Fantasies of the new class: Ideologies of Professionalism In Post

In the 1930s, two disciplinary paradigms emerged that cannily prefigured the institutional requirements of the post–World War II university and expanding new class: the New Criticism developed by southern poet-critics such as John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, and Allen Tate and the structural functionalism spearheaded by Harvard sociologist Talcott Parsons.¹ Both of these paradigms helped transform their disciplines into erudite yet teachable bodies of knowledge, in ways that seemed tailor made for the mass influx of students that took place in the 1940s and 1950s. In the case of the New Critics, this transformation was facilitated by their promotion of close reading as the discipline’s primary interpretive method. John Guillory and Gerald Graff, in their disciplinary histories of English literature, describe the apparently contradictory demands that the New Critics’ espousal of close reading fulfilled. On the one hand, Guillory states, it allowed the New Critics to reimagine literary language as an advanced form of cultural capital, one that imparted to texts “a certain kind of rarity, the very difficulty of apprehending them.”² On the other hand, according to Graff, close reading’s bracketing of social context seemed “ideally suited to a new, mass student body that could not be depended on to bring to the university any common cultural background.”³ Parsons’s structural functionalism fulfilled similar demands. His chief accomplishment was to develop a highly technical theoretical vocabulary, one that lent a veneer of scientificity to the discipline that it had hitherto lacked. At the same time, Parsons’s purpose was to thoroughly systematize his discipline in ways that made it more amenable to presentation in postsecondary textbooks.⁴

However, in spite of these pedagogical parallels, the two paradigms seemingly embodied different models of professionalization. In general, as Guillory argues, the humanities and social sciences underwent a process of definition by mutual exclusion in the 1940s and 1950s as each marked off its respective proximity to the hard sciences: “First, the social sciences were led to discard interpretation as much as possible from their methodological repertoire. And second, the humanities came to be identified as the disciplines whose only method was interpretation.”⁵ For the first generation of U.S. New Critics, who began their careers as Agrarian ideologues opposed to the industrialization of the South, literature was the only remaining counterweight to the triumph of technical rationality within the welfare state. Their cultivation of close reading was in part an effort to isolate this anti-instrumental dimension of literature, to shelter it from the technocratic pretensions of the new class. Hence, the New Critics rejected any approach to literary studies that seemed social scientific. Literary historicism, Allen Tate complained in 1941, “takes its definite place in the positivistic movement which, from my point of view, has been clearing the way for the slave state.”⁶ If the New Critics tried to make literary studies less sociological, Parsons conversely tried to make sociology less literary. His work represented the apogee of his discipline’s technocratic ambitions. He pushed sociology away from the interpretive tendencies of earlier paradigms such as the Chicago school and tried to refashion it as an objective science. The New Criticism and structural functionalism, in other words, pulled their disciplines to opposite poles of the professional spectrum. In Alvin Gouldner’s terms, the New Critics cultivated a purist image of themselves as traditional, humanistic intellectuals; sociologists reenvisaged themselves as potential members of the technical intelligentsia.

As I argue in this chapter, the separation of literary studies and sociology that took place under the aegis of New Criticism and structural functionalism masked underlying affinities between the two disciplines’ attitude toward the new class that critics and sociologists hoped to train within their classrooms. Both paradigms involved similar deformations of the social trustee ideology that pervaded the professional stratum in the early twentieth century. As we saw in the introduction, this ideology encompassed both technical and moral claims; the social trustee professional was a technically qualified expert dedicated to the public good. Both the New Criticism and structural functionalism attempted to synthesize these claims. The New Criticism was indeed rooted in an overt hostility toward the technocratic tendencies of the sciences and social sciences. However, the effect of the New Critics’ work was to reshape literary studies in imitation of these disciplines; the method of close reading, as John Crowe Ransom argued in “Criticism, Inc.” (1937),⁷ was supposed to make criticism more scientific—that is, more predictable and rigorous. Close reading became the discipline’s specialized techne, its claim to professional identity, and the New Critics linked this techne to the imagined moral effects of literature in modern society. Parsons’s structural functionalism similarly tried to push sociology closer to the natural sciences by excluding interpretation and fashioning a new technical vocabulary for the discipline. At the same time, his conception of the sociologist’s function was essentially humanistic and cleaved to the lineaments of the social trustee ideology. At the heart of Parsons’s byzantine theoretical edifice was the notion that social systems are held together by noninstrumental moral values that once originated from the pulpit but today come from the universities. The purpose of sociologists and other welfare-state professionals is to maintain and reproduce these values, which ensure the homeostasis of the social system.

