On the intellectual value of smallness

Invariably, upon first contact with the prehistory of whichever epochal research programme you like, you have the reaction 'whoa, I can't believe *they* knew each other'. With exposure to enough of these supposedly chance encounters, you start to question just what was in the water. But if you take a closer look at the coming-of-age of the dramatis personae themselves, a puzzle emerges: by our standards, they are ordinarily rather glaringly underqualified for the task we know them to be about to take on.

Most intellectual movements benefit immensely from the equivalent of nepotism. You take whoever happens to be around, reward them with spoils we would today consider wholly out of the question in exchange for nothing more than their vague promises, and somehow emerge having profited from the equation. A.J. Ayer, a man with hardly any definite interest in doing philosophy, got sent off to Vienna like a 19 year old Mormon in order to be the guy who'd reconcile the new philosophy going on over there with the new philosophy going on over here. Wittgenstein, famously, just *showed up*, with hardly any knowledge, ideas or skills to his name, not even speaking the language. John Maynard Keynes obtained his post as an economist at Cambridge not only with no publications but having done a grand total of zero coursework in the subject (he was awfully charming, though). Talcott Parsons, a biology major who vaguely wanted to be an economist and took a lone Kant class when the firing of Amherst's President disrupted his senior schedule, got a doctorate at Heidelberg because he learnt it only required three semesters of coursework. When he got back to America, he still didn't know what it was he wanted to do, but he wanted to learn economics for real, of which he knew fairly little. So his prof procured for him a teaching position in the Harvard economics department, such that he might sit in on classes on Marshall's intro textbook, and invited him to commit some of his vaguer thoughts to paper in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, so he could sort his career out. He didn't produce any work for another decade. This is how we wind up with the modern discipline of sociology in America. I could give a dozen examples of exactly the same grade.

Usually, contemporary analyses of what's going on in these pictures focus on something like the selection effects of elite education. This is bunk. Frege answered all his letters, and America lacked universities that took fewer than half their applicants until after the second world war. At best, we can say that there were strong selection effects for social class. But I can't imagine seriously drawing a line between a firm foothold in the gentry and originality of thought. Look at today's Harvard students.

Of course, the obverse of this picture is the relative smallness of these discourses in their early days, and thus the relative smallness of our heroes' achievements. They weren't just being gracious in shrugging. At this stage these research programmes are characterised by an only token selectivity of their publication organs, an excessive generosity with overenthusiastic undergrads, and basically uncertain prospects. You take whomever you can get.

I want to argue that this parochialism actually serves a key role in the production of the very best work. Namely, it gives young and inexperienced people permission to work on foundational concerns. There are barely half-a-dozen papers, so you don't have to catch up on much, there are no real comps to give you, and you have permission to spin your wheels about figures you know hardly anything about, because nobody will catch you on it. And nepotism, by its blind and uncaring nature, captures a slice of people temperamentally far more heterogeneous than those who would've made it the hard way. It's not just that our disciplines are specialised today—specialisation is not really anything new. It's that they are competitive, and meritocratic, in a way that a discipline at its onset can never really be. Floating to the top in meritocracy requires not only hard work and talent—it requires being basically onboard with the starting points of the discipline you're intervening in, and so even the interventions from the elders who made it, and are at last permitted to intervene on the big questions, do little to stymie the sclerosing of the field. Our academics lack not only the requisite courage, but also the naïveté, arrogance and indolence. The work we admire most, and come back to, tends to be from figures guilty to some extent of all three.

The puzzle is, there really is an awful lot in most fields to catch up on today. Journal selectivity has never been more stringent, and yet the ever-greater volumes continue to make it practically unrealistic to read deeply outside your subfield. And it's not as if lowering the gates would do anything to stem the surge. Hardly anyone will read your work, unless you have a truly exceptional number of accrued advantages to your name. Usually, these entail having a particular educational & institutional pedigree, if an at least notionally meritocratic one. This wouldn't change if journals became less selective, as some in philosophy have floated; it would instead make it more difficult than ever for those with fewer accrued advantages to grind for a platform that ensures that at least a small handful of people who haven't heard of their dissertation supervisors & emeritus colleagues will skim their abstracts.

To me, no ready solution suggests itself. The best I can do is a hunch: that the early days of these research programmes were shaped by acute aesthetic sensibilities as to which manners of investigation were appropriate, that they gave themselves permission to engage in shallow misreadings of the things they didn't think were important and thus in all sorts of new dogmatism, and that above all they were characterised by shared purposes. This is what I want this field to do, and what it is failing to do; I am going to turn up my nose at anything that doesn't fit this purpose. Disciplines as they accrue in the academy lack these goals, because they are collections of people with diplomas and gainful employment in departments with approximately the same name, rather than groups with real commonality in intentions. And if you can find a half-dozen broadly well-read people around you who seriously want to answer more or less the same overweening question you do, and they can really give it a decade or two, try to start a new one.