Professionalism and the University

The central argument of this editorial by Boaz Barak, from a few days ago, is that we “restore trust” in academic institutions by maintaining “professionalism” in the classroom, by refusing to “be political,” which here means taking partisan positions. “When we erode the boundaries between the academic and the political, we ultimately harm both.” Many people have raised major objections to this. Historians, for instance, might very reasonably ask how to avoid politics when teaching about the 20th century, even outside the United States. And of course this one more in a long line of NYT editorials written from and perhaps mainly about Harvard.    

There really are two main points being made here, and they are worth being clear about because this editorial is not the only place in which they are expressed. The first is a matter of principle, maybe even ontology. If there can be no policy without some kinds of scientific knowledge – social science, administrative science at a minimum – so too it is the case that science, even in this broad sense, cannot tell us precisely what policy should be, what the state should do. Yes, accepted!  

The second claim is of a very different order. It is that people, by and large, are resentful of universities and especially of the cultural elitism they are thought to represent – and as a corollary that using one’s privileged position in the university to advocate for specific policies is, in fact, counter-productive and is only likely to draw the fire of the politicians who want to capitalize on the generalized resentment that we are assured exists. Barak says that the current administration is doing irreparable harm to the institutions – but, still, the way to combat it is to give evidence of professionalism beyond the partisan. If these people could be convinced by evidence we would not be here.   

I am sympathetic to the desire for professionalism. Even sympathetic as I believe I am to the notion of the university as a space apart both from the public and from the private – or, perhaps, overlapping with both – understanding the kind of work that goes on in the classroom as this writer does leads nowhere in particular. We can agree that collaborative work on hard problems, often leading to failure, has a salutary effect. But I do not agree that “trying and failing to solve hard problems teaches students that there is such a thing as an objective truth and our first attempts to find it are often wrong.” If the student in question is one of these identitarian fundamentalists we hear about but who seem actually very hard to find, indeed the classroom may give them some practice in the necessary skill of working with people with whom you may not have a great deal in common except for the problem at hand. To some degree that might be meta-political, but it’s not a different lesson that we might expect to be taught by military service or many other kinds of jobs.   

I have spent a certain amount of my scholarly career writing on or near the Dreyfus Affair. It is thus remarkable to read the following paragraph: 

All academics are experts on narrow topics. Even when they intersect with the real world, our expertise in the facts does not give us authority over politics. Scientific research shows that vaccines work and climate change is real, but it cannot dictate whether vaccines should be mandated or fossil fuels restricted. Those are decisions for the public, with the scientific evidence being one factor. When academics claim authority over policy, the result is not an increased effect on policy but decreased trust in academia. 

Again, in principle, I agree that science does not simply dictate policy, and that academics should not claim authority over politics, or anyway that it’s silly for them to do so. But that’s not, by and large, what’s happening here. A few scholars of the Middle East, racism in the United States, or Constitutional law aside, most academics who are intervening politically in the ways Barak finds so objectionable are not doing so on the basis of their scholarly expertise, but as a matter of conscience and as citizens. So at least is my strong sense. And Barak is echoing in this above paragraph the language of the anti-Dreyfusards, who said that scholars and artists had no right to object to the arrest and imprisonment of Alfred Dreyfus – this was a matter for military intelligence, for political men placed so as to understand the issues at play. The argument then was antidemocratic. Barak does not mean to be quite doing that, but that's certainly the meaning of the intervention in the present.  

How are we to think about the university in society at this moment? Big question! I think we can safely leave aside the absurd idea that Harvard, or anywhere else, can professionalize its way out of the Trump administration’s sights. The question that should matter to us is a larger one – if there is resentment, and not just in the current administration, what is its source? To even begin to answer this question what we need is not a defense of professionalism, but an understanding of how higher education currently fits into the American class system, and in particular of the social reproduction that is supposed to be taking place in universities but I think largely no longer is.

