Entry sixteen - Purely academic

Once upon a time, (some) intellectuals conducted research and published works that confidently sought to tackle global structural "problems". When new political entities began popping up after World War II, a simple rebuke of colonialism was no longer enough. The new breed of post-War scholars were preoccupied with two principles - a will-to-knowledge (finding correlative rules according to which societies worked) and a will-to-change (using this knowledge to effect positive change). They rejected the particularism of their predecessors and insisted on empirical research based on "hard" data. They then identified problems that "Third World" countries needed to overcome in order to complete their entry into the global community promised with independence. They needed "modernisation". To throw off "dependency". To achieve "development". Nearly all concrete policy suggestions were firmly embedded in such approaches.

Somewhere along the way, however, this fell apart. Modernisation was exposed as a hoax. Dependency revealed its one-dimensionality. Development was derided as so much wishful thinking. As academics pondered the shortcomings of their earlier paradigms, some of them rather swiftly abandoned the project of "problem-solving" altogether. In the aftermath of this shift came students who, instead of looking for routes to liberation, sought examples of ambivalence and transnational subjectivity. The result has been something akin to foreign policy debate in the United States. Even after three disastrous years in Iraq by any measure, opposition to American foreign policy has failed miserably to put together anything resembling a coherent alternative. As a result, a stuttering simpleton (a self-proclaimed "problem-solver") has been able to contrast his global, even progressive, foreign policy with the presumed "isolationism" of his incoherent opponents. Likewise, paternalistic conservative bankers, backed up by so many number-crunching economists, have managed to monopolise policy debates about "problem-solving" while their opponents whimper about anti-foundationalism and the fallacy of civil society. Despite the monstrous and unambiguous failure of these bankers over three generations, they continue to rule the debate on "development" and "globalisation" - both of which are noble but ill-defined concepts.

Since I am not a problem-solver, I do not propose an alternative to such an impasse. Unlike politicians, academics are not supposed to compromise intellectual honesty for political gain. Thus, unlike American Democrats, they have something of an excuse. However, I have not advanced far enough in the academic world to abandon the temptation to yearn for the days when it was as simple as proscribing "modernisation" or "development" to feel like one was "doing something".