Intellectuals in Politics and Academia:

Culture in the Age of Hype Russell

Jacoby
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmass.com/product/intellectuals-in-politics-and-academia-culture-in-the-a
ge-of-hype-russell-jacoby/
 Political Philosophy and Public Purpose

Series Editor
Michael J. Thompson, William Paterson University, New York,
NY, USA
This series offers books that seek to explore new perspectives in social
and political criticism. Seeing contemporary academic political theory and
philosophy as largely dominated by hyper-academic and overly-technical
debates, the books in this series seek to connect the politically engaged
traditions of philosophical thought with contemporary social and political
life. The idea of philosophy emphasized here is not as an aloof enterprise,
but rather a publicly-oriented activity that emphasizes rational reflection
as well as informed praxis.
 Russell Jacoby

Intellectuals in Politics
and Academia
Culture in the Age of Hype
Russell Jacoby
Department of History
University of California
Los Angeles, CA, USA

ISSN 2524-714X ISSN 2524-7158 (electronic)

Political Philosophy and Public Purpose
ISBN 978-3-031-07645-9 ISBN 978-3-031-07646-6 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07646-6

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2022
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc.
in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such
names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for
general use.
The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and informa-
tion in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither
the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with
respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been
made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps
and institutional affiliations.

Cover credit: © Jose A. Bernat Bacete, gettyimages

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
 Preface

Against the Current runs the title of a volume of essays by Isaiah Berlin,
the esteemed Anglo humanist. The conceit is typical, if not universal.
Everyone believes he or she stands against the tide of history. Virtu-
ally no one proclaims devotion to conformity. Even conservatives, who
uphold traditional values, see themselves as beleaguered since they defend
positions now spurned. They also are “against the current.”
Can everyone be against the current? Evidently not. The issue becomes
what is the current and what is the counter current. To keep it simple,
currents vary—to retain the metaphor—by inlet or river on which one
resides. One might swim with local currents and buck distant tides. We
all have encountered the militant professor whose office is festooned with
posters “in solidarity” with this or that protest and who lives in a toney
section of town, drives a BMW, sends his children to private school, and
flies off to conferences to hob-nob with like-minded colleagues. Which
current is she or he against? Not local ones. In the gradebook of courage,
this prof gets failing marks. To oppose colleagues right here shows more
guts than to oppose colonialism over there.
To be sure, one venerable leftist tradition views itself as in tune with the
current, although against reactionary counter currents that are doomed.
The old, and revived term “progressive” captures this stance, the notion
that history is the story of progress—and that we “the progressives”
ride an unstoppable movement forward. The German Communist Party
confidently expected in 1933 that the appointment of Adolph Hitler as

v
vi PREFACE

chancellor would lead to great revolutionary victories. “When the Nazis’

stormtroopers marched outside the KPD’s [German Communist Party]
headquarters, the party even saw it as a sign that class power was shifting
in favor of a proletarian revolution,” notes a recent account.1 But instead
of a red future, the communists faced exile, prison, and execution. The
writer Rebecca Solnit, an exemplar of today’s progressivism, declared that
conservatives are angry because they are losing. The left is a “mighty
river” that cannot be stopped. “The right is trying to push the water
back behind the dam.”2 Dream on.
I will not pretend that the following essays, a selection of my work
from forty years, all stand against the current. I can say they stand against
a familiar progressivism that posits the world always improves. In fact, the
oldest piece by far, the last essay, broaches the opposite idea that society
regresses. For most readers today, myself included, this essay on “the
falling rate of intelligence” bristles with an uncongenial Marxist vocab-
ulary, yet it addresses a topic still pertinent. Is society getting dumber?
A question like this allows no simple or single answer. The essay outlines
the imperatives of advanced capitalism that ceaselessly produce more and
more stuff that does not last. Who today fixes a toaster or microwave
oven? The same necessity may drive intellectual life. Quantity overwhelms
quality. Academics respond to the capitalist imperative, publish or perish,
with mountains of scholarship, but what is its quality or importance? We
have “smart” everything, but are we smarter?
My book, The Last Intellectuals , probably my most cited work, tackles
these issues from another angle. For better or worse, the book introduced
the term “public intellectual,” which passed into common usage. I sought
to outline a new phenomenon, the emergence of a generation of academic
or professional intellectuals that was not orientated toward a public, but
only to itself. This generation—my radical sixties generation!—entered
the universities, and never departed. It encompassed left-wing sociologists
or literary critics, but they addressed only their colleagues. The “famous”
Marxist critic was famous to graduate students, to no one else. The new
intellectuals lost, or never sought, the ability to write for a lay audience.
Instead, they produced reams of turgid material for each other.
The Last Intellectuals elicited much criticism, which I assess in the
opening chapter here and in a new introduction to that book. The profes-
soriate did not like to be criticized. Humanities professors especially did
not appreciate being upbraided for their unreadable prose. Of course, I
was not alone in this criticism. A literary journal sponsored a half-serious
 PREFACE vii

bad-writing contest and awarded prizes to two high-flying professors,

Judith Butler and Homi K. Bhabha. Professor Butler was not pleased. She
defended herself by declaring that “the most trenchant social criticisms”
are “often expressed through difficult and demanding language.”3
Perhaps, but this has not been true for the most incisive thinkers,
be it Marx, Nietzsche or Freud. In fact, the opposite point speaks to
the moment: banal social criticism masks its banality through jargon
and fractured English. Opaque prose promises philosophical depth. With
hardened competitors this sentence secured Butler’s victory: “The move
from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure
social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in
which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and reartic-
ulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure,
and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes struc-
tural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the
contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of
hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the
rearticulation of power.” Trenchant social criticism?
One issue raised by critics of The Last Intellectuals deserves additional
comment. I wrote The Last Intellectuals on a typewriter. “Cut and paste”
still entailed scissors and glue. Without a doubt, the onset of the computer
and the Internet changed intellectual life.
From the beginning, the advent of the computer was not always for
the better. I worked for some years as an editor of the magazine Telos ,
a philosophical journal. I would receive dense fifty-page submissions and
could spend hours reading and commenting on them. Typically, I might
make a series of suggestions, such as the conclusion should be turned
into the introduction. In the typewriter era, such advice would keep the
author at bay for months, perhaps a year.
However, with computers a week later the author would submit a
revised version with a cheery note that the advice had been followed.
I would go through the manuscript again, note serious organizational
problems persisted, and make new suggestions. A few days later a new
version would show up with another upbeat message from the author,
who declared the recommendations had been carried out. Had they? After
a while, I gave up. Who could keep up with the revisions? I was not alone
in surrendering. The ability to crank out and alter text overwhelmed even
the best-intentioned editors. Nowadays most academic scholarship is not
intended to be read, just scanned or referenced.
viii PREFACE

Yet the gains due to computers and the Internet are obvious. They
blasted aside the editorial gatekeepers and provided an open podium. In
democratic countries anyone can post or create a website, which gives an
outlet to those who have been blocked or shunted aside, an undoubted
plus. The problem is not the lack of access but for the reader, the
opposite: how to find the music amid the din?
For the rest, the essays here should speak for themselves.4 Several of
the longer pieces consist of precises or sketches of my books. An effort to
puncture myths advanced by intellectuals (and others) links these essays.
The essay “The Myth of Multiculturalism,” developed in On Diversity
confronts the cult of multiculturalism with the reality that serious cultural
differences are diminishing, not increasing. The essay “Utopia and the
Myth of Violence,” elaborated in my Picture Imperfect, tackles the charge
that utopians are violent with the reality that most have been benign and
peaceful; and the essay “Violence and the Myth of the Other,” expanded
in my Bloodlust, upends the standard account, promulgated in a zillion
books and articles, that fear of the stranger (or “other”) leads to hate and
violence. In fact, from domestic violence to civil wars, most violence takes
place among friends, neighbors, and acquaintances. Even interstate wars
like World War I hardly fit the paradigm of stranger violence. Were the
British and French, on one side, and the Germans on the other, who tried
to murder each other with enthusiasm, strangers? Not in any real sense.
Even genocide typically occurs between kindred peoples, not strangers.
My efforts to put to rest these myths have found little success. No
matter. My second book bore the title Dialectic of Defeat. If I remember
the argument, I indicated that everyone celebrates success—in politics,
business, and love—and virtually no one owns defeat. But the victorious
today may be the vanquished tomorrow—or the day after tomorrow; and
the defeated, once brushed off as malcontents, may prove far-sighted. The
Russian Revolution was successful, until it was not; and its critics derided,
until they turned out right. Or, in a different register, a line from Leonard
Cohen’s “A Thousand Kisses Deep” runs “You win a while and then it’s
done/Your little winning streak.”
Victor Serge, the Russian radical and novelist, writes in his great
Memoirs of a Revolutionary 1901–1941 of his experience of defeat
throughout Europe. “Out of a little over fifty years, I have spent ten in
various forms of captivity.” He experienced four exiles and seven flights in
twenty years; he was expelled from Brussels, Paris, Berlin, Barcelona, and
Leningrad—and ended as a stateless refugee in Mexico, where he died in
 PREFACE ix

1947, aged 56. My books “have known a life as hard as my own.” In the
United States, right-wing publishers found them too revolutionary and
left-wing publishers too politically incorrect. Serge did not toe the line.
In no way do I compare my life with Serge’s, but we can learn from his
steadfastness. “Yes, we have lost, but our spirit is strong.” He notes that
“with our nondescript little journals, we have often seen clearly where
statesmen have floundered.” He adds that we are not destined for failure.
“We have known how to win, we must never forget that.”5 Amen.

Los Angeles, CA, USA Russell Jacoby

Notes
1. See Bernhard H. Bayerlein “The Entangled Catastrophe: Hitler’s 1933
‘Seizure of Power’ and the Power Triangle—New Evidence on the Historic
Failure of the KPD, the Comintern, and the Soviet Union,” pp. 260–
280 in Laporte, Norman and Hofrogge, Ralf Weimar Communism as Mass
Movement: 1918–1933 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2017).
2. Rebecca Solnit, “Why Are US Rightwingers So Angry? Because They Know
Social Change Is Coming,” The Guardian, December 20, 2021.
3. Judith Butler, “A ‘Bad Writer’ Bites Back,” New York Times , March 20,
1999.
4. Except for minor clarifications and corrections, these pieces appear here as
published. I attach to each the original date of publication.
5. Victor Serge. Memoirs of a Revolutionary 1901–1941, transl, by Peter Sedg-
wick (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), pp. 371–372; 366–367.
 Contents

The Mission of Intellectuals 1

After The Last Intellectuals 1
Irresponsible Intellectuals? 11
Academic Conceits 21
The Myth of Multiculturalism 21
Post-Colonialism and the Marginality Industry 28
Publishing On Diversity 41
Campus Reports 46
The Cult of Complications 46
Professional Amnesia 49
The Fate of Freud 53
Assessments 59
Isaiah Berlin: With the Current 59
Bernard-Henri Lévy: Leftist Fabulist 68
Sartre and Camus: French Public Intellectuals 77
Hannah Arendt: Philosopher or New York Intellectual? 82
Jonathan Franzen: The Last Viennese Intellectual? 86
Appreciations 97
Christopher Hitchens 97
Randolph Bourne 100
Christopher Lasch 102
Paul Piccone 105

xi
xii CONTENTS

Daniel Bell 109

C. Wright Mills 112
Strictures 119
A Sociologist on Utopia 119
An English Professor on Liberal Intellectuals 125
A Literary Critic on Academic Careers 131
Myths About Utopia and Violence 139
Utopia and the Myth of Violence 139
Violence and the Myth of the Other 146
Enlightenment in the Age of Hype 167
A Falling Rate of Intelligence? 167

Index 177
 The Mission of Intellectuals

After The Last Intellectuals

Over twenty years ago I published The Last Intellectuals which put into
circulation the term “public intellectual.” The term surfaced fleetingly in
C. Wright Mills, which I had not known or had forgotten. Inasmuch as
the book foregrounded the phrase, for better or worse the expression
caught on. I had noted that the category was “fraught with difficulties.”
A public intellectual was not a publicist or a public relations expert; it was
an intellectual with “a commitment not simply to a professional or private
domain but to a public world…My concern is with public intellectuals,
writers and thinkers who address a general and educated audience.”
Now the term is virtually a pat phrase, if not a cliche, and shows up
everywhere—in studies, conferences, and books. Googles Ngram Viewer
charts the frequency of “public intellectual” as a standalone term as
zero for centuries until the middle 1980s when The Last Intellectuals is
published, and its usage takes off. The success of the phrase, of course,
does not confirm my argument. It suggests, however, that the book
touched a nerve, a disquiet about the fate of intellectuals and cultural
life.
For purists the term is at best redundant. At least since Emile Zola’s
role in the Dreyfus Affair at the end of the nineteenth century the word
“intellectual” included “public.” This was the point, after all. A novelist