Reading Péguy

Some people—even Anglophones—do still read Charles Péguy. Even write about him. Antoine Compagnon champions him, which is perhaps enough to locate Péguy in the contemporary field. Although see here. And why people do not read him is perhaps obvious. He’s so Catholic, a mystical nationalist—practically a fascist, it will be said, or a reactionary or conservative antimodernist, others will say. Then there is also the prose itself, the form, the problematic of argument and engagement, which is what most interests me here. When we say “the prose itself,” though, maybe the most serious problem has already been dodged. Péguy is above all a writer among other writers, a person among others in a certain place and time, intensely of his own place and time, wanting more than anything, I think, to make his own writing of and for his place and time.

I’m looking at Péguy at this particular moment because I have been running across (to me) surprising references to Péguy in the interwar. Walter Benjamin admired and read Péguy. Just after the First World War. Lines from Péguy serve as a mutually-recognizable badge of Frenchness in Marc Bloch’s narrative of French collapse in the next war, Étrange défait. At much he same moment as Bloch was writing, Aimé Césaire adopted and adapted Péguy in his own journal, Tropiques, under the Vichy-aligned government in Martinique. The appearance of Péguy in Tropiques is sometimes waved off as a sop to the censors, who were likely to find that poet more congenial than some others. But Péguy was, of course, much more than a poet, and it seems to me that one place to begin is by assigning the same weight that he did to the Cahiers de la quainzaine—certainly this aspect of Péguy’s life is relevant to any consideration of what Césaire was up to with the Tropiques. So here too we come back to the point that Péguy—in strong distinction from, for instance, Proust—is difficult to read disconnected from a worldly project, given flesh, as it were, in the Cahiers.

Thinking about all these things, I’ve picked up Notre jeunesse. Together with some of the poems and, perhaps, l’Argent, this is Péguy’s best known and most read work. Few and far between are the historians writing about the Dreyfus Affair who can resist Péguy’s distinction between mystique and politique, or his dictum that the former inevitably is consumed by the latter—to which I’ll return below. But the text itself is a great deal more than that, about 250 pages in a modern edition (I’ve been reading and marking up an old edition in the idées-nrf Gallimard series).

In general terms, we can characterize the text—and I think it is better to call it a text than a book—as belonging to the genre of post-Dreyfus score-settling. It is an explicit response to Daniel Halévy’s Apologie pour notre passé (Péguy doesn’t feel he has anything to apologize for), and the triptych is filled out by Sorel’s Mes raisons du syndicalisme—all three are from 1909-10. Péguy is also concerned to defend himself—to differentiate himself—from the younger intellectuals around the Action français. Jean Variot is just one acquaintance who is called out to by name in the text. It is easy to poke fun at the act of voting, at the “formalité grotesque, universellement menteuse” that is the modern election

Et vous avec le droit de le dire. Mais des hommes ont vécu, des hommes sans nombre, des héros, des martyrs, et je dirai des saints, -- et quant je dis des saints je sais peut-être ce que je dis, -- des hommes ont vécu sans nombre, héroïquement, saintement, des hommes ont souffert, des hommes sont morts, tout un peuple a vécu pour que le dernier des imbéciles aujourd’hui air le droit d’accomplir cette formalité truqué. Ce fut un terrible, un laborieux, un redoubtable enfantement. Ce ne fut pas toujours du dernier grotesque. Et des peuples autour de nous, des peuples entiers, des races travaillent du même enfantement douloureaux, travaillent et luttent pour obtenir cette formalité dérisoire. Ces élections sont dérisoire. Mais il y a eu un temps, mon cher Variot, un temps héroïque où les malades et les mourants se faisaient porter dans des chaises pour aller déposer leur bulletin dans l’urne. Déposer son bulletin dans l’urne, cette expression vous paraît aujourd’hui du dernier grotesque. Elle a été préparée par un siècle d’héroïsme. Et je dirai du plus français. (29-30)

