by From Robert Locke In his 1927 book, Julien Benda, wrote about the Treason of the Intellectuals (la trahison des clercs) One reviewer (Roger Kimball) noted: “From the time of the pre-Socratics, intellectuals were a breed apart. They were non-materialistic knowledge-seekers who believed in a universal humanism and represented a cornerstone of civilized society. According to Benda, this all began to change in the early twentieth century. In Europe in the 1920s, intellectuals began abandoning their attachment to traditional philosophical and scholarly ideals, and instead glorified particularisms and moral relativism.” Benda used the term clercs advisedly, as a special brotherhood, charged with knowledge seeking, who like the monks in the “dark” ages got civilization through barbarism, as
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from Robert Locke
In his 1927 book, Julien Benda, wrote about the Treason of the Intellectuals (la trahison des clercs) One reviewer (Roger Kimball) noted:
“From the time of the pre-Socratics, intellectuals were a breed apart. They were non-materialistic knowledge-seekers who believed in a universal humanism and represented a cornerstone of civilized society. According to Benda, this all began to change in the early twentieth century. In Europe in the 1920s, intellectuals began abandoning their attachment to traditional philosophical and scholarly ideals, and instead glorified particularisms and moral relativism.”
Benda used the term clercs advisedly, as a special brotherhood, charged with knowledge seeking, who like the monks in the “dark” ages got civilization through barbarism, as the art historian Kenneth Clarke put it, “by the skin of its teeth.”
The subject recurred when Thorstein Veblen, in 1918, criticized the movement to create schools of commerce (business schools) in US higher education, as a return from civilization to barbarism.
John Kent in “The Business School in the Corporation of Higher Learning in the USA,” notes that Veblen
In The Higher Learning in America, speculated on the prospects of the schools of commerce within the American university.
“Specifically he postulated that (a) instruction in the field of commercial training may fall into a more rigidly drawn curriculum, that diverges from the ways of scientific inquiry (b) the college of commerce would divert funds from legitimate university uses, (c) create a bias hostile to scholarly and scientific work and (d) train graduates who would have better skills to predation on the community.”
According to Veblen, there are people in every society who have “knowledge which their human propensity incites them to cultivate”. These people exhibit a “blatant pursuit of scholarship”, a “scholarly efficiency”. They work for the “advancement of disinterested knowledge”. They have the positive attribute of “idle curiosity”, the display of which works to define the culture of the civilization. They are internally motivated, the scholarly activity is fulfilling in, and of, itself. The university is a place for “men with ingrained scholarly ideals and a consistent aim to serve the ends of learning. The university …is specialized to fit men for a life of science and scholarship”. [Veblen, 1918, p.192]
Veblen juxtaposed the goals and endeavors of vocational training with this ideal of a university. “An effectual university … sufficient to the single-minded pursuit of the higher learning, would be a seminary of the higher learning as separate from an assemblage of vocational schools. [Veblen, 1918, p.193]. Vocational training “is training for proficiency in some gainful occupation and it has no connection with the higher learning, beyond that juxtaposition given it by the inclusion of vocational schools in the same corporation with the university”. [Veblen, 1918, p.149] An effectual university should be “concerned with such discipline [vocational training] only as will give efficiency in the pursuit of knowledge and fit its students for the increase and diffusion of learning” [Veblen, 1918, p.151]. The university should be solely for the “pursuit of scientific knowledge and serviceability”. [ Veblen, 1918, p.194] The choice is between a “matter-of-fact learning versus advancement of disinterested knowledge…the academic authorities face the choice between scholarly efficiency and vocational training, and hitherto the result has been equivocal”. [Veblen, 1918, p.160] Veblen judged that academic authorities had, by and large, championed the matter-of-fact knowledge and vocational training over the advancement of knowledge.
The Higher Learning in America, then, was meant to be a warning about the cumulative effect of the conduct of universities by business principles.
Post WWII, Americans business schools tried to escape the charge of vocationalism by transforming themselves into centers for the study of prescriptive sciences. With sciences, the business schools would fulfill the mission of the intellectuals, which the establishment figures involved in their reform claim they have done. It did not matter if business schools represented the rich and privileged if the sciences they used objectively prescribed policies for the real world. But the claim is bogus; economics and management have not become prescriptive sciences, which means that Benda’s and Veblen’s strictures about the role of intellectuals in societies still apply.
J.C. Spender in his comments talks about “the almost total lack of interest in the ‘theory of the firm…’, politically, theoretically, and historically,” among management academics and economists; Susan Holmberg and Mark Schmitt, at the Roosevelt Institute, observe in “The Milton Friedman Doctrine Is Wrong. Here’s How to Rethink the Corporation,” adding, ”we won’t fix the problem of the gap in incomes between the rich and poor, until we address the nature of the corporation.”
When we address the nature of the corporation we also have to address the role of business schools and how they are integrated into firm governance. I have discussed business schools for decades, with particular reference to German business studies, that is to an alternative in a very successful economy to the ways of the US management schools (Locke, 1985, 2006, 2015). Ken Zimmerman commented in the rwer that “generally things that are settled, routine, taken-for-granted don’t rise to the level of conscious discussion and concern very often. They become part of the background of day-to-day life. So, it is in the USA with the firm.” Is that our particular version of what Benda called, “the treason of the intellectuals?
References
Kemp, R. (2011). “The Business School in the Corporation of Higher Learning in America.” Journal of Pedagogy. Vol 2, No 2, 283-94.
Khurana, R. (2007). From Higher Aims to Hired Hands: The Social Transformation of American Business Schools and the Unfulfilled Promise of Management as a Profession. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Locke, R. R. (1985). “Business Education in Germany: Past Systems and Current Practice.” Business History Review. 49:2. Spring. 232-54.
_________2008. “Comparing the German and American Systems.” Roundtable on Business
Education. A Consideration of Rakesh Khurana’s From Higher Aims to Hired Hands. Business History Review, 82(2), 336-342.
____________. Appreciating Mental Capital (2015). WEA ecommerce edition.