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2022
R. Jacoby, Intellectuals in Politics and Academia, Political Philosophy
and Public Purpose, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07646-6_1
2 R. JACOBY

intruded in matters of state. An intellectual connoted someone inter-

vening in public issues. For conservatives this was the very problem:
intellectuals are people not simply intervening but interfering in affairs
they do not understand. This was the charge of Edmund Burke against
Thomas Paine. Paul Johnson, the conservative historian, recently updated
this accusation and closed his broadside against intellectuals with the
observation that people are increasingly skeptical of the right of writers
and philosophers “to tell us how to behave and conduct our affairs.”
He added, “A dozen people picked at random on the street are at
least as likely to offer sensible views on moral and political matters as
a cross-section of the intelligentsia.”
Yet—and this was and is my argument—the term intellectual itself
reflects historical shifts. Not simply the emergence, but the expansion
of higher education affects intellectual life—and the lives of intellectuals.
Intellectuals increasingly become professors—or professionals. As such
they are increasingly beholden to specialist standards and criteria and
are drawn away from public engagement, and indeed public prose. The
term ‘public intellectual’ sought to underline this development that we
now had intellectuals who have lost contact with the public world. We
had politically minded sociologists or political scientists who contributed
to professional magazines and addressed colleagues, but who failed—
and frequently did not want—to address a wider public. We now have
“famous” Marxist literary critics, for instance, but they are famous only
among professors and graduate students. This was new.
The term spoke to this issue that while we had many intellectuals—
hundreds of thousands of professors—we had few that possessed a public
profile. I continue to ask my students if they can name a living Amer-
ican philosopher. Perhaps once they could have offered William James or
John Dewey. Today they are stumped, not because they are uneducated,
but because leading American philosophers are mainly technical experts
in language and logic. They may be intellectuals, but they are not public
intellectuals.
In The Last Intellectuals I offered a generational explanation for what I
saw as the eclipse of younger public thinkers and writers. Why in 1987 had
the same intellectuals dominated for over twenty years with few new faces
among them? Why was it that the Daniel Bells or Gore Vidals or Kenneth
Galbraiths seemed to lack successors? Professionalization and academiza-
tion appeared the reason. Younger intellectuals retreated into specialized
and cloistered environments. Earlier twentieth-century thinkers like Lewis
 THE MISSION OF INTELLECTUALS 3

Mumford and Edmund Wilson kept the university and its apparatus at
arm’s length. Indeed, they often disdained it. They oriented themselves
toward an educated public, and, as a result, they developed a straight-
forward prose and gained a non-professional audience. As his reputation
grew Wilson printed up a postcard that he sent to those who requested
his services. On it he checked the appropriate box: Edmund Wilson does
not write articles or books on order; he does not write forewords or intro-
ductions, does not give interviews, or appear on television, and does not
participate in symposiums.
Later intellectual generations, including, paradoxically, the rebellious
sixties cohort do give interviews; do write articles on demand, and most
do participate in symposiums. They grew up in a much-expanded campus
universe, and never left its safety. Younger intellectuals became professors
geared toward their colleagues and specialized journals. If this genera-
tion—my generation!—advanced into postmodernism, postmarxism, and
post-colonialism, where the Daniel Bells and Lewis Mumfords never
trod, it did so by surrendering a public profile. It neither wanted nor,
after a while, could write an accessible prose. The new thinkers became
academic—not public—intellectuals with little purchase outside profes-
sional circles. While a book by Edmund Wilson could be read with
pleasure by an educated citizen, a volume by an academic luminary such
as Judith Butler or Frederic Jameson could not be.
With some exceptions the professoriate did not appreciate my book.
George Washington University Professor Leo Ribuffo called it “glib,
superficial and oracular,” a “symptom of the intellectual slump” it
purported to explain. New York University Professor Thomas Bender
denounced it as “careless, ill-conceived, and perhaps even irresponsible.”
For many, I was guilty of the primal sin of all forward-thinking people:
nostalgia. I was romanticizing old white guys—the Lewis Mumfords and
Edmund Wilsons. I failed to realize that things changed and improved.
Other critics rediscovered the oldest wisdom, nothing changes. In this
scenario intellectuals were always disappearing and always existed—or
never existed. Case closed.
In point of fact I did not romanticize earlier intellectuals. (Nor did I
exclude women: Jane Jacobs, Susan Sontag, Rachel Carson surface in my
text.) “If the intellectuals from the 1950s tower over the cultural land-
scape right into the 1980s,” I wrote, “this is not because the towers are so
high but because the landscape is so flat.” The issue was not the brilliance
of earlier intellectuals but the whereabouts of their successors.
4 R. JACOBY

It turns out they are everywhere. All my critics produced lists of public
intellectuals, usually friends and acquaintances, whom I slighted or over-
looked. “Where are all the public intellectuals?” asked the historian Rick
Perlstein. “A well-stroked three-wood aimed out my Brooklyn window
could easily hit half a dozen.” However, he did not name them. Ribuffo
offered as examples Pat Aufderheide, David Garrow, Robert Reich and
Jeremy Rifkin. Barnard College Dance Professor Lynn Garafola nomi-
nated her husband Eric Foner as well as Rosalind Krauss, whom I was
informed was “an art critic so well-known that a New Yorker profile (on
someone else) opened with a description of her living room.” I cher-
ished this information but remained uncertain whether it was the living
room (“Its beauty has a dark, forceful, willful character.”) or the New
Yorker notice that mattered. In any event, a book like mine depends
on generalizations. These must be grounded in specifics, but the lists
offered do not by themselves rebut my argument. Some individuals—
and perhaps this includes hubby Foner, Rick Perlstein, and his Brooklyn
neighbors—manage to swim against the current, but does this alter larger
realities?
Have the years since I wrote the book clarified this argument? To
be sure, the assumption that the passage of time itself resolves cultural
controversies is questionable. My book challenged the idea of linear
progress. Perhaps the new generation, I broached thinks less boldly than
the preceding generation. History has known periods of reversal and
confusion. We could be in one such period. While advances in science
and technology cannot be doubted, the humanities do not necessarily
keep pace. Today we may be no better positioned than twenty years ago
to appraise our intellectual situation.
Of course, few like to believe that we live in an era of mediocrity. A
working title of my book was “The Decline of Public Intellectuals.” I had
an agent for my manuscript—he eventually dropped me—but he declared
that my title would kill sales. The word “intellectuals” would bewilder
consumers. Nor would “decline” win them back. He wondered if I could
at least recast the manuscript as a story of achievement, for instance, “The
Rise of American Intellectuals.” That might sell!
Yet valid criticisms have been raised about my argument, and only the
obtuse could claim that nothing has happened in the last two decades
that might recast the terms of intellectual life. For starters a new group
of African American intellectuals such as Henry Louis Gates and Gerald
Early, as well as a series of robust women columnists such as Maureen
 THE MISSION OF INTELLECTUALS 5

Dowd and the late Molly Ivans emerged. Yet their appearance may cause
a revision of my argument, not its refutation.
In The Last Intellectuals I did not even allude to computers and the
Internet. I wrote my book on an electric typewriter. “White-Out” was
my trusty companion. “Cut and paste” still referred to scissors and tape.
One does not have to be a cheerleader to believe that the Internet has
altered cultural realities. Writers—including professors—can escape censo-
rious editors and referees by establishing their own blogs. The Internet
gives anyone an electronic pulpit. All ideas are game. The old-fashioned
intellectual with a book or an essay may be as outdated as a horse and
buggy.
Yet the role of the Internet and blogs in the United States may differ
from that in Myanmar or China. In Myanmar, the Internet threatened
the state with news of bloody anti-government protests and the govern-
ment shut it down. China regularly monitors blogs and news sites and
allows only tame dissension. Certain terms such as “human rights” or
“corruption” block a site. In the United States, however, blogs are not
so much about challenging an authoritarian state as about adding to the
cacophony. Blogs may be more like private journals with megaphones
than reasoned contributions to public life. Michael Bérubé, an accom-
plished blogger, admits as much. “One day I’ll have an analysis of the
hockey playoffs,” he writes about his own blog, “the next day a story
about the night my band opened for the Ramones, the next day an
account of a trip with my younger son, Jamie”.
This is not all he and others do in their postings, but what is the net
result? The Internet provides instant communication and quick access to
vast resources, but has it altered the quality or content of intellectual
discussions? Too many voices may cancel each other out. The fear of the
Spanish writer José Ortega y Gasset a century ago of the “revolt of the
masses” needs an update. We face a revolt of the writers. Today everyone
is a writer or blogger, but where are the readers? A New Yorker cartoon
reverses the usual picture of a literary festival with book lovers lined up
to get the author’s autograph. The cartoon shows a table and a queue,
but authors line up to see The Reader, who sits behind the table. On the
Internet the stuff pours forth, but who can keep up with it? And while
everything is preserved (or “archived”) has anyone ever looked at last
year’s blogs? Rapidly produced, they are just as rapidly forgotten.
The fate of public intellectuals today allows no neat and certain
answers. Even the effort of the indefatigable Richard Posner, judge,
6 R. JACOBY

professor, and conservative, falls short. In Public Intellectuals: A Study of

Decline, Posner sought to finally give precision to this topic. He wanted to
nail down the species and measure its worth, which he found inadequate.
Enamored, if not blinded, by a market approach, Posner found an absence
of quality control in public intellectuals. He tabulated Web “hits” and
scholarly citations not only to identify leading intellectuals but to indicate
their defective quality. Public intellectuals, he concluded, gain attention as
they lose scholarly credibility. The more they address public issues, the less
their professional colleagues refer to them—for good reason, according to
Posner.
As public intellectuals step outside their specialty, they offer substan-
dard information. Stephen Jay Gould attacked (in The Mismeasure of
Man) the notion of IQ, but Posner declares that the late Harvard
professor lacked expertise on the subject. Gould was a paleontolo-
gist, not an authority on intelligence. The scientists who objected to a
national antimissile defense system, the lawyers who protested the Clinton
impeachment, or the professors who questioned the invasion of Iraq did
not know what they were talking about. None possessed the requisite
professional knowledge. Posner, who knows everything, uses the stick of
specialization to dismiss those with whom he disagrees. The decline of
public intellectuals correlates with the rise of Richard Posner.
Of course, this hardly exhausts the issue. Yet a diagnosis of the state
of public intellectuals depends on the diagnostician. Different reports
derive from different vantage points. For instance, Jeffrey R. Di Leo, a
professor of English and Philosophy, bemoans the discouraging condi-
tion of public intellectuals in an essay called “Public Intellectuals, Inc.”
“Society at large just doesn’t seem to afford its iconic or star public intel-
lectuals much respect anymore.” Once upon a time thinkers like Emerson,
James and Dewey loomed large. “For much of the last century, Dewey,
for example, was regarded as not just another expert commenting on the
public school system in America. Rather, he was treated as one of Amer-
ica’s finest philosophers who just happened to be sharing his ideas on
education to a respectful and attentive national audience. At the opening
of the twenty-first century, however, the situation is much different.”
Conversely, Jacob Heilbrunn, an editor and writer, begins a recent
piece this way: “George W. Bush has done a favor for the intellectuals
who hate him so much: he has made them celebrities. His War on Terror
has triggered an impassioned debate on the left over the direction of
American foreign policy.” Heilbrunn cites the clash between Christopher
 THE MISSION OF INTELLECTUALS 7

Hitchens and Paul Berman, on one side, and Ian Beruma and Tony Judt
on the other, as an instance of this high-octane argument.
In fact, DiLeo and Heilbrunn may not differ as much as they appear.
Heilbrunn goes on to argue that unlike earlier public intellectuals such
as Sidney Hook, the contemporary representatives are more flash than
substance. “Rather than the hard and solitary work of writing and
thinking and achieving an output that far overshadowed their public pres-
ence, today’s intellectuals often succumb to celebrity culture, shouting
on FOX News and MSNBC rather than arguing their ideas in books
or in the pages of magazines.” For Heilbrunn, “What in an earlier era
were battles grounded in strenuous intellectual engagement today often
amount to little more than highbrow food fights and, in some cases, nifty
career moves…Compared to their predecessors, who staked everything
on disputes over fascism, Stalinism, and imperialism, today’s rank-breakers
are mere epigones.”
Is this so? Or is this a version of an ever-tempting nostalgia that
previous intellectuals stood higher and walked stronger? This is the argu-
ment of Stefan Collini’s recent book about English intellectuals, Absent
Minds. The complaint that once upon a time intellectuals addressed a
wide public, and nowadays they have become insular specialists belongs
to a time-honored and time-tested proposition. For Collini, this idea has
been trotted out over the centuries: “And so a new generation takes up
the old tune: there used to be intellectuals who were capable of reaching
a wide public, but specialization is making them extinct in our time…
Only the presence of the modish term ‘public intellectual’ distinguishes
these statements from comparable ones made at almost any point in the
past century”.
The point is well-taken, yet it runs the risk of advancing the tired
wisdom that there is nothing new under the sun. A recurrent observation
about intellectual life turns into an argument that history does not move.
Yet a historical investigation calls for alertness both to continuities and to
shifts. An observation made in the past is not necessarily untrue today. To
be sure, one must be careful about romanticizing past intellectuals.
The issue of separating out what is new in intellectual life from what
is not-so-new can be approached from a comparative perspective. I had
originally planned The Last Intellectuals to be a comparative study and
wanted to include a discussion of intellectuals in France, Great Britain,
and Germany. The question I posed would roughly be the same as
that for the United States. What had changed in intellectual life? Where
8 R. JACOBY

are the successors to Sartre’s generation? Or to the generation of E.P.

