Date: Sat, 19 Oct 1996 14:07:06 -0400 (EDT)
From: Justin Schwartz <jschwart-AT-freenet.columbus.oh.us>
Subject: Re: Oxford shafted Maggie T, bless its reactionary heart


On Sat, 19 Oct 1996, Hugh Rodwell wrote:

> So you were at Cambridge. Well, it was home to some of the biggest weasels
> of them all -- Keynes and Joan Robinson. As well as being alma mater to
> Prince Big-Ears of Cymru.

I agree with what Doug has to say about Keynes and Robinson, both fine
economists, given their limits. In general I think that Marxistss still
havea  lot to learn from bourgeois economics, although always in the
critical spirit that Marx took the bourgeois economists of his day. To
cross the Altantic for a moment, the new institutional economics of Coase,
Williamson, ALchian, Demsetz, and (on the liberal left) Stiglitz is a
genuinely major advance and can be turned to radical purposes, as Bowles
and Gintis have shown. ANyway, as an old Kingsman, I havea  lingering
fondness of Keynes as a person as well as a thinker. 

> 
> Any thoughts on the differences between British and American academic
> traditions and how this might affect the role of intellectuals in the class
> struggle?

I offer a few ideas with a goos deal to tentativeness:

1) I suspect that AMerican academe is more dependent on government,
especially military funding and on corporate backing--there's been an
explosion of John M. Olin Professorships and a long history of intimate
corporate-university relations. One thinks back to Clark Kerr's The
Business University, as I think the book was called, savaged by Hal Draper
in his brilliant essay, The Mind of Clark Kerr (reprinted in the
Humanities collection Socialism from Below). My Cambridge alumni mag and
reports from the Economist and the Manchester Guardian Weekly suggest that
Briitish academe has started to move rapidly in this direction too, but
until recently at least Oxbridge and London were largely mainly publically
supported in a  way that gave British academics more breathing space, or
so it seems to me. I do not say this with great confidence.

2) British academics has a much stronger left tradition, unsurprising in a
countrry with a Labour Party that, whatever its defects, was until
recently miles to the left of anything in US politics, with real popular
support. Brit academics never underwent anything like the McCarthite purge
of the academy that the universities in this country perpertrated in
1947-57; many distinguiushed American leftists, like M.I. Finley, fled to
Britian to find work in that period. It is inconcerivable even today, with
the old New Left having won some positions in the academy, that Marxists
like Cohen or Hill could occupy equivalent positions of prestige in this
country. America's leadering (former) Marxist historian, Eugene Genovese,
never got a first rank university chair, for example. I don't mean that
MArxists don't get tenure at major universities here, although normally
they don't, but it's quite a different picture in Britain.

This affects the tenor of academic life and the range of options
considered respectable subjects for discussion in various ways, mostly
obvious. A lot of lefta nalysis taht's just part of the scene in the UK is
thoroughly marginalized here. It's not refuted: holding positions to the
left of welfare liberalism is per se evidence of incompetence or
unsuitability in most American universities.

In this connection someone, whose message I unfortunately deleted,
mentioned pomo-ism as a big deal in Oz. I left Britain in '81, before pomo
hit it big, so I can't comment on its popularity there now. I do note that
a number of Brit critics (Terry Eagleton, Christopher Norris,a nd the
amazing Alex Callinicos) have found it worthwhile to attack, so it must
have gotten some sort of foothold. I suspect, though, that the Brit
equivalent was the new Stuart Hall "New Times" stuff, which is, for all
its faults and weaknesses, more intelligible and less pernicious than
pomo. Now in America pomo is largely confined to a number of sorts of
departments: English, Lit, Comparative Lit, Americam Studiers, Women's
Studies, etc. It hasn't caught on in Philosophy, History, or Political
Science, much less Economics. But it's what passes in public for "the
left" in American academics, although there's not much that's lefta bout
it in any tradiutional sense, given that for the most partit is defined in
opposition to Marxism, socialism, and class analysis. Terry Eagleton
hy[othesizes that pomo is a practical responseand rationalization of the
defeat of the New Left in the current climate, making a virtue of ugly
necessity when class based movements appear to be weak and disorganized.
That sounds plausible to me as far as it goes.

3) British academics seem to me nore engaged in public life. I don't mean
American aacdemics don't do a lot of work for the government; they do. But
by public life I mean actively trying to affect the shape of informed and
mass opinion. I think this may have to do something with waht Richard
Hofstdadter called ANti-Intrellectualism in American Life. We don't want
no pointy headed ainaleckchuals tellin' us what to think. I didn't dectect
tahts o much in Britian. Sure, there's a yob press which is as a gutter
level as you like, but my general impression, which may be wrong, since
it's based on limited and old experience, is taht Britih workers respect
thinking rather having contempt for it. The communications gap is there,
in vocabulry and so forth, but it struck me as narrower, I don't know why
this is. Somew of the explanation of American academic isolation from
public life may be a trace assoiciatuion of intellectulas with Commies
taht is left over from McCarthyism, but American anitiintellectualism is
older than that. 

These fragmentary thoughts are rather half baked and I don't pretend
otherwise. 

--Justin