Intellectual Courage

Alan Ryan Intellectual Courage THIS IS AN ARTLESS PAPER, WITH MORE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL CONTENT than is proper. The autobiographical content may be excused by this consideration: teaching political philosophy for 40 years in a great variety of institutions, I have been puzzled and amused by the ways in which different writers and their work have attracted or repelled their readers. In particular, there is often a sharp disconnect between the narrowly intellectual and the more broadly human—what one might call the psychological or temperamental—appeal of different writ­ ers. This is not, of course, to suggest that either the intellectual or the human appeal has been predictable, as though every student can be relied upon to find Augustine emotionally engrossing but intellectually rebarbative—indeed, I find him the reverse. Does any of this matter? In the following manner, perhaps. In an aside during a conference a few years ago, Wendy Brown aptly charac­ terized political theory as the intellectual practice of teachers who are besotted with 24 books—give or take another two dozen. Ignoring the old question whether the 24 books represent a canon, and whether the veiy idea of a canon is wicked, or the creation of a canon one of the bastions of civilization, we can here wrestle with a smaller question about the kind of engagement with the work and its author that sustains teacher and student. If you do not hold, as I do not, that the purpose of the political theory curriculum is the inculcation of eternal moral truths, the unmask­ ing of assorted forms of race, class, or gender tyranny, or any one thing whatever, you will probably fall back on the thought that the teacher’s task is to facilitate a fruitful encounter between the new reader and the immortal dead, while taking a fairly relaxed view about what the fruitful­ social research Vol 71 : No 1 : Spring 2004 13 ness is to consist in. But that, of course, brings us back to the question of the nonintellectual charms of the writers with whom we spend a lifetime. Puzzling over these phenomena, I have wondered which aspects of this “human” attraction exerted by political thinkers matter most. To me, I think, it is a certain boldness, a readiness to cut across commonsense , tradition, and authority; it may go along with a willingness to be proved wrong, but in the work of two of the boldest, least commonsensical , and most strikingly anti-traditionalist writers of all, it certainly did not. Plato was one of them, and Hobbes the other. Hobbes may, as a country clergyman complained, have affronted a whole host of the learned, but Hobbes cared nothing for that. John Aubrey reported that Hobbes remarked that if he had read as much as other men he might have known as little as they. But Hobbes surely did not think that he might be wrong; as he said, the only thing not demonstrated in Leviathan was that monarchy is the best of all forms of government; all else he thought was proved beyond doubt. This is not, even on the “human” dimension, the sort of thing that appeals to all readers; and even the reader who shares my taste for intellectual risk takers will respond to many other aspects of a writer’s temperament, just as I do. But, one thing at a time. What does intellectual courage consist in? What fosters it, and what subverts it? Is it always a virtue? THERE ARE MANY STANDARD OBSERVATIONS THAT WE MAY MAKE ABOUT courage in general, and they seem to apply directly to intellectual courage. This is not, however, because someone who thinks bravely is simply a courageous person, thinking. Consider Hobbes once more; he prided him self on his timidity. “I was the first of them that fled,” he said of his part in the English Civil War, and when he set out the duties of the sovereign authority over several chapters of Leviathan, he took care to insist that men who were naturally timorous should not be made to do military duty but could be excused on condition that they paid for substitutes. He was, if we take him at his own...