Thompson and Raymond Williams? Or to the Frankfurt School thinkers?
I renounced this plan simply because it proved too large a project. Yet
I think it remains important to explore to what extent the issues of
passing or changing public intellectuals are not simply North American,
but common to advanced capitalist nations. In France in particular an
ongoing debate on the state of its intellectuals has taken place. About
the time I published The Last Intellectuals both Bernard-Henri Lévy
and Alain Finkielkraut published books that addressed the fate of French
intellectuals. Lévy wondered whether the dictionary of the future will
define “intellectual” as a social and political type, born in Paris during
the Dreyfus Affair; died in Paris at the end of the twentieth century.
On the face of it there seems to be little parallel with the United
States. It is hardly news that France takes its intellectuals very seriously,
and they in turn take themselves very seriously. The adoration of Lacan,
for instance, simply has no American analogue. This is true for a series
of French figures such as Foucault, Barthes, and Levi-Strauss. In 2004
Jacques Chirac, then the French president, announced “with sadness” the
death of Jacques Derrida. He called Derrida “one of the major figures in
the intellectual life of our time,” whose work was “read, discussed, and
taught around the world.” It need not be underlined, but it is impossible
to imagine an American president—Bush? Ford? Reagan?—commenting
upon the death (or life) of an American literary critic or philosopher.
Nevertheless, France is not immune to global realities. The American
eclipse of public intellectuals may lead the way, and perhaps France is
just now catching up—but it is important to see the starting place is
different. John Dewey may have been an important public philosopher
but the public did not care where he went for coffee; and his funeral
did not compare to the outpouring at Sartre’s death. Yet both Lévy and
Finkielkraut detected a shift, a demise of the old intellectuals.
According to Lévy, after so many political disillusionments, after so
many attacks on reason and truth, after too much deconstructionism,
and relativism, intellectuals have lost confidence in Truth with a capital
T and in Reason with a capital R. “There can be no intelligentsia,” writes
Lévy, “without some values being elevated to absolutes.” Intellectuals can
no longer intervene in public life if they completely doubt what they
know; and this is the case today. Finkielkraut indicts relativism as well.
Nowadays cartoons are considered an art form; rock critics are creators.
Western culture itself is just one of the many offerings. If you don’t like
 THE MISSION OF INTELLECTUALS 9

it, try another. In this situation, thought itself loses itself uniqueness; it
is devalued, and so are intellectuals—at least to themselves. What do they
know? The sweeping confidence of Sartre has not survived the many polit-
ical reversals as well as the intellectual demolition experts, happy to level
everything. Everything is text—rock n’ roll as well as Hegel.
Compared to my approach, theirs is resolutely conceptual. Lévy and
Finkielkraut—somewhat crudely and quickly— consider the content of
ideas and find them deficient. It is not the decline of Bohemia, the
expansion of universities, professionalization or the fragmentation of the
audience that leads to the restructuring of intellectual life, it is the ideas
themselves.
The argument is not convincing—at least for the United States.
Finkielkraut mainly takes up the impact of structuralism and relativism
on literary and cultural theory. However, if one examines, for instance, a
field such as a history over the last 20 years the growth of social history,
new history, and the history of women and minorities can be observed.
Its practitioners have not suffered because of post-structuralist thought. If
they have suffered, it is because they conceive of their projects in micro-
terms. In other words, economists, historians, or sociologists have not
been shaped (and misshaped) so much by postmodernist relativism as by
an institutional and social environment.
For support I had drawn upon a Brandeis sociologist, George Ross,
who in an essay on “The Decline of the Left Intellectual in Modern
France” argued that the traditional left intellectual had become an endan-
gered species in France. Yet he completely rejected the view that this was
due to the theoretical defeats of structuralism or deconstructionism. He
offered two reasons: the French Communist Party, which for decades had
sustained left intellectuals, shut down intellectually by 1981; and what
he called “massification of education” or the structure of the intellec-
tual market. In 1936 there were 9,000 secondary school teachers—the
backbone of left intellectual networks; now there are almost 300,000.
“As specialization intensified, the importance of peer group professional
scrutiny within fields intensified.” In other words, it is possible to discern
kindred developments in the American scene.
I had sought to survey the situation in Germany; and again, my
references are two decades old, although, the situation may not have
fundamentally changed. I posited a shift in intellectual generations from
the Frankfurt School to its successors, essentially Jürgen Habermas,
the philosopher, and his associates such as Albrecht Wellmer. Unlike
10 R. JACOBY

the earlier Frankfurt School figures, the Habermasians embraced the

university—its idiom and concerns. The move—to take the extremes—
from Adorno to Habermas might be characterized as progress in the
academization of critical theory. This change includes a change in
language but is not exhausted by it. Habermas writes a bureaucratic prose,
where Adorno wrote—what?—an anarchistic prose.
Yet the change goes beyond language; it bears on the audience and
type of concerns.
Habermas, and some of his followers, turned explicitly toward the
university. This was partly how they distinguished themselves from the
earlier Frankfurt theorists. The first generation worked out brilliant
critiques of positivism or the enlightenment, but from the Habermasian
perspective, it failed to present the critique in a form that would convince
the academic reader. The Habermasian project sought to elaborate critical
theory in a fashion and form that might stand up to academic objec-
tions. The writings of the Frankfurt School—Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s
Dialectic of Enlightenment or Adorno’s Jargon of Authenticity or even
Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man were not written to convince philos-
ophy professors. Habermas’s work is almost founded on the opposite
principle: to win over the professorate; to work out the rational supposi-
tions of critical theory.
Professor Adorno or Professor Marcuse were professors and lived
largely in an academic environment. Yet their relationship with the univer-
sity, perhaps due to their generational experience of Weimar and Nazism,
was different from the next generation. For decisive years during their
American exile, they were not professors or hardly professors. Perhaps the
Frankfurt School people were first critical theorists and second academics;
and with the successor generation that relationship is reversed.
Even the old and cautious Horkheimer wrote in his letter forward to
the first history of the group, Martin Jay’s Dialectical Imagination, that
its members “came together with the belief that formulating the negative
in the epoch of transition was more meaningful than academic careers.”
The question is whether Habermas and some Habermasians have paid
too heavy a price for a turn toward academic concerns; whether their
project of convincing the professoriate has evolved into technical argu-
ments where the vitality of critical theory attenuates. Is it possible that
the subversive element in critical theory depends on its utopian belief
that it addresses everyone, not simply colleagues?
 THE MISSION OF INTELLECTUALS 11

This hope and aim should not be surrendered. Indeed, one of the
classic nineteenth-century liberals, John Stuart Mill, raised a similar note.
While lauding the necessity of thinkers to follow their own logic; and
calling for the liberty of thought, Mill also addressed the relationship of
intellectuals to the wider society. “Not that it is solely, or chiefly, to form
great thinkers that freedom of thinking is required. On the contrary, it is
as much and even more indispensable to enable average human beings to
attain the mental stature, which they are capable of. There have been, and
may again be, great individual thinkers in a general atmosphere of mental
slavery. But there never has been, nor ever will be, in that atmosphere an
intellectually active people.”
Mill observed that some periods have been characterized by great intel-
lectual fervent, for instance, the early Enlightenment. But “where there is
a tacit convention that principles are not to be disputed, where the discus-
sion of the greatest questions which can occupy humanity is considered
closed, we cannot hope to find that generally high scale of mental activity
which has made some periods of history so remarkable.”
The point here is simple: the fate of intellectuals is bound up with the
fate of the larger culture. If that culture becomes insular or indifferent or
angry, then intellectuals will look in mirrors—and see themselves. As Mill
presents it, the goal is to create the conditions for “an intellectually active
people.” This remains the agenda.
(2009)

∗ ∗ ∗

Irresponsible Intellectuals?
In November 1965, President Johnson received a message from Secretary
of Defense Robert McNamara advising a “three- or four-week pause”
in the bombing of North Vietnam. The reason? To pursue, or more
exactly pretend to pursue, negotiations that would drum up more public
support for renewed violence. Before intensifying the troop deployments
and aerial attacks “we must lay a foundation in the mind of the American
public and in world opinion for such an enlarged phase of the war.”
On Christmas Day, 1965, the United States announced the bombing
pause, which was extended through January. With the foundation for
intensified bombing in place, Johnson ordered the resumption of U.S.
12 R. JACOBY

attacks on North Vietnam. A year later, on Christmas Day, 1966,

Harrison Salisbury’s first dispatch from Hanoi appeared in the New York
Times. His reports refuted administration claims that surgically precise
bombing had spared civilians, hospitals, churches, and schools.
Noam Chomsky’s “The Responsibility of Intellectuals” bears the marks
of 1966, a year low in political protests, and high in private anger.
Chomsky sought to goad intellectuals into opposition; he wanted intel-
lectuals committed to moral and historical categories to judge, condemn,
and resist, not to pragmatically assess options. The essay, the “]’accuse!” of
the Vietnam protest, garnered much attention partly because, renowned
as a scholar in linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
Chomsky was little known as a radical critic; partly because in naming
and denouncing individuals, frequently his Cambridge academic neigh-
bors, he did not observe the usual collegial niceties; partly because of the
force of his argument. Chomsky served to notice that a radical critique of
American policies and intellectuals could be stringent, uncompromising,
and devastating.
Some twenty years later, American foreign policies are not conspic-
uously different. Nicaragua is not Vietnam, but the American empire
deploys its guns and dollars to back authoritarian dictators from sea to
shining sea. The dictator Somoza of Nicaragua was tolerable for decades,
his successor for minutes. An intellectual opposition is present, but gener-
ally lacks the elan and confidence that marked Chomsky’s critique. One
reason is apparent: confidence also is historical.
In twenty years an opposition has witnessed the Soviet invasion of
Czechoslovakia, the flight of “boat people” from Communist Vietnam
and “killing fields” of Communist Cambodia. To be sure, the critique
of American practices does not rest on the idea, much less the reality, of
socialism. Yet perpetual disillusion with revolutionary governments takes a
toll. Many intellectuals have moved to the right; others have had “second
thoughts.” Chomsky keeps trucking along, but the traffic is thinning out.
His essays, once splashed across the New York Review of Books, now appear
in small journals. Of course, this is not necessarily bad; he may appear in
marginal journals, but Chomsky is not marginal. His speaking schedule is
full, and his talks jammed.
Chomsky addressed intellectuals’ responsibility when the categories
seemed less ambiguous. The terms now sound awkward. “Responsibil-
ity” hints of a moral order and rectitude increasingly out of reach; and the
 THE MISSION OF INTELLECTUALS 13

subject—the intellectuals—has exploded into a thousand pieces. Sociolo-

gists, literary critics, art historians, methodologists, and feminist theorists
dot the landscape, occasionally gathering in conferences, but “intellec-
tuals” are difficult to identify. Numerous studies indirectly confirm their
elusiveness; the studies are usually historical or sociological, treating inde-
pendent intellectuals as something past or something else. Is there a
“responsibility of intellectuals” without intellectuals?
Yet the strength of Chomsky’s formulations may not depend on their
empirical accuracy; rather Chomsky conjures up an era when intellectuals
walked tall and talked straight. Before they became managers, technocrats,
and professors, intellectuals challenged the state and its apologists. They
were writers and thinkers—not specialists—devoted to the truth and a
better world. When was this? Chomsky refers to Randolph Bourne or
Emile Zola, but the particulars hardly matter. Chomsky is a rationalist; he
is also a moralist. The verb “to be” contains a “should,” a moral obli-
gation. Intellectuals “are” means intellectuals “ought”; they should be
independent souls; they should write and act like Bertrand Russell. In his
lectures honoring Russell, Problems of Knowledge and Freedom, Chomsky
approvingly quotes the English philosopher:

Those whose lives are fruitful ... see in imagination the things that might
be and the way in which they are to be brought into existence They do
not spend time and passion defending unjust privileges of their class or
nation, but they aim at making the world as a whole happier, less cruel,
less full of conflict.

