The Chronicle of Higher Education The Chronicle Review
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v54/i46/46b00501.htm
From the issue dated July 25, 2008
CONSIDER THIS
Gone, and Being Forgotten
Why are some of the greatest thinkers being expelled from their disciplines?
By RUSSELL JACOBY
How is it that Freud is not taught in psychology departments, Marx is
not taught in economics, and Hegel is hardly taught in philosophy?
Instead these masters of Western thought are taught in fields far from
their own. Nowadays Freud is found in literature departments, Marx in
film studies, and Hegel in German. But have they migrated, or have they
been expelled? Perhaps the home fields of Freud, Marx, and Hegel have
turned arid. Perhaps those disciplines have come to prize a scientistic
ethos that drives away unruly thinkers. Or maybe they simply progress by
sloughing off the past.
A completely unscientific survey of three randomly chosen universities
confirms the exodus. A search through the philosophy-course descriptions
at the University of Kansas yields a single 19th-century-survey lecture
that mentions Hegel. Marx receives a passing citation in an economics
class on income inequality. Freud scores zero in psychology. At the
University of Arizona, Hegel again pops up in a survey course on
19th-century philosophy; Marx is shut out of economics; and, as usual,
Freud has disappeared. And at the University of Wisconsin at Madison,
Hegel does not appear in philosophy courses, Marx does not turn up in
economics, and Freud is bypassed in psychology.
The divorce between informed opinion and academic wisdom could not be
more pointed. If educated individuals were asked to name leading
historical thinkers in psychology, philosophy, and economics, surely
Freud, Hegel, and Marx would figure high on the list. Yet they have
vanished from their home disciplines. How can this be?
A single proposition can hardly explain the fate of several thinkers
across several fields. However, general trends can inform separate
disciplines. For starters, the ruthlessly anti- or nonhistorical
orientation that informs contemporary academe encourages shelving past
geniuses. This mind-set evidently affects psychology. The American
Psychological Association's own task force on "learning goals" for
undergraduate majors makes a nod toward teaching the history of
psychology, but it relegates the subject to an optional subfield,
equivalent to "group dynamics." "We are not advocating that separate
courses in the history of psychology or group dynamics must be included
in the undergraduate curriculum," the savants counsel, "but leave it to
the ingenuity of departments to determine contexts in which students can
learn those relevant skills and perspectives." The ingenious departments
apparently have dumped Freud as antiquated. A study by the American
Psychoanalytic Association of "teaching about psychoanalytic ideas in
the undergraduate curricula of 150 highly ranked colleges and
universities" concludes that Freudian ideas thrive outside of psychology
departments.
The same antihistorical imperatives operate effectively, if with less
force, in economics and philosophy. Again, generalizations can be made
only with qualifications, but economics departments, like psychology
departments, tend to be fiercely present-minded. Their basic fare
consists of principles of economics, macroeconomics, microeconomics,
finance, game theory, and statistics. To be sure, often the departments
offer lecture classes on the history of economic thought, which survey
economic thinking from the Greeks to the present. But in this sprint
through the past, Marx shows up as little more than a blur. At the
University of California at Los Angeles, for instance, students devote
less than a week to Marx in a course on the history of economic
theories. One scholar of Marx estimates that in more than 2,000
economics departments in the United States, only four offer even one
class on the German revolutionary. In 1936, Wassily Leontief, who later
won a Nobel in economic science, gave a seminar on Marx in Harvard's
economics department. No such seminar is given now.
Compared with economics, philosophy prizes the study of its past and
generally offers courses on Greek, medieval, and modern thinkers.
Frequently, however, those classes close with Kant, in the 18th century,
and do not pick up again until the 20th century. The troubling 19th
century, featuring Hegel (and Kierkegaard and Nietzsche), is omitted or
glossed over. General catalogs sometimes list a Hegel course in
philosophy, but it is rarely offered. Very few philosophy departments at
major universities teach Hegel or Hegelian thought.