This chunk of text, less than a whole paragraph, which I already feel to have cut off before the main thought really got out, is a fine taste of Péguy’s prose. It is, I want to say, oratorical, as though it is a formal address that simply goes on for days. Péguy wants to defend the republican tradition, but he wants to defend it in its heroism. Indeed the above passage comes just before the famous sentences on mystique and politique, the most famous of which—“Tout commence en mystique et finit en politique”—is worth putting into its context:

Vous [Variot] nous parlez de la dégradation républicaine, c’est-à-dire, proprement, de la dégradation de la mystique républicaine en politique républicaine. N’y a-t-il pas eu, n’y a-t-il pas d’autres dégradations. Tout commence en mystique et finit en politique. Tout commence par la mystique, par une mystique, par sa (propre) mystique et tout finit par de la politique. (31)

The point, Péguy goes in to say, is not that a particular politique has triumphed, but rather to figure out how what is essential to each particular mystique may be preserved from generalized politicization (not his word).

Péguy repeats many times that “we are heroes” (cf 190). The first person plural here mostly refers to the subscribers to the Cahiers (although see p 99 for Louis Louis-Dreyfus unsubscribing himself). The Affair itself as a mystique was “une culmination, un recoupement en culmination de trois mysticismes au moins: juif, chrétien, français” (73). And he goes on, in one of many extraordinary statements about the “cahiers”:

Je suis en mesure d’affirmer que tous les mystiques dreyfusistes sont demeurés mystiques, sont demeurés dreyfusistes, sont demeurés les mains pures. Je le sais, j’en ai la liste aux cahiers. Je veux dire que tout ce qu’il y avait de mystique, de fidèle, de croyant dans le dreyfisisme c’est réfugié, s’est recueilli aux cahiers, dès le principe et toujours... (73-74)

But the real hero of the text is certainly Bernard Lazare. And the villain, the perfect embodiment of politique, is Jean Jaurès. I do not want to try to untangle the relations and events involved here—the apparent betrayals, the hysterical fidelities, all that. There are a number of monumental studies on the Cahiers to consult, and many involved, after Péguy’s death in the war, wrote about their relationship with him (Romain Rolland, for instance, and Daniel Halévy). But if we must set out a social location, this is it: on the outside, happily on the outside. 

Péguy is, certainly, vocally anti-modern, and against what he identifies as modernisme in the Church, a tendency he defines, I get the sense, much more loosely and broadly than is usually done, as the mechanism that transforms mystique into politique within christianity. His socialism, too, is anti-modern, siding we might say with William Morris rather than Edward Bellamy (156, 167)--although he knew more than a little about Marx and German socialism, having learned both from Sorel and Charles Andler. And this critique of modernity is one route by which he attacks the Action français. They are decidedly modern, decidedly intellectualist, precisely what they claim to attack (193-4). And, more generally, “Les antisemites sont beacoup trop moderne” (209). The antisemites, Péguy goes on to say, don’t even know Jews. The divide between the wealthy and the poor is so great, that any difference in general between Jews and non-Jews is immaterial beside it. In particular the antisemites, at least their propagandists, are themselves wealthy and imagine all Jews to also be wealthy. “Nous qui sommes pauvres, comme par hasard nous connaissons un très grand nombre des Juifs pauvres, et même misérables” (205). The betrayals of the Dreyfus Affair have ruined an number of these lives. And, with Bernard Lazare, Péguy has learned to read the news, to read about pogroms in the east, to read about refugees betrayed by various states. Jaurès is here the great betrayer (with Hervé as a sort of familiar). Again I don’t want to go into the details of this, but will rather point to the extraordinary five pages in which Péguy, having laid out his attacks on the socialist leader, ventriloquizes Jaurès’ response: “Jaurès ici intervient, au débat, et se défend. Si je reste avec Hervé, dit-il, dans le même parti, si j’y suis resté...” (182-186).

