Actually do some meaningful work? Us? Top academics, The Young Ones Photograph: image.net
When the history of how a good crisis went to waste gets written
up, it will surely contain a big chapter on the failure of our academic
elites. Because just like the politicians, the taxpayer-funded
intellectuals at our universities have missed the historic opportunities
gifted to them by the financial collapse. And it will be the rest of us
who pay the price.
At the start of the banking crisis, the air
was thick with the sound of lachrymose economists. How did they miss the
biggest crash since 1929? Professors at the LSE were asked that very
question by the Queen – and were too tongue-tied to reply. A better
answer came from Alan Greenspan, until recently the most powerful
economist on the planet, who went to Capitol Hill and confessed to a
"flaw" in his model of the world. Clearly, the economic crisis was also a
crisis of economics.
With the all-powerful dismal-ists
temporarily discredited, an opportunity opened up for the sociologists,
the political scientists and the rest to charge in, have their say – and
change the way public policy is shaped.
If all that sounds like a
battle of the -ologies to you, then consider: no discipline has so
profoundly shaped Britain or America over the past 30 years as
mainstream economics, with its almost unshakeable faith in markets, and
its insistence on taking politics out of the public sphere. Displace
that narrow, straitened form of economics from its position as the
orthodoxy on modern capitalism, and you have a shot at changing
capitalism itself.
So have the non-economists grasped their
moment? Have they hell. Look at the academic conferences held over the
past few weeks, at which the latest and most promising research in each
discipline is presented, and it's as if Lehman Brothers never fell over.
Britain's
top political scientists met in Belfast a couple of weeks ago, and
you'd have thought there'd be plenty in the crisis for them to discuss,
from the technocrat governments installed in southern Europe to the
paralysis of British politicians in the face of the banks. But no: over
the course of three days, they held exactly one discussion of Britain's
political economy. There was more prominence given to a session on how
academic research could advance dons' careers.
Perhaps you
have more faith in the sociologists. Take a peek at the website for the
British Sociological Association. Scroll through the
press-released research,
and you will not come across anything that deals with the banking
crash. Instead in April 2010, amid the biggest sociological event in
decades, the BSA put out a notice titled: "Older bodybuilders can change
young people's view of the over-60s, research says."
Or why not do the experiment I tried this weekend: go to three of the main academic journals in
sociology,
where the most noteworthy research is collected, and search the
abstracts for the terms "finance" or "economy" or "markets" since the
start of the last decade.
Comb through the results for articles dealing with the
financial crisis
in even the most tangential sense. I found nine in the American
Sociological Review, three in Sociology ("the UK's premier sociology
journal"), and one in the British Journal of Sociology. Look at those
numbers, and remember that the BSA has 2,500 members – yet this is the
best they could do.
Sociologists are reliably good at analysing
the fallout from crises: the recessions, the cuts, the dispossessed, the
repossessed. I'd expect them to be in for a busy few years. But on the
upstream stuff, the causes of this crisis, they are practically silent.
At Oxford, Donald MacKenzie has pulled off remarkable close-up studies
of financiers in action but without context or politics: the view is all
cogs and no car. Indeed, leave aside three remarkable books from
Karen Ho,
David Graeber and
Alexandra Ouroussoff,
all of whom are anthropologists (and all discussed here previously),
and the bigger picture is still in the hands of those formerly
shamefaced, but now rather assertive, economists. One promising
initiative has just begun on the Open Democracy website called
Uneconomics,
where non-economists do chip in on the upstream causes of the crisis.
But that's it: a cheap and cheerful internet forum. The Second
International it ain't.
It wasn't always like this. One way of
characterising what has happened in America and Britain over the past
three decades is that people at the top have skimmed off increasing
amounts of the money made by their corporations and societies. That's a
phenomenon well covered by earlier generations of sociologists, whether
it's Marx with his study of primitive accumulation, or the American C
Wright Mills and his classic The Power Elite, or France's Pierre
Bourdieu.
But those sociologists were public academics, unafraid
to stray outside their disciplines. Compare that with the picture of
today's teacher in a modern degree-factory, forever churning out
publications for their discipline's top-rated journals. Not much scope
there to try out a speculative research project that might not fly, or
to collaborate with specialists in other subjects.
Nor is there
much encouragement to engage with public life. Because that's what's
really missing from the other social sciences. When an entire discipline
does what the sociologists did at their conference last week and
devotes as much time to
discussing the holistic massage industry
("using a Foucauldian lens") as to analysing financiers, they're never
going to challenge the dominance of mainstream economics. And it's hard
to believe they really want to.
