Hillsdale College Hillsdale, Michigan 49242 Vol . 6, No . 9September, 197 7

THE IMPACT OF THE ACADEMY IN TH EFORMATION OF OPINION : SOME SECONDTHOUGHTS

by Dr. Stephen Tonsor

Dr. Tonsor is a professor of intellectual history at th eUniversity of Michigan. He has served as the secretary to th eReim and Earhart Foundations, president of the PhiladelphiaSociety, a member of the Mont Pelerin Society, and a con-sultant to the President 's Council of Economic Advisors.

He is the associate editor of Modern Age and the autho rof Tradition and Reform in Education .

This presentation was delivered as part of the Center fo rConstructive Alternatives seminar on "Centers of Power an dInfluence : Shaping the Course of Events. "

No myth of the 20th century is more pervasiv ethan the belief that intellectuals, whether they ar ejournalists or academicians, determine the climate o fopinion and shape the values and the politics of thei rsociety. This is a view of social reality which i sespecially flattering to those who have power overthe word and from Plato to Daniel Bell the cry hasalways been the same : corruption is the work o fSophists, "spoiled priests, " philosopher, "the run-ning dogs of the capitalist press," or left-leanin gliberal academicians . Newspapermen love to cal lthemselves "the fourth estate," poets like to believ ethat they are the "unacknowledged legislators of th ehuman race" and some of my colleagues on univer-sity faculties imagine themselves, to put it in th emodest language of the philosopher Hegel ,"Napoleons of the spirit . "

John Maynard Keynes wrote in the final para-graphs of the General Theory in an often quote dpassage : the ideas of economists and political phi-losophers, both when they are right and whe nthey are wrong, are more powerful than iscommonly understood . Indeed the world i sruled by little else. Practical men, who believ ethemselves to be quite exempt from any in-tellectual influences, are usually the slaves o fsome defunct economist . Madmen in authority ,who hear voices in the air, are distilling thei rfrenzy from some academic scribbler of a fe wyears back . I am sure that the power of veste dinterests is vastly exaggerated compared with thegradual encroachment of ideas. Not, indeed,

immediately, but after a certain interval ; for inthe field of economic and political philosophythere are not many who are influenced by newtheories after they are twenty-five or thirt yyears of age, so that the ideas which civil ser-vants and politicians and even agitators apply t ocurrent events are not likely to be the newest .But, soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests ,which are dangerous for good or evil . )

Keynes' views, however elegantly expressed, aremuted compared to those of Thomas Molnar wh owrote in his book, The Counter-Revolution, pub-lished in 1969, that "the principal strategy of revo -lution for the past two hundred years has been th epurposeful utilization of the communication smedia ."2 Molnar went on to argue in that book that :

. . . a revolution is often, if not always, a contes tof two wills in which the more aggressive on ehas a clear advantage . . . .therefore it is vital tha tthe milieu in which the contest of revolutionar yand counter-revolutionary wills takes place i sprepared in advance so as to favor the former .Here the crucial role of the republique deslettres, or generally of the intelligentsia, of th eintellectual classes, cannot be sufficientlyemphasized . 3

Molnar views the republique des lettres essentiallyas a conspiracy of the intellectuals ; a kind of GrandOrient of the intellect, capable of deposing kings an demptying churches . He sees, as did Edmund Burk eand Hippolyte Taine, the French Revolution as theconsequence of this great conspiracy, "the loose ye t

im•pri•mis (im-pri ' mis) adv . In the first place . Middle English ,from Latin in primis, among the first (things) . . .

