Comments on: Race, French national identity, and disciplinary politics

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Fri, 11 Dec 2009 10:18:56 +0000

[...] Race, French national identity, and disciplinary politics from decasia: critique of academic culture by eli [...]

By: Michael Bishop

Michael Bishop — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 20:13:04 +0000

I agree that the word intellectual is often used the way you suggest. But even with that distinction, there are individuals who are first influential for their narrow expertise, then achieve public recognition and popular influence. Economists like Paul Krugman, and Gary Becker. Political scientist James Q. Wilson, sociologist William Julius Wilson. Law professors like Posner or Lessig. Even far less famous experts sometimes address the public directly, my father was on Lou Dobbs a couple months ago and recently wrote this for the online new york times: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/19/the-case-for-a-job-creation-tax-credit/

By: eli

eli — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 18:07:46 +0000

Maybe I’m prejudiced, but I don’t think I would call an expert working on trade policy an ‘intellectual.’ More like a ‘technocrat.’ In France, at least, a quite strong cultural distinction is made between the two roles (and even in the US there is a whole social science literature that’s about the distinction between intellectuals, experts, and other such social roles). I rather agree with Max, being an effective French intellectual is essentially a matter of having a public audience. But it may also be the case that public media access can translate into a certain amount of actual political influence in France. For example, the birth of the term “intellectuals” in the turn-of-the-20th-century French Dreyfus Affair had everything to do with famous authors causing a public scandal that ultimately had major political ramifications. So while I think the existence of behind-the-scenes academic advisors is pretty straightforward (either they have the ear of some government official or they don’t), the political impact of intellectuals who speak in public is somewhat harder to pin down, I think. About Chomsky, btw, I wouldn’t be surprised if his political impact has changed over the years… this article actually has a lot of pretty interesting details about the changing political reception of his work in the 70s and 80s (I hadn’t realized one of his books was almost censored for unpatriotism in 1973!):

http://chomsky.info/onchomsky/1985—-.htm

but one would have to look into his influence around the time of Vietnam. My sense is that he has been marginalized ever since by the official American intelligentsia.

By: Max

Max — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 08:23:15 +0000

I guess I was thinking more in terms of popular appeal. I’m sure all sorts of academics have influence on government policy behind the scenes in America, but it’s not often that they “create a stir” with the public at large. For example, philosophers are rarely asked to make statements on national television shows in America, whereas that seems to be fairly commonplace in France.

By: Michael Bishop

Michael Bishop — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 07:58:48 +0000

I was under the impression that a big U.S.-France difference was the greater respect from the general public that professors of humanities receive in France. But of course other sorts of intellectuals have more influence, e.g. people working on education policy, energy policy, trade policy, environmental policy, etc. When it comes to these experts its unclear to me whether they have more or less influence in either country.

By: Max

Max — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 00:40:28 +0000

My first paragraph was in reference to the part about identity being considered by the petitioners to be a “private matter.” In America, it seems that American identity is just as likely to be a very public matter as it is to be practiced privately, but that the implications of one or the other (that one is “more in line with shared values” than the other) isn’t always clear. The implications of flying the American flag, for example, don’t seem to be as clear-cut as I’ve heard they are in France.

It seems that, in America, public displays tend to be viewed as a reinforcement of ideals like “freedom” and “liberty,” whereas keeping political, religious, etc. values completely in the private realm epitomizes those values in France (public displays being perceived as potential incursions on those values). (Which perhaps explains the stance on banning symbols?)

I agree that the way the university system is set up in America–as mostly a state-based affair, if we leave private universities aside–probably contributes to the situation of academics rarely being called on to play a role in “national dialogues.” I guess what I find kind of strange about France is that an academic, such as Alain Badiou, could actually “create a stir” by, say, criticizing Sarkozy. I can’t picture a single academic with that kind of power in America. I mean, we have Noam Chomsky, I suppose, but the extent to which he’s ever been able to “create a stir” is debatable at best. Though I suppose I don’t have a first-hand idea of how deep Badiou’s criticisms of Sarkozy have been felt in French culture (I saw him on BBC’s HardTalk discussing the matter, which would seem to indicate that there were waves of some note).

By: eli

eli — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 23:23:12 +0000

Yeah, the humanities seldom get called up in the service of a national dialogue in the US — thought note that they weren’t being asked to really speak in this case; they were just being invited as audience members. But when I think about national kinds of events — like haven’t there been national forums on reading, often led by the First Lady or the like? — I think that in America they would be more likely to request a famous author of some sort to participate than a humanities professor. That said, I do get the sense that a few famous American humanists do make the newspapers — Judith Butler or Slavoj Zizek have been in the new york times, and even someone like Sam Pickering from UConn is probably occasionally invited to non-academic events, don’t you think? It’s true, however, that intellectuals are much better regarded overall in France than in the US and more in the public view; partly that’s just a kind of cultural fact and partly I think it has to do with a much closer institutional integration between elite academic institutions and the state. The fact that there has been much more of a centralized, technocratic government with a lot of power to set uniform, national policy has offered more possibilities for successful intellectuals to influence the centers of decision-making, whereas in the US things like education policy are much more decentralized.

I didn’t quite get what your first paragraph was about. However, I can tell you that, depressingly, a lot of French people seem to think that banning the minarets is an excellent idea. I haven’t followed closely, but it’s far from generally condemned.

By: Max

Max — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 13:04:32 +0000

That’s an interesting distinction. In America, it seems that we’re just as likely to “keep it to ourselves” as we are to trumpet it far and wide, and yet both acts are usually indicative of the core values (“freedom,” “equality,” etc).

I’ve heard that flying the tricolor outside one’s house in France is a signal that one is politically hard-right (as in Le Pen hard-right). The same act, in America, has far more broad, and far less predictable, implications.

What I find most interesting about this situation is the idea of academia being called on in the first place–especially the humanities–explicitly to perform some service as part of a “national dialogue.” It’s something that I can’t ever imagine happening in America, for nefarious purposes or not. The closest we’ve come, perhaps, is in calling on climatologists to help craft messages on global warming, but our political class relies far more on labor unions, think tanks, and corporate/religious lobbies for the fulfillment of this role than it ever will academia.

Slightly off-topic, but what’s the feeling in France, if any, about Switzerland’s ban on minarets?