In common idiom “responsible” citizens, students, and taxpayers

dutifully heed their superiors. Do “responsible” intellectuals sound out
colleagues and administrators before speaking up? While Chomsky calls
for responsibility, he also executes a shift. Moral responsibility requires
irresponsibility: decisive judgments unaffected by careers and protocol. “A
striking feature of the recent debate on Southeast Asian policy,” he wrote
in “The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” “has been the distinction that is
commonly drawn between ‘responsible criticism,’ on the one hand, and
‘sentimental’ or ‘emotional’ or ‘hysterical’ criticism, on the other.” The
former, “responsible” criticism, smacks of conformity, minor objections to
major misdeeds. Ten years later in “Intellectuals and the State,” Chomsky
calls “responsible intellectuals” those who revere power and authority.
14 R. JACOBY

Though he never puts it this way, Chomsky wants “irresponsible” intel-

lectuals who incautiously challenge nationalist assumptions and American
interests. They risk, however, the label of malcontents and partisans. What
Chomsky said of Russell might be a comment about himself. “I need not
review here the harassment, the ridicule and abuse that Russell endured
... the shameful suppression and distortion, the revilement by apologists
for the criminal violence of the state.”
A personal and intellectual history, which he does not hide, gives rise to
Chomsky’s supreme confidence, moral outrage, and distrust of the state.
He opened and closed “The Responsibility of Intellectuals” appealing to
earlier essays on the responsibility of intellectuals and peoples by the writer
Dwight Macdonald. “I read them as an undergraduate, in the years just
after the war [the Second World War],” recalled Chomsky, “and had occa-
sion to read them again a few months ago. They seem to me to have lost
none of their power or persuasiveness.”
The reference surprises insofar as Macdonald is usually dismissed as a
clever essayist and critic. He was more. After passing through Marxism
and Trotskyism he founded his own magazine, Politics, in 1944. As
Macdonald put it, he served as “the editor, publisher, owner, proofreader,
layout man and chief contributor.” Nevertheless, Politics aimed high, and
drew on talented writers like Victor Serge, Paul Goodman, George Wood-
cock and C. Wright Mills, all representatives of an ethos that Macdonald
prized: anarchism, antiauthoritarianism, moralism. It also ran a series that
Chomsky read on the responsibility of peoples and intellectuals.
Macdonald posed the issue of complicity to an evil system; he reprinted
the reflections of the refugee Bruno Bettelheim of his concentration-camp
experience, “Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations,” where
the psychoanalyst observed that prisoners regress to childish dependency.
Bettelheim concluded that resistance required “independent, mature and
self-reliant persons.” These thoughts colored Macdonald’s “The Respon-
sibility of Peoples,” a series of reflections on Nazism and the Second
World War that first appeared in Politics. Macdonald rejected ideas of
collective guilt as well as the general innocence of the German people.
The German atrocities are unique, but the same tendencies surface in the
“democratic” societies. “Modern society has become so tightly organized,
so rationalized and routinized that it has the character of a mechanism
which grinds on without human consciousness or control.”
Nevertheless, the danger is total exculpation. Macdonald cited from
an interrogation of a captured death-camp paymaster; the official offered
 THE MISSION OF INTELLECTUALS 15

the standard excuse that he was simply following orders. Macdonald

commented that “it is not the lawbreaker we must fear today so much
as he who obeys the law.” But he eschewed cheap philosophizing: “Only
those who are willing to resist authority themselves when it conflicts too
intolerably with their personal moral code, only they have the right to
condemn the death camp paymaster.”
Macdonald’s brief essay “The Responsibility of Intellectuals” was
provoked by the ten-cent moralizing of a liberal journalist. Max Lerner,
then a war correspondent following the advances of the American army,
happened upon some older German farmers. “Descending from his
jeep,” Macdonald recounted, “Lerner asked them: Are You Guilty?” Not
receiving a satisfying answer, Lerner fell into deep thoughts. “‘I came
away heartsick and discouraged,’ wrote Lerner. ‘Nowhere did I find the
moral strength to face the fact of guilt. Only protests that they were not
responsible for what had happened.’” So much for the “responsibility of
intellectuals,” which Macdonald meant sarcastically. Lerner exemplified
the hypocrisy of intellectuals tough on others, easy on themselves.
As the deconstructionists have taught, meaning does not inhere in
texts. Chomsky’s reading of Macdonald may be more important than its
textual validity. Nevertheless, Macdonald’s moralism and antiauthoritar-
ianism permeate Chomsky’s oeuvre. The linguist interpreted Macdonald
as translating the question of German war guilt into British or Amer-
ican guilt—the complicity of a population in atrocities. Referring to the
bombings of German cities, as well as Nagasaki and Hiroshima, Chomsky
asked, “To what extent are the British or American people responsible
for the vicious terror bombings of civilians ...?” However, he intensified
responsibility by narrowing it from amorphous “people” to intellectuals,
a “privileged minority” with the “leisure, the facilities, and the training”
to find the truth. “The responsibilities of intellectuals, then, are much
deeper than what Macdonald calls the ‘responsibility of peoples,’ given
the unique privileges that intellectuals enjoy.”
Chomsky’s anarchist past defines his writings on intellectuals—and
drew him to Macdonald’s Politics. In an interview with an anarchist maga-
zine, Chomsky recalled that “all my aunts and uncles” partook of the
“Jewish radical intelligentsia”; an influential uncle was “active in the anti-
Bolshevik left.” As a child in this family, he imbibed the anarchist critique
of Marxism, including the anarchist suspicion of intellectuals. This stayed
with him, marking his writings in a double way: Chomsky both distrusts
and exalts intellectuals. Intellectuals serve state power; they also expose it.
16 R. JACOBY

The anarchist critique of intellectuals, which Chomsky cites, runs

from the nineteenth-century Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin to the
twentieth-century German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg. The anar-
chists, “left” communists and syndicalists denounced intellectuals as
forming a new and oppressive class, reversing an interpretation common
among American sociologists. For Chomsky, it is a “natural presumption”
that intellectuals will adopt an “elitist position,” seeking to “manage”
and “control” society. He quotes a sociologist (Harold Lasswell) who
considers “the rise of intellectuals and semi-intellectuals to effective
power” the critical and beneficial shift of modem times. In “Objec-
tivity and Liberal Scholarship,” Chomsky continues: “The ‘ultra-left’ critic
foresaw in these developments a new attack on human freedom and a
more efficient system of exploitation. The Western sociologist sees in the
‘rise of intellectuals to effective power the hope for a more humane ...
society,’ in which problems can be solved by ‘piecemeal technology.’ Who
has the sharper eye?” For Chomsky, there is no doubt.
However, there is doubt how this hard-nosed view of intellectuals
serving power coexists with a moral vision of intellectuals devoted to truth
and humanity. If the former is self-evident, even natural, why bother to
document the misdeeds of intellectuals? Why cry “treachery” if intellec-
tuals instinctively defend power? How can one be perpetually indignant
at perpetual betrayal?
This antinomy is not unique to Chomsky: it bedevils many reformers
and revolutionaries, especially anarchists. C. Wright Mills, the sociolo-
gist whose anarchist inclinations drew him to Macdonald, both savaged
and celebrated intellectuals. Intellectuals were nothing but craven depen-
dents or timid white-collar workers; however, they should also champion
truth and change. Mills elevated intellectuals partly because he resisted
anointing the working class. “I do not believe ... that it is only ‘Labor’
or ‘The Working Class’ that can transform American society.” Intellec-
tuals have a “unique opportunity”; “we can begin to create a Left by
confronting issues as intellectuals.”
Other anarchists indicted Mills for a flagrant contradiction. Mills had
already classified intellectuals as “the Swiss Guard of the Power Elite,”
remarked Fredy Perlman in an anarchist polemic against Mills, The Inco-
herence of the Intellectual. Yet “he calls on these fragmentary men whose
social positions rest on their service to power to annihilate their own
‘roles,’ ... by becoming ... Promethean history-makers; Mills calls on
Carpetbaggers to overthrow the slave system.”
 THE MISSION OF INTELLECTUALS 17

Chomsky halfheartedly escapes from this dilemma by adopting conven-

tional labels distinguishing intellectuals orientated toward technical policy
and those committed to value judgments; the former serve power, the
latter democracy, and truth. Nevertheless, for Chomsky, the oppositional
intellectuals are so few, almost nonexistent, that the categories seem
dubious. Are Henry James scholars, analytic philosophers, or art histo-
rians militant adherents of truth and democracy? Chomsky often laments
that the democratic United States successfully eviscerates dissent. Intel-
lectuals operate the ideological “pump handle” for the state or the free
enterprise system; and the state never runs out of willing writers and ideo-
logues. Chomsky closes one essay bitterly commenting that “those who
may be concerned about unemployment for intellectuals need not worry
too much.”
Yet Chomsky cannot write off intellectuals; they remain a possi-
bility, a hope—and generally his audience. He once complained that the
New Leftists pretended to be workers instead of themselves, students,
and intellectuals. His own writings are marked by these contradictory
impulses, an anarchist theory positing the betrayal of intellectuals as
self-evident and profound anger at the betrayal. Palpable disdain of intel-
lectuals increasingly infuses his books; he refers to intellectuals’ “mindless
incantation of state propaganda” or their debased “norms of educated
discourse.” He writes that the educated are not the most but the least
able to understand social realities. Chomsky scorns the intellectuals he
needs.
Chomsky’s contribution reveals a shift in the nature of intellectual
resistance. Chomsky has two careers; he is a much-respected professor
of linguistics and a much lambasted critic of American foreign policies.
The two endeavors seem hardly to touch.
To be sure, Chomsky occasionally tries to show the loose links
between his two commitments. A belief in free individuality stamps
both his projects. His linguistics implicitly challenges conventional leftism
contending all human nature and creativity are historical, and depen-
dent on specific circumstances. For Chomsky, this brand of historical
materialism is politically dangerous. “If in fact humans are indefinitely
malleable, completely plastic beings, with no innate structures of mind,”
he writes in “Language and Freedom,” “... then they are fit subjects
for the ... state authority, the corporate manager, the technocrat, or the
central committee.” In his linguistic theory, Chomsky sets forth “the
18 R. JACOBY

intrinsic human characteristics” or universal grammar which precludes this

manipulative possibility.
Even if valid, the philosophical-political underpinnings of his linguistics
are barely enunciated; and for his professional audience Chomsky’s polit-
ical loyalties play no obvious role. Similarly, his foreign affairs reportage
stays clear of language theory, probably to the relief of his political readers
or listeners. As a professor, he sticks to specialized linguistics; as a regular
public lecturer and writer, Chomsky is presented, and presents himself, as
a critic of American foreign policy and press.
There have been numerous individuals, past and present, with broad
interests and talents who contribute to diverse fields: philosophers who
write mystery novels, historians who are jazz critics, and physicists who
pen socialist essays. But are there many who established roughly equal
reputations in fields that seem unconnected? Einstein might have written
socialist essays, but no one would identify him as a major social critic; Eric
Hobsbawm also writes on jazz, but the keyword is “also”; he is primarily
a social historian of modem capitalism. Chomsky, however, forcefully
contributes to both linguistics and international affairs.
The issue is not Chomsky’s talents; rather, his bifurcated career illu-
minates a cultural universe that is not new but newly potent, a world of
experts and authorities. Chomsky addresses the American government,
its misdeeds, and defenders as an outsider. It is almost inconceivable that
Chomsky would be a tenured professor of political science, international
studies, or sociology; his writings lack the requisite deference and moder-
ation. In other words, as a radical public intellectual, Chomsky is not an
MIT professor, but an independent critic.
This is not just an interesting fact but expresses—and protests against—
the academic world that neutralizes thought by subdivisions and approved
specialists. Chomsky is clear about this. “The university system is suffi-
ciently obedient to external power so that appropriate experts will gener-
ally be available to lend the prestige of scholarship to the narrow range
of opinion.” The departmental and guild structure militates against unac-
credited outsiders. When he spoke about linguistics, Chomsky recalled,
even in areas beyond his expertise, “no one would have dreamed of chal-
lenging my credentials But when I speak, say, about international affairs,
I’m constantly challenged to present the credentials that authorize me to
enter this august arena.”
Inasmuch as Chomsky writes convincingly on diverse subjects, resisting
the divisions of labor, he exemplifies the traditional intellectual in the
 THE MISSION OF INTELLECTUALS 19

age of the university. He is both inside and outside the academic insti-
tution—inside as a professor of linguistics and outside as a critic. This
strategy would seem a simple and effective response to the imperatives
of academic life: to intervene without fear of penalties in one area from
the security of a tenured slot in another. The mathematician would fear-
lessly criticize government programs; the anthropologist would examine
foreign policy. In the latter capacity, he or she would not be looking for
collegial approval, promotion or grants.
Yet it is surprising how few are able (or willing) to adopt this maneuver.
The responsibility of intellectuals devolves upon responsible intellectuals.
Why? Either the professional costs remain forbidding; the literary critic
writing on ecology risks the disapproval of colleagues. Or the effort to
stay abreast of a single field precludes informed contributions on another
terrain. Or specialization guts a will to intervene elsewhere.
In the age of hyper-specialization, the old Thorstein Veblen critique
of professors as serving power is partly obsolete. The migration of intel-
lectuals from small magazines to large universities, from the streets to
the offices, cannot be characterized as increased subservience. Marxist,
radical, and feminist professors hardly appear slavish; they challenge the
disciplinary idiom or consensus. Drawing on Gramsci, Foucault, and
Derrida, they think of themselves as the cutting edge.
However, by cutting their research to fit the field, they are not pruning
but prudent. In the contemporary American university, thought bows less
before political power than before a hundred minipowers, the journals,
and leading figures of a field. Marxists may hone their metaconcepts, but
if their reality is exclusively Turkish marriage patterns or 1950s Holly-
wood beach movies, their conclusions echo only down departmental halls.
These constraints render harmless the contribution of numerous radical
scholars. Formerly the universities were largely closed to Marxists and
dissenters and their threatening ideas. Today left scholars are well repre-
sented, but they have embraced or succumbed to microfields, which they
sometimes confuse with the world.
A recent university press book is titled Intellectuals in Power. One
might reasonably expect that the book surveys intellectuals who are
statesmen or advisers to the state, perhaps a Leon Blum, a Prime Minister
of France, or a Henry Kissinger, an American Secretary of State. Not so.
Its author, Paul Bové, surveys literary and cultural theorists like Michel
Foucault and Edward Said; these are the intellectuals “in power.”
20 R. JACOBY

