Enemies of Promise: Publishing, Perishing, and the Eclipse of Scholarship, and: Editions de sciences humaines et sociales: Le Coeur en danger (review)

Do Common Knowledge readers bemoan a scarcity of good new contributions to the republic of letters? Not like it was in the good old days, blockbusters coming out faster than you could absorb them? Here are two items to help you think about the problem. A pamphlet in English, a cry of anguish from the longtime humanities editor at Harvard University Press. And an amazingly civilized report in French, commissioned by the Centre national du Livre and based on committee hearings: yes, it has statistics (useful and clear) but also anecdotes and a lively presentation. One French story that bridges the Atlantic tells of Roger Chartier, surely the scholar of the printed book. A Princeton editor told him enthusiastically how well one of his books was doing. Chartier, delighted: "How well?"—"300 copies sold in three years." That would be a bit of a shocker for any of us who try to write interesting books. Lindsay Waters says all the university presses are feeling that kind of pain.

Le Coeur en danger has an eight-page preface by Pierre Nora, long a figure in French publishing-for-the-mind. The systems of publishing in the two languages are wholly different. In English, we have trade books and the university presses. No such division occurs in France, where commercial publishers tend to know their authors personally but also where more subsidies are available than meets the eye. (Presses Universitaires de France is not now a university press.) Remarkable, then, that there should be two such expressions of heartfelt concern about the lack of important books of ideas appearing.

The French author has a name for these, livres raison: books that generate widespread debate, books that enliven both the university and the "cité." Neither author has any compunction about elitism. They know what the good books are and that they are getting thinner on the ground. I am persuaded, however, by Sophie Barluet that the moan about a Parisian golden age recently ended expresses in part an illusion. Anyway, look at both books for a sense of the problem. Turn to Lindsay Waters for the fireworks.

What a polemic! There are a bunch of villains out there, but the systemic vice lies in university departments of the humanities, which outsource their hiring and tenuring to university presses. A young scholar has to publish to get or keep a job. There is a terrible incentive to publish quickly. Safety in ideas is encouraged, says Waters, and long periods of waiting and maturing are suicidal. As for individual bad guys, Waters doesn't hesitate to name names, namely Stanley Fish and Richard Rorty. Has Waters gone off half-cocked? Fish and Rorty have themselves given us livres raison; in at least Rorty's case, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature was altogether against the tide when it was published in 1979. Is he not an ally by example if not in what he preaches? And surely the American tenure system, while demanding a quick first book, ought to allow a slow maturing of what will be fireworks twenty years later? Is the fact that the French and the English-language systems of publishing have identical worries a sign of something larger than their local problems—and therefore perhaps worse?

Long live Prickly Paradigm Press, successor to the British Prickly Pear Press. (The former's books are marketed by University of Chicago Press.) Long may its flaming pamphlets lift us from our complacency. That might be the best thing to jolt a young mind out of safety and on the road to a book that all of us, and not a mere handful of scholar-peers, will read.