IMPRIMIS is the journal from The Center for ConstructiveAlternatives. As an exposition of ideas and first principles, i toffers alternative solutions to the problems of our time . Asubscription is free on request .

solid framework of writers and philosophes" 4 whobecame, as Louis XVI's minister Necker said, th e"invisible power which commands everywhere, in-cluding the king's palace ." 5 Moreover, Molnar be-lieves that "a replica of the intellectuals' republicexists"6 at the present time in the United State scomposed of "the manipulators of ideas and images ,writers, professors, artists, journalists" 7 with suf-ficient power to make revolutionary attitudes"respectable to the point of gradually being looke dupon as legitimate, and more . . . .as the only legitimatethesis and attitudes."8

Of course Molnar is not alone in arguing thi sthesis . Kevin Phillips last year published a book ,Mediacracy, which makes essentially the same argu-ment. Phillips writes :

America's new mandarins are not the peopl ewho sell manufactured items but the peopl ewho shape and market ideas and information .

substantially influence, if not dominate, th ecultural establishments today : the publishinghouses, museums, the galleries, the majo rnews, picture, and cultural weeklies and month -lies ; the theater, the cinema, and the univer-sities . 1 0

One can hardly quarrel with the assertion thatliberals, leftists, and cultural subversives dominat ethe media, the arts and the academy . It is a fact s oobvious that the liberals proclaim it openly . Nor i sthe impact of an "establishment" something whollynew to the Western world . My own mentor, astaunchly liberal Protestant who had studied at th eSorbonne shortly before World War I, remarked t ome one day that in order to hold an academic chair a ta French University in those days it was necessar yfor the academician to demonstrate that he wa santi-clerical . One accomplished this in any of threeways. One could be Protestant, one could be a Je w

The media have become pivotal . Politics havealso been affected . Instead of having a veste deconomic interest in stability, as did previou sconservative business establishments, the knowl-edge sector has a vested interest in change —in the unmooring of convention, in socio -economic experiments, in ongoing conceptio nof new ideas . . . . The intelligentsia's traditionalsupport for liberal credos is bolstered by eco-nomic interest in social and research spending ,plus involvement in the mores of the newaffluent knowledge-sector culture . 9

Let me offer one final opinion on this subject .This time the opinion is that of a social-democratwhose intuitions have shifted him to the right .Daniel Bell, the Harvard sociologist, published thi syear The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism . It isa compilation of Bell's essays over the past severa lyears and is one of the most provocative and interest-ing pieces of cultural diagnosis to have appeared with -in a decade . Bell's line of argument is very like that o fMolnar and Phillips . Bell writes :

The adversary culture has come to dominat ethe cultural order . . . .The protagonists of theadversary culture, because of the historic sub-versive effect on traditional bourgeois values,

and one could be a Free-Mason . It was better stillif one were able to combine two of these affiliations .

Granted that establishments enforce a measure o funiformity and control in cultural and politicalinstitutions, does it follow that these establishment sare able to exercise effective control over the climat eof opinion and determinative influence over valuesand politics? I believe this latter assumption verydoubtful . Moreover the conservative assumptionthat our ills, our failure to sweep public sentimen tbefore us at the polls, are due to the fact that we d onot control the media and the academy, is a dan-gerous assumption which prevents conservative sfrom seeing either their great strength or the source sof their weakness .

Periodically the advertising business and America nindustry as a whole is attacked for misleading th eAmerican public . Most recently John Kenneth Gal-braith and Ralph Nader have argued that advertisin gkeeps the whole shaky structure of capitalist enter-prise erect by persuading people to buy things whic hthey really do not need, do not want and which areharmful to them anyway. In a socialist society, on esupposes, uncorrupted by advertising, high govern-ment officials would abandon their black limousine s

2

and walk to work even though exactly the opposite i strue of every socialist society the world has known .

Now obviously men do not, as Ralph Nader an dJohn Kenneth Galbraith suppose, purchase anythingjust because the trumpets of Madison Avenue hav esounded . No amount of advertising will populariz ethe green persimmon as a between meals snack . No rdoes anyone need to mount an extravagant adver-tising campaign in order to sell motorcycles to teen -aged males. In short, certain things cannot be sol dbecause they are essentially antithetical to huma nwants and satisfactions and certain things need n oselling because of human desires and predilections .