Railing against specialists is a favorite pastime. Need it be stated that

advanced society is not possible without experts and their knowledge?
Nevertheless, especially for the letters and arts, obsessive specialization can
kill critical thought. To think against fields, turfs, disciplines—not ignore
them but resist them—belongs to the emphatic notion of the intellectual.
For sociologists to slough off economics to economists, or economists to
pass off philosophy to philosophers sabotages truth.
To be sure, the smallest area can reveal the most salient truths. It is
less the magnitude of the field than its relationship to the whole that
is decisive. “Whether one is an intellectual,” wrote T.W. Adorno of the
Frankfurt School group, “is expressed above all in the relationship to
one’s own work and to the social whole of which it is a part. This relation-
ship, not the preoccupation with specialties like theories of knowledge,
ethics or history of philosophy, constitutes the essence of philosophy.”
This is true in a double sense. The relationship to the whole must also be
expressed in the language of the community, the vernacular. The general
findings of scholars, thinkers, and researchers must be couched in the
general language.
The responsibility of intellectuals is not exhausted by fealty to the
truth. Some twenty years after Chomsky’s exemplary essay, this respon-
sibility requires more than ever a measure of boldness, an anarchist
suspicion of experts and officials. If intellectuals are to be more than
responsible specialists—even radical and critical specialists—they must risk
irresponsibility and subvert specialization and its jargon.
(1989)

∗ ∗ ∗
 Academic Conceits

The Myth of Multiculturalism

Multiculturalism, cultural diversity, cultural pluralism: in the United
States few causes have won such widespread enthusiasm. These phrases
kick off a thousand speeches and articles; they appear in hundreds of
essays and books. Government officials, college administrators, corpo-
rate executives, museum curators, high-school principals—to name just
a few—declare their commitment to multiculturalism. One sign of the
times: the American Council of Education published a guide to programs
and publications on cultural diversity that runs four hundred pages.
Even conservatives, who might be expected to resist a liberal steam-
roller, often join in, confining their objections to fringe formations, not
the thing itself. Publicly at least, they hesitate to protest larger multicul-
turalism. To establish its credentials, a conservative foundation puts out
a magazine called Diversity edited by an African American with a Jewish
name, David S. Bernstein.
These causes were not always so popular. Horace M. Kallen, the Amer-
ican philosopher who virtually copyrighted the term “cultural pluralism,”
stated in 1924 that the idea was “popular nowhere in the United States.”
He knew why. Vast immigration and the First World War aggravated
fears of foreigners; Americanization and assimilation, not pluralism and
diversity, became the watchwords. For Kallen the revived Ku Klux Klan

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 21

Switzerland AG 2022
R. Jacoby, Intellectuals in Politics and Academia, Political Philosophy
and Public Purpose, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07646-6_2
22 R. JACOBY

exemplified a repressive American conformity: “The alternative before

Americans is Kultur Klux Klan or Cultural Pluralism.”
Seventy years later everyone has joined Kallen in celebrating “cul-
tural pluralism.” Why? Is this a case of victorious liberalism? Has a
dissenting program supported by Kallen and a few other intellectuals won
over everyone? Has a new and varied immigration forced recognition
of cultural diversity? Have Americans become more tolerant, liberal, and
cosmopolitan? Perhaps, but this is hardly the whole story—and perhaps
none of it.
Let me put my cards on the table: multiculturalism and the kindred
terms of cultural diversity and cultural pluralism are a new cant. Inces-
santly invoked, they signify anything and everything. This is not simply
an example of sloppy terms; these phrases have become a new ideology.
To put it provocatively: multiculturalism flourishes as a program while
it weakens as a reality. The drumbeat of cultural diversity covers an
unwelcome truth: cultural differences are diminishing, not increasing. For
better or worse only one culture thrives in the United States, the culture
of business, work and consuming.
The difficulty of arguing, even stating this, derives from the confu-
sion that besets the terms. “Multiculturalism,” “cultural diversity” and
“cultural pluralism” all contain a protean word: culture. What is culture?
A small library could be assembled with books that address this ques-
tion. If shelved by date, however, such books might roughly reflect a
conceptual shift. In the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
the notion that “culture” meant “cultivating” art, philosophy, and spirit
dwindled. From Matthew Arnold in Culture and Anarchy (1869) to T.S.
Eliot in Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948) writers sought
to preserve “culture” as the turf of education and art, contrasting it to
a more material “civilization.” The effort was futile: liberals, Marxists,
Freudians, anthropologists—among others—rejected as elitist and reac-
tionary any distinction between the two concepts. Arnold’s book opened
by quoting a liberal politician who denounced “culture” as meaning “a
smattering of the two dead languages of Greek and Latin.” This idea
became common currency: culture reeked of aristocratic irrelevancies.
Neither Marxists nor Freudians saw any justification in making a sepa-
ration. “I scorn to distinguish between culture and civilization,” stated
Freud.
 ACADEMIC CONCEITS 23

Yet it was less socialist or Freudian materialism than anthropological

relativism which carried the day. In the name of liberalism, anthropolo-
gists effectively dispatched as prejudiced the idea of culture as learning
or cultivation. The key work may have been a twentieth-century anthro-
pological bestseller, Ruth Benedict’s 1934 Patterns of Culture. Bene-
dict surveyed three peoples—the American Indians of the southwestern
Pueblo and of the Northwest Coast, and the Dobu of Melanesia—and
argued succinctly not only against biological determinism, but for the
relativity of cultural standards. “Social thinking at the present time,” she
concluded, “has no more important task before it than that of taking
adequate account of cultural relativity.”
Benedict drew upon other anthropologists like Franz Boas and Alfred
Kroeber who also sought to undercut cultural chauvinism. Cultures vary
around the globe, all people have a culture, and all cultures are roughly
equal: this was the drift of much of their thought. “The comparative study
of culture,” stated Kroeber has diminished “ethnocentrism—the parochial
conviction of the superiority of one’s own culture—from which so much
intolerance springs… Anthropologists now agree that each culture must
be examined in terms of its own structure and values.”
The problem with this anthropological relativism is not its tolerance
and liberalism; rather it obscures what constitutes distinct cultures. When
“culture” is defined as an “ensemble of tools, codes, rituals, behaviors”,
not simply every people, but every group and subgroup has a “culture”.
The cultures Benedict studied differed dramatically. At least no one would
confuse the Dobuan growing practices with those of present-day farmers
or suburban gardeners. “Yams are conceived as persons,” Benedict wrote
of Dobu farming, “and are believed to wander nightly from garden to
garden…Incantations lure the roaming yams to remain in one’s own
garden at the expense of the garden in which they were planted.”
Once this anthropological relativism shifts from wandering yams or
Zuni marriage rituals to American society, things get trickier. What consti-
tutes a “culture” within American society? To judge some group behavior
as not comprising a culture—as un-cultured—appears ethnocentric or
biased; rather, many anthropologists, sociologists, and observers conclude
that anything and everything might be a culture. It is then a short step to
talking of a “culture” of the poor, drug addicts, dog fanciers, sports fans,
computer hackers, suburbanites, and so on. Each has its rituals, codes,
and language that constitute a culture.
24 R. JACOBY

Of course, cultural diversity or multiculturalism does not usually

encompass the “culture” of drug addicts or dog fanciers; it refers to the
“culture” of African Americans or Korean Americans, or Latinos. Yet the
relativizing of culture guts multiculturalism, which supposes that every
group has a distinct culture. In a pre-modern world, separate groups
might develop singular cultures, but in a highly organized American
society the maintenance of unique cultures is improbable; neither the
means nor the requisite isolation exist. To talk of distinct American “cul-
tures” denotes something very different from the culture of the Dobus.
The American cultures partake of a larger American industrial society;
they carry its signature in their souls and their wallets.
To put this sharply: America’s multiple “cultures” exist within a
single consumer society. Professional sports, Hollywood movies, auto-
mobiles, designer clothes, name-brand sneakers, television and videos,
commercial music, and CDs pervade America’s multiculturalism. These
“cultures” live, work and dream in the same society. Chicanos, like
Chinese Americans, want to hold good jobs, live in the suburbs, and drive
well-engineered cars. This is fine—so does almost everyone—but how do
these activities or aspirations compose unique cultures?
Amid the interminable discussions on multiculturalism virtually no one
admits that the diverse “cultures” do not offer any real alternative to
American life, leisure or business. A section of the Left may be the worst
sinner or the most hypocritical; it jabbers about diversity, hegemony and
“the other,” but its vision is no different than anyone else’s. Heated
disputes turn on curriculum, programs, and hiring; the implicit goal is
always the same: what is the best way to enter and prosper in the American
mainstream? Exceptions are small, insular communities like the Amish and
Hasidic Jews, who stand outside of the mainstream—and largely outside
of discussions of multiculturalism.
Obviously, all groups do not participate in American society with
the same success. Those excluded because of racial or ethnic injustice,
however, do not necessarily constitute a distinct culture—far from it. In
his provocative book on poor black children in Philadelphia, On the Edge,
Carl H. Nightingale found that these kids increasingly have succumbed
to consumer society, which targets them as vulnerable. Precisely because
they are excluded and humiliated, they become fanatical devotees of name
brands, gold chains, and pricey cars—insignias of American success.
 ACADEMIC CONCEITS 25

“As soon as they are able, the kids begin to demand the basic building
blocks of the b-boy outfit. Already at five or six, many kids in the neigh-
borhood,” Nightingale reports, “can recite the whole canon of adult
luxury—from Gucci, Evan Piccone, and Pierre Cardin, to Mercedes and
BMW…From the age of ten, kids become thoroughly engrossed in the
Nike’s and Reebok’s cult of the sneaker…” Then comes the fascina-
tion with rappers and drug dealers. The “ubiquitous rap tapes” show
“a preoccupation with consumption and acquisition that never charac-
terized the old soul and R&B hits.” The lure of the local drug dealers
arises from their “glorification of blackness…with virtuoso performances
of conspicuous consumption.” Nightingale concludes that “the cult of
consumption has permeated the emotional and cultural life of poor urban
African-American kids” with devastating consequences.
No group wants to hear that it lacks culture, but that is hardly
the issue; rather the question is how different the various cultures are
from each other and from the dominant American culture. For instance,
scholars from Melville Herkovits to Sterling Stuckey have documented the
persistence of African tales, songs, and language in the American black
experience. This is a valid and valuable endeavor, but it does not mean
that in the 1990s African—Americans constitute a distinct culture—any
more than Italian-Americans or Polish-Americans.
To what degree have ethnic cultures survived or flourished in the
United States? The argument has waxed and waned, but since the 1960s
the cheerleaders have drowned out the sceptics. In his 1981 book The
Ethnic Myth Steven Steinberg argued against the cultural and ethnic
romantics. The ethnic revival, he stated, cannot undo the long-term
“atrophy of ethnic cultures and the decline of ethnic communities”; the
revival is really a “dying gasp” of groups as they enter the mainstream. In
a new edition of the book, Steinberg comments on his “utter failure” to
slow the ethnic hype.
Yet the evidence for the loss of distinct ethnic cultures is every-
where. For instance, observers regularly cite the number of languages
spoken by American children as proof of cultural diversity. Schools in
Fairfax County, Virginia serve students from seventy different languages.
While this presents enormous pedagogical problems, it does not challenge
the domination of English. Most studies conclude that new immigrants
acquire English as fast, if not faster than previous generations. Second-
and third-generation Korean Americans or Haitian Americans will speak
English, and probably only English.
26 R. JACOBY