Both paradigms thus exemplify the fracturing of social trustee ideology that took place within the post–World War II academy. In Gouldner’s scenario, the university was supposed to be the site where the disciplines would come together to perpetuate a common culture of critical discourse, thereby forging a meritocratic new class that would displace the old bourgeoisie as society’s intelligent and moral elite. Among other things, this scenario did not take into account the logic of specialization, which tended to atomize the new class rather than binding it together into a coherent social stratum. As Barbara Ehrenreich and John Ehrenreich argue, “specialization was the [professional-managerial class] member’s chief selling point, the quality which justified his or her claim to a unique niche in society, but it acted as a centrifugal force on the class as a whole.”⁸ In literary studies and academic sociology, this atomization went beyond differences in technique; the social trustee synthesis of techne and morality gave rise to discipline-specific and mutually antagonistic fantasies of cultural education. These fantasies eroded social trustee professionalism’s pragmatic impetus, instead narrowly orienting it toward disciplinary self-perpetuation.

The differentiation of sociology and literary studies that began in the mid-1930s is particularly striking given that the two disciplines often overlapped in the United States in the early decades of the twentieth century. Before the emergence of the New Criticism and structural functionalism, many sociologists incorporated the methods and assumptions of writers into their work and vice versa. In particular, as Carla Cappetti documents, a rich cross-fertilization of sociology and literature took place in Chicago in the 1920s and 1930s. The dominant sociological paradigm in the United States at this time was the Chicago School of Sociology, generally remembered for its empirical studies of Chicago’s ethnic neighborhoods and subcultures. This school relied on qualitative methods, especially ethnographic techniques borrowed from the Boasian tradition in anthropology. According to Cappetti, the Chicago school also borrowed from late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century literary naturalism—especially the work of urban writers such as Émile Zola and Theodore Dreiser; this debt was particularly evident in the sociologists’ style, which relied on rich description to convey a phenomenal sense of Chicago’s communities. The Chicago sociologists in turn influenced the generation of naturalists that emerged in the 1930s—James Farrell, Nelson Algren, and Richard Wright. Hence, as we have seen, novels such as Farrell’s Studs Lonigan directly incorporated Chicago urban sociology as an explanatory framework. By the late 1930s, says Cappetti, Chicago sociology and literary naturalism were converging toward a common writing practice: “on the one hand the tendency toward a more subjective sociology, a sociology that rediscovered the subjectivity of the individual as a social and cultural being; on the other the tendency toward a more objective literature, a literature that rediscovered the individual’s unbreachable ties with the larger cultural and social spheres.”⁹ This literature also explored the progressive notion that societal problems can be alleviated through broad organizational changes. Wright’s Native Son (1940), for instance, concludes with Boris Max’s vision of the worldwide Communist movement working to demolish the decrepit buildings that crippled Bigger Thomas’s development. Similarly, in The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan (1934), the bookish Danny O’Neill finds respite from the environmental forces that destroy Studs and other neighborhood youth by reading Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of Business Enterprise (1904) and envisioning “a better world, a cleaner world, a world such as that the Russians were attempting to achieve.”¹⁰

Within sociology, the backlash against this disciplinary conjunction took the form of some sociologists’ rejection of the Chicago school. In part, this rejection was regional. Eastern sociologists chafed against the midwestern dominance of their field: Chicago sociologists at this time dominated both the discipline’s major professional association (the American Sociological Society, later renamed the American Sociological Association) and its premier journal (the American Sociological Review).¹¹ However, the backlash was primarily against the Chicago school’s ostensibly unprofessional tendencies; its sociology seemed too qualitative, too amateurish, and too unscientific. These deficiencies were particularly galling because sociology seemed poised on the brink of becoming a discipline that would be centrally involved in government administration and industrial management; the reaction against the Chicago school thus roughly coincided with the rise of industrial sociology and the increased use of social scientists in the New Deal.¹² In the place of the Chicago school, Talcott Parsons gradually emerged as the discipline’s major theorist. He established his institutional base at Harvard University, where he was the leading voice within the influential Department of Social Relations, an interdisciplinary program that brought together sociologists, social psychologists, and cultural anthropologists.¹³ By the 1950s, a plurality of sociologists worked within a structural functionalist framework derived from Parsons’s second major book, The Social System (1951), and from articles written by students such as Robert Merton.¹⁴