Neither do people shift from one candidate toanother, abandon traditional values, or even accep tinterpretations of the news solely or even wholly o nthe basis of saturation propaganda produced by apervasive establishment . Any set of ideas which re-ceives wide currency must bear some close resem-blance to a reality perceived by relatively largenumbers of people . Abraham Lincoln, a very ablepolitician, pointed out in a deservedly much quotedspeech at Clinton, N .Y., in 1858 that "you can foolall the people some of the time, and some of th epeople all the time, but you cannot fool all of thepeople all the time ."

It is precisely in those states where control is tota land where intellectuals, journalists and artists are al lthe creatures of the power elite that art and idea sare received with the greatest skepticism . Everyonein the Soviet Union listens with the third ear for th eechoes of truth which lurk somewhere in the fog o fparty-Chinese and even the readers of the New YorkTimes have learned to ask themselves precisely whatpolitical motives lie behind an unflattering articl eon Senator Edward Kennedy or a picture of Pres-idential Candidate Jimmy Carter addressing anAmerican Legion Convention and featured on th efront page, a picture which reveals the candidateto be a weak and confused man . Nothing appear sby accident in the Times just as nothing appears b yaccident in Pravda but not everything is equallyeffective in the formation of public opinion .

Current conservative interpretations of the impactof the media and the academy in the formation o fpublic opinion have a curiously Leninist flavor t othem . You will recall that Lenin too held elaboratenotions about the value of elite leadership cadres an dthe importance of holding what Lenin called "thecommanding heights ." In fact, however, no revolu-tion is ever made until the ruling elite has discredite dits mandate ; until the ruling elite has deauthorize ditself. The only instance of which we know wherethe walls came tumbling down at the sound of th etrumpets is the fall of Jericho as reported in th eBook of Joshua . It is the fact of deauthorizationand a discredited mandate which conservatives ough tto examine rather than the supposed power of th emedia and the academy. Ruling elites are neveroverthrown by revolution. They, in fact, commi tsuicide and their bodies are disposed of by the jackal sand vultures of the ideological world .

Revolutions are not the work of entrenche destablishments . Those great movements which leadmen to reinterpret reality and reorder and restructur ethe world are not made by established claques, but b ythe powerful and the well-placed and the intellectual sand artists in their employ . The history of Christian-ity and nearly every other great world religion i sinstructive in this matter . The founder of Christianitywas the leader of a despised sect within a despise drace . His followers were totally without influence an dposition . In the ordinarily tolerant Hellenistic worldinto which Christianity was born Christians were apersecuted minority from the outset and continue dto be persecuted for another three hundred years .Yet the triumph of Christianity in the late-Roma nworld was complete . Some commentators hav eargued that it was only after Christian control ofpower and intellectuality was complete that Chris-tianity lost its ability to persuade . Since 325 A .D . ,some critics would say, "it has been downhill all th eway ."

Recently a good deal of attention has been give nto the way in which natural scientific explanation sare generated, old scientific theories displaced an dnew explanations established . These revolutions i nscientific thought are made against an establishe dposition which is as dominant and as complete a sthat maintained in most orthodox theologica lsystems. Changes occur as sudden and complet eshifts of viewpoint, often made in the face of receive dopinion . They have the characteristics of a conver-sion experience .

Thomas S . Kuhn in The Structure of Scientifi cRevolutions describes them in the following fashion :

. . .Paradigms are not corrigible by normal scienceat all . Instead, as we have already seen, norma lscience ultimately leads only to the recogni-tion of anomalies and to crises. And these areterminated, not by deliberation and inter-pretation, but by a relatively sudden and un -structured event like the gestalt switch. Sci-entists then often speak of the "scales fallin gfrom the eyes" or of the "lightning flash" tha t"inundates" a previously obscure puzzle, en-abling its components to be seen in a new waythat for the first time permits its solution . 1 l

Those who have observed the social sciencesclosely over the past decade have the sense that muc hthe same sort of experience has shaken and converte dindividual social scientists . Suddenly the older an destablished explanations are perceived as no longe rtrue. It is not a case of an adjustment or a rein-terpretation being necessary, a sort of theoretica l"fine-tuning." No, it is as though the scholar for thefirst time sees that the whole of the old theory i swrong and that it must be jettisoned and replaced .You will note that this happens in spite of and no tbecause of the establishment . As Galileo is reporte dto have said to the inquisitors : "But it does move ."

