The Right-Wing Medievalist Who Refused the Loyalty Oath
On Ernst Kantorowicz, academic freedom, and “the secret university.”
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By Simon During
<https://www-chronicle-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/author/simon-during>
NOVEMBER 20, 2020
In 1950, Ernst Kantorowicz, a distinguished professor of medieval
history, was fired from the University of California at Berkeley for
refusing to sign an oath of loyalty, which had been mandated, in a fit
of Cold War panic, by the University of California’s Board of Regents.
Kantorowicz principally objected to the Board of Regents’ requirement
that all professors with U.S. citizenship declare in writing that they
upheld the Constitution and were not members of any organization
advocating the government’s overthrow.
Simon During's Humanities
The literature and cultural-studies scholar Simon During — author of
many books including/The Cultural Studies Reader/(Routledge, 1993)
and/Modern Enchantments/(Harvard, 2004) — has been long at work on a
history of the humanities, a topic which he has addressed recently in
"Are the Humanities Modern?" (included in the collection/Latour and the
Humanities/, just out from Hopkins), as well as in a series of essays
for/The Chronicle Review/:"Losing Faith in the Humanities,"
<https://www-chronicle-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/article/losing-faith-in-the-humanities/>"What
Were the Humanities, Anyway?"
<https://www-chronicle-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/article/what-were-the-humanities-anyway>and
the essay you are reading now.
Drawing on the history of ideas, the institutional history of the
university, and the study of religion and secularity, the essays in this
series are essential reading for anyone hoping to understand the
peculiar situation of humanities scholarship now, at once ubiquitous and
marginalized.
Kantorowicz was by no means alone in his refusal to sign. Across the UC
system, another 36 tenured professors lost their jobs alongside him. As
it turned out, California’s Supreme Court overturned the sackings. By
then it didn’t matter much for Kantorowicz. He had already found a job
at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
Looking back, this incident may seem trivial enough: just another
display of Cold War paranoia, just another demonstration of supine
conciliation on the part of university authorities.
But we shouldn’t let Kantorowicz’s firing fall out of institutional
memory. If anything, his act has become more rather than less
significant, because, paradoxically, the reasons he gave for his refusal
were so peculiar, so out of touch. They were remote from ordinary ways
of thinking about the professoriate’s role and status then. They are
even more remote now. This very remoteness can suggest new ways for
professors to relate to the university system today, as it becomes
unmoored from centuries-old traditions and legitimations and as the
empire of obsolescence expands.
In refusing to sign the loyalty oath, Kantorowicz did not appeal
primarily to the notion of “academic freedom” as articulated by John
Dewey and others earlier in the century. Nor did he refuse to sign
because he was any kind of leftist. To the contrary, he was (as he put
it in the pamphlet he wrote about the affair) a “conservative” who, as a
volunteer fighter against the Munich 1919 uprising, had actually killed
Communists.
His reasons appealed to a different conceptual or institutional
tradition than any acknowledged either in modern politics or by modern
academic administration. He believed that a professor is “entrusted
with” an office in a particular “body corporate,” or/corpus mysticum/,
i.e., a university. That status was defined in medieval Europe when
universities were established as a/universitas magistrorum et
scholarium/— as bodies made up of students and professors and nobody else.
As a corporation, the university had a particular legal status. It could
not be identified with the sum of its members; it was rather a
disembodied entity, permanent and immortal. What enabled the scholar to
participate in the university was professorial office, which endowed its
bearer with “dignity.” Dignity, thus conceived, is not a personal
comportment but a quality essential to office. Or rather: In a
permanent, mystical institution, dignity fuses office to the private
personality, as Kantorowicz put it in his most famous book,/The King’s
Two Bodies/(1957)/./
In refusing to sign the loyalty oath, Kantorowicz did not appeal to
“academic freedom.”
As a/corpus mysticum/, the university is a corporation in a different
sense than the modern business enterprise. Because students and
professors/were/the embodied/corpus mysticum/, regents or janitors, for
instance, do not themselves belong to the university proper. They are
attached outsiders. Janitors, for instance, merely keep the campus
clean. Regents ensure that formal university procedures as mandated by
the state are observed. But as members of the university’s body
corporate, professors were not employees at all.
In other words, for Kantorowicz, a professorship was a public trust. No
one had control over professors. No one measured their performance. The
dignity of the professorial office called upon its bearers to act
according to their “conscience,” which was held to be inseparable from
the professor’s “genuine duties as member of the academic body
corporate.” Furthermore, dignity required them to enact their conscience
with “passion” and “love.” It involved a willingness to sacrifice their
embodied self for the sake of the office: a concept of sacrifice whose
historical origins included God’s sacrifice of Christ’s humanity.
This way of thinking was, of course, utterly obsolete in 1950. No other
professor refusing to sign the loyalty oath invoked anything like it.
Most were members of the left, standing up for academic freedom against
the threat of what was then sometimes called “democratic totalitarianism.”
Kantorowicz’s gesture came from somewhere else: from Germany circa 1900,
and from the lessons he had absorbed from the George-Kreis (the group of
acolytes around the poet Stefan George) and its commitment to a “Secret
Germany,” supposedly more spiritual, timeless, noble, and real than any
actual Germany. In a Frankfurt University lecture he had bravely given
against the Nazis in 1933, just before exiling himself, Kantorowicz had
expressed his belief in this Secret Germany, in which the poet and the
thinker held something like monarchical dignity. His refusal to sign the
loyalty oath in 1950 repeated this act of defiance.
