Untimely Intellectuals and the University

The current overtly pronounced concern with the crisis in Black intellectual leadership is grounded in an old familiar theoretical conundrum of sociological thinking: the subject. This requires considerable elaboration. For while it is readily apparent that the concern with the status or conditions of a designated class of social actors—Black intellectuals—is sociological, it is, perhaps, not so obvious how it is a function of theory. A contradiction presents itself. A concern is obviously sociological but not theoretical. Then again, assuming the validity of claiming that the crisis in Black intellectual leadership is a concern of sociology, it is not at all surprising that its theoretical status is obscure. Sociology remains itself, after all, in a crisis of theory. Among the more well-known and rehearsed aspects of that crisis is sociology’s dilemma regarding its status as an empirical science, whose vast and ever expanding field of empirical research has substantially increased information about, but has provided no unified theory of, society. The seeming opaqueness of such a claim is due, in turn, to a profound naïveté with regard to the conceptual genealogy of sociological thinking on the part of even the most systematic of those who remark on this crisis.

The crisis is as old as sociology. It is also a crisis that provided the occasion for both the articulation of sociology as a scientific field in the later half of the nineteenth century and the systematic study of what was then known as the Negro experience and condition, which over time became first Black studies, then Afro-American studies, and, recently, Africana studies. The observation here is pointed: The beginnings of the systematic scientific study of the Negro—and significantly by Negroes—are contemporaneous with those of the research university in the United States of America. In fact, they share the same conceptual field. This observation wreaks some havoc on the claim that the present crisis among Black intellectuals stems from the relatively recent professionalization and specialization of knowledge, the bureaucratization of the university as an institution, and the marginalization of humanistic studies. These processes have affected virtually all university intellectuals, generating a general sense of demoralization in academia, from which not even the “hard” sciences are free. Yet it is also fashionable to insist that the demoralization is greater among Black intellectuals, due to what can be summarized as an institutional Eurocentrism that makes cultural alienation the price for success in the academy. By this account, Blacks engage in an intellectual vocation at high cost, because the conceptual basis of American racism constitutes Blacks as nonthinking (nonintellectual) beings. Assuming an intellectual vocation has always meant, for Blacks, the struggle to prove their worthiness as thinking beings in modernity’s terms, there is something sound about this account, but precisely to the extent that it is sound, it is also amiss.

The error comes with the assumption that Blacks are, in fact, nonintellectual beings or, as it is more often formulated, that Blacks think themselves anti-intellectual. This formulation underpins the equally fashionable claim that strong-minded Black scholars deliberately distance themselves from the academic mainstream in order to remain, conceptually, at least, in solidarity with the masses of Black folk. Such distancing runs the risk of isolation and collective paranoia. At least, it produces an overvaluation of mediocrity in support of collective solidarity, the absurdity of which is quite pronounced when pondering how it is that these same isolated Black intellectuals persistently fail to hook up with the masses.

This last concern with the social relationship between Black intellectuals and the masses is one of vocation. What are the possibilities of intellectual vocation in general? When considering this question, we would do well to recall Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s application, in his Jena 1794 lectures, of the first principle of the Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre— “das Ich setzt sich als bestimmt durch das Nicht-Ich”—to define the scholar. Of course, I cannot give these...