Péguy is where we should look, his writing is what we should understand, if we want to understand what it is to take public language as morally serious. Péguy really believes in the moral consequences of public speech, of logical failures, of one’s alliances, their purity. More than that, the torrential quality of his writing, its constant repetitions and self-references, perform a sense of the weight of the act. I don’t know if there is an archive, if there are manuscripts for Péguy’s writing. But it is hard to imagine that these sentences were re-written many times. They are too earnest in their translation of the act of intelligence itself, of esprit made physical in the text. The final pages assert that the only motive for “our” action—and here, finally, we get a definition of sorts for mystique—is the pursuit of freedom, especially freedom of conscience or mind. Péguy then considers the AF’s orthography, for instance, mocking the republic by referring to Respubliquains. Péguy rejects this, for a number of reasons but especially because, “on ne refonde aucune culture sur la dérision et la dérision et le sarcasme et l’injure sont des barbarie. Ils sont même des barbarismes. On ne fonde, on ne refonde, on ne restaure, on resititue rien sur la dérision” (251-252). Finally, Péguy recounts Variot, or some other AF cadre, asserting during one of the famous Thursdays that “Nous serions prêts à mourir pour le roi, pour le rétablisement de notre roi”—this, he says, is something. And it merited a response from another, Michel Arnauld, who “interrompit, conclut presque brusquement: Tout cela c’est très bien parce qu’ils ne sont qu’une menace imprécise et théorique. Mais le jour où ils deviendraient une menace réelle ils verraient ce que nous sommes encore capables de faire pour la République, tout le monde comprit qu’enfin on venait de dire quelque chose” (254).

Much could be said about the distinctions Péguy draws, the theory of moral force that he elaborates, his understanding of the Third Republic, the kind of socialism, the kind of nationalism, that he unfolds in these pages. His approach to antisemitism, his way of thinking about Jewishness and Frenchness I think would be especially interesting to untangle. Certainly his own death—shot in the forehead in September 1914—gives a certain taste to the above declaration (which might as well be Péguy’s own) of willingness to die for the Republic in 1910. It seems to me, though that it is not so much the death as the desire “enfin...de dire quelque chose” that should really draw our attention today. The emphasis should be on the dire, and we should understand, like Péguy, that one cannot speak except among other people. So, finally, I want to try to think through Péguy about public speech, public thought, and the conflation of—overlap between—speech and action in what is taken to be a defective or failing democratic society. Much separates us from Péguy, but not perhaps as much as we would like.

Paul Lapie. "La justice pénale"

A colleague recently pointed me to a short essay, “La justice pénale,” by Paul Lapie in the Revue de métaphysique et de morale. It’s from the March 1898 issue of the journal and this colleague came across it because the Union pour l’action morale reprinted and distributed it. Lapie, and the Rmm, have figured in my work before. So I read with interest and finally could no resist writing a little bit about it.

The essay, only about 12 pages long, might at first look like a book review, although it appears in the “Questions pratiques” rubric. At its head we find a book listing: Jean Cruppi, La cour d’assises, but also “La collection des journaux française, depuis six mois.” Many of Céléstin Bouglé’s essays from this period had similar notices, but I’m not sure how common the practice was. Especially in Bouglé’s case, the notices are clearly intended for the curious reader, but also as sign of scholarship, a bibliography even in the field of what was never really admitted to be polemic. In other words: I may be writing about contemporary political matters, but I’m a scholar not just some scribbler. It’s hard, though, not to smile at Lapie’s breezy ‘the papers in the last six months...’

