We find ourselves in an age when the academia is branded as increasingly disconnected from the lived experiences of the everyday citizen. Political discourse across Western liberal democracies emphasizes the relatable over the elevated and the concrete over the theoretical. On the one hand, most academics (particularly philosophers) find their works read by a gradually dwindling audience confined to journal subscribers and peers working within similar (highly specialized and technical) fields (Desch 2019). On the other hand, a small group of ‘public-facing’ intellectuals receives, as compared with their peers, disproportionate attention. Whilst they shape and pioneer ideas within the public realm, they are often chastised by the academic sphere as being ostensibly intellectually un-rigorous. The dissolution in public faith in meta-narratives (Lyotard 1979) is followed by a similar decline in trust in thinkers with sophisticated and internally consistent theoretical frameworks. The question then emerges: what political responsibilities do academics have in the 21stcentury?
In The Human Condition (1958), Arendt characterises the ‘modern age’ as demarcated by three key events: “the discovery of America and the ensuing exploration of the whole earth; the Reformation, which […] started the two-fold process of individual expropriation and the accumulation of social wealth; the invention of the telescope and […] a new science that considers the nature of the earth from the viewpoint of the universe.”
A liberally metaphorical interpretation of these events would find resonance in the five decades that have passed since her work’s publication. The pace of ‘exploration’ has accelerated, both through rapid developments of interconnected travel and commerce networks across countries in the world, and significant extraction of natural resources; as resource consumption and waste emission grow geometrically, so has the size and scale of our collective calamities, as evidenced by global warming. Individual accumulation of social wealth has culminated at radical inequalities in status, power, and wealth across generations, classes, and countries, threatening to dissolve the social fabric that holds together the demos of democracies. Finally, the advent of technology has not only enabled men to escape from the political realm of the Earth into the distant space (as Arendt argues), but also catalysed our withdrawal into the individual-centric, performance-driven hyperreality (Baudrillard 1981) of the internet and social media.
Arendt’s ideal polis is a space of appearance. It is a space “where I appear to others as others appear to me, where men exist not merely like other living or inanimate things, but to make their appearance explicitly.” (pg. 198-9, Arendt 1958). With the three forces above, this political space is progressively eroded across the world. Citizens find themselves excluded from not just electoral politics, but increasingly commercialized or confrontational (at times violent) contentious politics. Material inequalities strip citizens of the ability to speak (see political lobbies’ influence over media outlets and platforms). The rise in new technologies has led to a bifurcation of society into those who could latch onto and benefit from mechanisation and artificial intelligence. There are those who are left behind in solitary silence.
Yet not all hope is lost: Arendt offers us two prospective solutions to rejuvenate the polis. The first constitutes the establishment of a collective identity that (re-)unites the political demos through grounding political interactions in an imagined community (Anderson 1981) that transcends merely materialistic or myopic interests. The second involves the facilitation of citizens in exercising effective political agency. Academics have an invaluable role to play in both of them: through partaking in the foraging of these new paths out of our democratic crisis, academia would also regain its practical and political significance.
The polis behooves the formation of a collective identity, built around a core set of commonly adopted assumptions. Such assumptions need not be ‘thick’ or normatively embedded. They could just as well be merely a minimalist commitment to deliberative procedure or values of open-minded, self-reflexive dialogue (Habermas 1992), which enable citizens to agree upon how to resolve or approach disagreements. Here academics could play a critical role. They are uniquely suited to evaluate, critique, and generate normative frameworks for policymakers to employ to rebuilding political solidarity; to expand their repertoire of analytical tools to account for the ‘sentimental’ aspects of politics that post-Enlightenment social sciences have often neglected, and even to provide politicians with the stories to tell in reviving civic friendship and invoking public camaraderie. To illustrate this claim through more specific examples, philosophers and political theorists should situate their elevated debates over what is just, right, and good within the frustrating complexities and imperfections that is real life; social scientists and psychologists could offer analytical tools and insights into how we could best reconstruct the notion of the “we” in an age of “me”, whilst natural scientists and medical experts should orient their research towards the increasing interrelation between physical, mental, and social health.
The polis also thrives only if the citizens within are in possession of effective political agency. There can be no agency if all decisions are exercised in an uninformed manner. Here there is substantial room for academics to emancipate and expand the common knowledge sphere accessed by the public. Academics possess the expertise to interpret and translate the thoughts of their peers. More importantly, they can and ought to engage in disseminating such thoughts to citizenry who do not possess the financial or social privilege of attending prestigious universities or accessing so-called ‘advanced institutions’. Looking down on public-facing intellectuals may be a chic past time amongst the most secluded and self-aggrandising circles, but such arrogance is unhelpfully snobbish at best.
Arendt herself is skeptical of the prospects for the factual truth to survive in politics. She sees truth as stifling to alternative modes of discourse, but politics as equally repressive and distortionary to truth. Truth is both fragile and capricious, in that telling the truth almost is always less persuasive than convenient, propagandistic fictions that defy the truth.
This may well be the case, but this doesn’t mean academics have no recourse. We should instead focus on transforming the factual truth (anodyne and mundane, even) into enlivened truths that emotionally engage the public. We could turn to storytelling, personalized dialogue, and semi-fictions as instruments of delivering and preserving the truth (Young 2002).
Academics actively benefit from a pre-existing social hierarchy that assigns to them both status and respectability amongst particular circles. Academics are also distinctly suited, given their training, to help the citizenry expand its moral imagination (Diamond 2000), challenge power structures (McNay 2008), and produce unifying ideals and proposals that shed light upon some of the starkest challenges confronting humanity today. We cannot take up a critical civic role if we continue to embed ourselves within niche mind-games and inaccessible language. We must embrace public engagement, not walk away from it.
Brian Wong
Brian Wong is an MPhil in Politics (Theory) student at the University of Oxford. They graduated from Oxford with a First Class Honours in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics in 2018. They are primarily interested in topics that intersect political theory, normative ethics, meta-ethics, and metaphysics; their current research focuses on the link between historical injustice and obligations of contemporary non-state actors. They are also the Founding Editor-in-Chief of the Oxford Political Review.