Indeed the United States is a relentlessly monolingual society—

much more than other multicultural societies. Kallen’s favorite example
of a harmonious and diverse society was Switzerland, where bi- and
tri-lingualism are common. In his damning study of the American
curriculum, Tourists in Our Own Land, Clifford Adelman of the US
Department of Education remarks on the minuscule number of serious
students of foreign languages. “In all the contemporary discussions of
‘multiculturalism’ and ‘cultural diversity’,” he complains, “we hear little,
if anything, about native language and language maintenance, let alone
do we see native speakers of English reaching out to immerse them-
selves in another culture through second-language acquisition.” Without
studying another language, states Adelman, people “will never be more
than tourists.” In different terms, learning about Africa through Kwanzaa,
a popular holiday based on African ceremonies that was created by an
American professor, is like learning about Germany through Oktoberfest.
Good evidence exists for a counterargument. The racial mix in schools
and campuses; the alterations in the curriculum; the spread of ethnic
restaurants and eating; the new immigrants: all can be chalked up as
proof of certain multiculturalism. None of this can or should be dismissed.
Confirmation of new cultural heterogamy can be found in all corners of
life. The friends of my daughter, who attended a Los Angeles public high
school, included a Korean American, an Eritrean, and a Japanese African
American. We joked that they looked like a little United Nations when
they go out together.
Of course, they were going out shopping. While the face and faces
of American society have unquestionably changed, the consuming heart
has not skipped a beat. The new immigration has improved American
eating or, at least, widened the spectrum of restaurants. But can anyone
claim that Thai, Mexican, Chinese, Italian, and Middle Eastern food bars
in the local mall illustrate multiculturalism and not the great leveler,
consumerism? Does the fact that salsa sales surpassed ketchup sales signify
that the United States has become culturally diverse or just that more
people eat Mexican American food?
Indeed the most devoted multiculturalists might be American corpo-
rations, a point which David Rieff has recently argued. “Are the multi-
culturalists truly unaware,” he asked, “of how closely their treasured
catchphrases—‘cultural diversity,’ ‘difference,’ the need to ‘do away with
boundaries’—resemble the stock phrases of the modern corporation:
‘product diversification,’ ‘the global market,’ and ‘the boundary-less
 ACADEMIC CONCEITS 27

company’?” AT&T sponsors ads aimed at thirty different groups. Time

magazine in a special issue on “The New Face of America” quotes
an AT&T manager with the revealing title, Director of Multicultural
Marketing. “Marketing today,” she states, “is part of anthropology.”
If marketing and consumerism call the shots, why are the issues of
cultural identity so charged? Why is America obsessed with cultural diver-
sity? I offer two reasons. For starters, “cultural diversity” is a genteel
phrase for ethnic and racial parity and sometimes for affirmative action.
Instead of saying we need more African Americans or Latinos in a foun-
dation, corporation, or school, the preferred phrase is we need more
“cultural diversity.” This sounds ethereal and elevating.
Proportional representation of racial groups can be argued on other
grounds, however. To read racial and ethnic inequalities as cultural differ-
ences is not only inaccurate but make a bad situation worse. It fosters
group chauvinism and enmities; it infers every group has a special perspec-
tive and intelligence, which each member represents. An African American
is hired, then, not from simple justice but for cultural reasons; he or she
carries a distinctive sensibility.
To be sure, cultural diversity is more than a bureaucratic nicety. It taps
into the emotional dimensions of self and community, which today are
as fragile as the rainforest. Cultural loss may be inevitable for productive
citizens of an advanced industrial society. The cost, and the loss, give rise
to regrets, pain, and sometimes anger; few embrace a vision of self and
society stripped of a personal history and community. As people willingly
or unwillingly surrender their past, they make gestures toward it. The
“uprooted,” the title of Oscar Handlin’s classic work on immigration,
search for “roots,” the title of Alex Haley’s book. The rooted don’t have
to search.
The quest for roots and cultural identity may be laudable, benign,
or hostile—or all three. It may involve real learning about the past,
and perhaps real self-transformation; it usually settles on flags, bumper
stickers, or T-shirts (‘Kiss me, I’m Italian’), now conveniently available
from a new apparel chain, “Nationalities,” catering to the ethnically
proud; it may become prickly and aggressive. Belligerent affirmations of
cultural identity may be most frequent where the loss is most striking. At
elite universities, Chicano or African-American students are on the path
from the barrios and ghettos to the working and consuming mainstream.
They are buying in and being bought out. They know it; they want it,
and they half hate it.
28 R. JACOBY

Little suggests that any group except the most marginal and stub-
born can maintain, or even wants to maintain, a distinct culture amid
American society. This is not a new proposition. “Cultural pluralism,” as
Kallen formulated it, may have been a brave effort to preserve cultural
identity in the face of a repressive Americanization. It was this, and some-
thing more—or less; it was also a half-step in cultural accommodation.
Kallen, born in Silesia, was brought to the United States by his father, an
orthodox rabbi; the father’s implacable religious world repelled the son.
“He was the last of the old school of Jews,” Kallen wrote of his father,
“who made absolutely no concession to their environment.”
Kallen wanted Judaism to move toward the mainstream, to make
it ‘secular, humanist, scientific, conditioned on the industrial economy,
without having ceased to be livingly Jewish.” Kallen and others who
joined him in the program of “cultural pluralism,” like the African-
American Alain Locke, may have been more successful than they wished.
Today the terms “cultural pluralism,” “multiculturalism” and “cultural
diversity” summon up less different lives in different cultures than
different lifestyles in American society. The “diverse” cultures all dream
of, plan for and sometimes enjoy the same American success. Only the
ideologues of multiculturalism have not heard the news.
(1994)

∗ ∗ ∗

Post-Colonialism and the Marginality Industry

“Oh, it’s something post-colonial,” responded my friend to the question
about a birthday present, a piece of pottery with an unusual pattern. Was
it a Mayan pattern? Persian? No, it was post-colonial. Welcome to the
newest field hurtling along the disciplinary turnpike: post-colonial studies
and theory. Everywhere the new discipline seems to be providing answers
and getting attention.
Both Columbia University Press and Routledge published 500-page
anthologies on the subject and one of these, The Post-Colonial Studies
Reader, has already gone back to press. The PMLA, the main publi-
cation of the Modern Language Association, weighed in with a special
number on “Colonialism and the Postcolonial Condition,” which, its
editor informs us, generated more submissions than any previous special
 ACADEMIC CONCEITS 29

topics issue. Critical Inquiry, Social Text, Diacritics and the Yale French
Studies already examined the terrain; and the field encompasses several
high-profile academics such as Edward Said and Gaytri Chakravorty
Spivak. There is much more: numerous conferences on the topic and the
burgeoning and related discipline of “Subaltern Studies.”
Now the problem: What is this new territory? If you think history or
sociology or anthropology has an identity crisis, try post-colonial studies.
Its enthusiasts themselves don’t know what it is. Indeed, this is part of its
charm. Post-colonial theory—I’m using theory and studies interchange-
ably—is obsessed with itself. Few agree on where it came from, what
it includes or where it is going. Even the “post” is up for grabs. One
school maintains that post-colonial refers to societies after the onset of
colonialism; another restricts the field to the period after the end of legal
colonialization following World War II. The difference? About four and
half-centuries.
“Colonial” fares no better. Some adherents maintain that imperialism
defines colonialism and its sequel post-colonialism, which restricts the
terrain to South America, Africa, and parts of Asia. Others argue that the
term includes the “white settler” colonies like Canada, Australia, New
Zealand, and even the United States. What is left out? Very little. In their
1989 The Empire Writes Back, a founding text for the post-colonial theo-
rists, Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin estimate that three
quarters of the globe suffered from colonialism. Here is a new field that
claims four centuries and most of the planet as its domain. Not bad. One
anthology includes articles on teaching English in Canada, female circum-
cision in Africa, jazz and the West Indian novel, and Gerardus Mercator,
the sixteenth-century Flemish geographer and cartographer.
More than its territorial reach, a conceptual and political orienta-
tion announces post-colonialism. Marxism begot structuralism and post-
structuralism; post-structuralism begot deconstructionism; deconstruc-
tionism begot postmodernism and they both gave rise to post-colonial
studies. The post-colonialists endlessly bounce off the theories of Gramsci,
Foucault, Derrida, Gaytri Spivak, and Edward Said. They are also schol-
arly progeny of the sixties and specifically of what has been called the
second phase of decolonization or the wars of national liberation.
For a historical moment in the late 1950s and early 60s, not only were
the old forces of colonialism being defeated in Cuba, Algeria and Vietnam
, but, as many believed, new cultures were being formed. Today the hope
is dead, a victim of relentless internationalization and local tyrannies. Yet
30 R. JACOBY

the idea of resisting Western domination and preserving non-Western

cultures lives on—at least in universities.
One starting point for Post-colonial studies is 1961, when Franz Fanon
published Wretched of the Earth and Michel Foucault his first influen-
tial book, Madness and Civilization. As much by their lives as by their
ideas, Fanon and Foucault undergird the field. A black Martinique, who
was educated in France, Fanon became a psychiatrist devoted to Alge-
rian liberation. Foucault was a philosophical and sexual rebel, a theorist
of insanity, power, punishment, and sexuality, who died of AIDS. Very
schematically, it is possible to situate post-colonial studies at the intersec-
tion of Foucault, a theorist of discourse and domination, and Fanon, a
theorist of cultural and national liberation.
Wretched of the Earth reverberated with the emancipatory tones of
Marx and Hegel and sported an introduction by Jean-Paul Sartre. As
Edward Said stated in Culture and Imperialism, Fanon captured the
nature of imperialism that “lingers” by way of cultural oppression and
enslavement; Fanon’s call for national liberation was also a call for cultural
liberation. Though hardly unique to him, Fanon infused with rare power
and eloquence the idea of a cultural revolt against Western domination.
The first sentence of Fanon’s earlier book, Black Skins, White Masks
read: “I ascribe a basic importance to the phenomenon of language”; it is
through language, he went on, that “the other” is created. Here Fanon
and Foucault almost touch. By reason of almost deliberate inconsistencies,
Foucault resists summary, but in his early work he sought to uncover
the anonymous and hidden codes in discourse that virtually create reality.
Later, as he turned to prison reform and leftist politics, Foucault argued
that the codes did not simply structure understanding, but structured
power or, more emphatically, they were power itself.
The post-colonial theorists, who in an earlier incarnation were known
as post-colonial discourse theorists, adopted these ideas about “rules”
and “discourse.” Drawing upon Foucault, to whose work he is “greatly
indebted,” Edward Said’s 1978 Orientalism stands as as the essential
book of post-colonial theory, a case study of discourse as domination.
“I have found it useful here to employ Michel Foucault’s notion of a
discourse,” states Said in the preface. “My contention is that without
examining Orientalism as a discourse one cannot possibly understand
the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was
able to manage—and even produce—the Orient politically, sociologi-
cally, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively…” Ranging
 ACADEMIC CONCEITS 31

widely over scholarly, scientific and imaginative writing, Said shows how
the West, mainly England and France, “represented”—and in effect,
created—something called the Orient. He closes his book alluding to the
national struggles for liberation and calling for the end of the “worldwide
hegemony of Orientalism.”
In recent years the book has come under sharp criticism from the right
and the left. In Islam and the West, Bernard Lewis charges that Oriental-
ists no more invented the Orient than classicists invented ancient Greece.
Aijaz Ahmad in his In Theory finds in Said a Manichean simplification of
colonial reality into “east” and “west.” No one should read Orientalism
today without considering these criticisms, especially Ahmad’s uncom-
promising evaluation. Yet Orientalism undoubtedly was the key book
launching post-colonial studies.
From Foucault, Said, and others there arose a series of vexing issues
concerning “representation,” “subjectivity,” and “agency.” Foucault
implied that the individual subject disappears in a network of power
and discourse. But this notion leaves much in the dark. Are there truths
that go beyond deceptive representations of “the other”? Could Western
scholars or travelers say anything about the Orient that was not tainted
and distorted? Could, or should, the Orient only speak for itself—or was
there no such thing as “the Orient”? Said’s epigraph for Orientalism states
“They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented.” Why can’t
they represent themselves?
In fact, the epigraph seems singularly inappropriate; it comes from The
Eighteenth Brumaire, where Marx discussed why in the aftermath of the
1848 revolution the “small-holding” peasants of France rallied to Louis
Napoleon, who hardly governed in their interests. They saw him as a
savior because they lived under conditions of “stupefied seclusion” that
did not allow them to perceive their own class interests. Inasmuch as
they could not “represent” themselves, the peasants delivered themselves
to adventurers like Louis Napoleon. Surely Said did not want to imply
that “Orientals” were incapable of representing themselves and willingly
handed themselves over to Western interpreters. In any event, this ques-
tion of representation haunts another fundamental text of post-colonial
studies, Gayatri Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?”.
In this involuted and opaque essay, Spivak weighed into the issue of
representation—can the subordinated classes speak for themselves? One
obvious answer—of course, they can—is challenged by Spivak. Drawing
on Derrida she contests the belief in some pristine and uncontaminated
32 R. JACOBY

essence that can be ferreted out; all subjectivity, she implies, is fractured
and tainted. At the same time, she notes that the search for the voice of
the oppressed is conducted by Western academics who, in effect, nomi-
nate themselves to represent the unrepresented, perpetuating a familiar
domination. Spivak’s method seems to rule out both representation and
the represented. Where does that leave us? The transition from abstract
proposition to concrete situation renders Spivak’s argument even dicier.
Toward the end of her essay, she takes up the case of widow sacri-
fice in India, known to the British as “suttee” or “sati.” How can the
“post-colonial theorist” interpret the eradication of this practice by the
British imperialists in 1829? Spivak offers two sentences that capture the
dilemma. The British actions might be viewed as, “White men saving
brown women from brown men.” The Indian nationalist might respond,
“The women actually wanted to die.” Neither formulation is satisfactory,
and neither allows the women to speak. Spivak tacks back and forth but
seems ultimately to suggest that the British turned a ritual into a crime;
and that “suttee” might be read as a perverse act of freedom, even of
resistance. “Can the ideology of sati, coming from the history of the
periphery,” she asks, “be sublated into any model of interventionist prac-
tice?” The answer to this awkward question is a hesitant yes. In an Indian
woman’s suicide of 1929, Spivak sees nothing less than an “subaltern
rewriting of the social text of sati-suicide.” The subaltern may not be able
to speak, but at least can die.
The issues broached by Said and Spivak attracted the post-colonial
studies group, which consists mainly of leftist professors of English and
literature. The reason for the appeal is obvious. Text and discourse are
the natural turf of English professors. Moreover, these academics face a
crisis of dwindling materials; classic books have been studied to death.
With the added allure of subverting Western hegemony, post-colonial
studies open up new turf and allow the re-examination of old ground.
The “post” professors can legitimately study Australian Aboriginal oral
culture—something traditional English professors ignored—as well as
reconsider, for instance, Joseph Conrad and Jane Austen, which Said does
in Culture and Imperialism.
Troubling questions arise, however. As they move out from traditional
literature into political economy, sociology, history, and anthropology, do
the post-colonial theorists master these fields or just poke about? Are they
serious students of colonial history and culture or do they just pepper
their writings with references to Gramsci and hegemony?
 ACADEMIC CONCEITS 33

