Assorted ideas-1

Citizens of the former Soviet states also suffer from ideology fatigue. Especially on the periphery of the former Soviet Union, where communism was experienced as a reform imposed from a distant capital, many people today see democracy in similar terms, as a foreign ideology that has little to do with their lives. Sean Roberts, an anthropologist and Central Asia specialist at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs, writes that “most citizens of Kazakhstan, and perhaps most post-Soviet peoples outside the Baltic states, engage the concept of democracy much as they embraced communism before—as a mostly empty ideological framework to facilitate deference to the authority and power of the state, not as a system of formal institutions that can effectively represent people’s interests and make governance more successful in serving the people.” Roberts further observes that “if many Americans saw in the end of the Cold War the victory of American ideals, per [Francis] Fukuyama’s ‘end of history,’ most former Soviet citizens viewed it more as an ‘end of ideology,’ or a sign that grand ideals are essentially incompatible with the realities of life.”

from Voting Against Freedom by Joshua Kucer, The Wilson Quarterly, Winter 2013. 

Perhaps sociology of culture has achieved such a dominant share in the contemporary “marketplace” of ideas because it too perfectly mirrors those corporatist and institutional values whose pervasive influence it seeks to expose. We can glimpse the triumph of the sociological view of the university as the credentialing, class-replicating institution par excellence in the positivist counterpart to the critique of credentialism: Are credentials meaningless? Well, now private “degree-granting” farms like the University of Phoenix offer for-credit classes with no content apart from forcing students to memorize statistics about the purported benefits of earning one’s degree.

from Too Much Sociology in the n+1 journal. 

Timothy Snyder: You mentioned the ethical and the prudential sources of social democracy, and I asked you about the aesthetic. It strikes me also that there is a truthfulness question that’s important. When we think of Gaskell, or Engels, or Dickens, or Upton Sinclair, we think of certain terms which they introduced which have stuck with us: “hard times,” for example. And I wonder if something which is missing today isn’t the same willingness or ability of intellectuals to formulate what’s actually going on in the economy and in society. Tony Judt: That capacity has come undone in two stages. The first stage, which I would date from the late 1950s, was the self-distancing of intellectuals from a concern with the straightforward, observable injustices of economic life. It seemed as though those observable injustices were rather being overcome, at least in the places intellectuals lived. The focus upon the “down and out in London and Paris,” as it might be, seemed almost jejune—you know, “yes, yes, yes, but it’s more complicated than that, the real injustices are,” and then something else. Or the real oppression is in the mind, rather than in the unfair distribution of income, or whatever it might be. So left-wing intellectuals became cleverer at finding injustice—and less interested in what seemed rather like the 1930s or, if they were more historically conscious, 1890s style of moral horror at simple economic unfairness and suffering.
More recently, I think we really are the victims of a discursive shift, since the late 1970s, towards economics. Intellectuals don’t ask if something is right or wrong, but whether a policy is efficient or inefficient. They don’t ask if a measure is good or bad, but whether or not it improves productivity. The reason they do this is not necessarily because they are uninterested in society, but because they have come to assume, rather uncritically, that the point of economic policy is to generate resources. Until you’ve generated resources, goes the refrain, there’s no point having a conversation about distributing them.
This, it seems to me, comes close to a sort of soft blackmail: surely you are not going to be so unrealistic or unworldly or idealistic as to place goals before means? We are accordingly advised that everything begins with economics. But this reduces intellectuals—no less than the workers they are discussing—to rodents on a treadmill. When we talk of increasing productivity or resources, how do we know when to stop? At what point are we sufficiently well-resourced to turn our attention to the distribution of goods? How would we ever know when the time has come to talk about deserts and needs rather than outputs and efficiencies?
The effect of the dominance of economic language in an intellectual culture which was always vulnerable to the authority of “experts” has acted as a brake upon a more morally informed social debate.

 from Thinking the Twentieth Century by Tony Judt, with Timothy Snyder, Penguin Books, 2013.