SELF-INDULGENCE:
Red Pill, Blue Pill: The Crisis in Political Theory (Joshua Mitchell, May 06, 2025, Cluny Journal)
The altered landscape of graduate education over the past four decades is partly to blame for the current state of affairs. First, there is now what could be called the intellectual ecosystem problem, by which I mean the ever-diminishing presence of what makes the “uni” in “university” possible, namely, a rough canon of books with which all of its members must engage, however coarsely. The abolition of the Dead-White-Man-Canon has deprived graduate students of a set of governing questions and provisional answers, and this loss has meant there is no reality-check on scholarship. In a healthy intellectual ecosystem, weeds do not grow. They proliferate only in disturbed habitats. Eventually, it is impossible to discern what the native growth even is. Second, the push to complete a Ph.D. in four or five years and to reduce attrition along the way has effectively ruled out bold and ambitious thinking among graduate students. This would be a less formidable problem if it were understood that they should aim higher later in their career. The unfortunate fact is that once the habit of thinking-writ-small takes hold, it is not easily broken. Moreover, when the announced intention of a graduate program is to get everyone through, scarce faculty time that might have been otherwise devoted to helping a lone super-star advance must be directed in some measure to students who in an earlier age would have been asked to leave the program. Third, there is a growing “ethos” problem. The simple and perhaps overstated way to put this is that courage and risk have been supplanted by an admixture of fear and empathy. Visiting lectures and job talks at our best universities four decades ago were academic versions of Celebrity Death Match. It was expected that one of the two warriors in the arena would be bloodied or slain. Anything akin to that is unthinkable today. Our graduate students are taught, above all else, fear and empathy: fear that they will not get a job if they aim too high, or that they will not get a job no matter where they aim; and empathy for the struggles, obstacles, and suffering they, their fellow-graduate students, and the world’s innocent victims daily endure. The secret that few want to acknowledge is that faculty advising has increasingly drifted into psychological counseling. Those who refuse to transform their offices into intake clinics are seen as callous and insensitive to graduate student “needs.” The solitary scholar of old has been replaced. Because that path today is too lonely, too risky, too frightening, we now have “collaborative learning.” It takes a village. Once faculty told graduate students that the ideas in their essays were wrong; now seminars throughout the academic year are dedicated to helping graduate students improve their writing. Because their ideas are considered to be unassailable, only further clarification of their tender ideas is required. The vicious cycle of cause and effect this pandering and handholding produces is unsurprising: those disposed to the ethos of fear and empathy increasingly populate our graduate programs and faculty rosters; those inclined to courage and risk do not apply, or leave early. Soon, the entire profession is transformed. Fourth, there is the “who says” problem. Alexis de Tocqueville observed in Democracy in America3 that citizens of the future will only trust in the authority of their own experience. A century-and-a-half later, Christopher Lasch saw the pathological culmination of this development in Culture of Narcissism4. When we abandon textual deference altogether, we do not get responsible critique and brilliant breakthroughs; instead we get Selfie Political Theory, in which seminal authors from the political theory canon serve as a backdrop for Me-Me-Me. In the 1980s, any job talk that began with, “I want to argue that . . .” would have been met with howls of laughter and derision, because the first task of political theory was understood to be textual exposition, not personal confession. By the early 2000s, that had changed entirely, and theorists were told—and came to believe—that four years of dabbling in a Ph.D. program justified wandering through the grocery aisle of ideas, gathering whatever they found there to make a meal of their own devising, and then forcing others to eat it at no-exit APSA Panels or at mandatory job talks.
Incredibly few have anything to add: they should learn what is known.