The first sentence of the special topics issue of the PMLA announces:
“The twentieth century has seen the end of official colonial rule in much
of the non-European world and, as many have argued, the simulta-
neous recolonization or neocolonization of the globe by multinational
economic forces.” This is by a Toronto University English professor,
Linda Hutcheon, in a journal devoted to “the study of language and
literature.” She continues, “Such a general statement, however, risks
downplaying the significant differences between the historical, political
and cultural effects of empire in settler colonies (such as English and
French Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and even the United States) and
the diverse nonsettler colonies of the Indian subcontinent, the Caribbean,
Indonesia, Korea, Latin American, and the many nations of Africa.”
This stuff drives conservative nuts. Here are English professors who
blather about multinational economic forces and differences between
settler and nonsettler colonies instead of analyzing literature. Even some
leftists like Aijaz Ahmad, a professorial fellow at the Nehru Memorial
Museum and Library in New Delhi and Arif Dirlik , a Duke University
history professor, object to the loose literary formulations that pervade
post-colonial studies.
Writing in Late Imperial Culture, Ahmad states that the phrase “post-
colonial” first emerged in discussions about Pakistan and breakaway
Bangladesh in the early 1970s. The term smacked of a specific time and
place and referred to a particular problem—the nature of the state in
a “post-colonial” society. No longer. In the hands of literary theorists
the term comes to indicate a global post-colonial condition, as if one
could abstract some essential “post-coloniality” from India, South Africa,
Vietnam, and the United States, all of which had been colonies. For
Ahmad, the title of Gayatri Spivak’s collection, The Postcolonial Critic,
“with a notable emphasis on the ‘the,’” nicely captures the literary
conceit.
Discipline hopping and chutzpa are hardly ills in themselves and they
may be good for the soul. They also testify to dissatisfaction with a
specialization that often cripples thought. The question of how someone’s
work “fits into the field” constitutes the most repressive academic inquiry.
Perhaps it doesn’t. So what? In breaking down intellectual compartments
and expanding the cultural terrain, the post-colonial theorists force old
and new scholars to justify and rethink what they are doing. This is all
to the good. However, a fracture, almost a hypocrisy, runs through the
new field that sabotages its reach and promise. The post-colonial theorists
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
condensed from the sea, and fresh water always brings a big price.
There are no streams anywhere for miles around. The town is
situated in the crater of an extinct volcano, and there is one great
depression near by in which some famous stone tanks were made a
thousand or so years ago. These tanks are so big that if they were
cleaned out they might hold thirty million gallons of water. The water
is caught when it rains, and is sometimes auctioned off to the highest
bidder. The receipts go to the British Government, to which a good
rain may bring in fifteen or twenty thousand dollars or more.
This is my second visit to Aden. My first was sixteen years ago
when I stopped here on my way around the world. I do not see that
the town has changed and I doubt whether it has any more people
than it had then. The population is made up of all the nations and
tribes common to the Indian Ocean. It contains Arabs, Africans,
Jews, Portuguese, and East Indians. There are about four thousand
Europeans, including merchants, officials, and soldiers. The majority
of the people are Arabs and the prevailing colour is black. There are
tall, lean, skinny black Bedouins from interior Arabia, who believe in
the Prophet, and go through their prayers five times a day. There are
black Mohammedans from Somaliland and black Christians from
Abyssinia. In addition there are Parsees, Hindus, and East Indian
Mohammedans of various shades of yellow and brown. A few of the
Africans are woolly-headed, but more of them have wavy hair. The
hair of the women hangs down in corkscrew curls on both sides of
their faces. Of these people neither sex wears much clothing. The
men have rags around the waist, while the women’s sole garments
are skirts which reach to the feet.
The East Indians, who are everywhere, do most of the retail
business and trading. They are found peddling on every street
corner. They dress according to their caste and religion. The
Parsees, who are fire-worshippers, wear black preacher-like coats
and tall hats of the style of an inverted coal scuttle. The East Indian
Mohammedans wear turbans and the Hindus wrap themselves up in
great sheets of white cotton. There are besides many Greeks and
Italians, and not a few Persians. The English dress in white and wear
big helmets to keep off the sun.
 This is the land of the camel. Caravans are coming in and going
out of the city every day bringing in bags of Mocha coffee and gums
and taking out European goods and other supplies to the various
oases. There is a considerable trade with Yemen as well as with the
tribes of southeastern Arabia. There are always camels lying in the
market places, and one sees them blubbering and crying as they are
loaded and unloaded. They are the most discontented beasts upon
earth, and are as mean as they look. One bit at me this afternoon as
I passed it, and I am told that they never become reconciled to their
masters. Nevertheless, they are the freight animals of this part of the
world, and the desert could not get along without them. They furnish
the greater part of the milk for the various Arab settlements, and the
people make their tents of camel’s hair. They are, in fact, the cows of
the desert. They are of many different breeds, varying as much in
character as horses. There are some breeds that correspond to the
Percheron, and the best among them can carry half a ton at a load.
There are others fitted solely for riding and passenger travel. The
ordinary freight camel makes only about three miles an hour and
eighteen miles is a good day’s work. The best racing camels will
travel twenty hours at a stretch, and will cover one hundred miles in
a day. Seventy-five miles in ten hours is not an uncommon journey
for an Arabian racer, and much better speed has been made. As to
prices, an ordinary freight camel brings about thirty dollars, but a
good riding camel costs one hundred dollars and upward.
Have you ever heard how the camel was created? Here is the
story of its origin as told by the Arabs. They say that God first formed
the horse by taking up a handful of the swift south wind and blowing
upon it. The horse, however, was not satisfied with his making. He
complained to God that his neck was too short for easy grazing and
that his hoofs were so hard that they sank in the sand. Moreover, he
said there was no hump on his back to steady the saddle.
Thereupon, to satisfy the horse, God created the camel, making him
according to the equine’s suggestions. And when the horse saw his
ideal in flesh and blood he was frightened at its ugliness and
galloped away. Since then there is no horse that is not scared when
it first sees a camel.
 This story makes me think of the Arab tradition as to how God first
made the water buffalo, which, as you know, is about the ugliest
beast that ever wore horns, hair, and skin. God’s first creation was
the beautiful cow. When He had finished it the devil happened that
way, and as he saw it he laughed at the job, and sneered out that he
could make a better beast with his eyes shut. Thereupon the Lord
gave him some material such as He had put into the cow and told
him to go to work. The devil wrought all day and all night, and the
result was the water buffalo.
I have made inquiries here and elsewhere as to the Arabian horse.
He is a comparatively scarce animal and he does not run wild in the
desert, as some people suppose. Indeed, comparatively few of the
Arabian tribes have horses, and the best are kept on the plateau of
Najd, in the centre of the peninsula. They belong to the Anazah tribe,
which is one of the oldest of all, and which claims to date back to the
Flood. It is a wealthy tribe, and it has been breeding horses for many
generations. The best stock has pedigrees going back to the time of
Mohammed, and the very choicest come from five mares which were
owned by the Prophet and blessed by him. These horses seldom go
out of Arabia. They are owned by the chiefs, and are not sold, except
in times of the direst necessity. Now and then a few get into Egypt
and other parts of North Africa, and the Sultan of Turkey has usually
had some for his stables.
It is only occasionally that a pure-bred Arabian goes to Europe or
the United States. Two of the best stallions we ever imported were
those which General Grant brought from Constantinople. This was, I
think, during his tour around the world. While in Turkey he and the
Sultan visited the royal stables together. As they looked over the
horses the Sultan told Grant to pick out the one he liked best, and he
designated a dapple gray called the Leopard. “It is yours,” said the
Sultan, “and this also,” pointing to a four-year-old colt called Linden
Tree. In due time these two horses arrived in the United States and
were put on General Ed Beale’s farm near Washington. They were
used for breeding, and they produced about fifty fine colts.
 CHAPTER XXIX
IN MOMBASA

Mombasa is the terminus of the Uganda Railway as it comes down

from Lake Victoria. It is the port of entry for all the sea-borne trade of
the seven provinces of British East Africa, or Kenya Colony, as it is
now called, Uganda, and adjacent territory. It is on an island halfway
down the coast of East Africa and just below the Equator, where old
Mother Earth is widest and thickest. If I should stick a peg down
under the chair in which I am writing into the old lady’s waist, and
then travel westward in a straight line I would soon reach the upper
end of Lake Tanganyika, and a little later come out on the Atlantic
Ocean just above the mouth of the Congo. Crossing that great sea, I
should make my next landing in South America, at the mouth of the
Amazon, and, going up the Amazon valley, I should pass Quito, in
Ecuador, and then drop down to the Pacific. From there on the trip to
the peg stuck in at Mombasa would comprise sixteen or more
thousand miles of water travel. I should cross the Pacific and Indian
oceans, and the only solid ground on the way would be the islands of
New Guinea, Borneo, and Sumatra.
Three thousand miles from Port Said and more than six thousand
miles from London, Mombasa is far below the latitude of the
Philippines. It is just about a day by ship north of Zanzibar and thirty
days’ sailing from New York.
So far, most of my travels in Africa have been in the sands, with
only a patch of green now and then. I was close to the Sahara in
Morocco, and I travelled many hundreds of miles over it while in
Algeria and Tunisia. In Tripoli my eyes were made sore by the glare
of the Libyan wastes and their dust blew across the Nile valley
during my stay in Egypt and the British Sudan. The Arabian desert
was on both sides of us as we came down the Red Sea and its
sands several times covered the ship. We had the rockiest of all
deserts in southern Arabia while that of Italian Somaliland was not
any better.
Here at Mombasa we are in the luxuriant tropics where the
surroundings remind me of Solomon’s song. All nature seems joyful.
The rain has conquered the sun and there are mosses, vines, and
trees everywhere, The shores of the mainland are bordered with
coconuts, we have mighty baobab trees loaded with green scattered
over the island, and even its cliffs are moss grown.
A jungle of green on a foundation of coral, Mombasa is only a mile
or so wide and three miles in length, but it rises well up out of the
sea and is so close to the continent that one can almost hear the
wind blow through the coconut groves over the way. On the island
itself the jungle has been cut up into wide roads. There is a lively
town with a polyglot population at one end of it, and the hills are
spotted with the homes of the British officials. The island has two
good harbours, a little one and a big one. The little one, which is in
the main part of the town, is frequented by small craft. The big one
could hold all the ships that sail the East Coast, and the people here
say it is to be the great port of this side of the continent. The larger
harbour is called Kilindini, a word that means “the deep place,” It has
only a few warehouse sheds and a pier above it, the main
settlements being across the island four miles away.
It was in Kilindini that I landed, and that under difficulties. Our ship
was anchored far out and our baggage was taken ashore in native
boats. Finding the main quay was crowded, I had my boatman go
direct to the custom house and let us out on the beach. The custom
house is a little shed about big enough for one cow situated so high
up above the water that our trunks had to be carried out upon the
heads of the Negroes. The water came up to their middles, but
nevertheless they waded through it and brought both us and our
baggage to the land. The customs examination was lenient. The
officers looked through our trunks for guns and ammunition and
warned us that we could not hunt elephants and hippopotami without
a two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar license. A little later the natives again
took our trunks and lugged them about a quarter of a mile to the top
of a hill, where we got the cars for Mombasa.
 The word “cars” savours of electricity or steam. The cars I took
were run by men. Here in East Africa human muscle forms the
cheapest power. The wages of the natives run from five cents a day
upward, while in the interior there are many who will work eight or
nine hours for three cents. The result is that the trolley cars are
propelled by men. Each car consists of a platform about as big as a
kitchen table, with wheels underneath and an awning overhead. In
the middle of the platform there is a bench accommodating two to
four persons. The wheels run on a track about two feet in width, and
each car is pushed from behind by one or more bare-legged and
bare-headed men who run as they shove it up hill and down. There
are such car tracks all over the island, with switches to the homes of
the various officials. There are private cars as well as public ones,
and everyone who is anybody has his own private car with his
coolies to push him to and from work. At the beginning and closing of
his office hours, which here are from eight until twelve and from two
until four, the tracks are filled with these little cars, each having one
or more officials riding in state to or from the government buildings.
 Kilindini harbour, or “the deep place”, is connected with the town of Mombasa by
a mile-long tramway, the cars of which are pushed by native runners. Mombasa is
the chief port of Kenya Colony.
 In this African village there are 25,000 natives, representing perhaps a hundred
tribes, each with its own dress and customs. All, however, are eager buyers of the
gaudy print cloths in the bazaars of the Hindu merchants.

