Intellectuals, Power, and Knowledge. Studies in the Philosophy of Culture and Education

It is interesting to try to see the relationship between the concept of postmodernity (as used in the philosophy of culture) and that of globalization or the global age (as used in many non-philosophical areas, but also in the philosophy of education). "Postmodernity" was certainly the catchword at the beginning of the nineties, just as "globalization" was the catchword at the the end of the decade and continues to be until today. To see how the relationship between power and knowledge changes, it is interesting to look at the two magisterial products of modernity discussed in the present volume: the modern (and usually leftist) intellectual engaged in changing the world (Part 1), and the modern nation-state focused, and welfare-state supported, institution of the university (Part 2). Two modern achievements, the modem figure of the intellectual and the modern institution of the university, have been undergoing a radical crisis of identity. As we develop this theme in Chapter 12, the decline of the philosophical project of modernity is turning out to be a painful process for modern culture: once again it has to reformulate the aims of its social institutions (for us here, the aims of the university) and the tasks of its cultural heroes (for us here, the tasks of the intellectual). If it is successful, the institutions and cultural heroes in question will regain their cultural vitality; if it is not, they will fall into cultural sterility. The traditional modern figure of the intellectual seems untenable in a more and more postmodern cultural surrounding. The modern institution of the university may face a similar fate in a more and more globalized surrounding: either it is going to accept the rules of bureaucratic, consumer-oriented corporations, or it will have to try once again to find a new regulative idea which would have to be as transformative as the role suggested for the university two hundred years ago by German Idealists and Romantics. The breakthrough in the conception of the university two hundred years ago was an event equal in importance to the vast social and cultural transformations of that time. It is hard to tell whether there will appear new ideas about the university comparable in significance. The questions about the modern university and about the modern intellectual are inseparable from a more general question about modernity as a large cultural, social and political project. The institution of the university may be soon affected by the gradual completion of this project. Another modern product, the figure of the intellectual in the form we are familiar from Zola to Sartre (and perhaps even to the middle Foucault) in France, as it is discussed in the present volume, is already affected by it. It is both the intellectual and the modern institution of the university that turn out to be closely, for better or for worse, associated with modernity. Doubts about modernity go hand in hand with doubts about the figure of the intellectual and the modern university. Thus, the history of the university and the history of the intellectual in the 20th century being parallel, the present volume consists of essays in the philosophy of culture (devoted to the intellectual) and in the philosophy of education (devoted to the modern university) and attempts to link the two modern themes together