1

[This essay was delivered on 11 February 2000 as the invited Munro Beattie
Lecture, 1999-2000 at Carleton University. The version that appears here
incorporates revisions made in 2003 for a projected volume, to be published by
Carleton University Press, that was to have brought together the four most recent
Munro Beattie lectures, but that never appeared. Abbreviated versions of this
paper were delivered as invited lectures to the Miedzywydzialowy Zaklad Studiow
Amerykanskich of the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland (18 April 2000), and
at the conference on Italy and Canadian Culture: Nationalisms in the New
Millennium at the University of Udine, Italy (18-20 May 2000), but it has not
previously been published.]

[Index: Canadian politics, US politics, higher education, corporatism,

civil commons, critical humanism]
[Date: February 2000, 2003]

Forging Freedom: Critical Humanist

Strategies of Resistance to Corporatism

Munro Beattie Lecture, 1999-2000, Carleton

University

Michael Keefer

1. Inventing crises
I wonder whether the widespread failure of North Americans to
notice that we are living in the midst of a social and political revolution

2
stems more distinctly from inattention, from diffidence, or from
incredulity. In the United States, one might incline toward the former
explanation: our southern neighbours have a well-nurtured capacity
(not seriously dented by the events of September 11, 2001 and their
aftermath) for remaining sublimely unaware of much that goes on in
the world. Diffidence, on the other hand, is supposed to be a national
characteristic

of

Canadians:

have

we

perhaps

noticed

the

transformations taking place all around us, but all-too-tactfully

refrained from giving them a name? Or have we simply been unable to
credit what is happening, either because we think of revolutions as
events that occur, by definition, elsewhere and in other times, or else
because the very notion of a revolution has been so debased by its
application in advertising to everything from automotive styling to
men's toiletries that we greet fresh deployments of the term with a
yawn?
Whatever

else we might fault them for,

the corporatist

revolutionaries of our time cannot be accused of having failed to

disclose their intentionsand their strategies as well. Ronald Reagan
campaigned for the American presidency in 1980 as the bringer of
something he called the Reagan Revolution; a year into his first term
his budget director, David Stockman, revealed with surprising candour
the way in which Reagans handlers (if not the president himself)
understood what they were up to. All the talk about balanced budgets
and

prosperity

through

trickle-down

economics

was

hot

air,

Stockman confessed. The real goal was a radical redirection of

resources away from social spending, and a deliberate amassing of
huge budget deficits that would make this redirection irreversible by
depriving future governments of the wherewithal to restore the
welfare and civil rights entitlements cut away by the Reaganites. A
1

See Stockmans interview with William Greider in the Atlantic Monthly (November
1981). As George Clark has observed, Stockman's candour cost him his job, but
mentioning his name in the mainstream media is politically and journalistically
1

3
liberal welfare-state future, should the opposition to this radical
conservatism

ever

sufficiently

reassert

itself

to

the

point

of

contemplating such a thing, would be discovered to have been preemptively, already and for ever, bankrupted.
The anxiously proleptic temporality disclosed by Stockmans
indiscretions, this desire to constrain succeeding generations by
bankrupting any possible alternative to the future that is being
envisioned and announced, is one early signdespite all the obvious
continuities with prior forms of capitalist governanceof the radically
transformative nature of what I will be calling the corporatist
revolution. There is, of course, a large disjunction between the
Reaganite rhetoric of economic and military rejuvenation, which
implied the opening out of an expanding field of choices for the
American polity, and the force of negation revealed in this desire for a
foreclosure of all futures but onebeneath which may be detectable a
more deeply rooted readiness to cancel human futures altogether. It
was, after all, a colleague of David Stockman in Reagans first cabinet,
Environment Secretary James Watt, who justified the issuing of mining
permits in national parks by remarking that Jesus expects us to have
exhausted all of the planets resources before he returns to earth. The
2

strip-mining of national parks would, in this view, accelerate the

Second Coming, the end of time, the cancellation of futurity in a
blessed eternal present.
Brian Mulroney, Jean Chrtien, Paul Martin, Preston Manning,
Stockwell Day, Stephen Harper, and the other politicians who since
1984 have collaborated in hitching the Canadian caboose ever more
tightly onto the tail end of the Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush Express
incorrect (Brian Segal on the University: A Response, ACCUTE Newsletter [June
1994]: 8).
2 Astonishingly, this statement did not cost Watt his job; only after he had scornfully
summed up a congressional committee to which he had to report as consisting of a
black, a woman, a Jew and a cripple (the latter being Senator Daniel Inouye, who lost
a leg in military service) was President Reagan persuaded to replace him.

4
have, on the whole, been less forthcoming about their motives than
David Stockman was. But the inhabitants of Ontario, our most
populous and economically most powerful province, have had in
Premier Mike Harris another self-proclaimed revolutionaryand in the
figure of John Snobelen, Harriss first Education Minister, one of the
philosophers not just of Harriss Common Sense Revolution, but also
of the larger corporatist revolution of which it was a part. Shortly after
taking office in 1995, Snobelen had himself videotaped explaining his
plans for change to senior education ministry bureaucratsone of
whom had the decency to share a copy with the media. Despite the
informal looseness of his syntax, Snobelens meaning is clear:
[We must] bankrupt the actions and activities that
arent consistent with the future were committed to.
But there are a couple of things we need to get done
properly along the way. One of those is ... to declare
the future.
.... Its not a very collaborative process. That
needs to be done before what needs bankrupting and
how to bankrupt it occurs.
I like to think of it as creating a useful crisis....
Creating a useful crisis is what part of this will be
about. So the first bunch of communications that the
public might hear might be more negative than I
might be inclined to talk about [otherwise].
Yeah, we need to invent a crisis. And thats not an
act just of couragetheres some skill involved.

These excerpts from Snobelens talk are derived from the linked quotations given
by Richard Brennan, Minister plotted to invent a crisis, The Toronto Star
(September 13, 1995): A3; Lisa Wright, Apologize for remarks Harris tells
Snobelen, and Thomas Walkom, Snobelen scales windy heights of bafflegab, The
Toronto Star (September 14, 1995): A3, A25. A slightly different transcription of the
concluding sentences quoted here appeared in an unsigned article, Harris Mainly
Mum on Plans for Post-Secondary Education in Ontario, in the CAUT/ACPPU Bulletin
(November 1995): 6.
3

5
Snobelens words were dismissed by some commentators as
mere

bafflegaban

interpretation

he

encouraged

when

he

responded to calls for his resignation by claiming that he did not mean
to invent a crisis in any normal sense, but had been using a
management-consultant jargon in which these plain words signified
something else altogether. But with due allowances made for
differences in historical context and in the scale of the bankrupting at
hand, Snobelens project is quite obviously a development of the
Reagan Revolution, and his posturings provide a glimpse of the mental
workings that underlie and correspond to the radical material
transformations
corporatism.

being

The

organized

strategy

by

Snobelen

contemporary
enunciated

was

capitalist
promptly

followed by the Harris government, with invented crises in public

housing,

welfare,

environmental

regulation,

labour

legislation,

municipal restructuring, primary and secondary education, health

care, urban transportation, and public utilities, including water supply
and the generation and distribution of electricity. Higher education has
also come in for its share of attention.

2. Defunding criticism
With cuts of 25 percent during the 1990s to university budgets
that in the late 1980s stood at little more than two-thirds of the
funding per student provided to equivalent state universities in the
northern United States, Ontario had by the beginning of the new
millennium sunk to a level of per capita funding of post-secondary
education that put the province last or second-last among the sixty
James Wattss apocalyptic ramblings deserve our close attention for the same
reason; however bizarre they may seem, similar forms of thought appear both
among the leaders of the Canadian Reform/Alliance Party and among the members
of George Bush Jr.s cabinet.
4

6
jurisdictions with post-secondary systems north of the Rio Grande. But
in this case the invented crisis is being compounded by demographic
factors. University administrations have belatedly woken up to the fact
that the demographic bulge known as the baby-boom echo, which
will produce a ten to fifteen percent increase in the annual student
cohort, is currently moving up through the Canadian school system,
and will arrive at the college and university level at approximately the
same time as the double cohort that Ontarios elimination of Grade
13, the final year of secondary school, will produce in 2003.

In

anticipation of an overall enrollment increase of forty percent by 2010,

the Council of Ontario Universities in October 1999 urgently requested
the commitment of at least $1 billion per year in additional base
funding, in addition to the $742 million that the government had
announced would be allocated to capital funding.

The Harris

government promptly slapped the universities away from the cookiejar with a further $30-million cut, and then in February 2000 initiated a
reduced $660-million program of capital spending on universities and
community

colleges.

Targeting

this

funding

to

such

areas

as

information technology, engineering and the health sciences, the

Ontario government also made it available only in cases where
matching funds could be raised from outside sources, thus ensuring
corporate control of a remodeled higher education infrastructure. As
finance minister Ernie Eves declared, The private sector ... believes
its best to have some input on the ground floor of the postsecondary
education system.... They know what skills are required in the

The baby boom was a dramatic and sustained rise in birth rates in Canada from
the years immediately following World War Two until the end of the 1950s.
Demographic statistics revealing a significant surge in numbers among the offspring
of the baby boomers, available since the early 1990s, and showed that in 2006-07,
at a time when the postsecondary education system would still be coping with the
double cohort, the number of Canadian students graduating from secondary
school would be about ten percent higher than in the preceding year.
6 Multi-Year Commitment Needed, Says COU, At Guelph (October 13, 1999): 1, 5.
5

7
marketplace. Any shortfall in the capacity of the post-secondary
7

education system is to be met by recourse to this same private sector,

through an invitation to private degree-granting institutions to
establish themselves in the provincepresumably in the form of what
historian David Noble has called digital diploma mills: low-overhead
distance education operations employing ill-paid faculty on revolving
door contracts to provide job-market training to large numbers of
students in a manner that maximizes the institutions profits.