In the academy, as in the world at large, one ough tnot to expect support for a reevaluation or restruc-turing of society, a reconsideration which flies in th e

3

ce of the "establishment" whether liberal or con-rvative . Intellectual change, the transvaluation o fdues, transition in the political order does not tak eace in that fashion.

One of the most interesting aspects of the curren tberal ascendency in the academy is its rather recen tate . Fifty years ago departments of history, as in -,ed nearly every department in the social sciences i nie United States, were filled with what John Highamas described as "conservative evolutionists ." TheirDlitics were Republican and their historical writin g[tensely nationalistic . Theodore Roosevelt not onl y,came President of the United States ; he served asresident of the American Historical Association .

In economics, even though German-educated:onomists infected with the "socialism of the chair"id begun to appear on faculties of American uni -:rsities, the field was dominated by men who would

national cultural life is not bought at a dear price .It is. And the mockery of the myth of free enquir yin a social situation which, in reality, penalizes thedeviant view is a costly bit of social hypocrisy . Iam arguing that, short of the ruthless mechanismsof the totalitarian state all establishments are rathe rshaky affairs and that those moments in which the yappear most secure are their moments of greates tdanger .

However, let us assume that the contemporar yliberal establishment is unlike past establishment sand has discovered the secret of the fountain o fyouth. Let us assume that it is not only able to main-tain its dominant position but it succeeds in ex-cluding all deviant and contrary ideas from the publi carena . Ought we then to expect a decade or two o frevolution in America ?

It is very unlikely that such will be the case, for

ause Milton Friedman to appear as a dangerou sidical . The shift which has taken place in the:,ademy over the past fifty years is a shift which ha sken place in the society as a whole and far fro m1stigating and propagandizing that remarkable transi -on, the academy, if anything, lagged somewha tehind the movement of society . For, in spite of'hat university professors say of themselves, a sinovators and harbingers of revolution they are, i nct, apologists for the past, whatever that past ma y,. They rationalize established intellectual positions .he great bulk of academicians are entirely un-riginal men who dot the i's and cross the is ofie revolutionary generalizations of a generationrevious . They write the simple-minded textbook sad boil down the "General Theories" into popularctures .

But, in fact, no establishment is less secure thanthe moment it seems to have achieved its widest

arrency and its most dominant position . It is thenat the small Galileo-like voices are heard in th eight saying, "But it does move." Establishments are.agile and temporary structures and not even in-uisitors and secret policemen can shore them up)rever. Of course I am not arguing here that homo -,neity and conformity in the academy and in our

revolutions are inconsistent with democratic socie-ties . Democratic societies are essentially and deep-seatedly conservative . I wish to explore the conten tof this conservatism a bit later, but for the momen tI want to demonstrate the existence and cause o fthis conservatism .

Tocqueville in Democracy in America, publishedin 1834, made the following observation :

I hear it said that it is in the nature and habit sof democracies to be constantly changing thei ropinions and feelings. This may be true of smal ldemocratic nations, like those of the ancien tworld, in which the whole community coul dbe assembled in a public place and then excitedat will by an orator. But I saw nothing of thekind among the great democratic people tha tdwells upon the opposite shores of the At-lantic Ocean. What struck me in the Unite dStates was the difficulty of shaking the majorityin an opinion once conceived or of drawing itoff from a leader once adopted . Neither speak-ing nor writing can accomplish it ; nothing bu texperience will avail, and even experience mus tbe repeated . 1 2

Tocqueville continued his observations by noting :

