It is because the moral economy has little need of the market that market forces are up in arms against it. Zygmunt Bauman
There is no wealth but life. John Ruskin
What is a University? This is not the same question as has been asked many times and very fruitfully before, namely “What are Universities For?” For Stefan Collini (What are Universities For?, 2012), higher educational institutions ought to work towards creating the educated public which sits at the heart of democratic civil society, a desirable and aspirational conception in the tradition of an earlier Cambridge Critic, F. R. Leavis (see ‘Elites, Oligarchies and an Educated Public’ in his collected essays, Nor Shall My Sword, 1972).
The political role of the university was also central to José Ortega y Gasset. In his lectures on the subject (Mission of the University , 1930), he concluded by describing the university as the most important pillar of a democratic society, precisely because in its commitment to the scientific pursuit of truth it would never pander to the masses in the way politicians and even the free press inevitably do. Where for Leavis and Collini the university produces the educated public central to a democracy, for Ortega y Gasset things were more abstract: it was the idea of the university itself as a temple to truth which supported the idea of democracy as a good to be cherished.
But what is a University? Collini and Ortega y Gasset tell us things that a University should do or produce, and the values it should stand for, and this is indeed a way of describing a thing, enumerating its characteristics and thereby differentiating it from other things which are not it. But in other words, describing a thing by its characteristics is actually to answer the question “what is it not?” But there is another way to describe a thing, to answer the question (which T. S. Eliot says we shouldn’t ask), “what is it?”, and that is to attempt to identify so-called essential features, those that hold in all times and places.
The reason to attempt this approach with regard to the university is that the university is an ancient institution, one which has existed under that name for almost a thousand years, ever since the foundation of the Universitas Bononiensis (today better known as the University of Bologna) in 1088. And of course this was merely the first institution of learning to call itself a universitas, a medieval Latin word meaning corporation. The novelty of the universitas lay not in being a space dedicated to advanced learning - in this it had been preceded in medieval Europe by the so-called Cathedral Schools, and before that, in the world of Antiquity, either by famous schools associated with great philosophers, such as Plato’s Academy and the Lyceum of Aristotle, both in Athens, or by state-sponsored institutions dedicated to research, such as the Mouseion (“temple of the Muses”) at Alexandria, home to the legendary library. What was new was rather the act of enshrining the community of paying students and teaching masters as a legal entity with rights and privileges, the most important of which was the right to grant degrees.
It has been argued that since its establishment on the cultural landscape, the university has always been what Collini and Ortega y Gasset and others have claimed it to be: a principle of truth, a moral and intellectual compass for society. But this is far from the truth. Unfortunately, judging by what they have done and produced, throughout most of their history universities have been co-opted as factories for replicating hegemonic ideology, i.e. the values and practices which keep those who profit by the exploitation of others safely in their seats. I’ve written somewhere else on here (‘The State of Education’) about the way in which the education system impounds our intellectual autonomy and gives it back to us bit by bit to the extent that we show ourselves to be suitably subservient to the apparatus of oppression. Few if any make it through all those nets unscathed. Indeed, it was really only in the post ‘68 decades that universities could and did become seminaries for genuinely committed democratic citizens, “hippies” whose “counter-culture” was one of peace and community in opposition to the death and destruction offered by both Eastern and Western governments alike.
My point is that a university cannot be said to be the seedbed for democracy - this is what it could be, but more often than not has not been. And yet it has nevertheless still been a university. So what is a university?
I think we are onto something when we agree with Collini and Ortega y Gasset in so far as we accept that a university is a productive community. It is, moreover, a community apart from the society within which it forms, and whose products and modes of production also differ therefrom. Sociologists have used the term communitas (“community”) in conjunction with societas (“society”_) to describe a structuring tension in human culture between on the one hand a strictly speaking anarchic tendency towards horizontal bonding (communitas), and on the other the desire to impose regular, i.e. rules-based, routines (see e.g. Bauman, discussing Victor Turner, in Liquid Love, 2003, pp. 72-73). Bauman writes, ‘[i]t is societas with its routine and communitas with its anarchy that together, in their reluctant and conflict-ridden cooperation, make the difference between order and chaos.’ (p. 73). For Bauman, societas is aligned with institutionalization, and above all the market economy, while communitas is characterized by a non-market, or pre-market, economy: a moral economy: ‘mutual care and help, living for the other, weaving the tissue of human commitments, fastening and servicing interhuman bonds, translating rights into obligations, sharing responsibility for everyone’s fortune and welfare.’ (p. 74). The market economy seeks to commodify as much of this moral economy as possible, jealous of its self-sufficiency, its super-abundant productivity. From the point of view of the beneficiaries of the market economy, whom we may term the dominant or exploitative class, the trouble with the horizontality of communitas is that it offers no high ground from which one group may come to dominate an other. In other words, exploiters are afraid of community because they see no place for themselves in it, which when we think about it is really tragic.
And as Bauman warns, ‘The invasion and colonization of communitas, the site of the moral economy, by consumer market forces constitutes the most awesome of dangers threatening the present form of human togetherness.’ (p. 74). The reason that this attack is catastrophic is because if communitas is atomized into a range of commodities and so obliterated, societas too will vanish. Nature of course abhors a vacuum, and History stands ready to fill this one: with tyranny, dictature, and rampant oppression. A dictatorship is the least politically active state of human “togetherness”. In a dictatorship most political activity of any wide significance is located around the dictator. This is interesting to note, because one of the weird things about history as we have it is how much of it is concerned with kings - to the extent that until as late as the Second World War, and for some time after, many historians held that “true” history meant the deeds of “great men”, i.e. kings, generals, major politicians etc. That most of our surviving (intentional) records of the past do corroborate this story should tell us just how much of our past was mired in the swamps of dictatorship, a state of being characterised by no productive tension between communitas and societas.
The trouble with rules and routines is that they can be automated, and a political system which prioritizes the predictability of routine will inevitably do away with the need for people at all. This won’t mean that people vanish, it will just mean that they won’t “count” anymore. We will cease to be citizens and will all become Giorgio Agamben’s homo sacer, a person who is defined by but not protected by the law.
While admitting the impossibility of absolutes (nothing is ever just one thing, totally and forever), we may feel close to a productive description when we hazard a guess and say that in our western(ised) societies the university represents an abode for that communitas without which societas itself withers away. The university is still a space that offers the potential for horizontal community. Learning means or depends upon openness in the face of ignorance, in the face of which no one can be said to be above or ahead of anyone else. It is achieved through the mutual give and take between students and teachers, and it is something that happens naturally, organically, spontaneously, and which is unpredictable in its ways and results, like life itself.
Achievement in this field is not rewarded with mastery over others but mastery of the self, and it is worth remembering, if only as symbols for what I mean, that medieval university graduates earned the right to call themselves “master” and to teach in their turn. And that in Italy today, students who complete their undergraduate thesis are crowned with a laurel wreath, like an emperor. Not so they may feel themselves ‘imperially alone’, lords of their own ‘tiny, skull-sized kingdoms’, as David Foster-Wallace cautions (‘This is Water’, 2005), but so they may, if they wish, see themselves as lords over themselves. Whether or not this is the intended or generally perceived significance of words like “master” in degrees or traditions like the laurel crown (it is probably not), who cares - the meaning is ineradicably there for us to make. While we all may still pretend to own things, we can never own the possibilities of meaning latent within them, nor the words to express them.
Thus the horizontal community is not one devoid of order, if order is understood as a hierarchically imposed control. In the community of the moral economy, each member is master over themselves. And this is the secret which the market economy does not want anyone to learn.