Having informed Ontarios universities that capital funding could

be requested from the provincial government only for expanded
programs in the applied sciences, Premier Harris subsequently
declared that the universities proposals for funding showed there to
be student demand and institutional need for new money in these
areas alone, and not in the humanities and social sciences: The
demand for new programs is not in liberal arts. The demand is in the
areas where the universities have made applications for significant
expansion [to prepare students] for jobs in the future. When the
9

Ontario university chancellors reacted to this maneuver by issuing a

statement defending liberal arts programs, Harris simply repeated his
claim: We havent had very many universities saying they need to
John Ibbitson, Universities and colleges get big boost from Ontario, The Globe
and Mail (February 23, 2000): A1, A7.
8 See David Noble, Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education,
Toronto: distributed by OCUFA, October 1997; and Digital Diploma Mills, Part II: The
Coming Battle Over Online Instruction, Toronto: distributed by OCUFA, March 1998.
For some historical context to the developments outlined here, see Janice Newson
and Howard Buchbinder, The University Means Business (Toronto: Garamond Press,
1988); and Neil Tudiver, Universities for Sale: Resisting Corporate Control over
Canadian Higher Education (Toronto: James Lorimer, 1999). Parallel developments in
the U.S. have been analyzed by Sheila Slaughter and Larry L. Leslie, Academic
Capitalism: Politics, Policies, and the Entrepreneurial University (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1997).
9 Richard Mackie, Postsecondary-education reforms support job-related courses,
The Globe and Mail (February 24, 2000): A9. In the same press conference Harris
declared, no less disingenuously, that Were very supportive of liberal arts and
continue to fund them to the same levels that students wish to take those programs
and the same levels as they have been in the past. The guiding assumption of such
statements as this is clearly that the electorate has a very short memory.
7

8
expand history and Latin and English departments. We have a lot of
universities saying they have a huge demand for engineering, for
mathematics, for a lot of these new programs. So were responding to
their requests.

10

The deception is childishly transparent. As the premier and his

policy advisers must have been aware, there had in fact been a
significant increase since 1998 in student applications to Bachelor of
Arts programs in Ontario universities, and at the same time a
decrease in applications to professional programs such as Engineering,
and a slight decrease in applications to the sciences. Setting aside
11

the premiers evident contempt for facts, it is interesting to see a

discourse of free-market supply and demand applied to a policy
system that more closely resembles a Stalinist command economy.
As with the invented crisis that our federal government has
created by its withdrawal of support for the Canadian health care
system, the current crisis in higher education seems designed to
convince the public that a once very satisfactory arrangementa
publicly-funded sector that has fulfilled an essential social function
with (in comparison to the American parallels) high efficiency, high
quality and low costneeds to be replaced by an increasingly
privatized system run by private corporations for private profit.

12

In

this light the Ontario Conservative governments deep tax cuts44

See Chris Wattie, University chancellors back liberal arts studies, National Post
(March 1, 2000): A21; and Richard Mackie, Harris denies bias against liberal arts:
Universities sought science funds, Premier says, The Globe and Mail (March 2,
2000): A6.
11 Communication from Charles Cunningham, Registrar of the University of Guelph,
March 2000.
12 This agenda has been pressed with increasing insistence over the past two
decades. In a 1992 address to the Canadian Corporate Higher Education Forum,
John H. Panabaker, former CEO of the Mutual Life Assurance Company of Canada and
former Chancellor of McMaster University, advocated the development of
alternative privately-financed and customer-driven institutions, but felt that
although individual programmes and functions might be privatized, it would not
yet be possible to privatize a major Canadian university. See Panabaker, The
University for Tomorrow, Canadian Federation for the Humanities Bulletin 15.2
(Autumn 1992): 4-5, and my comments in Lunar Perspectives: Field Notes from the
Culture Wars (Toronto: Anansi, 1996), pp. 34-35.
10

9
percent between 1995 and 2000, with further cuts enacted in 2001,

13

and additional corporate tax cuts promised for 2002-03can be seen

to have served the double function of rewarding the high-income
supporters whom they disproportionately favour, and of preventing
the economic boom of the late 1990s from pushing the government
into budget surpluses that would have made it hard to justify
continued cuts to essential public services in the name of deficit
reduction.

14

It would be nave to suppose that Premier Harriss repeated

dismissals of the human sciences as useless and unwanted implied
any claim to knowledge of some actual state of affairs. What these
speech acts displayed was rather an ideologically formed intention, a
will to bring about irrevocable change. Despite its grammatical form,
Harriss declaration that there is no new public demand for liberal arts
programs was performative rather than constative in nature: a
statement not of what he took to be the case but of what he intended
should become the case.

15

The agenda of the Ontario Conservative

government, and of its imitators in British Columbia and elsewhere,

involves a systematic defunding of those sectors of the universities
and colleges within which a critical understanding of sociocultural
See Richard Mackie, Harris ponders steeper tax cuts, The Globe and Mail
(February 7, 2001): A6.
14 The recession of 2001 may in this sense have been welcome to the provincial
government, as helping to push any question of substantial social reinvestment
beyond the horizon of acknowledged possibilities. The manipulative use of budget
deficits is of course a well-established feature of recent attacks upon social
programs. In 1995 Dean Neu and David Cooper (professors of accountancy at the
University of Calgary and the University of Alberta) analyzed the Klein governments
calculations of debt and deficit and argued that the provincial Conservatives [had]
inflated deficit figures by about 30 per cent to justify deep cuts in program
spending.... See Linda Goyette, We Dont Want Cheeky Professors Questioning Our
Oil Barons, Do We? CAUT/ACPPU Bulletin (March 1996): 9. The political economy of
deficit hysteria has been lucidly analyzed by Linda McQuaig in Shooting the Hippo:
Death by Deficit and Other Canadian Myths (Toronto: Viking, 1995).
15 The Council of Ontario Universities attempts to inform Premier Harris of (for
example) the evidence that humanities and social sciences graduates do as well on
the job market as the graduates of job-oriented programs were consistently futile.
The performative nature of his statements shows him to have been interested not in
such facts, but rather in establishing a new set of facts.
13

10
structures and forces can be produced, and a transfer of resources to
those sectors that are most purely instrumental in orientation and
most clearly aligned with the profit nexus of corporate interests.
Harriss

sneering

anti-intellectualismWe

seem

to

be

graduating more people who are great thinkers, he declared in

February 2000, but they know nothing about math or science or
engineering or the skill sets that are needed earned him an
16

editorial cartoon in The Globe and Mail which revised Jacques-Louis

Davids painting of The Death of Socrates to show a blandly smiling
Ontario Premier handing Socrates the cup of hemlock.

17

But Harriss

attitudes seem in fact to be widely shared among Canadas political

elites, for although the Ontario government has been more vociferous
than its federal counterpart in valuing skill sets above critical
intelligence, its instrumentalism and its drive towards privatization
dovetail neatly with the higher education agenda of Jean Chrtiens
neo-Liberal national government.
In October 1998, federal Trade Minister Sergio Marchi took part
in the Second Annual Canadian Education Industry Summit, a
conference which energetically promotes privatization at all levels of
the education system and enthuses over the huge profits available
within the education for profit industry. The Summits aim, according
to its own promotional literature, is to create a platform for the
education industry leaders and the investment community to discuss
the unique opportunities in this new .... $700 billion growth industry.
Marchis participation in the event signalled, in the words of Summit
organizer Charles Ivey, the clear support and involvement of
Canadas Federal Government.

18

Richard Mackie, Ontarios colleges get more cash to cope with growing
enrollment, The Globe and Mail (February 22, 2000): A7.
17 The Globe and Mail (March 3, 2000).
18 I am quoting from a press release, The Canadian Education Industry (October 7,
1998), issued by a coalition including the Canadian Association of University
Teachers, the Canadian Federation of Students, the Canadian Health Coalition, the
Canadian Teachers Federation, the Canadian Union of Public Employees, the
16

11
This and similar signals have been accompanied by action.
Federal finance minister Paul Martins February 28, 2000 budget
denied any funding increase to the Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research
Council and the Medical Research Council, while lavishing $900-million
(a fraction of the sum withdrawn by the federal government from
higher education funding since 1993) upon the recently established
Canadian Foundation for Innovation. Louise Forsyth, president of the
Humanities and Social Science Federation of Canada, noted that
because CFI funding is restricted to the areas of technology and
applied science, and because the federal government made no
provision for the infrastructures needed to support a revival of
research activity, this initiative can only exacerbate the pressures on
universities to sacrifice humanities and social sciences scholarship.

19

To obtain CFI funding, moreover, researchers must be able to match

each forty cents of public money with sixty cents from other sources.
Jim Turk, the executive director of the Canadian Association of
University Teachers, noted that this partnership arrangement (which
closely parallels the Ontario governments provisions for capital
funding) gives the corporate sector effective veto power over who
gets public money, renewing ongoing questions about the implications
for the integrity and independence of university research.

20

It may be nave to think that debate over such issues is still

ongoing, when for corporatist organizations like the Canadian AgriFood Research Council the matter is already settled. That bodys
national strategy for 1997-2002 declares that Canada must focus
research funding on
National Anti-Poverty Organization, the Ontario Federation of Labour, and the
Ontario Public Service Employees Union.
19 Quoted in Perspectives 3.7, ed. Wayne Kondro (7 March 2000),
http://www.hssfc.ca/Pub/PublicationsEng.html).
20 Virginia Galt, Students, faculty worry that private sector's campus presence
tainting the ivy, The Globe and Mail (March 2, 2000): A3.

