Against "social theory bureaucrats"

Having been affiliated to the University of Sussex and the Graduate Programme in Social and Political Thought (SPT) for three years now, I find it expedient to explain my take on social and political thought.

First and foremost, with my research on anti-egalitarian and anti-democratic thinking I hold SPT to account for the full scope of the phrase “social and political thought”. It was the width and breath of this specification that induced me – in its interdisciplinarity and intellectual openness, incorporating social sciences, arts, and humanities in one programme – to choose Sussex as the university to do my doctoral degree at and SPT as the programme to do it in.

Unfortunately, I quickly gained the impression that SPT does not always live up to its promise. Probably due primarily to the smallness of the programme and the reliance on a small core of academics (six or seven) that keep the programme alive, too often the interests of the programme appear to be limited to the interests of these academics and to formal social and political theories. This, I believe, is a severe organizational, but also intellectual shortcoming.

I assume that there must have been a reason for choosing the phrase “social and political thought” to designate the programme and that what is currently being done in the programme is not necessarily all the programme does allow for or indeed intends. In particular, the founders of the programme used the word “thought” rather than the word “theory”. SPT is not a programme in “social and political theory” (or theories), but in “social and political thought”.

I make a distinction between thought and theory. This may well be due to the fact that in my doctoral research I am looking at a kind of thought that has just as often been put in the form of literature – plays and novels – as in that of philosophy. Neither plays nor novels or philosophy qualify as formal scientific theories. Nevertheless, what the authors of the plays, novels, and philosophies under consideration by me express is social and political thought.

Quite often this thought is presented in the form of aphorisms (i.e. Nietzsche) or short sequences of dramatic dialogue (e.g. Ibsen) rather than in the systematic manner of academic theories. My own research will be the first attempt to systematize this kind of non-systematic thought and come up with some form of comprehensive theory.

I realize that the stress of my research on subjectivity also somewhat clashes with the realities in SPT. Should people doing a programme in social and political thought be made to think on their own – or should they be turned into “semi-automatons” (as Alex Higgins put it to me in 2006)? Attending the regular SPT graduate seminars during my time in England, I could not fail to notice (and find increasingly irritating) that no one seemed to be talking about their own thoughts in these seminars. Everyone appeared to be talking about what others thought (mostly some two hundred years back) and how to interpret it – but is anyone in SPT actually creating social and political thought themselves? And should not students and doctoral candidates in a programme like SPT be encouraged to create and explore contemporary and future systems of social and political thought of their own?

More polemically put: Is there such a thing as “social theory bureaucrats”? Archivists and classifiers and re-classifiers of social theories? People whose first impulse on encountering an independent thought is to catalogue it? Other people develop library management systems – is SPT a programme developing social theory management systems?

I do think that social and political thought is not a theoretical matter. Differently from social and political theory, social and political thought ought to incorporate an active and activating element – be this acting in a play, joining a political movement, or founding a research centre of our own. Seeing the ontology that I will be attempting to systematize in my research as the foundation of a new political system (to be expanded on in other, later research projects), I am in a somewhat similar situation to Marx. He found communist thought pre-formed in all sorts of texts and social movements, but it was him systematizing it. His intention, famously, was not primarily to write a social theory, but to do so in order to change the world.

Again, it is atypical for someone in SPT to be writing about thought that might lead to deeds in the future rather than to be interpreting dead thinkers. But as all political movements are based on social and political thought (or ideologies) of some kind – even if they are never being formulated as systematic theories –, this must, in my understanding, be covered by what the phrase “social and political thought” implies and thus be justifiable and accepted.