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Democracy's Children: Intellectuals and the Rise of Cultural Politics
Reviewed by William G. Tierney
John McGowan.
Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2002, 243 pp.
A few months after September 11, 2001, I found myself stranded in Washington, D.C., on a Saturday after an AAUP committee meeting. A friend invited me to her sister's house for a dinner party, and, upon arriving, I felt as if I had stepped back in time. People were in the large kitchen casually talking over wine as my hosts prepared dinner. Fresh bread stood ready to be cut. The hosts and guests were professionals in their forties and fifties; the mixture of faded denims and corduroy coats struck me as a throwback to the days when we all had time for good conversation over a sumptuous meal. Early in the evening, I made a sarcastic remark about George Bush's administration and the room fell quiet. Boy, had I misread things.
We spent the next five hours arguing about the problems the country faced and how "people like you" (read "academic" or "intellectual" or "lefty") liked to criticize, but never had concrete solutions for anything. We needed to heed the president's call to be vigilant, to strike back, or this country was going to the dogs, explained my friend's sister. My hosts' argument turned on their inability to feel safe since September 11. They wanted to be able to go down into the Washington subway system and not worry that they were going to be gassed. One solution was to seal the borders; keep out the foreigners. My observation that there were more foreign-born individuals living in America in 1901 than 2001 had no effect other than to inflame the argument; I was drawing straw men, and the president was acting to protect us. And so the evening went. How was I to interpret the experience?
Enter John McGowan. Democracy's Children: Intellectuals and the Rise of Cultural Politics is a meditation on how intellectuals might try to achieve their political and social goals in the early twenty--first century. Although the book's seven chapters were written before September 11, they are useful in thinking through how academics might respond to the problems that currently confront us. McGowan is a professor of English and comparative literature at the University of North Carolina, and he considers himself a pluralist and a pragmatist. That he is something of a skeptic comes as little surprise-what academic is not-but he also admits to being an optimist. The chapters are written in the first person in an engaging style that permits readers to think through the confusing intellectual terrain that confronts academics today.
McGowan is out to refashion what it means to be an intellectual. At one and the same time, he wants to "combat the narcissism of intellectuals," establish that "intellectuals should be the champions of democracy," demolish the idea that "colleges [are] the repositories of knowledge with professors as the custodians of the tradition," and question why an academic's work is more important than the work of most Americans. With such sweeping goals, one might assume that the author has a clear philosophical trajectory complete with an action plan, but such an assumption would be misplaced.
McGowan recognizes the importance of investigating the ideological production of values and beliefs, but such investigation is not the book's primary purpose. Following in the path of cultural critics John Guillory and Bill Readings, he also recognizes that the university has outlived its traditional purpose. He acknowledges that the college campus is merely one cultural setting among many, and that the academic intellectual has to rethink his or her roles even while unsure of what those roles should be. If the institution no longer exists to impart received wisdom to the young, McGowan wonders, then what is its purpose?
Where McGowan fails is in his inability to make sense of pluralism and pragmatism in a way that might assuage the fear that my dinner party hosts felt. McGowan writes that "pluralism suggests that intellectuals will find their work in the rhetorical effort to get people to change the names that they apply to situations," but he also raises a concern, quite standard among liberals, that tuition at public universities is subsidized welfare for the upper-middle class. Thus, on the one hand, we have an author with a marvelous depth of knowledge from the classics proclaiming that the intellectual's role is to create more dialogue, and on the other, we have a neophyte policy wonk trying to figure out how to determine college-funding streams.
McGowan never seems quite able to marry the two realms of intellectualism and pragmatism, and I was left wanting more of both—a more fully developed argument about what a twenty--first century university might be other than a tower of Babel, and a discussion of what policy implications might exist if we take seriously his admonition that the twentieth century university is dead. He offers hints of what such an institution might be toward the end of the book, but never develops them. Interdisciplinary work, McGowan contends, is the pluralists' coin of the realm. Rather than have one person assume the mantle of interdisciplinarity, he suggests that intellectuals should work in groups aimed not at convergence, but at understanding one another's positions. He acknowledges that such work will refashion how the academy structures and rewards work, but he does not suggest how to make that work feasible. He points out that the artificial divide between town and gown needs to be done away with so that individuals and groups can inform one another, but he isn't clear about how to make such interactions possible. Is it enough to ask of intellectuals that we simply host salons and invite a wide range of people to tea?
I do not intend any disrespect to the author of Democracy's Children, for the book is thoughtful, provocative, timely, and well written. Throughout the text, one senses that McGowan wants a "better" life for his children, students, friends, and colleagues. Perhaps a clear and complete articulation of such a better life is too much to ask of one author, but without such an articulation I am left, as McGowan notes, quoting Matthew Arnold: "Wandering between two worlds, one dead, / The other powerless to be born, / With nowhere yet to rest my head." We need to articulate both what this new world might be and the academics' role in fashioning it. McGowan offers a sketch of a university where we would have "more democracy, not less," but he challenges the reader to fill in that sketch.
William Tierney is director of the Center for Higher Education Policy Analysis at the University of Southern California and Academe's book review editor.
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