12
those

areas

with

highest

value

and

return

on

investment.... Priorities for applied research are set by

the marketplace via partnerships, e.g., industry funds
research

that

fits

their

priorities....

Augmented

private-sector participation in research priority-setting

will

...

ensure

appropriate

scientists

market

have

signals,

are

access

to

the

aware

of

the

technology requirements of industry and can focus

their research appropriately.
Scientific

researchers

who

21

fail

to

focus

their

work

appropriately, who work on subjects that do not hold out the

prospect of a quick return on investment, or who adhere to antiquated
notions of a public good that may not in every case be congruent with
the maximizing of profits for Monsanto, Nortel, Microsoft, or General
Foods, will have increasing difficulty in obtaining research funding.
While their more compliant colleagues publish, they will perish.
Thus, while underfunded liberal arts faculties are exposed ever
more completely to the proletarianizing processes acerbically analyzed
by Cary Nelson and Stephen Watt in Academic Keywords, the sciences
and applied sciences are ever more completely handed over to
corporate interests and to a wholesale instrumentalizing that reduces
scientific inquiry to what Sheila Slaughter and Larry Leslie call
academic capitalism. As Bill Readings noted in The University in
22

Quoted by John McMurtry, Accountability and openness to whom?, At Guelph

(November 24, 1999): 4. For an account of the bizarre inefficiencies as well as the
alarming epidemiological consequences of agri-business pseudo-science, as applied
to cattle-raising, see Edward Luttwak, Sane Cows, or BSE isnt the worst of it,
London Review of Books (8 February 2001): 26-27.
22 See Nelson and Watt, Academic Keywords: A Devils Dictionary for Higher
Education (New York and London: Routledge, 1999), and Slaughter and Leslie,
Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policies, and the Entrepreneurial University
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). Nelson and Watt observe that
under this regime, scientific departments commonly become no more than producttesting laboratories: The most thoroughly degraded corporatized university
program is one that no longer does any original thinking; it simply tests products
developed elsewhere by the corporation (p. 87).
21

13
Ruins, the corporatist university defines and assesses itself in terms of
excellence, a notion which is like the cash-nexus in that it has no
content. The vacuous appeal to excellence at one and the same
time exposes the pre-modern traditions of the University to the force
of market capitalism and marks the fact that there is no longer any
idea of the University, or rather that the idea has now lost all
content.

23

But we need to understand these developments in their widest

(shall we say their global?) context.

3. Global corporatism
Beyond the domestic boundaries of its Reaganite or Harrisite
manifestations, and beyond the confines of the higher education
sector, the most conspicuous effects of the widely celebrated process
of globalization include an accelerating transfer of wealth from
already desperately poor countries in Africa, Central and South
America, and southern Asia to the developed economies of North
America, Europe and Japan. This transfer was already well under way
by the 1960s and 70s, thanks to neocolonial political and economic
relations

that

involved

the

routine

subversion

of

democratic

governments and their replacement by dictatorships which fostered

high levels of corruption and bribery, cut labour standards and gave
transnational corporations unfettered access to natural resources. At
24

the same time, existing agricultural economies were being displaced

by the Green Revolution, with an ensuing pattern of mono-crop
Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1996), pp. 13, 38, 39.
24 See Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, The Political Economy of Human
Rights, vol. 1: The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism (Montreal: Black
Rose Books, 1979).
23

14
export, concentration of land ownership and dependence on first-world
loans.

25

In recent decades the transfer of wealth and the ruination of

traditional agriculture have been accelerated by the widespread
imposition of World Bank and International Monetary Fund loanrepayment austerity plans, which dismantle any structures within
debtor nations that might impede the maximizing and repatriation of
the profits of transnational corporations, and at the same time
accentuate social class divisions by reducing the infrastructures of civil
society to a skeletal remnant. The concurrent imposition of an
international trade regime that gives unprecedented global mobility to
finance

capital

has

made

possible

such events

as

the

1995

devastation of the Mexican economy and the so-called meltdown of

East Asian economies two years later. A recognition that these
developments have produced monstrous injustices has not been
confined to thinkers on the left: Michel Camdessus, who as Managing
Director

of

the

IMF

contributed

in

no

small

way

to

the

internationalizing of the corporatist revolution, declared recently that

the widening gaps between rich and poor within nations, and the gulf
between the most affluent and most impoverished nations, are
morally outrageous, economically wasteful, and potentially socially
explosive.

26

Essential reading on this subject is still Susan Georges How the Other Half Dies:
The Real Reasons for World Hunger (1976; 2nd ed., Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977).
26 This statement by Camdessus, made at the Tenth UN Conference on Trade and
Development in Bangkok, February 13, 2000, is quoted by Immanuel Wallerstein,
The Head of the IMF: A Secret Radical? Comment, 34 (February 15, 2000; email
forwarded by the Council of Canadians). For analysis of the issues noted in this
paragraph, see Jerry Mander and Edward Goldsmith, eds., The Case Against the
Global Economy (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1996); Paul Smith, Millennial
Dreams: Contemporary Culture and Capital in the North (London and New York:
Verso, 1997); Graham Dunkley, The Free Trade Adventure: The WTO, the Uruguay
Round and GlobalismA Critique (London and New York: Zed Books, 1997); Biplab
Dasgupta, Structural Adjustment, Global Trade and the New Political Economy of
Development (London and New York:Zed Books, 1998); Ronaldo Munck and Denis
OHearn, eds., Critical Development Theory: Contributions to a New Paradigm
(London and New York: Zed Books, 1999); Jim Yong Kim, Joyce V. Mullen, Alec Irwin,
and John Gershman, eds., Dying for Growth: Global Inequality and the Health of the
25

15
Within the developed countriesespecially those that have
most completely followed the recipes of Chicago School economics
there has been a correspondingly relentless transfer of wealth from
poor to rich, with a resulting surge in immiseration and homelessness.
Skilled (and once well-paying) jobs have been exported to foreign lowwage autocracies, or else have disappeared in a frenzy of down-sizing,
the CEO instigators of which are rewarded with salaries that may be
hundreds of times those of their remaining shop-floor employees.

27

Once-progressive personal taxation structures have come increasingly

to favour the rich; and U.S. Republicans, followed by their Canadian
clones in the Reform and Alliance parties, have pressed for a truly
regressive flat income tax and for further reductions of corporate
tax rates, even though these have already shrunk to a fraction of their
1950s levels.
Growing disparities in wealth have been accompanied by an
escalation of political corruption. Episodes such as the kickback
scandals of the Mulroney era, the Reaganite Savings and Loan scandal
(involving the transfer of approximately one trillion dollars from the
public purse into private pockets), or the still-unfolding Enron scandal
may invite one to suspect a shift from something distantly resembling
democracy, government by the people, to kleptocracy, government by
thieves. But the context of systemic corruption out of which these
scandals have arisen is still more disquieting. International business
Poor (Lonroe, Maine: Common Courage, 2000); Sarah Anderson, ed., Views from the
South: The Effects of Globalization and the WTO on Third World Countries (Chicago:
Food First Books and International Forum on Globalization, 2000); and Linda
McQuaig, All You Can Eat: Greed, Lust, and the New Capitalism (Toronto: Penguin,
2001), pp. 40-93.
27 The previous business strategy of vertical integration (in which corporations
sought control-through-ownership of as many levels as possible of the processes of
production, distribution and sales) has been supplanted by a strategy of branding
and out-sourcing (which depends on saturation advertizing of brand-name goods
which are manufactured under contract, and at a small fraction of the final sales
price, in off-shore free-trade zones where working conditions are no less brutal and
destructive than those of the early nineteenth-century industrial revolution). For a
brilliant analysis of this pattern, see Naomi Klein, No logo: taking aim at the brand
bullies (Toronto: Knopf, 2000), pp. 195-229.

16
deals resting on public-sector purchases commonly involve bribery
and kickbacks of the kind that ex-Prime Minister Mulroneys associate
Karl-Heinz Schreiber has been accused of, and it has become generally
accepted that corporate interests should be able to shape legislative
agendas through campaign financing and through a lobbying industry
whose sole purpose, as John Ralston Saul notes, is that of converting
elected representatives and senior civil servants to the particular
interest of the lobbyistor in other words, corrupting the peoples
representatives and servants away from the public good.
The

so-called

liberalizing

of

trade

which

28

is

the

most

conspicuous feature of the movement towards a globalized economy

might be more accurately described as a formalizing and legitimizing
of the power of corporate capital to maximize transnational profits at
the expense not just of democratic governance, but also, more
directly, of labour rights and environmental protection. Jeff Faux has
written of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that
If the leaders of the United States, Canada, and Mexico
wanted simply to lower tariffs, the agreement could
have been written on one page. Instead, it is one
thousand pages of detailed rules, most of which are
aimed at protecting the interests of U.S. and Canadian
investors seeking cheap Mexican labor. Intellectual
property rights for corporations, repatriation of capital,
and deregulation of foreign business are not only
spelled out, specific punishments and penalties are
described. In contrast, the protections for labor and the
environmentcore elements in any modern social
contractare for all practical purposes non-existent....