In any case, the essay is divided into two parts—institutions et croyances—and the first draws directly (or so it appears) on Cruppi to present practical issues in this particular part of the French legal system, arguing that the vices of the civilian courts are magnified in the military ones. I’m not prepared to adjudicate in any useful way these claims. But a few points. First of all, the judges are not really impartial, because they are associated so closely with the prosecutors. We needn’t be thought simply to be copying the English system, Lapie says, if we simply want to bring a bit more independence and institutional separation to the judge (265). Judges also simply do not have the time to think about cases in a meaningful way. Lapie quotes Cruppi telling us that some judges are obliged to rule on as many as a hundred cases a day (262). Absurd. To judge, after all, is complex. “Les faits établis, ils [les juges] sauront appliquer les lois. Mais comment les faits sont-ils établis?” (261).  Even the question of what happened is not so straightforward, “l’accusé est-il l’auteur du fait incriminé?” is one question, another is “l’accusé est-il responsable de son acte?” (262) Finally is correct application of the law. Thus there are three questions, the first is essentially historical, the second moral, and the third juridical. One needs both time and method—science—even and perhaps especially for moral problems.

And here is Lapie’s great theme. Given the current state of affairs, judges and juries have no choice but to fall back on “la conscience.” Since in this format I can, here is a large block quote:

(263)

Among the things I wish I understood a bit better is the claim here about the yes-or-no nature of the judgment. Is this really the case? And I am a little amazed at the link between the historian and the judge. How common was this comparison at the time? (It’s history, not historiography that is supposed to be the Weltgericht). But it’s really the necessity of falling back on ‘intimate conviction’ that Lapie finds objectionable. He admits that judges have no choice: “la méthode qu’on les contraint de suivre les supent [sic?] dans le vide.” They are obliged to fall back on experience guided by intuition to make rapid decisions. This is not acceptable. Lapie raises the practice of indicating doubt as to true guilt with lighter sentences as an especially outrageous byproduct of the situation.   

In the case of military justice, the situation is even worse. Without impugning the honor or rectitude of the officers concerned, it is still necessary to point out, Lapie says, that here there is hardly any of the juridical learning that, at least, civilian judges have. “Nous retrouvons donc dans la justice militaire, aggravés par l’incompétence, les vices de notre justice pénale.” Conscience is invoked especially often within the military.

(265)

Especially that last line! And this is in March of 1898. Zola had been convicted for libel only the month before—not, of course, that the name “Dreyfus” appears anywhere in this piece. Indeed the above is one of the more direct references to what Lapie also refers to later on as “the present crisis,” with no modifiers.

Since any citizen might be obliged to sit on a jury, why not bring some measure of juridical education into the curriculum? This is not, Lapie hastens to add, to say that we should teach everyone law, only “tous devraient avoir acquis le goût et l’habitude de la recherche méthodique” (266). Here, again, the historian is the model. We demand more evidence of “esprit critique” in the historian reconstructing “les faits et gestes de Clovis” than of judges, and this is wrong. This plea for education makes Lapie transition to the second part of the essay, which looks at the underlying cause for the institutional problems, which Lapie sees in “croyances...la survivance d’anciens préjugés” (266). I’ll point out, given this straightforward refusal of sociology, that the first article in the very next issue of the Rmm is Durkheim’s “Représentations individuelles et représentations collectives.”

Two contrasting pairs of terms dominate the second half of the essay: justice and order, as a pair of governing principles, and then conscience and science. We claim today, following the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, says Lapie, to prioritize justice. But it is easy to see that most people—a legacy of empire?—prefer order. The appeal to conscience is simply another form of the religious mindset. Yet it remains widespread in “une sorte de kantisme instinctif d’après lequel il suffit d’obéir à sa conscience pour faire le bien” (268). And we should vigorously refuse the idea that balance must be struck between order and justice. Of course, the government is charged with maintaining order. But we must not be hypnotized by the old regime: “la justice n’était jadis qu’un moyen de maintenir l’ordre; l’ordre ne doit être maintenant qu’un moyen de garantir la justice” (268). For we inhabitants of the 21^st century, this remains an attractive formulation. But Lapie’s counter-intuitive move is to firmly reject the appeal to conscience in just this context. To have the “intimate conviction” that you have done your duty is almost completely worthless. Some lines from one extraordinary paragraph: “La conscience n’est souveraine que si elle est éclairée...Un jugement n’a de valeur morale que s’il a de la valeur logique: s’il ne’st pas appuyé à des preuves, il est presque nécessairement la cause d’une injustice...Il n’y a donc pas de probité morale distincte de la probité scientifique: toute action reposant sur un jugement, la méthode qui sert à établir des jugements exacts peut déterminer les actions bonnes...la morale n’est pas seulement affaire de conscience, mais affaire de science...une conscience dénuée d’esprit scientifique peut devenir criminelle” (269). With that last line, especially, Lapie offers the precise opposite of the more typically 20^th century judgment that science without conscience easily (inevitably) becomes criminal.