4

It is a mistake to believe that, when once equal-ity of condition has become the old and un-contested state of society and has imparte dits characteristics to the manners of a nation ,men will easily allow themselves to be thrustinto perilous risks by an imprudent leader o ra bold innovator . Not indeed that they wil lresist him openly, by well-contrived schemes ,or even by a premeditated plan of resistance .They will not struggle energetically againsthim, sometimes they will even applaud him ;but they do not follow him . To his vehemencethey secretly oppose their inertia, to his rev-olutionary tendencies their conservative in-terests, their homely tastes to his adventurouspassions, their good sense to the flights of hi sgenius, to his poetry their prose . With immenseexertion he raises them for an instant, but the yspeedily escape from him and fall back, as i twere, by their own weight . He strains himselfto rouse the indifferent and distracted multi-tude and finds at last that he is reduced t oimpotence, not because he is conquered bu tbecause he is alone .

I do not assert that men living in democrati ccommunities are naturally stationary ; I think,on the contrary, that a perpetual stir prevails i nthe bosom of those societies, and that rest i sunknown there ; but I think that men bestirthemselves within certain limits, beyond whichthey hardly ever go . They are forever varying ,altering, and restoring secondary matters, bu tthey carefully abstain from touching what i sfundamental . They love change, but they dreadrevolutions . 1 3

In this dread of revolutions Tocqueville saw agreat weakness in democratic societies, strange a sthis seemed to Tocqueville's readers who were livin gin an era characterized by revolution and strange a sit may seem to us who have lived with contemporaryrevolutionary movements . Tocqueville closed thechapter in Democracy in America which he entitle d"Why Great Revolutions Will Become More Rare "with the following paragraph :

It is believed by some that modem society wil lbe always changing its aspect ; for myself, Ifear it will ultimately be too invariably fixed inthe same institutions, the same prejudices, thesame manners, so that mankind will be stoppedand circumscribed ; that the mind will swin gbackwards and forwards forever without be -getting fresh ideas ; that man will waste hisstrength in bootless and solitary trifling, and ,though in continual motion, that humanity wil lcease to advance . 1 4

More than fifty years after the publication ofTocqueville's Democracy in America, another French -man, Gustave le Bon, having lived through repeatedrevolutionary upheavals, produced one of the classic sof modern sociology, a book entitled The Crowd .Le Bon uses the word "the crowd" as a kind o fshorthand for modem democratic society and he i seven more emphatic than Tocqueville in asserting the

conservative character of crowds . Here is what h esays :

However, to believe in the predominance amongcrowds of revolutionary instincts would be tomisconstrue entirely their psychology . It ismerely their tendency to violence which de-ceives us on this point . Their rebellious anddestructive outbursts are always very transi-tory . Crowds are too much governed by un-conscious considerations, and too much subjec tin consequence to secular hereditary influence snot to be extremely conservative . Abandoned tothemselves, they soon weary of disorder, an dinstinctively turn to servitude . . . .It is difficult tounderstand history, and popular revolutions inparticular, if one does not take sufficiently int oaccount the profoundly conservative instinct sof crowds. They may be desirous, it is true, o fchanging the names of their institutions, and t oobtain these changes they accomplish at time seven violent revolutions, but the essence of theseinstitutions is too much the expression of thehereditary needs of the race for them no tinvariably to abide by it . Their incessant mobil-ity only exerts its influence on quite super-ficial matters . In fact they possess conservativ einstincts as indestructible as those of all primi-tive beings. Their fetish-like respect for alltraditions is absolute ; their unconscious horro rof all novelty capable of changing the essentialconditions of their existence is very deeplyrooted . 1 5

And then Le Bon appends a most interestingobservation which permits us to see into the goals o fdemocratic majorities .