29

John Ralston Saul, The Unconscious Civilization (Toronto: Anansi, 1995), p. 93.
Jeff Faux, Jeff Faux Replies [Jay Mandle and Jeff Faux on free trade and the
left], Dissent 45.2 (Spring 1998): 81.
28
29

17
The

basic

asymmetry

of

NAFTAas

also

of

the

World

Trade

Organizations adjudication panels and the temporarily defeated

Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI)is explained by Tony
Clarke and Maude Barlow as stemming from an extension into
international law of the U.S. constitutional principle known as the
takings rule, which prohibits governments from taking private
property without adequate compensation and valid public purpose.
This principle,
used to protect transnational corporations from any
government intervention or regulation that inhibits the
free flow of capital and profitable investment, ... has
the effect of taking away the power of governments
to serve and protect the democratic rights of their
citizens. There are no corresponding rules to protect
governments
corporations.

from

the

takings

of

transnational

30

Transnational corporations thus emerge as strangely hybridor

proteanentities. They have all the legal rights of human personhood
(including, astonishingly, the right to free speech, which was the basis
of the tobacco industrys successful appeal in the Canadian Supreme
Court against the federal law banning tobacco advertising). And yet
they manage to evade most of the human condition's liabilities,
remaining largely immune, it would seem, to those two fixities of
human experience, death and taxes.
Should the clauses of the MAI become law, whether through
inclusion in the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA) or
through some more devious means, transnational corporations would
also acquire the status of nationhood, though in a similarly hybrid or
doubled manner. They would be the equals in law of the nation-states
Tony Clarke and Maude Barlowe, MAI: The Multilateral Agreement on Investment
and the Threat to Canadian Sovereignty (Toronto: Stoddart, 1997), pp. 32-33.
30

18
that make up the membership of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), while at the same time enjoying
free access to signatory countries for their key personnel, treatment
no less favourable than that accorded to domestic companies, and
exemption from labour and environmental standards.

31

And since the

new international trade regime enshrined in the regulations of NAFTA,

the WTO and the MAI prohibits nation-states from considering extrajurisdictional matters in relation to tradethat is to say, from
discriminating in any way against imports produced (for example) by
child labour, slave labour, or under conditions of systematic torture or
mass-murdertransnational

corporations

are

already

effectively

exempted from compliance with international law on human rights.

32

Although the protean corporate entity has at once no fixed

address and many shifting addresses, it thus claims equality with the
spatially delimited nation-stateand indeed establishes itself within
its household, claiming a key to the front door, the same (or better)
rights of bed, board and access to the houses contents that its
citizen-residents enjoy, the right to bring in material of whatever kind
obtained by whatever means, and finally the right to depart
unmolested with whatever portion of the household goods it has been
able to appropriate.
The extension and legitimizing of corporate power through what
amounts to a slow-motion global coup dtat has of course had
political as well as economic repercussions. John Ralston Saul argued
in 1995 that contemporary corporatism is well on the way to fulfilling
the primary aspirations of the fascist corporatism of the early
twentieth century: these were to transfer political power from elected
parliamentary bodies to hierarchically and corporately-organized
socio-economic interest groups, to intrude entrepreneurship into
Clarke and Barlow, pp. 33-38.
John McMurtry, The Cancer Stage of Capitalism (London: Pluto Press, 1999), pp.
232-37.
31
32

19
previously public domains, and to obliterate the boundaries between
public and private interest.... A parallel recognition of a threat to the
33

structures of representative democracy is evident in billionaire

currency speculator George Soros's 1997 expression of his fear that
the untrammelled intensification of laissez-faire capitalism and the
spread of market values into all areas of life is endangering our open
and democratic society. The main enemy of the open society, he went
on to propose, is no longer the communist but the capitalist threat.

34

4. The civil commons and the tragedy of the

commons
The nature of the threat perceived by Saul and by Soros can be
readily

defined.

The

corporatist

revolution

operates

through

diversion of professedly democratic state power into ever more

complete subservience to the interests of transnational corporations
thereby making any claim of governments to be (in Lincolns words)
by the people and for the people seem increasingly fraudulent.
What is occurring, philosopher John McMurtry has argued, is a
mutation of governments to become more and more dominantly
coercive debt collectors on behalf of banks and foreign bond-holders
from citizens who have received little or no benefit from the debts, and
international

trade

agents

and

deal-makers

for

transnational

corporations against the most basic interests of domestic workers and

businesses....

35

Saul, p. 87. Saul here acknowledges Traute Rafalski, Social Planning and
Corporatism; Modernization Tendencies in Italian Fascism, International Journal of
Political Science 18 (1988):10; Rafalski is in turn quoting from Paolo Ungari, Alfredo
Rocca e l'ideologia giuridica des fascismo (Brescia, 1963).
34 George Soros, The Capitalist Threat, Atlantic Monthly (February 1997): 45,
quoted by McMurtry, Cancer, p. 202.
35 McMurtry, Cancer, p. 219. See Eduardo Galeanos acerbic discussion of the
power of kidnappers and of what he calls globalitarian power in Upside Down: A
33

20
If we remind ourselves that one of the goals of transnationals is
unrestrained access not just to the oil reserves of the Persian Gulf and
the Caspian basin, but also to resources like the forests of the Lubicon
Cree or the Coast Salish and the Nisgah, or, on a larger scale, to the
diminishing remains of the Amazonian rainforest and to the fresh
water of the Great Lakes and the Canadian Shield, it will be evident
that something more significant even than political freedoms is at
stake. What governments are collaborating in is, in McMurtrys words,
a stripping of societys shared life-ground, an attack upon what he
36

calls the civil commons, and defines as human agency in personal,

collective or institutional form which protects and enables the access
of all members of a community to basic life goods. This civil
commons includes, at the same time, those aspects of our life-ground
in nature which we can work to preserve through conscious human
acts and social constructions (for example, effective laws against
environmental pollutants that destroy the global commons of the
atmosphere or oceans) but which under unregulated market
37

conditions are subject to what Garrett Hardin in a famous essay, first

published in 1968, called the tragedy of the commons.

38

McMurtrys concept of the civil commons differs significantly

from Hardins much more limited understanding of the commons. The
things we define as commonsincluding, for example, the Grand
Banks cod fishery, the crown land rain forests of the Pacific coast, or
the St. Lawrence River, in its capacity as an open sewerare all finite
Primer for the Looking-Glass World, trans. Mark Fried (New York: Metropolitan Books,
2000), pp. 148-56.
36 Ibid., p. 192.
37 McMurtry, Cancer, pp. 204-5.
38 Garrett Hardin, The Tragedy of the Commons, Science 162 (December 13,
1968); rpt. in Mary Elizabeth Bowen and Joseph A. Mazzeo, eds., Writing About
Science (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 331-48. I am concerned here
only with Hardins analysis of the logic of the commons; the principal argument of
his essay, a neo-Malthusian proposal of a need for coercive population-control
measures, does not interest me; it rests upon sociological and anthropological
assumptions that are naive in the extreme.

21
in nature. Hardins view of unrestrained freedom in a commons as
tragic, in the sense of resulting in inexorable degradation, stems from
this recognition. However, McMurtry finds reason for a more hopeful
analysis in the fact that many different cultures have articulated their
sense of interdependence with the natural life-ground in the form of a
practical

and

institutionally

embodied

social

ethic

that

offers

alternatives to Hardins grim conclusions.

Taking the example of common grazing land, Hardin argues that
in conditions of social stability (which rule out wars or cattle-raids) its
destruction is inevitable. For if the marginal benefit of adding an
additional animal to each cattleherds share of a herd supported by
common land accrues to the single owner alone, while the marginal
deficit caused by overgrazing is communally shared among all users of
the common land, it will always be in the private interest of every
cattleherd to increase the number of grazing animals he or she owns.
Claiming that each cattleherd is locked into a system that compels
him to increase his herd without limitin a world that is limited,
Hardin declares that Ruin is the destination toward which all men
rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in
the freedom of the commons.

39

I have italicized the word compels because it so conspicuously

does not follow from any of the stated assumptions of this case. If
Hardins logic of marginal private advantage had occurred to medieval
English cattleherds, it would have done so in the form of temptation
rather than compulsion, because their common land was in fact
regulatedand protectedby the requirement that each commoner
could graze only as many animals on it as could be fed in his or her
own corral over the winter.

40

Only when the economic agencies in

Hardin, p. 336.
See Gary Snyder, Understanding the Commons, in Susan J. Armstrong and
Richard G. Botzler, eds., Environmental Ethics: Convergence and Divergence (New
York: McGraw-Hill, 1993), pp. 227-30 (cited by John McMurtry in Unequal Freedoms:
The Global Market as an Ethical System [Toronto: Garamond Press, 1998], p. 399).
39
40

22
question are behaving in the same way as capitalized corporate
bodiesoperating, that is, in accordance with the demands of modern
equity and commodity marketscan it be said that participants in a
commons are compelled, on penalty of loss of market share, reduced
equity value, and absorption by competing corporations, to maximize
profits by following the logic of marginal private advantage (and
marginal communal disadvantage) in relation to whatever in the
commons can be appropriated for productive use or employed for the
disposal of wastes. Hardin acknowledges this to be his guiding
assumption when, in writing of waste disposal, or of what he called
the tragedy of the commons as a cesspool, he remarks that The
rational man [sic] finds that his share of the cost of the wastes he
discharges into the commons is less than the cost of purifying his
wastes before releasing them. Since this is true for everyone, we are
locked into a system of fouling our own nest, for so long as we
behave only as independent, rational, free-enterprisers.

41

Hardins analysis of the commons is thus premised upon a quite

specific economic logic, that of free enterprise. This makes it all the
more compelling as a refutation of the claims made in support of
deregulation and market liberalization by the ideologues of the
corporatist revolution. Whether we think of the commons in terms of
production, as the natural basis of all life-sustaining activities, or in
terms of waste disposal, as providing sites for the absorption and
dispersal of human wastes, Hardin argues that it is only through one
or another form of social regulation that the tragedy of freedom in a
commons can be averted. He proposes, for example, that our
particular concept of private property contributed, as one such form
of regulation, to a closing of the commons in relation to productive
land use. However, he is at the same time aware that the rule of
private property obstructs contemporary struggles to close the
41

Ibid., p. 338.