Lapie wants to retain the idea of collective action and morality—that is, political choice and commitment—but without the pernicious form of collective responsibility that holds an individual responsible for the supposed crimes of, say, the race, family, nation, and so forth. In a curious turn of phrase, Lapie writes “Toute notre étude est destinée à montrer que nous sommes tous responsables de la crise qui vient d’éclater” (270). I take this to mean that the study he is now winding up shows that the present crisis has roots in collective conscience, in various collective and institutional failures for which we are all, in a certain way, responsible. Because, he goes on to say, we aren’t all equally responsible. Those who have simply failed to conquer their outmoded prejudices, who have failed to reform institutions as justice demands, that is the vast majority, are partly to blame, “mais quelques hommes, qui ont joué un rôle important dans l’affaire, encourent une responsabilité plus directe” (270).   

In sum, for Lapie, the current crisis—the affair, not yet capitalized—has to do with our failure to fully assume the moral consequences of the scientific revolution. Systematic doubt is difficult, and so we prefer not to practice it. But if justice is to be our ordering principle, then we must prefer truth to opinion or mere conscience. Lapie wraps things up neatly, invoking in his closing paragraph the difference between authorship of an act and the various grades of responsibility and social consequence, as well as closing with the same mot from Tostoy (or, Tolstoï)—“il est très bon qu’un cas de conscience se pose pour la France”—good indeed, Lapie says, if we meet the challenge not with simple reaction, but with measured self-criticism and improvement of “nos institutions et de nos esprits” (271).

How to interpret this text, and the appeal it had for the Union? It is, most obviously, a text in favor of revision of the verdict against Dreyfus. Lapie argues powerfully against the injustice built into military courts, and is clear that truth, pursued in a scientific way—and here is an argument for a certain style of republican professor—must be the overriding value. That truth and justice are coincident he feels he may simply assert. The ‘instinctive kantism’ remark is interesting in light of the neo-Kantianism that pervaded the Rmm, but Lapie himself—as many others—was as much a Platonist as anything else (although what that means is a difficult question). Much that Lapie says appears today almost laughably naive, and surely one must quickly ask after who, exactly, is in a position to enunciate the truth of which he speaks. And yet.

The desire for a public that is institutionally committed to methodical doubt, to the pursuit of justice through that of truth—this is appealing. And further there is something appealing about the round rejection of conscience-claims. This sounds, on its face, flatly antiliberal. Freedom of conscience is a fundamental freedom. But I don’t think this is quite what he means. He means, rather, that because you feel something deeply does not mean you have any kind of right to assert it as true. We can go one further and say that since truth is intersubjective, this can be extended to mean that you do not have a right to oblige others to accept what you feel deeply just because you are “intimately convinced” of it. This is, as Lapie would doubtless be happy to further explain, an Enlightenment point of view. There is no truth, and so no justice, without ruthless critique. It would be easy to object to this sort of position, for instance in its characterization of conscience, in the necessary connection of truth and justice, or in how Lapie relates the individual to the institutional. Indeed people Lapie knew well made such objections to him at various points. He has, nonetheless, the merit—more rare than one might think—of writing with great conviction about the need to temper conviction with evidence and doubt.