Against the view from nowhere

An academic diary on Marx, the Renaissance, and the merits of prejudice

My sixth term has begun which has brought three new modules – one on the writings of Karl Marx, one on the furious free will debates between Erasmus and Luther, and a Classics module on the Age of Augustus – all three of which seem very promising. I’m also continuing from last semester my module on the Glorious Revolution, which is now turning towards the reign of William of Orange. Our house is freezing, which I suppose makes getting myself to campus early easier – good for my recent commitment to structure and discipline.

I feel somewhat vindicated as the Russell Group universities have been encouraged to move away from ‘traditional’ exams and offer ‘inclusive assessments’, making education worse for everyone under the guise of helping minorities. As I’ve written elsewhere, universities seem to have forgotten what assessments are actually for. Not to mention the sheer stupidity of this move right now, when no one has any idea how to deal with AI. Take-home exams and coursework so obviously benefit the most unscrupulous and privileged students but alas, they are probably just another money-saving exercise masquerading as misguided egalitarianism.

In other news on the crisis in the humanities, I have been thinking about why exactly – if we look past the catch-all ailment of social media – we aren’t reading more books.

I. In defence of prejudice

When so much else is available, you sort of have to love books in order to read. The biggest readers I know are not as critical of what they read, and you find them in an excited rush when they’ve finished a book, bursting to tell you about characters, themes, storylines – the way everyone seems to be feeling about Middlemarch at the moment. Books are whole things – stories, arguments, objects of admiration and singularly shaped by their author’s consciousness and skill. A book is the ultimate expression of subjectivity, and as an experience it is meant to be swallowed whole.

But from academia to literature we are afraid of subjectivity – of points of view rooted in time and place, perhaps implicitly too Eurocentric or anthropocentric. The worst accusation – one that is levied at both left- and right-wing academics – is that of bias or prejudice. Universities today have a gold standard of feigned impartiality: it is hard to imagine a Hegel influencing a generation from his lectern, or even a Quentin Skinner shaping his cohort of intellectual historians. Instead academic disciplines cling to their distinctive ‘methods’ and endlessly critique their merits – ideally unmoored from those who brought them about and usually with few true disciples. It’s not objective, but it is impersonal.

This is reflected in the apprehension in the field of history to the study of biography – a mode often spoken of as outdated despite the flurry of biographies that appear each year (often with a slightly apologetic preface that asks for forgiveness for this self-indulgence). The merits of biography is an important meta-discussion in the field of history. J. E. Neale wrote in 1951 – in continuation of an adage of his master A. F. Pollard - against biographies as research theses: “It is against young people writing a life before they have gathered sufficient experience to interpret it.”

But it is not biographies that are out of vogue; rather, it is the mode of biography. Any nineteenth-century work with any self-respect will include long digressions on the baldness of a certain duke or the promiscuity of a monarch; they carry on their sleeve the author’s judgement of the characters of history. But more contemporary histories shy away from these digressions, part of a larger shift away from the great man theory of history, more interested in impersonal processes and collective change than the efforts of political actors or the ideas of great intellectuals.

My original interest in the subject sprung out of an investigation into the biographies of Mary Wollstonecraft which I carried out for an essay last term. Over time they too have become less focused on her character towards understanding her ideas – a worthy pursuit. But her history of the French Revolution is certainly not the most interesting or accurate account of historical events, and even her much-celebrated Vindication of the Rights of Woman owes much to her more obscure precursor Catharine Macaulay, who fell out of favour for her unfortunate sin of marrying a much younger man.

But as a character Wollstonecraft is both tragic and determined, witty and wise. Her ideas come alive in the context of her life – her propensity to fall deeply in love with the wrong men, the limitations of her home life and her uneasy disposition. And had not generations of amateur and historian biographers fallen in love with the mystery of her life, there would have been no impetus to explore her ideas. Our collective interest in Wollstonecraft is contingent on the interests of those who came before.

