Eric Hobsbawn, Fractured Times: Culture and Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: The New Press, 2014) (From "Politics and Culture in the New Century": "[T]he natural sciences must operate without censorship or political correctness, or they don't operate at all. No government that funds nuclear research can afford to care a damn what the Koran or the Mahabharata or Marxist-Leninism has to say about the nature of matter, or the fact that 30 percent of the voters in the USA may believe that the world was created in seven days. And why can they not afford to care? Because, since the early twentieth century, fundamental research in the natural sciences has been essential to the holders of political power in a way that the arts and humanities have not. It has been essential to war. To put the matter with brutal simplicity: Hitler learned the hard way that he lost little by driving out Jewish musicians and actors. However, it proved fatal to have driven out Jewish mathematicians and physicists." Id. at 43, 44. "From the point of view of the market, the only interesting culture is the product or serve that makes money. But let us not be anachronistic. In the cultural fields the contemporary concept of 'the market'--an undiscriminating, globalising search for maximum profit--is quite novel. Until a few decades ago the arts, even for those who made profits from them as investors or entrepreneurs, were not like other products. Dealing in art, publishing books, financing new plays or organizing the international tours of a great orchestra were not undertaken because they could be shown to be more profitable than selling women's lingerie. Duveen or Kahnweiler, Knopf or Gallimard would not have gone into the hardware business if it had been more lucrative than art dealing or book publishing. What is more, the concept of a single universal rate of profit to which all enterprise must conform is a recent product of the globalized free market, as is the concept that the sole alternative to going out of business is unlimited growth." Id. at 48. From "The Intellectuals: Role, Function and Paradox": "The age of the intellectual as the chief public face of political opposition has retreated into the past. Where are the great campaigners and signatories of manifestos? With a few rare exceptions, most notably the American Noam Chomsky, they are silent or dead. Where are the celebrated maitres a penser of France, the successors of Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Camus and Raymond Aron, of Foucault, Althusser, Derrida and Bourdieu? The ideologists the late twentieth century preferred to abandon the task of pursuing reason and social change, leaving them to the automatic operations of a world of purely rational individuals, allegedly maximizing their benefits through a rationally operating market that naturally tended, when free of outside interference, towards a lasting equilibrium. In a society of unceasing mass entertainment, the activists now found intellectuals to be less useful inspirers of good causes than world-famous rock musicians or film stars, The philosophers could no longer compete with Bono or Eno unless they reclassified themselves as the new figure in the new world of the universal media show, a 'celebrity'. We are living in a new era, at least until the universal noise of Facebook self-expression and the egalitarian ideals of the internet have had their full public effect." "The decline of the great protesting intellectuals is thus due not only to the end of the Cold War, but to the depoliticisation of Western citizens in a period of economic growth and the triumph of the consumer society. The road from the democratic ideals of the Athenian agora to the irresistible temptations of the shopping centre has shrunk the space available for the great demonic force of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: namely, the belief that political action was the way to improve the world. Indeed, the object of the neoliberal globalization was precisely to reduce the size, scope and public intervention of the state. In this it was partly successful." Id. at 194, 198-199. Fuels my disappointment with legal education where the political, except the comfortable, neutered, purely symbolic political, is nonexistent. No more students, just customers and consumers of mind-candy.).