Parsons exemplified sociologists’ desire to establish their discipline on a firmer methodological footing by purging from it the literary influences of Chicago sociology. This ambition was announced in his first book, The Structure of Social Action (1937),¹⁵ an attempt to create a grand synthesis of preexisting sociological theory through detailed readings of Alfred Marshall, Vilfredo Pareto, Émile Durkheim, and Max Weber. The program announced by the book was the antithesis of everything represented by the Chicago school. The Chicago school sociologists focused on qualitative investigation, sometimes to the detriment of theory. Perhaps because of the influence of Chicago pragmatists such as John Dewey and George Herbert Mead, they treated sociological concepts as tools to be picked up or discarded, depending on the tool’s utility for a given project. This pragmatic attitude toward theory can be seen in Robert Park and Ernest Burgess’s Introduction to the Science of Sociology (1921),¹⁶ which was supposed to be the school’s basic theoretical text. In fact, it was a compendium of lengthy excerpts from other nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century social theorists, tied together by the two editors’ introductions and conclusions to each chapter.

Parsons’s goal, in contrast, was to reemphasize the priority of general theory in sociology. For Parsons, the problem with American sociology was that it was no more than a series of discrete analyses, devoid of any theoretical framework or consistent methodology. Sociology in the hands of the Chicago school had degenerated into an unprofessional and prescientific exercise in observing and recording the social world. Parsons described his alternative methodological position as one of “analytical realism.” As opposed to the Chicago school’s qualitative empiricism, Parsons argued that theory should come first: “scientific ‘theory’—most generally defined as a body of logically interrelated ‘general concepts’ of empirical reference—is not only a dependent but an independent variable in the development of science. It goes without saying that a theory to be sound must fit the facts but it does not follow that the facts alone, discovered independently of theory, determine what the theory is to be, nor that theory is not a factor in determining what facts will be discovered, what is to be the direction of interest of scientific investigation.”¹⁷ For this reason, Parsons’s work operated at a greater level of abstraction than that of any previous sociologist; in book after book, he developed an ever more elaborate conceptual apparatus intended to categorize and systematize all possible sociological knowledge.

Even more important in terms of the effect on his discipline, Parsons reinvented the language of sociology. Most members of the Chicago school had written in a nontechnical style, enriched with lengthy quotations from subjects and evocations of Chicago neighborhoods. This style had been a virtual necessity given the Chicago sociologists’ use of participant-observation methods, and it was one of the aspects of their work that so appealed to 1930s naturalists such as Farrell and Wright. Parsons, in contrast, invented a convoluted, technical vocabulary, which many of his students referred to as “Parsonese.” It was a style intended to give the reader a sense of the abstract, technical level at which Parsons’s sociology functioned. It was distinctly unliterary, and it made few concessions to the lay reader. C. Wright Mills, in The Sociological Imagination (1959), cited the following passage from The Social System to reveal the stylistic depths to which his discipline had sunk under Parsons: “‘A role then is a sector of the total orientation system of an individual actor which is organized about expectations in relation to a particular interaction context, that is integrated with a particular set of value-standards which govern interaction with one or more alters in the appropriate complementary roles. These alters need not be a defined group of individuals, but can involve any alter if and when he comes into a particular complementary interaction relationship with ego which involves a reciprocity of expectations with reference to common standards of value-orientation.’” ¹⁸ This style privileged conceptual difficulty for its own sake, and it lent a veneer of professional and scientific dignity to a discipline struggling to defend its position in relation to the hard sciences.