Had democracies possessed the power the ywield today at the time of the invention o fmechanical looms or the introduction of steam-power and the railways, the realization of thoseinventions would have been impossible, o rwould have been achieved at the cost of rev-olutions and repeated massacres. It is fortunatefor the progress of civilization that the power o fcrowds only began to exist when the greatdiscoveries of science and industry had bee neffected . l 6

It seems then, to me, that two sets of errors ar einvolved in the overestimation of the influence ofthe arts, the academy and the media on the formatio nof public opinion. Conservatives perceive libera lcontrol of the academy and the media as a dominan tand irresistible force in society . In fact its powersare extremely limited . It is effective only so long a sit articulates and rationalizes the values, politics an dsocio-economic conceptions of the folk-mind . Whenit enunciates ideas which are clearly in conflict wit hthese ideals or when it presents a view of the worl dclearly in conflict with the popular reality principl eit will be rejected and no amount of control orelectronic puffery will make its views acceptable .Conservatives need to concern themselves less wit hdiscussions of the liberal media and the libera l

5

academy and far more with popular values andaspirations. For while these values and aspiration sare traditional and conservative they are hardly thoseshared by most Americans who today call themselve sconservatives .

If conservatives are mistaken as to the extent o fliberal power, liberals are even more mistaken . Notonly do liberals fail to recognize the limits of thei rpower in transforming or changing society, they fai lto perceive the kind of society which will emerge a sa consequence of their agit-prop activities .

Let me be explicit . Democratic societies are notsocialist ; indeed, they are deeply anti-socialist, fo rsocialism is a rational construct which is post-in-dustrial and post-traditional . Democratic societiesare deeply populist, anti-rational and anti-intellectual ,egalitarian and submissive to authority when tha tauthority presents itself in a democratic guise . Thecurrent liberal conception of society as a value-fre eexploration of all the possibilities of human ex-perience is, because even the dumbest clod know sbetter, simply anathema to the great masses of th epeople . It is true that the values of that society ar epre-capitalistic, that is traditional, anti-rational ,oriented to consumption rather than production ,distributive rather than agglomerative . They are no tsocialist, for socialism demands a degree of con-centration, manipulation, rationalization and bureau-cratization which traditional society simply rejects .

When one deals with the realm of values it is eve nclearer that the cultural world of the liberal intelli-gentsia is simply rejected by the people. Indeed thisliberal world of the media, the academy and the art swould receive its most stunning check from the ver yforces it perceives as its support . The behavior of tha tsplendid populist politician from California, youn gGovernor Brown, is a case in point . A close friend and

chairman of a University of California department ,rather more liberal than myself, wrote me recentlyin rather naive confusion, "Governor Brown seem sto have been invented by God in order to punish th eintellectuals." To American liberals I say that it is ,for their own sakes, wise to look the gift horse o fpopulism in the mouth .

Finally, liberals ought to realize that only a portio nof their habitual vocabulary is effective in addressin gthe democratic folk-mind . That mind is essentiall yselective. It accepts those elements of the libera lvocabulary which are congruent with its prejudices ,and then only for a time . What a tragedy for liberal sthat the world which they strive so mightily to buil dis one in which they cannot possibly live .

'John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interes tand Money (London, 1936), pp . 383-384 .

2 Thomas Molnar, The Counter-Revolution (New York, 1969), p . 71 .

3 lbid., p . 29 .

4lbid., p . 6 .S lbid ., p . 25 .

6 lbid ., p . 24 .

7lbid., p . 58 .

8lbid ., p . 57 .

9Kevin Phillips, Mediacracy (Garden City, New York, 1975), p . 17 .

10Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York ,1976), pp . 40-41 .

11 Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Secon dedition, enlarged (Chicago, 1970), p . 122 .12Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, the Henry Reev etext as revised by Francis Bowen, Vol. II (New York, 1966), p . 257 .

13 lbid ., p . 255 .

"Ibid ., p . 263 .

15Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd, A Study of the Popular Mind (NewYork, 1960).

16lbid .

Hillsdale College is marked by its strong independence and itsemphasis on academic excellence. It holds that the traditionalvalues of Western civilization, especially including the free societyof responsible individuals, are worthy of defense . In maintainingthese values, the college has remained independent throughout its132 years, neither soliciting nor accepting government fundin gfor its operations .

The opinions expressed in /MPH/MIS may be, but are not necessarily, the views of the Center for Constructive Alternatives or Hillsdale College .

Copyright 'c 1977 by Hillsdale College . Permission to reprint in whole or in part is hereby granted, provided customary credit is given .