BY J. MOUFAWAD-PAUL

Alain Badiou once remarked that philosophy was “democratic” insofar as anyone is capable of critical thinking, but “undemocratic” because the pursuit of truth is not the same as voting according to one’s subjective opinion. In my opinion, this position is the basis for critical thinking and critical scholarship––anyone is capable of critical thought, but opinions are not the same as truth and truth is not the result of a vote––along with the political-ethical injunction to speak truth to power. Such an understanding of critical scholarship is opposed to the dominant, liberal conception that imagines academia to be a debate club that should foster a “marketplace of ideas.” According to this understanding (of which, tellingly, the so-called hard sciences are largely exempt) universities should function like a Smithian conception of the free market: through rational debate where every position is allowed, true ideas will naturally become prominent whereas erroneous ideas will be weeded out.

And yet this classical liberal notion of the marketplace of ideas is wrong. It was a faulty analogy (ideas are not identical to market commodities), and the model itself is also wrong––people still mass purchase shitty commodities and no “invisible hand” has resulted in a general equilibrium. Empirically speaking, no matter how many times false positions are thoroughly demonstrated to be false they continue to persist and push their way into academia (i.e. Murray’s racist “bell curve” thesis). Social-historical struggles lurk beneath scholarly practice. Moreover, a liberal conception of academic freedom invariably benefits a conservative and reactionary conception of scholarship that is an elitist reversal of the axiom I adapted above. That is, academia is “undemocratic” in the sense that only some very clever and important people are capable of being academics (meaning, usually, cis and able-bodied white men), while being simultaneously “democratic” in that truth is whatever consensus these privileged interlocuters and their followers decide upon. Reactionary scholars who implicitly or explicitly subscribe to this position often assert, like religious fundamentalists, that they are in fact defending Truth and denounce challenges to their absolutism by calling those challenges “postmodernism.” (Jordan Peterson, for example, likes to play this game.) In fact, they have no intention of examining rigorous scholarship that challenges their presumptions. They are instead devoted to enforcing conceptions of reality that reproduce dominant social power. Hence Trump’s 1776 Unites project: intended, against serious historical scholarship, to re-entrench dominant tropes of US settler-capitalist ideology by suppressing decades of rigorous historical work.

The reason why the liberal conception of academia inadvertently dovetails nicely with this reactionary elitist approach to scholarship is because reactionaries know how to use liberal mores to their advantage. Bruce Gilley’s work on colonialism and anti-colonialism is paradigmatic of this intersection. I’m aware of it because it has to do with what I study as an academic and because I was involved in an open letter challenging a reputable publisher’s plan to release a book series on “problems with anti-colonialism” that he was co-editing despite lacking qualifications. Gilley’s previous attempt to publish in this area resulted in a controversy over academic standards with Third World Quarterly, and his essay was even trounced by the Cato Institute for misrepresenting and misunderstanding primary research. An open letter signed by nearly 1000 academics, many of whom are experts in the subject matter, quashed the series. The signatories recognized that Gilley had no legitimate basis for weighing in on this discussion, and that his research was the worst kind of historical revisionism. But Gilley, and scholars like Gilley, understand the tactics afforded to them by liberal academia: they claim that legitimate challenges to their scholarship are “censorship” (a dirty word for classical liberals), and thus drum up fears about “cancel culture” and an intolerant left when, in point of fact, it is their legitimacy as scholars that is being challenged. Academic freedom cannot double as a cover for incompetence.

Hypocritically, given their reliance on “free speech,” Gilley and his ilk also seek to drive their critics out of academia, seeking to actively censor and discipline them, as he revealed in a talk where he argued that conservative academics should function like NATO. The tactic is to play the victim, even if this victimhood is simply a result of erroneous ideas being revealed as erroneous. Such tactics aren’t new; they have been happening for decades. What is new, perhaps, is the growing awareness of how liberal discourse undercuts genuine intellectual inquiry by helping to keep alive ideas that have been previously demonstrated to be erroneous. Perhaps, even more to the point, academic debate has not annihilated these erroneous ideas, no matter how erroneous they have been shown to be, because such ideas are dependent on very real class commitments. If we care about scholarship, we need to marginalize the regurgitation of discredited and reactionary thought.

Guest blogger J. Moufawad-Paul lives in Toronto and works as casualized contract faculty at York University where he received his PhD in philosophy. He is the author of Demarcation and Demystification (2019), Austerity Apparatus (2017), and Continuity and Rupture (2016).