However, as we have seen, if Parsons wanted to professionalize his discipline by liberating it from the literary tendencies of the Chicago school, he also wanted to claim for his discipline the moral concerns typically associated with the humanities. Beginning with The Structure of Social Action, he initiated a polemic against the positivistic–utilitarian tradition in the social sciences. This polemic prefigured Trilling’s argument against literary naturalism and progressive criticism in The Liberal Imagination; Parsons imagined culture, the world of ideas, as a distinct sphere irreducible to economic determination. Hence, the central effort of The Structure of Social Action was to show that Parsons’s four theorists—Marshall, Pareto, Durkheim, and Weber—had initiated a paradigm shift in the social sciences away from economic models of social action. Society, all four theorists imagined, exists insofar as all individuals within it are guided by a “common system of value attitudes.”¹⁹ These values are fundamentally nonrational, meaning that they cannot be contained within a means–end calculus of the kind imagined by utilitarian thinkers. In Parsons’s later social systems theory or structural functionalism, which departed from his early action theory in important ways, he maintained this emphasis on the determining role of culture. At the heart of his later theory, with its description of systems within systems within systems, was the idea that every society has a central cultural system, consisting of its nonrational values and traditions. The purpose of a modern society’s social institutions (schools, hospitals, courts of law, and so on) is to integrate these values into the psyche of every individual and to recondition therapeutically anyone who goes astray. This process ensures the equilibrium or homeostasis of the social system—two of the key terms of Parsons’s critical vocabulary.

Throughout his work, Parsons combined this cultural determinism with a new-class fantasy about professionals’ function in U.S. society.²⁰ As Howard Brick documents, in Parsons’s sociology of the 1930s he envisaged social reform as a question of cultural education. In claiming that each society depends on a nonrational value consensus, Parsons believed that he had discovered the focus of all future reform efforts. “Since ‘political’ measures,” Brick claims, “depended for their efficacy on a preexisting moral bond secured in social institutions, the real locus of reform lay not in the state but in civil society.”²¹ This early emphasis on cultural education gave Parsons’s early work its reformist edge; he believed that professionals should push back against the profit-oriented, traditional bourgeoisie. Professionals, who were the group in society most attuned to disinterested social ideals, should reshape America’s value consensus. Brick argues that over the course of the 1940s and 1950s Parsons became increasingly sanguine about this cultural impact. He believed that professionals were already displacing the old bourgeoisie as America’s hegemonic elite and that this displacement was an inevitable feature of the welfare state: “where once Parsons called for critical analysis of the economic order, he now declared the virtual supersession of capitalism as a social system.”²² Professionals do not need to do anything to influence policy or reshape public attitudes; the new-class revolution was quietly taking place anyway.

One of the distinguishing features of this vision of professionals’ cultural influence was that it blurred the distinction between humanistic intellectuals and the technical intelligentsia. Echoing Émile Durkheim, Parsons viewed all professionals as agents of socialization, secular priests who shape and incite belief in society’s core values.²³ Parsons argued, for instance, that physical illness is not merely a bodily dysfunction but also a form of social deviance that places strain on the social system. Doctors do not merely cure patients; they manage and discipline the sick role, ensuring that patients conform to cultural expectations about sickness and recovery.²⁴ In addition, Parsons also claimed that humanistic intellectuals’ distinctive mode of self-governance was spreading throughout American society, gradually transforming it into an ideal social system. He conceived of professionalism as a mediating term between two of the central concepts of sociological theory—gemeinschaft and gesellschaft. Gemeinschaft, or traditional community, is collectivist and immediate, bound together by face-to-face contacts. Gesellschaft, or modern society, is individualistic and abstract, bound by contractual relations and therefore prone to anomie. The professions combine the best elements of both. In Parsons’s terms, they are societal communities—organic villages of experts sprouting up within the impersonal, bureaucratic state. Parsons’s preeminent example of this type of association is the academic department: “the collegial pattern is today perhaps most fully institutionalized in the academic world, which contrary to what many have argued, is not giving way to bureaucratization, even though higher education has recently undergone unprecedented expansion. The basic equality of ‘colleagues’ in a faculty or department is in particularly sharp and persistent contrast with bureaucratic hierarchy.”²⁵ According to Parsons, this type of organization was spreading throughout the United States as more citizens received a higher education and flooded the marketplace. Academia stood at the center of what he called an educational revolution, akin to the industrial and democratic revolutions of previous centuries. This revolution was in the process of transforming the United States into a massive societal community of free professionals. Even in business, “organizations have become more associational, for it is essential to secure the cooperation of specialists without asserting sheer authority. Much of modern ‘bureaucracy’ thus verges on the collegial pattern.”²⁶ Prefiguring Gouldner’s vision of new-class unity, Parsons imagined that the technical intelligentsia, trained by humanistic intellectuals in the academy, would reform both government and the modern corporation in its image. America was becoming a university.²⁷