The impersonal turn in the humanities, the unwillingness to explicitly contribute our own biases, interests and prejudices, reflects a paradoxical non-judgementalism. On the one hand, we collectively condemn major figures to the dustbin for their sins through institutional denouncements based on collaborative reports (I’m thinking here of actions like the de- and then renaming of the Berkeley Library at my own university) with no single individual responsible for the condemnation. On the other hand, we rarely take on the challenge of embracing and standing by our own judgements. We are comfortable judging historical figures with the eyes of the present but unwilling to judge them with our own. We search for objective grounding in current trends, what is generally considered ‘outdated' or problematic, rather than what we think is true or false, wrong or right, good or bad. The biography is not just meta-historically passé because it focuses on individuals, but because it makes explicit the contingent and idiosyncratic relationship between the author and their subject.

In a world that idolises objectivity, the ideal book is merely a vessel for information. But if that is all, it can be found more efficiently elsewhere, in podcasts or AI-generated summaries. This leads to an odd form of decision paralysis: there’s so much to read. Not only are we not reading, we’re not reading whole books – we jump from book to book to get the gist, skim read introductions, opt for shorter papers and we go through our lives just obtaining information. We are afraid to spend to long with a single persons subjectivity, lest our own objectivity is thrown off course. Better to balance with a representative opposing view, hedge your bets, deflect criticism.

Increasingly, we build our castles on the foundations of past prejudices while remaining unwilling to explicitly contribute our own. Without a wholesale embrace of our own point of view, the humanities and its books will forever be stuck in a spiral of navel-gazing self-criticism. Returning to the musings of Neale’s prologue, they are not a critique of biography as an approach, an idea he refuses to entertain as an obviously moot point, as “Human beings are the stuff of history.” His emphasis is on the merits of the biographer – before you have lived, have yourself become a character, refined your minor prejudices and grand judgements, can you write insightfully about the characters of history? This recognition is incompatible with our fashionable view from nowhere. A good book stands and falls not on the absence of the author’s prejudices, but on their calibre.

III. Currently reading

One of my experiments this semester is focusing on reading whole books. An endless reading list and similarly endless list of papers makes it tempting to jump around and get a sense of it all. There’s just too much material. But armed with my conviction that letting yourself try on other people’s prejudices is good actually, I’m trying to be more discerning; dropping books I don’t like (unless I’m writing about them) and crucially finishing the ones I enjoy.

Accordingly, I’ve been making my way through a few biographies of Marx, and finding him a very interesting character: we find common ground in our mutual hatred of bureaucracy and knack for unfinished projects. Though I get the sense he could only get away with it because he was a genius. I also acquired some of Marx’s letters to his family in Galway’s phenomenal Charlie Byrne’s bookstore for €1, and have taken this as a sign that I should get serious about re-establishing my German language skills. Anyone with some good suggestions – if I have about an hour a day to dedicate to it – would be much appreciated. By the end of this term I should be reading The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon in German.

I used my Renaissance module as an excuse to finally read Burckhardt’s A Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, and it did not disappoint. It’s such a delightfully ambitious project: to capture “the spirit of the age” by turning over every element of it; the state, society, the individual and morality, all the way insisting on the peculiar character of the Italian Renaissance man. He is a master at biography, thoughtfully lingers at each character he describes to judge their merits, unafraid to let go of the mirage of objectivity, and braving the murky waters of determining character.

We are dragged into his unmitigated admiration for Florence, feel the allure of the Roman ruins, cringe at the thought of sifting through kitschy revivalist Latin poetry, try on his lukewarm feelings towards the humanists, and trace the development of human individuality. His is not a defence but an ode, written with unwavering faith in the robustness of his subject: “A great nation, interwoven by its civilization, its achievements, and its fortunes with the whole life of the modern world, can afford to ignore both its advocates and its accusers. It lives on with our without the approval of theorists.” What a joy it is to think with someone who so clearly loved humanity. And indeed, if we believe in the robustness of the world we insignificant individuals are free to judge it.