In Kenya Colony the East Indians complicate matters for the British government.
They practically control the retail trade and, having grown rich and prosperous,
have begun to raise embarrassing political issues.
 I wish I could show you this old town of Mombasa. It began before
Columbus discovered America, and the citizens can show you the
very spot where Vasco da Gama landed when he came here from
India shortly after he discovered the new route to Asia by the Cape
of Good Hope. He landed here in 1498 at just about the time that
Columbus was making his third voyage to America. Even then
Mombasa was a city and Da Gama describes it. A little later it
became the property of the Portuguese. The most prominent building
in the town is the great red Fort of Jesus, built by the Portuguese in
1593, when the city was made the capital of their East African
possessions. It was later the scene of massacres and bloody fights
between Portuguese and Arabs. To-day the red flag of the Sultan of
Zanzibar flies over the old fort, now used as a prison, admission to
which is forbidden.
After the Portuguese were driven out the Arabs held Mombasa for
many years, and it was an Arab ruler, the Sultan of Zanzibar, who
owned it when the British came in. It still belongs to him in a nominal
way. He has leased it to the British for so much a year, but his flag
floats above John Bull’s ensign everywhere on the island.
Most of the population of Mombasa is African. Of the twenty-six
thousand inhabitants, only about three hundred and fifty are white.
There are people here from all parts of the interior, some of them as
black as jet, and a scattering few who are chocolate brown or yellow.
These natives live in huts off by themselves in a large village
adjoining the European and Asiatic quarters. Their houses are of
mud plastered upon a framework of poles and thatched with straw.
The poles are put together without nails. There is not a piece of
metal in any of them, except on the roof, where here and there a
hole has been patched up with a rusty Standard Oil can. Very few of
the huts are more than eight feet high, while some are so low that
one has to stoop to enter them. They are so small that the beds are
usually left outside the house during the daytime, and the majority of
each family sleep on the floor.
I find this African village the most interesting part of Mombasa. Its
inhabitants number over twenty-five thousand and comprise natives
of perhaps one hundred tribes, each of which has its own dress and
its own customs. Most of the women are bare-headed and bare-
legged; and some of the men are clad in little more than breech
cloths. Now and then one sees a girl bare to the waist, and the little
ones wear only jewellery. On the mainland all go more or less naked.
It is amazing how these people mutilate themselves so as to be
what they consider beautiful. The ears of many of the women are
punched like sieves, in order that they may hold rings of various
kinds. At one place I saw a girl with a ring of corks, each about as
big around as my little finger, put through holes in the rims of her
ears. She had a great cork in each lobe and three above that in each
ear. There was a man beside her who had two long sticks in his
ears; and in another place I saw one who had so stretched the lobe
holes that a good-sized tumbler could have been passed through
them. Indeed, I have a photograph of a man carrying a jam pot in his
ear.
The most numerous of the natives here in Mombasa are the
Swahilis. These are of a mixed breed found all along the central
coast of East Africa. They are said to have some Arab blood and for
this reason, perhaps, are brighter and more businesslike than the
ordinary native. The Swahilis are found everywhere. They have little
settlements in the interior in the midst of other tribes, and the Swahili
language will carry one through the greater part of Central and East
Africa. The British officials are required to learn it, and one can buy
Swahili dictionaries and phrase books. During most of my journey I
shall take a Swahili guide with me, or rather a black Swahili boy, who
will act as a servant as well as guide.
Let me give you a picture of the Swahili women as I see them
here. Their skins are of a rich chocolate brown and shine as though
oiled. They have woolly hair, but they comb it in a most extraordinary
way, using a razor to shave out partings between the rows of plaited
locks so that when the hair is properly dressed the woman seems to
have on a hood of black wool. I took a snapshot of two girls who
were undergoing the process of hairdressing yesterday, fearing the
while that their calico gowns, which were fastened by a single twist
under the armpits, might slip. A little farther on Jack took a
photograph of another giddy maiden clad in two strips of bright-
coloured calico and numerous earrings, while I gave her a few
coppers to pose for the picture. At the same time on the opposite
side of the street stood a black girl gorgeous with jewellery. In her
nose she had a brass ring as big around as the bottom of a dinner
bucket, and her ears had holes in their lobes so big that a hen’s egg
could be put through them without trouble. Not only the lobes, but
the rims also were punctured, each ear having around the edges five
little holes of about the size of my little finger. These holes were filled
with rolls of bright-coloured paper cut off so smoothly that they
seemed almost a part of the ear. The paper was of red, green, and
blue and looked very quaint.
 The coast Negroes of East Africa are often Swahilis, descendants of Arab
traders and their native wives. They have a dialect of their own and pride
themselves on being more intelligent than the pure-bred Africans.
 The Uganda Railroad plunges the traveller into the blackest of the Black
Continent, where the natives seem people of another world. The few clothes they
wear are a recent acquisition from the white men.
 CHAPTER XXX
THE UGANDA RAILWAY

Travelling by railway through the wilds of East Africa! Steaming for

hundreds of miles among zebras, gnus, ostriches, and giraffes!
Rolling along through jungles which are the haunts of the rhinoceros
and where the lion and the leopard wait for their prey! These were
some of my experiences during my trip over the Uganda Railway
from Mombasa to Nairobi.
Only a few years ago it took a month to cover the distance
between these two points. To-day I made it in less than twenty-four
hours, and that in a comfortable car. The railroad fare, travelling first-
class, was fifty-eight rupees, which at normal exchange would total
about thirty dollars, and I had good meals on the way. The distance
is over three hundred miles, just about half the length of the railroad.
Wood-burning locomotives of the American type are largely used.
The maximum scheduled speed is twenty-five miles an hour. Trains
leave Mombasa daily for Nairobi and three times a week for Kisumu
on Lake Victoria, which is five hundred and eighty-four miles from
Mombasa.
Leaving Mombasa, our train carried us across a great steel bridge
to the mainland, and we climbed through a jungle up to the plateau.
We passed baobab trees, with trunks like hogsheads, bursting out at
the top into branches. They made me think of the frog who tried to
blow himself to the size of a bull and exploded in the attempt. We
went through coconut groves, by mango trees loaded with fruit, and
across plantations of bananas, whose long green leaves quivered in
the breeze made by the train as it passed. Now we saw a
gingerbread palm, and now strange flowers and plants, the names of
which we did not know. As we went upward we could see the strait
that separates Mombasa from the mainland, and higher still caught a
view of the broad expanse of the Indian Ocean. For the first one
hundred miles the climb is almost steady, and we were about one
third of a mile above the sea when we reached the station at Voi.
Here the country is more open, and far off in the distance one can
see a patch of snow floating like a cloud. That patch is the mountain
of Kilimanjaro, the top of which is more than nineteen thousand feet
above the sea. It is the loftiest mountain on the continent yet is not
much higher than Mt. Kenya, that other giant of British East Africa,
which rises out of the plateau some distance north of Nairobi.
After the jungle of the coast line, the country becomes
comparatively open and soon begins to look like parts of America
where the woods have been cut away and the brush allowed to grow
up in the fields. Here the land is carpeted with grass about a foot or
so high. Thousands of square miles of such grass are going to
waste. I saw no stock to speak of, and at that place but little wild
game. Without knowing anything about the tsetse fly and other cattle
pests, I should say that the pastures just back of the coast might
feed many thousands of cattle and hogs. The soil seems rich. It is a
fat clay, the colour of well-burnt brick, which turns everything red.
The dust filled our car; it coated our faces, and crept through our
clothes. When we attempted to wash, the water soon became a
bright vermilion, and the towels upon which we dried were brick-red.
My pillow, after I had travelled all night through such dust, had
changed from white to terracotta, and there was a Venetian red spot
where my head had lain. The wisest travellers cleansed eyes and
nostrils several times a day with an antiseptic solution.
It is a strange thing to go to sleep in the woods and then awake to
find one’s self rolling over a high, treeless country with game by the
thousand gambolling along the car tracks. We awoke on the Kapiti
plains, which are about a mile above the sea and two hundred and
sixty-eight miles from Mombasa. These plains are of a black sandy
loam and covered with a thick grass. They look much as Iowa,
Kansas, or Nebraska did when the railroads were first built through
them and the buffaloes galloped along with the cars. The same
conditions prevail here save that the game is of a half-dozen big
kinds, and most of it is such as one can see only in our zoölogical
gardens at home. According to law no shooting may be done for a
mile on each side of the track, so that the road has become a great
game preserve two miles in width and about six hundred miles long.
The animals seem to know that they are safe when they are near the
railroad, for most of them are as quiet as our domestic beasts when
in the fields.
Let me give you some notes which I made with these wild animals
on all sides of me. I copy: “These Kapiti plains are flat and I am
riding through vast herds of antelopes and zebras. Some of them are
within pistol shot of the cars. There are fifty-odd zebras feeding on
the grass not one hundred feet away. Their black and white stripes
shine in the sunlight. Their bodies are round, plump, and beautiful.
They raise their heads as the train goes by and then continue their
grazing. Farther on we see antelopes, some as big as two-year-old
calves and others the size of goats. The little ones have horns
almost as long as their bodies. There is one variety which has a
white patch on its rump. This antelope looks as though it had a
baby’s bib tied to its stubby tail or had been splashed with a
whitewash brush. Many of the antelopes are yellow or fawn
coloured, and some of the smaller ones are beautifully striped.
“Among the most curious animals to be seen are the gnus, which
are sometimes called wilde-beeste. As I write this there are some
galloping along with the train. They are great beasts as big as a
moose, with the horns of a cow and the mane and tail of a horse.
Hunting them is good sport.
“But look, there are some ostriches! The flock contains a dozen or
more birds, which stand like interrogation points away off there on
the plain. They turn toward the cars as we approach, then spread
their wings and skim away at great speed. Giraffes are frequently
seen. They are more timid than the antelope, and by no means so
brave as the zebras.”
 All the steel in the bridges on the Uganda Railway was made in the United
States and put in place under American direction, because the British bidders
wanted three times as long and double the price for the job.

Built primarily to break up the slave-trade in East Africa, the Uganda Railroad
has also proved that the natives, under proper direction, can become useful
workers. Thousands of them have been employed in the construction and
maintenance of the line.

The natives rob the railroad of quantities of wire, which to them is like jewellery.
Both men and women load themselves down with pounds of it coiled around their
arms, legs, and necks, and even through their ears.
 The Uganda Railway begins at the Indian Ocean and climbs over
some of the roughest parts of the African continent before it ends at
Lake Victoria, one of the two greatest fresh-water lakes of the world.
Leaving the seacoast, the rise is almost continuous until it reaches
the high plains of Kenya Colony. Here at Nairobi, where this chapter
is written, I am more than a mile above the sea, and, about fifteen
miles farther on at the station of Kikuyu, the road reaches an altitude
seven hundred feet above the top of Mt. Washington. From there the
ascent is steady to a point a mile and a half above the sea. Then
there is a great drop into a wide, ditch-like valley two thousand feet
deep. Crossing this valley, the railway again rises until it is far higher
than any mountain in the United States east of the Rockies. It attains
an elevation of eighty-three hundred feet, and then falls down to
Lake Victoria, which is just about as high as the highest of the
Alleghanies. The line was built by the British Government in less
than five years and has cost altogether some thirty-five million
dollars. It has a gauge of forty inches, rails which weigh fifty pounds
to the yard, and tracks which are well laid and well ballasted. In an
average year almost two hundred and fifty thousand tons of goods
and five hundred thousand passengers are carried over it, and its
earnings are more than its operating expenses.
It does not yet pay any interest on the capital invested, but it is of
enormous value in the way of opening up, developing, and protecting
the country. It was not constructed as a commercial project but to
combat the slave trade which flourished beyond the reach of the
British warships. To-day the Uganda line is the dominant influence of
Kenya Colony.
Among the most interesting features are the American bridges,
which cross all the great ravines between Nairobi and Lake Victoria.
Every bit of steel and every bolt and rivet in them was made by
American workmen in American factories, and taken out here and
put up under the superintendence of Americans. This was because
of John Bull’s desire to have the work done quickly and cheaply and
at the same time substantially. While he had been laying the tracks
from here to the sea our bridge companies had surprised the English
by putting up the steel viaduct across the Atbara River in the Sudan
within a much shorter time and far more cheaply than the best British
builders could possibly do. Therefore, when the British Government
asked for bids for these Uganda bridges, they sent the plans and
specifications to the English and to some of our American firms as
well. The best British bids provided that the shops should have two
or three years to make the steel work, and longer still to erect it in
Africa. The American Bridge Company offered to complete the whole
job within seven months after the foundations were laid, and that at a
charge of ninety dollars per ton, to be paid when all was in place and
in working order. This price was about half that of the British
estimates and the time was less than one third that in which the eight
bridges already constructed had been built, so the American
company got the contract. It carried it out to the letter, and had the
government done its part, the work would have been completed in
the time specified. Owing to delays of one kind and another, it really
consumed five months longer, but it was all done within the space of
one year, which was just about half the time that the British
contractors asked to get their goods ready for shipment.
The English were surprised at how easily and quickly the
Americans carried out their contract and how little they seemed to
make of it. A. B. Lueder, the civil engineer who was sent out to take
charge of the construction, was little more than a boy and had
graduated at Cornell University only a year or so before. There were
about twenty bridge builders and foremen from different parts of the
United States, and a Pennsylvania man named Jarrett who acted as
superintendent of construction. Arriving at Mombasa in December,
1900, these men had completed their work before the following
Christmas. They acted merely as superintendents and fancy
workmen. All the rough labour was done by East Indians and native
Africans, furnished by the British. When the road was started, the
government planned to use only Africans, but finding this impossible,
they imported twenty thousand coolies from India. The coolies came
on contracts of from two to five years, at wages of from four to fifteen
dollars a month and rations. The native labourers were paid about
ten cents a day.