23
commons to pollution by automobiles, factories, insecticide sprayers,
fertilizing operations, and atomic energy installations.

42

The apologists of corporatism are seeking, in Hardins sense, to

re-open the commonsfor this is what it means to insist on the
abolition of environmental regulation, and on unconstrained access by
transnational corporations to natural resources. Corporatist attacks on
labour legislation, union rights, welfare entitlements, public education
and medicare add up to a parallel attempt to return human labour to
the statusclosely resembling that of an unregulated commonsthat
it occupied in the slums of the industrial revolution and in the thought
of classical political economists like Adam Smith and David Ricardo.
In the rhetoric of the corporatist revolution, free competition is
described as the model and the basis of all other human freedoms.
But this hoary orthodoxy is no truer now than it was a century and a
half ago, when Karl Marx proposed that The analysis of what free
competition really is, is the only rational reply to the middle-class
prophets who laud it to the skies or to the socialists who damn it to
helland when, having made such an analysis, he heaped scorn on
the insipid view that free competition is the ultimate development of
human freedom, concluding rather that It is not individuals who are
set free by free competition; it is, rather, capital which is set free.

43

Contemporary evidence of the continuing validity of this conclusion

(and, at the same time, of the corporatist perversion of governments
noted by McMurtry) is provided by Shell Oils unconstrained polluting
of Ogoniland, aided and abetted by the Nigerian government's violent
repression of the Ogoni people and judicial murder of their leaders; by
the ecological and behavioural sinks of the maquiladora wastelands
along the Mexico-U.S. border, constructed in collaboration with a
Mexican

government

that

has

routinely

stolen

elections

and

Ibid., pp. 338, 347.

Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough
Draft), trans. Martin Nicolaus (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), pp. 651-52, 650.
42
43

24
collaborated in the elimination of opposition journalists by death
squads;

and,

in

Canada,

by

Daishowa

Corporations

ongoing

despoliation of the homeland of the Lubicon Cree, a process enabled

and facilitated by the Alberta and federal governments.
In these cases, and many others, one might respond to the
rhetoric of the free marketers with Garrett Hardins observation that
Individuals locked into the logic of the commons are free only to bring
on universal ruin....

44

In their rush to re-open the commons, the

ideologues of the corporatist revolution may be drawing us into a

more radical bankrupting of future possibilities than even they intend.
What Hardin calls the logic of the commonsa logic of
marginal

private

advantage

and

communal

disadvantage

most

evident at present in the operations of transnational corporationsis

diametrically opposed to the ethics and to the actuality of the civil
commons as these are analyzed by John McMurtry. Let us consider
the implications of this opposition. I have compared the labour market
of the industrial revolution to an unregulated commonsone that
might appropriately be called tragic, since it engulfed innumerable
human lives in misery and despair. This unregulated commons
developed in England as a direct consequence of the appropriation
and enclosure of communally regulated village common-land for use
as sheep-pasture by the landlords and merchants who participated in
the emergent international wool-trade. Village commons seized for use
as private pasture were simultaneously opened to exploitation as part
of a nascent capitalist system of cloth-manufacture, and closed to use
by the community, a large proportion of whose members were thereby
driven off the land. Toward the end of the first great wave of
enclosures, Thomas More wrote with bitter irony in his Utopia (1516)
that English sheep, that were wont to be so meek and tame, and so
small eaters, now, as I hear say, be become so great devourers and so
44

Ibid., p. 347.

25
wild, that they eat up and swallow down the very men themselves.
Rural people began to drift into the cities, deprived, More says, by
fraud, or by violent oppression, or by wrongs and injustices both
45

of their own small-holdings and of access to lands which for centuries

they had communally shared.
There were currents of resistance: around 1549 the anonymous
author of Jack of the North declared his intention to restore common
land to the common people [w]herever it hath been yet common
before; a century later, Gerard Winstanleys Diggers denounced the
gentry with their wisdoms so profound, to cheat us of our ground.

46

But by the early nineteenth century, after subsequent waves of

enclosures, the once numerous class of yeoman freeholders had
effectively disappeared from England, and a new urban industrial
working class was beginning its long struggle to organize itself against
unconstrained exploitation by employers in an open labour market.

47

Historians have long recognized connections between the

enclosure movement, which reached its height in England during the
late eighteenth century, and the developing corporate organization of
trade and manufacture.

48

John McMurtry follows them in seeing a

historical continuity between the privatizing tendency launched in

Sir Thomas More, Utopia, trans. Ralph Robinson, ed. Edward Arber (London:
Murray, 1869), pp. 40-41. (I have modernized Robinsons mid sixteenth-century
spelling and punctuation.) For a summary account of changes to the landscapes of
England, Wales and Scotland brought about by enclosures during the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, see Michael Reed, The Age of Exuberance 1500-1700 (1986;
rpt. London: Paladin, 1987), pp. 69-98.
46 David Norbrook and W.R. Woudhuysen, eds., The Penguin Book of Renaissance
Verse (London: Penguin, 1993), pp. 389, 465. (I have modernized the spelling.)
47 Linda McQuaig offers a lucid analysis both of the enclosure movement and also of
the popular resistance to it in All You Can Eat: Greed, Lust, and the New Capitalism,
pp. 161-93.
48 In the early 1920s, for example, Arthur J. Ireland noted that the enclosure
movement of the late eighteenth century marked the appearance of the trust
system in operation, although it was still in the embryo stage (English Life in the
Eighteenth Century, in J. A. Hammerton, ed., Universal History of the World [10
vols.; London: Educational Book Co., c. 1925], vol. 7, p. 4219). See also G. M.
Trevelyan, English Social History (1942; rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), pp.
391-95.
45

26
England by the international wool trade, the progenitor of the global
market from the fifteenth century on, and the movement towards the
clearance and appropriation of communal lands, with a concomitant
production of a landless urban labouring class and a growing assault
on the environment, that has subsequently swept across the world.

49

Central to McMurtrys concept of the civil commons is its

incorporation both of the natural life-ground that sustains human
society, and also of the human institutions and the web of social and
discursive interactions by which this natural life-ground is itself
preserved and sustained.

50

Insofar as this concept proposes an

understanding of nature as suffused with and sustained by discursive

terms that appear also in political, ethical and other discourses, it
might be said to resemble traditional doctrines of natural law
enunciated by thinkers like St. Thomas Aquinas and Richard Hooker.

51

However, McMurtrys view of the civil commons differs from these in

its recognition that the interactive co-dependence of social life and its
basis in nature is the expression of human rather than of divine
agency, that it is the product and material embodiment of human
histories, and that it is a matter of the utmost importance to any
human future. As he argues,
the progression or decline of the civil commons is the
most fundamental social fact there is, though like the
sea to the fish not recognized. [T]he question of
McMurtry, Unequal Freedoms, p. 399.
In this he differs from Hardin, who assumes human society to be an aggregate of
atomistic individuals motivated by considerations of immediate self-interest, and
gives no consideration to the social and discursive interactions (themselves
constitutive of the complex subjectivities of members of the society) which in any
functional social order also include countervailing suasions and sanctions that have
the effect of subordinating private to public interest. For detailed expositions of the
civil commons, and its rootedness in communal discursive practice, see McMurtry,
Unequal Freedoms, pp. 368-95, and Cancer, pp. 190-254.
51 See, for example, Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I-II, Q. 94, art. 1-6, in Anton C.
Pegis, ed., Basic Writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas (2 vols.; New York: Random
House, 1945), vol. 2, pp. 772-81; and Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical
Polity, ed. Christopher Morris (2 vols.; 1907; rpt. London: Dent, 1963), Book I. iii, vol.
1, pp. 154-61.
49
50

27
whether a society's civil commons is intact, falling or
gaining in the life goods all its members have access
to, is a real-world issue and of life-and-death reality for
all on a practical level.

52

5. Critical humanism and the civil commons

I have argued that we are living through a corporatist social and
political revolution whose goal is the destruction, through strategies of
deliberate bankrupting and invented crises, of what John McMurtry
calls the civil commons. (Consider again the objects of the corporate
revolutionaries

attack: progressive

labour

codes, environmental

regulations, redistributive taxation of private income and corporate

profits, international law governing human rights, laws restricting the
movement of corporate capital, civil rights entitlements, welfare and
public housing programs, state-owned corporations and utilities, public
non-profit health care, public education and, in particular, the
potentially critical as opposed to instrumental functions of public
higher education. The list amounts to a good first approximation of the
institutional embodiments of the civil commons.)
Certain aspects of the corporatist attack on public higher
education have been emphasized here: first, because this sectors role
in the reproduction, re-creation and transformation of the social order
makes it an important part of the civil commons; and secondly,
because this is a sector in which there has recently been a growing
awareness of the need to defend the human values, institutional
structures and forms of life threatened by the corporatist revolution.
Public

52

higher

education

McMurtry, Cancer, p. 212.

is

strategic

(if

already

seriously

28
compromised) site in the defence of the civil commons and the
resistance to corporatism.