Philosophy stands at the opposite pole from psychology in at least one
respect. In most colleges and universities, it is one of the smaller
majors, while psychology is one of the largest. Yet, much like
psychology, philosophy has proved unwelcoming for thinkers paddling
against the mainstream. Not only did sharp critics like Richard Rorty,
frustrated by its narrowness, quit philosophy for comparative
literature, but a whole series of professors have departed for other
fields, leaving philosophy itself intellectually parched.
That is the argument of John McCumber, a scholar of Hegel and Heidegger
who himself decamped from philosophy to German. His book Time in the
Ditch: American Philosophy and the McCarthy Era (Northwestern University
Press, 2001) savages the contemporary American philosophical profession
and its flight from history. He notes, for instance, that 10 years after
the 1987 "breakthrough anthology" Feminism as Critique, not one of its
contributors, from Seyla Benhabib to Iris Marion Young, still taught in
a philosophy department. The pressures that force — or tempt — big names
such as Rorty and Martha Nussbaum to quit philosophy, McCumber observes,
exert equal force on those outside the public eye. He charges, for
instance, that senior editors dispense with peer review and run the
major philosophy journals like private fiefdoms, and that a few
established professors select papers for the discipline's annual
conferences. The authoritarianism and cronyism drive out mavericks.
Psychology without Freud, economics without Marx, philosophy without
Hegel: For disciplinary cheerleaders, this confirms intellectual
progress. The cloudy old thinkers have made way for new scientific
researchers. But at what cost? The past innovators shared a fealty to
history. "We are what we are through history," stated Hegel; and Freud,
for all his biological determinism, believed that one must master the
past to master the present. Yet today we lack the patience to dig too
far, or perhaps we lack the patience to unravel the implications of
discoveries into the past. We want to find the exact pill or the exact
gene that provides an instant solution. Psychology transmutes into
biology. To the degree that a chemical imbalance results in depression,
or a gene gives rise to obesity, the effort to restore health by drugs
or surgery cannot be faulted. Yet an individual's own history may play a
decisive role in those disharmonies. We triumphantly treat the effect as
the cause. As a practical measure, that approach can be justified, but
it avoids a deeper search.
The flight from history marks economics and philosophy as well.
Economics looks more and more like mathematics, in which the past
vanishes. Sometimes it even looks like biopsychology. A recent issue of
the American Economic Review includes numerous papers under the rubrics
of "Neuroscientific Foundations of Economic Decision-Making" and
"Cognitive Neuroscientific Foundations of Economic Behavior." But can we
really figure out today's economic problems without considering whence
they came? Philosophy nods toward its past, but its devotion to language
analysis and logic-chopping pushes aside as murky its great 19th-century
thinkers. Polishing philosophical eyeglasses proves futile if they are
rarely used to see.
No doubt there has been progress in those fields, but is it possible to
advance without any idea of where one has been? Without a guide to the
past, the scholar, like the traveler, might move in circles. Moreover,
should the giants of the past be dispatched so coolly and mechanically?
Culture is not like an automobile that should be junked when old and
decrepit. I don't see how we can be educated — or consider ourselves
educators — if we consign to the dustbin, say, Freud's exchange with
Einstein on war, Marx's description of "the cheap price of commodities"
that batters down national boundaries, or Hegel's notion of the
master/slave relationship. Those ideas should be addressed, not parried;
taught, not dismissed.
To be sure, other fields adopt the thinkers that psychology, philosophy,
and economics have sent packing. Yet that itself is a problem. Instead
of confronting recalcitrant thinkers on their own terms, the new
disciplines slice them up. Freud turns into an interpreter of texts,
Hegel into a philosopher of art, and Marx into a cinema theorist. That
saves them from oblivion, but at the price of domestication. Freud no
longer excavates civilization and its discontents but merely unpacks
words. Hegel no longer tracks the dialectic of freedom but consoles with
the beautiful. Marx no longer outlines the movements of capital but only
deconstructs the mass spectator.
Driven out of their original domains because they are too ungainly or
too out of date, Hegel, Marx, and Freud succumb to an academic makeover.
In the mall of education, they gain an afterlife as boutique thinkers.
Russell Jacoby is a professor in residence in the history department at
the University of California at Los Angeles. He is author, most
recently, of Picture Imperfect: Utopian Thought for an Anti-Utopian Age.
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