Parsons’s sociology, then, eschewed the literary methodology and discursive style of the Chicago school, treating it as a disciplinary outside that threatened sociology’s professional identity; the discipline’s essential technique had to be kept pure of anything that seemed like an amateurish import from a humanistic discipline. At the same time, Parsons recuperated many of the concerns of literary intellectuals and other humanists by claiming nonrational moral consensus as the central object of sociological study. This social trustee synthesis of antiliterary technique and humanistic morality was crucial to Parsons’s conception of the role of sociologists and other professionals in the welfare state, and it explained the basic conservatism and fantasy element of his position. Parsons’s sociology, which New Left sociologists of the late 1960s attacked as a typical example of establishment thinking, was in fact rooted in liberal ideals. He hoped for a greater distribution of educational advantages, greater inclusion of African Americans in the U.S. “societal community,” a concerted professional effort to eliminate poverty, and so forth. The problem with these social ideals was that they were rarely coupled with any pragmatic program for their implementation; he assumed his ideals were already embodied in the practice of professionalism and need only await the progress of time to spread throughout the rest of society. Professionals, in other words, are not active reformers; by safeguarding and reproducing their society’s already existing central values, they ensure the continuity and homeostasis of the social system.

However, what is most striking about Parsons’s project is the extent to which his new-class fantasy contradicted the actual effects his work had on his discipline. According to Parsons’s theory, society’s central moral values radiate out from the professions to the rest of the social system, but the effect of Parsons’s own project was to help transform sociology into an insular discipline disconnected from public discourse. This effect stemmed directly from his methodological rejection of sociology’s literary tendencies—in particular, the Chicago school’s readable, nontechnical style. Ironically, the sociologists of the 1950s and 1960s who best fulfilled Parsons’s new-class fantasy were those who most vehemently rejected his methods—maverick sociologists who cultivated an accessible style and wrote for a nondisciplinary audience, such as C. Wright Mills.

While most American sociologists after the mid-1930s were trying to distance themselves from the literary-minded Chicago school, American literary critics were involved in a dialectical interplay with their own disciplinary other—the social sciences. The New Critics in particular responded to the same pressures of professionalization as Parsons and created a disciplinary synthesis of technique and morality that became a potent force in the post–World War II academy. For sociology in the United States, the eschewal of literary methods marked the changing of the guard between the University of Chicago and Harvard. With the New Critics, the influence of disciplinary specialization is directly traceable in the dramatic alteration of their theory over the course of the 1930s and 1940s. In the early 1930s, most of the New Critics were political Agrarians chiefly interested in protecting the South from industrialism; by the 1940s, they were formalist aesthetes interested in disseminating the apolitical practice of close reading throughout the academy.

This transition has been the focus of several studies of New Critical professionalization—in particular, Guillory’s Cultural Capital and Graff’s Professing Literature. Both studies highlight the essential continuity between the Agrarians’ early political ideals and New Critical formalism; hence, Graff argues that “New Critics like Ransom did not think they were turning their backs on the moral and social function of literature. For them, rather, the point was to define these social and moral functions as they operated within the internal structure of literary works themselves.”²⁸ Guillory similarly shows how the Agrarians’ interest in social doxa—a preconscious commonality of belief that the Agrarians thought was embodied in traditional communities—became translated into their later formalist criticism as an essential quality of literature. Graff and Guillory’s identification of this larger continuity underlying agrarianism and New Critical professionalism provides a useful corrective to most accounts of the New Critics’ depoliticization.²⁹ However, it overlooks an important discontinuity in the Agrarians and New Critics’ relation to disciplinary specialization, exemplified by their changing attitudes toward the sciences and social sciences. Both the Agrarians and the New Critics engaged in frequent polemics against these technical professions, which they viewed as harbingers of atheist rationalism and technocratic industrialism. However, the Agrarians viewed the sciences and social sciences as cultural rather than disciplinary threats; these disciplines embodied the foreign culture of the North. Resisting them meant becoming aware of one’s identity as a southerner; it entailed no particular vigilance toward one’s own disciplinary practices. Indeed, many of the Agrarians’ early essays exemplify the same intermingling of disciplinary practices that the Chicago school engaged in. Much of this work was not literary criticism at all, but amateur sociology; it dabbled in economics, anthropology, and history to theorize the difference between rural communities and industrial society. This sociological bent changed with the emergence of New Critical professionalism. The New Critics increasingly saw the academy rather than the region as the critic’s primary object of identification; in Antonio Gramsci’s terms, they came to imagine themselves as an independent class of traditional intellectuals rather than as organic intellectuals intimately connected to the South. It was now the discipline that needed to be defended from outsiders, and this defense could occur only through a process of professionalization—namely, by inventing and disseminating specialized reading techniques that could compete with the technical disciplines. The New Critics thus came to imagine themselves as dissident members of the national new class they had once shunned—members with a special access to aesthetic sensibility and moral values unavailable to the other disciplines. This changed awareness seeped into their work over the course of the 1930s—in particular into the work of John Crowe Ransom, the U.S. New Critics’ mentor and chief theorist.