53

But what does it mean to speak of critical humanism as one

way of defining the forms such resistance might take in my own
discipline of literary studies, and possibly more widely across the
human sciences? The term may well seem an oxymoron. Many of the
self-identified humanists of the past century, in addition to leaning
more in the direction of dogmatism than of an open or unconstrained
criticism, were also dubiously, if at all, interested in formulating or
supporting projects of a democratic tendency (it should suffice to
name Irving Babbitt, B. F. Skinner and H. J. Eysenck as examples)
54

while on the other hand, some of the most strenuous and most
influential critical thinkers of the late twentieth century (among them
Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida) defined themselves as antihumanists. But although any deployment of humanism might seem
controversial

(not

least

one that

would

take

the

critical and

emancipatory orientation of much of Renaissance humanism as

The public status of Canadian public universities has been compromised by the
government policies described abovewhich, as David Noble writes, have resulted
in an intensified web of interlocking directorates between the boards of universities
and private corporations, a plethora of largely secret contracts with private
companies, and the establishment of an intellectual property regime throughout the
institutions, which include[s] unprecedented emphasis on confidentiality and nondisclosure (How Public Are Our Public Universities? CAUT/ACPPU Bulletin
[January 2003]: A3). Noble also exposes at his own institution, York University,
moves by the administration to re-define it as a private, charitable corporation,
which is publicly assistedwhile at the same time withholding from public
disclosure any information regarding student enrollment, which is the chief criterion
for government funding, and course offerings, the educational grounds for charitable
status, by declaring these matters to be commercial in nature (ibid., A13).
54 For a brief indication of the reactionary and anti-Enlightenment orientation of
Babbitts New Humanism, see William V. Spanos, The End of Education: Toward
Posthumanism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 79-93, and
my Lunar Perspectives, pp. 146-47. Skinner and Eysenck were both involved with
the British Humanist Association (see their essays in A.J. Ayer, ed., The Humanist
Outlook [London, 1968]); Kate Soper has described their behaviourist stance as a
'technical fix' humanism which approaches human affairs on the model of the
industrial enterprise, where all can be set to rights provided we adopt the more
efficient management techniques afforded by scientific and technological
development (Soper, Humanism and Anti-Humanism [London: Hutchinson, 1986],
p. 14).
53

29
exemplary for our time), outright dismissal of the term entails another
kind of risk. Such at least is implied by Robert Youngs reflections on
the dilemma faced by literary theorists who sought to resist the
technologico-Thatcherite assault on the humanities, the British
form of the corporatist attack on the critical functions of higher
education:
[T]he terms by which their subject was established
historically, and the only effective terms with which it
could still be defended, were those of the cultural
conservatism and humanist belief in literature and
philosophy that literary theory has, broadly speaking,
been attacking since the 1970s. When theorists found
themselves wanting to defend their discipline against
successive government cuts they discovered that the
only view with which they could vindicate themselves
was the very one which, in intellectual terms, they
wanted to attack. In short, for theorists the problem
has been that in attacking humanism they have found
themselves actually in consort with government policy.

55

A brief glance at the history of the term humanism, and at the

cultural phenomena it was coined to describe, may help to dissipate
confusions of this sort. Among cultural historians of early modern
Europe, the word usually refers to a particular phase in the
development of what we now call the humanitiesthat surge of
critical, scholarly and creative energies that shaped the cultural forms
of the western European Renaissance of the fifteenth to seventeenth
centuries. Late fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italians had a word,
umanista, for those who were engaged in restoring or emulating the
textual remains of ancient Greece and Rome; this word passed into
Robert Young, The Idea of a Chrestomathic University, in Richard Rand, ed.,
Logomachia: The Conflict of the Faculties (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1992), p. 113.
55

30
French (1552), English (1589), and Spanish (1614) usages. But rather
56

surprisingly, the abstract noun dates only from early nineteenthcentury Germany, where Humanismus was coined as the name of a
traditional or conservative theory of education in the classics and
Christian

doctrine

which

opposed

itself

both

to

progressive

Rousseauistic or Enlightenment pedagogies, and also to practical or

utilitarian tendencies. The teaching practices of what we would now
57

call Renaissance humanism were no doubt the source of this German

pedagogical Humanismus,

58

and yet the new term seems to have

referred to current practices rather than to those of the Renaissance.

Subsequent appropriations of the term have likewise often been
both presentist and politically conservative in nature, even when
professedly referring to the humanism of Renaissance scholars and
writers. Detailed analysis would be required to show that this was the
case in Jacob Burckhardts influential 1860 interpretation of the Italian
Renaissance as the moment at which man became a spiritual
individual, and recognized himself as such, and of Renaissance
humanism as the ideology of autonomous selfhood; but a reactionary
59

presentism is clearly evident in Douglas Bushs claim, first published

in 1939, that sixteenth-century humanism amounted to a proleptic
echo of Matthew Arnolds conservative mid-Victorian orthodoxy of
sweetness and light.

60

See Nicolas Walter, Humanism: Whats in the Word (London: Rationalist Press
Association, 1997), pp. 13-14.
57 Walter briefly discusses Friedrich Niethammers Der Streit des Philanthropinismus
und Humanismus in der Theorie des Erziehungs-Unterrichts unsrer Zeit (1808) in
Humanism, pp. 17-19.
58 See Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities:
Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986). On the basis of a fascinating
study of Renaissance humanist pedagogy, Grafton and Jardine make what seem to
me unacceptable generalizations about the orientation of humanism as a whole.
59 Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy [1860], trans .
S.G.C. Middlemore (2 vols., 1958; rpt. New York: Harper & Row, 1965), vol. 1, p. 143;
Burckhardt characterizes the exponents of humanism as the advance guard of an
unbridled individualism (vol. 2, p. 479).
60 Douglas Bush, The Renaissance and English Humanism (1939; rpt. Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1962), p. 83. Bush argued that the biblical, patristic and
56

31
More recent and more historically adequate interpretations of
Renaissance humanism include Hiram Haydns recognition of an
antagonism in Renaissance Europe between divergent strains of
Christian and naturalistic humanism;

61

Michel Foucaults proposal

that humanism invented what he called subjected sovereignties,

structures within which human subjectivity claims a restricted, usually
internal rule or control, at the cost of a fuller subjection to external
powers, both social and metaphysical;

62

Anthony Graftons and Lisa

Jardines argument that humanist pedagogy, foster[ing] in all its

initiates a properly docile attitude towards authority, served the
needs of an emergent Europe of closed governing lites, hereditary
offices and strenuous efforts to close off debate on vital political and
social questions; Donald Kelleys analysis of Renaissance humanism
63

as embodying complementary motifs of institutio (individual and

collective self-fashioning) and restitutio (the recovery, encyclopedic
reintegration, and reanimation of antiquity);

64

and Charles Nauerts

argument that whatever Renaissance humanists may have thought

classical texts with which Erasmus and his predecessors worked were seen by them
as offering a working ideal of a universal state in which reason and the will of God
should prevail (p. 65). Sweetness and light and making reason and the will of
God prevail are Arnoldian catch-phrases: see Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy,
ed. Samuel Lipman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), pp. 31-32, 37-39, and
my comments in Lunar Perspectives, pp. 203-07. Bush maintained that sceptical
and naturalistic doctrines were the two great philosophic enemies of religion and
morality, and hence of Christian humanism (p. 85)thus with the stroke of a pen
banishing from the ambit of humanism such figures as Valla, Agrippa, Rabelais and
Montaigne, not to mention Erasmus himself. He claimed that, like the great body of
continental humanists, English humanists were unanimous in their defence of
established authoritya defence which appears, however, to have been an anxious
matter. For as Bush immediately added, this solid, all-embracing orthodoxy is a
dyke which the smallest stream of water may undermine, and every hole must be
stopped. But reinforcements are available: Shakespeare himself is no less
attached than the most orthodox humanist to constituted authority, is no less
scornful of the mob (pp. 88-89, 95).
61 Hiram Haydn, The Counter-Renaissance (1950; rpt. New York: Grove Press, 1960),
pp. 27-67.
62 Michel Foucault, Revolutionary Action: Until Now, Language, Counter-Memory,
Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry
Simon, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 221-22.
63 Grafton and Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities, p. xiv.
64 Donald R. Kelley, Renaissance Humanism (Boston: Twayne, 1991), pp. 23-33.

32
themselves to be doing, humanisms historical function was to act as
an intellectual solvent, striking at traditional beliefs of all kinds.

65

Lest we fall ourselves into the presentism of supposing that

recent writers on the subject, despite the fault lines that separate
some of them, might be approaching a consensual understanding of
the

diverse

tendencies

that

together

constituted

Renaissance

humanism, let us end this brief list of interpretations with a mention of

John Carrolls neoconservative sermonizing in a book whose subtitle
indicates with sufficient clarity the nature of its argument: Humanism:
The Wreck of Western Culture.

66

The ism termination of humanism, which would seem to

identify it as the name of an ideology, may be one source of the
debates that have swirled around this term. Yet the tendencies in early
modern culture to which humanism refers are perhaps better
described, in the manner of contemporary scholars like Kelley and
Nauert, in terms of the cultural practices they involved. (As they are
both aware, Paul Oskar Kristeller insisted that umanista carried no
specific doctrinal or ideological sense, but referred simply to a
professor or student of the studia humanitatis, a well-defined cycle of
teaching subjects listed as grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history and
moral philosophy.)

