  Charles A. Beard, “Politics,” in James Farr and Raymond Seidelman, eds. Discipline and History: Political Science in the United States (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 127.↑
7.  Ibid.↑
8.  American Political Science Association, “Core Objectives.”↑
9.  Smith, “Still Blowing,” 275.↑
10.  Ibid. 276.↑
11.  Ibid. 277-278.↑
12.  Ibid. 288, 291.↑
13.  For overviews see Kristen R. Monroe, ed., Perestroika! The Raucous Rebellion in Political Science (New Haven: Yale University Press); Sidney G. Tarrow, “Polarization and Convergence in Academic Controversies,” Theory and Society 37: 513-36.↑
14.  See e.g. Rogers M. Smith, “Should We Make Political Science More of a Science or More About Politics?” PS: Political Science and Politics 35: 199-201 (2002).↑
15.  Perspectives on Politics 1: 249-255 (2003), PDF available at here.↑
16.  Ibid. 251.↑
17.  Ibid. 249, 251.↑
18.  Ibid. 252. As a target of Putnam’s thoughtful and courteous criticism, let me note that I agree entirely with both these admonitions, though not entirely with the designation of the groups as “more” and “less” scientific.↑
19.  Ibid. 252-253.↑
20.  Jon R. Bond, “The Scientification of the Study of Politics: Some Observations on the Behavioral Evolution in Political Science,” Journal of Politics 69: 095 (2007).↑
21.  Burawoy, Michael. 2004. “Presidential Address: For Public Sociology,” American Sociological Review 70: 7, 9-10. Burawoy broke these activities down into further categories.↑
22.  Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000).↑
23.  Robert D. Putnam and Lewis Feldstein, with Don Cohen, Better Together: Restoring the American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003).↑
24.  Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990).↑
25.  For the books, see Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), and Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996).↑
26.  David D. Kirkpatrick, “The Conservative-Christian Big Thinker,” New York Times, December 20, 2009, MM24; Robert P. George, Making Men Moral: Civil Liberties and Public Morality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). This work, George’s most influential, has roughly 425 citations on Google Scholar.↑
27.  Donald P. Green and Alan S. Gerber, Get Out the Vote: How to Increase Your Voter Turnout, 2d ed. (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2008). For participant-observation evidence of the impact of this work, see Rasmus Nielsen, “Ground Wars: Personalized Political Communications in American Campaigns,” doctoral dissertation, Columbia University School of Journalism, 2010.↑
28.  Trent, “Political Science,” 193-194.↑
29.  Ibid. 194-195.↑
30.  Ibid.↑
31.  Ibid. 196-197, 199.↑
32.  Ibid. 204.↑
33.  Max Kaase, “Should Political Science Be More Relevant? A Comment on the Paper by John E. Trent,” European Political Science 10: 228, 231 (2011).↑
34.  Ibid. 231-232.↑
35.  Ibid. 230-231.↑
36.  Roger L. Geiger, Knowledge and Money: Research Universities and the Paradox of the Marketplace (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 2.↑
37.  Michael Burawoy, “Redefining the Public University: Developing an Analytical Framework,” August 5, 2011; Benjamin Ginsberg, The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), esp. ch. 6; Geiger, ibid. 3, 24-25, 29-33, 41, 44, 47, 180-231. On financing see also Donald E. Heller, “Financing Public Research Universities in the United States: The Role of Students and Their Families,” in Robert L. Geiger, Carol L. Colbeck, Roger L. Williams, and Christian K. Anderson, Future of the American Public Research University (Rotterdam/Taipei: Sense Publishers, 2007), 35-53.↑
38.  Geiger, ibid. 170-172.↑
39.  Ibid. 172-179.↑
40.  Samantha Stainburn, “The Case of the Vanishing Full-Time Professor,” New York Times, January 3, 2010, ED6, cited in Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott and Rogers M. Smith, “Teaching: The Issues Perestroika Neglected,” PS: Political Science and Politics 43: 751 (2010).↑
41.  Scott and Smith, ibid. and Kevin Carey, “That Old College Lie,” Democracy 15: 2010.↑
42.  See e.g. Derek Bok, Our Underachieving Colleges: A Candid Look at How Much Students Learn and Why They Should Be Learning More (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus, Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids—And What We Can Do about It (New York: Times Books, 2011); Richard Arum and Josipa Roksum, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Naomi Schaefer Riley, The Faculty Lounges: And Other Reasons Why You Won’t Get the College Education You Paid For (New York: Ivan R Dee, 2011). Bok is the former President of Harvard University. Hacker is professor emeritus in political science at Queens College, City University of New York, and Dreifus is an adjunct associate professor at Columbia University. Arum is a sociologist at New York University and director of education research for the Social Science Research Council, and Roksum is a sociologist at the University of Virginia. Riley, whose book is devoted to making the case against tenure, is a Harvard graduate and daughter of an accomplished political scientist.↑
43.  Geiger, Knowledge and Money, 13-14.↑
44.  Dan Berrett, “Want to Be a Good Researcher? Try Teaching,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, August 18, 2011.↑
45.  Ibid.↑
46.  Geiger, Knowledge and Markets, 13, 59-60, 237-238.↑
47.  David Glenn, “Senator Proposes an End to Federal Support for Political Science,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, October 7, 2009.↑
48.  Ibid.↑
49.  Ibid.↑
50.  Smith, “Blowing in the Wind,” 276-278.↑
51.  Katherine Mangan, “U. of Texas Adopts Plans to Publish Performance Data on Professors and Campuses,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, August 25, 2011.↑
52.  Ibid.↑