Academic Culture, Intellectual Courage, and the Crisis of Politics in an Era of Permanent War

Abstract

Pierre Bourdieu, a French Sociologist, was deeply concerned about the role that academics might play as a progressive force in politics. He believed that academics were indispensable, given their rigor as researchers, writers, and teachers in creating the pedagogical conditions that both furthered social and economic justice and challenged the forms of symbolic and material domination being exercised globally, especially under neoliberalism. Rejecting the commonplace assumption that academic work should be separate from the operations of politics, he reclaimed the role of the intellectual as an engaged social agent and “maintained that intellectuals have a fearsome form of social responsibility.”² Following Edward Said, Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, and others, Bourdieu argued that for academics to become engaged intellectuals they had to repudiate the cult of professionalism that has often positioned educators as narrow specialists, unencumbered by matters of ethics, power, and ideology, and wedded to a sterile objectivity that largely serves to justify a retreat into a world of banal academic rituals and unapologetic escapism. Against the cult of professionalism, Bourdieu posited the notion of committed intellectuals in search of “realist” utopias.

The question that I would like to raise is this: Can intellectuals, and especially scholars, intervene in the political sphere? Must intellectuals partake in political debates as such, and if so, under what conditions can they interject themselves efficiently? What role can researchers play in the various social movements, at the national level and especially at the international level—that is, at the level where the fate of individuals and societies is increasingly being decided today? Can intellectuals contribute to inventing a new manner of doing politics fit for the novel dilemmas and threats of our age?

—Pierre Bourdieu^l