67

Renaissance exponents of the studia humanitatis, obsessed with

what Donald Kelley calls restitutio, the project of giving a renaissance to the discursive, artistic, architectural and social forms of
the cultures of ancient Rome and Greece, coined the term Middle
Ages to speak of that which stood between them and the forms they
Charles G. Nauert, Jr., Humanism and the Culture of Renaissance Europe
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 197.
66 Carroll, Humanism: The Wreck of Western Culture (London: Fontana, 1993). For
other more responsible contemporary interpretations, see the essays assembled in
The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism, ed. Jill Kraye (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996).
67 Kristeller, Renaissance Thought and the Arts: Collected Essays (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 3.
65

33
wanted to re-vivify. The nineteenth-century term humanism likewise
came to confer upon a previous age meanings that it did not find in
itself: as Burckhardts classic study makes evident, this later restitutio
developed into an appropriation of early modern traditions in the
service

of

subjectivity.

a
68

Romantic

ideology

of

essentialist

autonomous

But if, setting aside this and subsequent primarily

ideological deployments of the term, we focus instead on Renaissance

humanism as a set of cultural practices rooted in a particular
sequence of western European social contexts, it may be possible to
draw different consequences from the emergence of humanism out of
the interactions of a nascent (or re-nascent) Italian civic culture with
the remains of ancient Roman and Hellenistic literary, rhetorical,
juristic, philosophical, and historiographic writings.
Social practices, even without constituting a coherent ideology,
can have large transformative effects, at once discursive and material.
The crucial contribution of the humanist practices of the Italian
Renaissance, as I proposed in Lunar Perspectives, was that they
opened out within the civic culture of cities like Florence and Venice

For an argument to this effect, see Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion,
Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (2nd ed.,
1989; rpt. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993). As Dollimore notes, one famous
Renaissance text, Giovanni Pico della Mirandolas Oration on the Dignity of Man,
does assert a radical human autonomywhile at the same time inverting the
traditional relationship between being and acting: in Picos rewriting of the creation
myth, Adam has the freedom to fashion his own nature into a vegetative,
animalistic, angelic, or divine nature. Dollimore (p. 169) quotes Ernst Cassirers
recognition that this text is existentialist rather than essentialist in implication: It is
not being that prescribes once and for all the lasting direction which the mode of
action will take; rather, the original direction of action determines and places being
(Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, trans. Mario
Domandi [1963; rpt. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972], p. 84).
While Burckhardts study gave a particular view of humanist subjectivity its
canonical late-nineteenth-century form, it seems no accident that the coinage of
Humanismus in the early nineteenth century coincided with von Humboldts
formation, in Berlin, of the first modern university, an institution dedicated to the
producing of autonomous subjectivitiesor perhaps, as Foucault would say, of
subjected sovereignties. See Readings, The University in Ruins, pp. 7, 46, 66-69;
and Walter, Humanism, pp. 17-20.
68

34
a discursive space, which the advent of printing
subsequently made accessible across Western Europe
under the name of the republic of letters. Within this
space various forms of writing (among them the highly
wrought

epistles

with

which

humanists

flattered,

cajoled, and bombarded one another) could acquire a

previously

unknown

degree

of

autonomy,

and

thoroughgoing critiques of constituted authority and

authoritative
undertaken.

dogma

could

be

envisaged

and

69

While conceding to Michel Foucault that humanist subjectivities

commonly

incorporated

duplicitous

conflation

of

supposed

autonomy and actual subjection, we may perhaps uncover a deeper

historical significance to humanism if, focusing on the literary and
critical productions of humanists, we understand the movement out of
which these texts emerged as
a collection of enabling strategies, which is also to say,
a rhetoric (Renaissance humanism was, if anything,
rhetorical)but a rhetoric whose general tendency and
function was to bring into being and to sustain a
discursive space, a public sphere, within which the
power of established authority no longer retained its
previously overwhelming position as a criterion of
judgment, and within which the goal of legitimizing
established

authority

no

longer

exercised

determinative influence upon the various forms of

writing which at one and the same time constituted
Lunar Perspectives, p. 148. Major contributions to an understanding of the
cultural impact of printing include Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an
Agent of Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), and The Printing
Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983),
and Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
69

35
and were enabled by this newly opened discursive
space or public sphere.

70

In this emergence of a public sphere we can identify an essential

precondition for the fully conscious development of the civil commons.
John McMurtry makes a point of distinguishing between the
commons as nature-given land or resource and the civil commons
which effectively protects it, and ensures access of all members of the
community to its continuing means of existence. The latter is civil
insofar as the common life-good it embodies is protected by conscious
and co-operative human agency, and what was once the commons
of nature becomes civil commons as it is preserved by conscious
human acts and social construction.

71

In reconstituting the republic of letters, a res publica or public

thing that had been a distinctive feature of certain phases of classical
culture but had wholly disappeared after the collapse of the western
Roman empire, Renaissance humanism reinvented, as a social
possibility, public debate about a public good. The respublica
litterarum of the humanists amounts therefore to the social space
within which a reflexive awareness of the common good could
develop.

It would not be an exaggeration to describe it as the

emergentif also fragile and perpetually endangeredmatrix of the

civil commons in its modern form.
Satirical discourses flourished within this social space, many of
them belonging to the mixed genre or anti-genre of Menippean satire
Ibid., pp. 148-49. Jrgen Habermas identified the development of the public
sphere of civil society as an eighteenth-century phenomenon; see his classic study
The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of
Bourgeois Society [1962], trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (1989; rpt.
Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991). More recent scholarship has shown that various
forms of public sphere were decisively active at least a century earlier; see for
example David Zaret, Religion, Science, and Printing in the Public Spheres of
Seventeenth-Century England, in Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public
Sphere (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), pp. 212-35. Emergent forms of a public
sphere are evident in the humanist mobilization during the Reuchlin affair (1510-20)
as well as in subsequent Reformation controversies.
71 McMurtry, The Cancer Stage of Capitalism, p. 205.
70

36
or anatomy that was epitomized for Renaissance readers by the
second-century writings of Lucian of Samosata: Mores

Utopia,

Erasmuss Praise of Folly, and Cornelius Agrippas Of the Vanity and

Uncertainty of All Arts and Sciences are prominent examples of the
type. These works contain wide-ranging critiques of social injustice,
misgovernment, corruption, religious dogmatism and clerical tyranny
and

display,

in

addition,

very

interesting

willingness

to

contemplate alternative arrangements. Within the humanist public

sphere to which they contributed it became possible to undertake, as
Machiavelli did in The Prince and The Discourses, a wholly disabused
analysis of political power; to declare, as Agrippa did in his
Declamation on the Nobility and Preeminence of the Female Sex, that
the inferior social status of women results from masculine bad faith
and violence, without reason or necessity natural or divine, but under
the pressure of custom, education, chance, or some occasion
favorable to tyranny; and to offer unstinted praise to fearless social
72

critics, as Thomas Nashe did to the memory of Pietro Aretino in a text

that has been described as an important late work of humanist
poetics:
If out of so base a thing as ink there may be extracted
a spirit, he writ with nought but the spirit of ink, and his
style was the spirituality of arts, and nothing else;
whereas all others of his age were but the lay
temporalty of inkhorn terms. For indeed they were
Henricus Cornelius Agrippa, Declamation on the Nobility and Preeminence of the
Female Sex, trans. and ed. Arthur Rabil, Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1996), p. 95. As I noted in Lunar Perspectives, Agrippas feminism was not merely
theoretical: At a time when such interventions were dangerous, he mocked the
theological faculty of the University of Cologne for having given its approval to that
notorious handbook of witch-hunters, the brutally misogynist Malleus maleficarum.
And when in 1518 he served as municipal advocate in the city of Metz, he put his life
and career on the line by intervening in the case of a woman who had been arrested
and tortured by the inquisition on a charge of witchcraft. Agrippa secured her
release and the return of her propertyand made the inquisitor answer to a charge
of heresy (pp. 145-46).
72

37
mere temporizers, and no better. His pen was sharp
pointed like a poinyard; no leaf he wrote on but was like
a burning glass to set on fire all his readers. No hour
but he sent a full legion of devils into some herd of
swine or other.... He was no timorous servile flatterer of
the commonwealth wherein he lived. His tongue and
his invention were foreborne; what they thought, they
would confidently utter. Princes he spared not, that in
the least point transgressed. His life he contemned in
comparison of the liberty of speech.

73

6. Exposing forgery, forging freedom

In what ways, then, might a contemporary critical humanism
affiliated to certain practices of Renaissance humanists and, more
widely, to the social function of Renaissance humanism as the
emergent matrix of the civil commons, be of strategic relevance to the
multiple invented crises brought on us by the corporatist revolution?
Etymology may provide one clue. I am thinking of the cognate
Greek and Latin verbs krino and cerno and their declinations and
derivatives. The Greek krino (meaning to separate, distinguish,
choose, or pick out) is part of a semantic field that includes the
adjective kritikos (able to discern), which moved into Latin as
Thomas Nashe, The Unfortunate Traveller, in The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. R.
B. McKerrow, revised by F. P. Wilson (5 vols., 1957; rpt. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966), vol.
2, pp. 264-65. I have modernized Nashes spelling. The identification of this fiction
as an important late statement of humanist poetics is Arthur F. Kinneys, in
Humanist Poetics: Thought, Rhetoric, and Fiction in Sixteenth-Century England
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986), p. 329. Aretino was not quite
the sixteenth-century Noam Chomsky that Nashe makes him seembut Nashe,
whose books were burned and banned by the Bishop of London five years after he
wrote this passage, and who subsequently disappears from history, had good reason
to admire Aretinos success in negotiating the literary patronage systems of the
period.
73

38
criticus (critic), as well as the nouns kriterion (a tribunal, standard
or test) and krisis (a choice, separating, a power of distinguishing, or
the result of a trial or contest, a decision or judgment). The Latin
cerno (meaning to sift, separate, distinguish, to decide or determine,
and also to see distinctly or perceive) is the root both of the English
verb to discern and also, through the past participle certus, of our
adjective certain.
With this semantic field in mind, Glyn P. Norton has understood
Renaissance humanism as showing that Criticism and crisis are
etymological friends:
Throughout history, literary criticism and cultural crisis
have

tended

to

follow

convergent

trajectories.

