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Scholarship and Freedom
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Geoffrey Galt Harpham
Language:
English
Published/Copyright:
2020
About this book
Geoffrey Galt Harpham argues that scholars play a unique role in liberal society, manifesting in refined form the freedoms it guarantees and demanding that it make good on those same guarantees. Far from ivory-tower intellectuals, scholars such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Linda Nochlin undertake the radical social act of questioning received wisdom.
Reviews
Geoffrey Harpham outflanks those who believe that scholarship must resist political engagement and those who believe that politics cannot be avoided by scholars who live and work in the real world. Harpham argues persuasively that the scholar’s devotion to truth is itself a potent political act because it has the power to ‘clear the ground for a better set of arrangements based on truth.’ In short, the purer scholarship is, the more politically useful it will be. A bold and welcome thesis.
-- Stanley Fish, author of The First: How to Think about Hate Speech, Campus Speech, Religious Speech, Fake News, Post-Truth, and Donald Trump
-- Stanley Fish, author of The First: How to Think about Hate Speech, Campus Speech, Religious Speech, Fake News, Post-Truth, and Donald Trump
An extraordinary paean to scholarship as an embattled Enlightenment ideal and as a practice devoted to the pursuit of reliable truths about human affairs, wherever that pursuit may lead. Harpham’s surprising argument is that scholarship inevitably leads to freedom—that independent thinking challenges calcified orthodoxies. His exempla, W. E. B. Du Bois, Bernard Lategan, and Linda Nochlin, give us ample reason to believe. A bracing book for dark times.
-- Michael Bérubé, author of What’s Liberal about the Liberal Arts?
-- Michael Bérubé, author of What’s Liberal about the Liberal Arts?
A distinctive and powerful book. A sharp introduction, three well-wrought case studies, and an eloquent conclusion offer the reader a brilliant, polemical account of why scholarship in the humanities and social sciences still matters.
-- Anthony Grafton, author of Inky Fingers: The Making of Books in Early Modern Europe
-- Anthony Grafton, author of Inky Fingers: The Making of Books in Early Modern Europe
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Frontmatter
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Contents
vii -
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Introduction: A Tropism toward Freedom
1 -
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One: The Scholar as Problem
11 -
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Two: Conversion and the Question of Evidence
50 -
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Three: Virgin Vision: Scholarship and the Birth of the New
92 -
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Conclusion: Too Much Freedom?
139 -
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Notes
149 -
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Acknowledgments
181 -
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Index
183
Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
September 8, 2020
eBook ISBN:
9780674250314
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
Main content:
208
eBook ISBN:
9780674250314
Keywords for this book
Scholarship; Freedom; Academic; Higher education; Research; Evidence; Bernard Lategan; Linda Nochlin; W. E. B. Du Bois; Democracy; Footnote; Enlightenment; Modernity; University; Art history; Biblical studies; Hermeneutics; History; Feminism; Ekphrasis; apartheid
