HABINEK,
Thomas Political Intellectuals and the Limits
of Expertise
This
paper considers three case studies of distinguished
academicians' engagement with the public sphere and the
consequences thereof. The political/intellectual careers
of Theodor Mommsen, Sebastiano Timpanaro, and Pierre
Bourdieu illustrate a range of ways in which the
relationship between profound academic work and
significant political intervention has been negotiated.
Mommsen's depiction of Julius Caesar as prototype of the
longed-for leader who would break the power of the
reactionary Prussian aristocracy is well known. Perhaps
less familiar, however, is his impact, directly and
indirectly (especially through Max Weber) on
anti-democratic movements in nineteenth century Germany.
The philologist Sebastiano Timpanaro provided
intellectual muscle for certain branches of the Italian
communist movement while also leaving an unparalleled
scholarly legacy. Yet his most widely read "political"
writing, On Materialism, makes virtually no reference to classical
antiquity and consists instead of a careful reading of
Lenin with an eye to recuperating his thought in
preference to "Stalinist dogmatism" and "'Western
Marxism.'" Bourdieu, although not a classicist by
profession, received early training in the field, which
seems to have shaped not only his influential concepts of
"symbolic capital" and "theory of practice," but also,
perhaps, his political resistance to the "disenchantment"
and "disembedding" that accompany the onward march of
post-industrial capitalism and globalization. Yet
Bourdieu was also strongly committed to the autonomy of
academic disciplines, to their need to insist upon
rigorous standards of professional review.
These
three case studies give some reason for skepticism about
any move to embrace the figure of the "public
intellectual" as distinct from that of professional
classicist. If anything, they suggest that perhaps the
best course of action for the political classicist is to
take seriously Walter Benjamin's call to dialectical
engagement between past and present or Nietzsche's
invitation to practice a "critical philology" that would
illuminate the present by "the bright light of
antiquity." But work of this sort requires a clear-headed
analysis of both past and present, something that
scholarly and pedagogical habits of identification, as
well as academicians' class allegiances, still militate
against. And so it may turn out that one good way to be a
public intellectual is to strive to become a better
classicist.