Renaissance humanism, above all, was responsible for

generating a language that would not only reflect the
cultural crisis at hand, but base that crisis in its own
distinctiveness as a period. The deepest, most central
impulses of humanism are thus critical.... The critical
temper, in its cultural as well as literary dimension,
fixes the Renaissance view of time squarely within the
Greek concept of krisis as designating a moment both
of separation and of decision.

74

Taking a hint from these etymologies, I would propose that a

contemporary critical humanism should understand the present crisis
or crises as a trial or contest that calls upon us to exercise our powers
of distinguishing across the whole field of the civil commons, and in so
doing to separate ourselves decisively from the business-as-usual of
placid orthodoxy.
Let me be explicit. I am talking about taking sides against
corporatism, and repelling its incursions with all the resources of
The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 3: The Renaissance (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 1.
74

39
critical analysis, rhetoric and public mobilization that may be at our
command.
If such language seems hortatory beyond the norms of
academic discourse, then it may be time we subjected those norms as
well to thorough criticism. For those who value intellectual freedom,
there is not, I think, any large choice to be made: when the whole
system of the civil commons is at stake, so also is the free critical
thinking that is one of its constituent parts.
But what particular forms of discernment could a critical
humanism, as opposed to other kinds of critical thinking, contribute to
this struggle? Anthony Grafton has argued persuasively that the
critical methods of humanist scholars in the Renaissance, based on a
growing awareness both of historical contexts and of dialectal
differences and changes in linguistic usage within the texts they
studied, arose out of the need to distinguish between genuinely
ancient

texts

and

documents

and

the

large

numbers

of

pseudepigraphic writings and outright forgeries that had accompanied

them in ancient Greece and Rome and in early Judaeo-Christian
traditionsas well as the vast quantity of more recent forgeries. As
75

Grafton writes,
Forgery and philology fell and rose together, in the
Renaissance as in Hellenistic Alexandria. And in all
cases criticism has been dependent for its development
Ancient forgeries and pseudepigrapha include at least thirteen of the forty-six
surviving works ascribed to Aristotle, most of the Hippocratic canon, the complete
works of the Egyptian sage Hermes Trismegistus, several of the canonical letters of
the apostle Paul and his entire correspondence with Seneca, all of the writings of
Pauls disciple Dionysius the Areopagite, and large numbers of other literary,
historical, medical and religious texts. The scale of more recent forgeries, many of
them in the domain of law, is indicated by Graftons remark that perhaps half the
legal documents we possess from Merovingian times, and perhaps two-thirds of all
documents issued to ecclesiastics before A.D. 1100, are fakes. And the volume
swelled enormously as scientific jurisprudence established itself firmly in the West,
and every practice and possession needed written documentation; the basic code of
canon law, Gratians Decretum, contained some five hundred forged legal texts
(Grafton, Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship
[Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990], pp. 24-25).
75

40
on the stimulus that forgers have provided. Criticism
does not exist simply because the condition of the
sources creates a need for it. The existence of so many
sources created with a conscious intention to deceive,
and the cleverness of so many of the deceptions,
played a vital role in bringing criticism into being.

76

One of the most celebrated humanist exposures of forgery was

Lorenzo

Vallas

demonstration

in

1440

that

the

Donation

of

Constantine, which documented the Emperor Constantines supposed

transfer of the western half of his empire to the papacy, contained
elements that are contradictory, impossible, foolish, strange, and
ridiculous. When Valla at the same time criticized this text as
having fraudulently legitimized papal corruption, war-making, and
spiritual wickedness in high places, he knew very well that he was
77

not just correcting a false understanding of the past, but was also, at
serious risk to his own safety, delegitimizing a contemporary structure
of political power.

78

Graftons reference to the existence of so many sources created

with a conscious intention to deceive may strike one as evoking a not
unfamiliar contemporary situation. Any critical watcher of CNN or Fox
News, or any critical reader of the corporate press, cannot help but be
aware of some of the principal causes of that widespread American
ignorance of the world at large to which I alluded at the outsetand of
course the structures of deception and mystification by means of
Grafton, p. 123.
The Falsely-Believed and Forged Donation of Constantine, ii.6 and xxii.19; quoted
from Lorenzo Valla, The Profession of the Religious and the principal arguments from
The Falsely-Believed and Forged Donation of Constantine, ed. and trans. Olga Zorzi
Pugliese (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 1985), pp. 65,
71. In the second passage Valla is quoting Ephesians 6:12.
78 See Valla, i.1, p. 63: how eagerly and hastily would they drag me off to torture,
if they only could, now that I am writing not just against the dead but against the
living too, not just against this or that individual but against a multitude of men, not
merely private citizens but even public officials? And which officials? Why, even the
Supreme Pontiff who is armed not only with a temporal sword, like kings and rulers,
but with a spiritual one too.
76
77

41
which news media under highly concentrated corporate ownership
induce the population to acquiesce in policies which are manifestly
against its interests have been lucidly analyzed by (among others)
Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky.

79

The processes by which

governments and the media collaborate in the manufacture of consent

commonly involve fabricated evidence: it would, for example, be
difficult to find any recent publicly acknowledged act of war on the
part of the United States that was not accompanied and justified by a
cloud of deliberate falsehoods.
mind-forged manacles

81

80

In this context, the metaphor of

by which William Blake explained the

perpetuation of bondage and oppression can be understood as

carrying a double sense.
The primary purposes of the critical work I am proposingto
unmask and discredit falsehoods circulated by the apologists of
corporate power and to delegitimize the agencies responsible for them
resemble those of Lorenzo Vallas critical labours.

Yet what is

involved, I would emphasize, is not just the philological detective work

required to expose forgeries, plagiarisms, or impostures, but also,
perhaps more importantly, a critical deployment of contextual and
See Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political
Economy of the Mass Media (New York: Pantheon, 1988), and also, as samples of
other critical perspectives on the media, Joyce Nelson, The Perfect Machine: TV in
the Nuclear Age (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1987), and Linda McQuaig, Shooting
the Hippo: Death by Deficit and Other Canadian Myths (Toronto: Penguin, 1995).
80 Some salient examples: the American invasion of Vietnam was justified by
fraudulent claims of a North Vietnamese invasion of the south and by the fabricated
Gulf of Tonkin naval incident; U.S. aggression against Nicaragua in the 1980s
(condemned by a judgment of the World Court) was justified by fraudulent claims of
Sandinista subversion of neighbouring countries; the U.S. refusal to contemplate a
negotiated withdrawal of Iraqi forces from Kuwait in 1991 was supported by
fabricated atrocity claims and the lie that Iraq was preparing to invade Saudi Arabia;
in 1993, a cruise missile attack on Baghdad was justified by fraudulent claims that
the Iraqi dictatorship had attempted to assassinate ex-President George Bush; in
1999, the NATO attack on Serbia was justified by false claims of massacres in
Kosovo; and finally, in 2003 the U.S./U.K. invasion of Iraq was justified by multiple
falsehoods, including outright forgeries and plagiarisms, which were exposed by
critical analysts almost as quickly as they were launched (for evidence, see Michael
Keefer, ed., War on Iraq: Critical Resources, available at this website.
81 The Poems of William Blake, ed. W. B. Yeats (London: Lawrence & Bullen; N.Y:
Scribners, 1893), London, p. 77.
79

42
historical analyses capable of showing up those larger processes of
distortion-through-selective-omission that I have elsewhere termed
subtractive politicizing.

82

Beyond this defensive work there lies the further constructive

labour of what I would call forging freedom: the consolidation of our
civil commons, and the extension of the civil commons into domains
where the necessity of preservation through public stewardship has
not previously been acknowledged. If in the present political climate
such a project seems utopian, I can only say in response that
utopianism is one of the native dialects of critical humanism.
Let me admit that the key question of how to get there from
here is not going to be answered in this paper. I am inclined to agree
with Noam Chomskys off-the-cuff remark, when asked what might be
a good strategy for organizing against the harm caused by imperialism
and such international agencies at the World Trade Organization, that
Everything is a good strategy.

83

Within my own sphere of work, I

would therefore support any movement towards a de-corporatizing of

universities, and towards a corresponding enhancement of the
emancipatory potential of their social function as institutions of social
reproduction; more widely, I would support any movement towards
restoring the primacy of human and life values over money values and
profits.

84

I want to conclude, however, with a reminder of the odds which

any project of taking past practices and traditions as a guide to
present struggles must face. Sixty years ago, in 1940, the year of his
death, Walter Benjamin wrote in his great meditation on history that

See Lunar Perspectives, pp. 86-95, 122-24, 205-06. Since subtractive politicizing
is a practice thoroughly embedded in the formative history of my own discipline of
English Literature, my closest colleagues and I may have a head start in work of this
kind.
83 Quoted by Milan Rai, Chomskys Politics (London: Verso, 1995), p. 121.
84 See John McMurtry, Unequal Freedoms, pp. 330-31.
82

43
Articulating

the

past

historically

does

not

mean

recognizing it the way it really was. It means

appropriating a memory as it flashes up at a moment
of danger.... The danger threatens both the content of
the tradition and those who inherit it. For both, it is one
and the same thing: the danger of becoming a tool of
the ruling classes.... The only historian capable of
fanning the spark of hope in the past is the one who is
firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe
from the enemy if he is victorious.

85

Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History, VI, in Walter Benjamin: Selected

Writings, ed. Michael W. Jennings et al. (4 vols.; Cambridge. Mass: Harvard University
Press, 1996-2003), vol. 4, p. 391.
85