Kantorowicz’s beliefs were inherited from medieval thought and practice,
to which he devoted his scholarly career. His research was dedicated to
showing how the dignity of office, in being simultaneously material and
spiritual, was originally attributed to the Roman emperors, then took a
Christological turn (because Christ is both divine and human,
disembodied and embodied) and, under the aegis of Latin Christianity,
was transferred to a sequence of institutionalized offices or positions:
the pope, the Holy Roman Emperor, the knight, the priest, the lawyer,
the professor, and the poet.
It is not hard to understand why Kantorowicz might have been attracted
to this quasi-mystical way of thinking. As a secular, queer Jew with
aristocratic pretensions and from a rich family, he found the sheer
disembodiedness of categories like “dignity” and “office” attractive.
After all, such categories did not involve race. In many ways this kind
of recondite conservatism was a conceptually and imaginatively more
powerful way of protecting oneself against anti-Semitism than
universalizing progressivisms such as Communism.
Kantorowicz’s esoteric ideas influenced some of his students. The notion
that poets held a noble office with a genealogy reaching back to
antiquity, and were thus detached from contemporary society and the
state, appealed immensely to a group of queer, young poets who were
Kantorowicz’s admiring undergraduate followers. Robert Duncan, Jack
Spicer, and Robin Blaser formed the nucleus of what became known as the
“Berkeley renaissance.” They also played a role in establishing what
would later become the counter-culture.
Spicer’s academic career was impeded when he joined Kantorowicz in
refusing to sign the loyalty oath. But Duncan transferred the passions
of Kantorowicz’s ultraconservative recalcitrance to a later political
moment of a very different kind, when he joined Berkeley’s free-speech
movement in 1964. The movement was the campus’s first mass act of civil
disobedience, and it introduced white America to that form of movement
politics which we now associate with 1968. It also established
Berkeley’s reputation as a hotbed of radicalism. It is worth remembering
that the radical left’s insistence on autonomy, freedom, and something
like personal dignity carries traces, via Kantorowicz, of an
ultra-conservative political theology.
Traces of Kantorowicz are also to be found in more-recent academic
thought, for instance in the influential “pragmatic sociology” of Luc
Boltanski.
Boltanski supposes that an existential “unease” is primary to people
because the future is radically uncertain and the unexpected always
awaits us. The management of this uncertainty requires institutions to
establish “security” by providing routinizing rules, protocols, and
discourses. Such security also calls upon critique, motivated by the
will continually to test and strengthen social institutions.
Just as Kantorowicz committed himself to tracing the conceptual duality
of office, Boltanski regards institutions as simultaneously embodied and
disembodied, agents in life as lived but also immortal, in the sense
that their identity is separate from any material thing and they don’t
die a natural death. Institutions, Boltanski says, following
Kantorowicz, have “two bodies.”
As far as I am aware, Boltanski has not addressed the concept of the
dignity of office. But there is a strong sense in his work that to avoid
the anxiety of contingency — what they used to call Fortuna — we need to
think of ourselves as bearers of offices in organizations that were here
before us and will be here after us.
Today, we find it difficult to think of ourselves as anything other than
embodied, even in our professional lives. As academics, our race, our
ethnicity, our gender, and our sexual preferences organize our
relationship to what we teach and research. From Kantorowicz’s point of
view, that would be a kind of heresy.
The modern university has decided not to think of itself as a/corpus
mysticum/indifferent to the private and embodied qualities of those who
work in it, but_radically to secularize
<https://www-chronicle-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/article/losing-faith-in-the-humanities/>_itself
by allowing professors’ personal moral and corporeal qualities to order
it. It has swapped dignity for equity, we might say.
There is no going back on that, of course. The history that Kantorowicz
reminded us of has come to an end. But a question remains: What are we
to do with that history now? Do we, in a progressive spirit, just
celebrate its passing? Or, in a Burkean conservative spirit, do we
regret and resist the loss of its undeniable (I think) glamour and power?
Neither.
Of course the/corpus mysticum/that Kantorowicz invoked never actually
existed. Not when the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II founded the first
secular, public university in Naples in 1224. Not in Germany in 1933.
Not in the U.S. in 1950. This means that the university as body
corporate was a mystical body in two senses: It was legally established
as a permanent, immortal, and thus spiritual corporation, but it was
also just an idea, an imaginative construct.
When Kantorowicz refused to sign the loyalty oath in 1950, as when he
resisted the Nazification of the German university system in 1933, he
was insisting that we should not confuse what is actual with what is
real. For him, what does not actually exist can be more real than what
does. The actual university is prey to the needs of war, to the forces
of management, to the pressures of ideology, to the demands of equity
and identity, and so on, but the real university — the secret university
— is not. Indeed, there may be moments when we have to sacrifice
ourselves for what is real against what is actual.
Let me restate this idea less esoterically, à la Boltanski: The notion
that our embodied, actual selves — our racialized, sexualized, managed,
productive selves — need, on occasion, to be sacrificed for the/corpus
mysticum/can never quite disappear, however secreted it may become.
Without it, there is no “us” as professors at all, no us as members of
an institution — the university — whose corporate status has allowed it
to endure for centuries. In our times, the “secret university” is not
the university that aims for more embodiment but for less, and it won’t
quite die because it can’t, at least until the university both as an
idea and as an institution itself disappears.
What might this mean in practice? From an idealistic perspective,
accepting that the secret university survives means that we should be
prepared to follow Kantorowicz’s example. We should be ready not just to
stand against the forces that are transforming the/corpus mysticum/into
the managed university but to sacrifice ourselves, if necessary, for the
dignity of office. But more realistically (since of course most
professors need their jobs to survive in the bourgeois world), the
persistence of the secret university just means that we acknowledge the
costs of betraying it — and accept ourselves, more or less dispiritedly,
as participants in the real university’s endless break up.
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