A la Recherche du Temps Perdu

The political movements in Europe and America in the 1960s that Americans identify primarily with opposition to the Vietnam War were not, at base, pacifist or anticapitalist or “countercultural,” or simply a revolt of youth against age, although they were all those things. Rather, they were held together by a general challenge to conventional structures of authority. They were an attempt to create a general crisis of legitimacy. They were a “Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority” and were made in the image of 1792 and the revolt of the Paris Commune. The state, the military, the corporate holders of economic power, those over thirty, males, whites—all were the sources of authority and legitimacy that maintained in place a social structure riddled with injustice. Those who were in the forefront of the struggles of the sixties knew what their revolutionary forebears knew, that a real crisis of legitimacy is the precondition of revolutionary change. But their attempt failed, and the main sources of authority and legitimacy for civil and political life remain what they have been for two hundred years, with no apparent effect on their stability or sense of permanence.

There is, however, one bit of the body politic whose sores from the abrasions of the sixties have never quite healed over, rather like a bloody heel that is perpetually rubbed raw by a new shoe that doesn’t fit the old foot. It is the academy and its intellectual hangers-on who, while not themselves professors, depend on academics to buy, assign, review, and cite their works. No one was more troubled, hurt, and indignant than the professional intellectuals when their legitimacy was challenged. The state and the corporations, after all, have long been the objects of attack. They are used to the fight, they know their enemies, and they have the weapons to hand. Their authority can always be reinforced when necessary by the police, the courts, and the layoff. Intellectuals, on the other hand, are particularly vulnerable, because professional intellectual life is the nexus of all strands of legitimacy, yet it has had no serious experience of opposition. Despite the centrality of authority in intellectual life, the academy has not, since the seventeenth century, been immersed in a constant struggle for the maintenance of the legitimacy of its methods and products; on the contrary, it seemed for a long time to be rooted in universal and unchallenged sources of authority. Then, suddenly, students began to question the authority of the older and the learned. No longer were genteel and civilized scholars allowed to propagate their political and social prejudices without rude challenge from pimply adolescents. The attack on the legitimacy and authority of the academy during the sixties was met by incredulity, outrage, and anger. It produced an unhealing wound that continues to be a source of pain to some intellectuals, who see nothing but an irrational nihilism in the rejection of traditional structures of academic authority.

Were it only the institutional authority of professors that was challenged, the hurt would be nearly forgotten. For the most part the control of the scholarly environment has returned to its former masters—although not without alteration: professors are no longer free to make racist and sexist remarks in class without challenge, and even quite innocent events may lead to serious struggles, making many academics long for the days when they could say anything they damned pleased. But even more sinister developments have continued the crisis in the academy long after the rest of civil and political society has restabilized. For the last three decades there has been a growing attack on the very intellectual foundations on which academic legitimacy is ultimately grounded. What was revealed even by the rather unsophisticated attacks of thirty years ago has encouraged a thoroughgoing foundational reexamination in every field...