Agrarianism, from the beginning, was a movement of traditional intellectuals; most of the writers and critics associated with it never strayed far from the academy. It got its start at Vanderbilt University in the early 1920s, when Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, and Allen Tate were undergraduate students of Ransom. With the exception of Brooks, they were members of a campus-based poetry group called the Fugitives, part of the southern literary renaissance.³⁰ These poets-critics turned from literature to conservative cultural criticism in the mid-1920s, inspired in part by the “Scopes monkey trial” of 1925. This widely publicized trial of John Scopes, a Tennessee high school teacher charged with teaching evolution against state law, pitted Clarence Darrow, the noted agnostic lawyer, against William Jennings Bryan, the onetime Democratic presidential candidate and representative of Christian fundamentalism. Like the northern reporters who descended en masse on Dayton, Tennessee, to witness the trial, the Agrarians viewed it as an epochal conflict between religious traditionalism and scientific rationalism, only they were on the traditionalists’ side. They began to write polemics on behalf of their region, which culminated in the publication of a collection titled I’ll Take My Stand (1930). This book, the Agrarians’ manifesto, condemned the effect of industrialism on the economy, folkways, and racial hierarchy of the Old South.³¹

In this early work, the Agrarians replayed the conflict at the heart of the Scopes trial between scientific and traditional ways of understanding the world. Ransom’s first book, published at the same time as I’ll Take My Stand, was God Without Thunder (1930), a philosophical defense of religious fundamentalism that exemplified his early, interdisciplinary approach. In it, he complained that the sciences and social sciences efface the full complexity of lived experience, what he called the “world’s body”; “when our thinking is scientific or conceptual, we fail to observe the particular objects as particulars, or as objects which are different, and contain a great many features not at all covered by the given concept. We attend only to what is constant or like among them, or to what has repetition-value.”³² This aesthetic failure, for Ransom, has consequences that are cultural, economic, and moral. Science leads directly to industrialism, which physically manifests the urge to reduce all phenomena to sameness. On the cultural front, industrialism effaces the differences between local regions, dissolving all folk cultures into a universal mass society that is everywhere the same. On the economic front, it treats nature as a resource to be exploited, robbing human beings of their ability to appreciate aesthetically the environment in which they live. On the moral front, it distorts the relations between human beings, leading them to treat each other as means to selfish ends. In this last regard, social science is particularly dangerous because it tries to turn human beings into objects of research and control.

Ransom’s solution was to defend traditions and conventions, which place limits on the rapacious energies and conceptual tyranny of industrialism and the sciences. His argument was based on an elaborate series of homologies between poetry, religion, social custom, and economics. Poetry, for instance, relies on the conventional devices of meter, rhyme, and poetic style. These devices introduce linguistic texture into the poem—local variations of meaning that prevent the poem from ever making a direct statement of fact. Poetry, in other words, incorporates a kind of surface complexity that forces the reader to pay attention to the language itself and thus disrupts any illusion of linguistic transparency. However, this distancing enables a new aesthetic appreciation of the lived experience that the poem gestures toward but can never comprehend; Ransom thus developed the paradox that in order to get closer to reality, we need poetic conventions that distance us from it. Social conventions work the same way. A community’s ingrained traditions, rituals, and beliefs place limits on social interaction and thus distance the citizen from a crude, materialist relationship to other people.³³ With regard to economics, Ransom similarly argued that agrarian communities are limited systems that open men and women to a more complex, aesthetic appreciation of nature by restricting their relations with it. Ransom’s nativist example, from “The Aesthetic of Regionalism” (1934), is a New Mexican Indian pueblo that the critic glimpses through a train window on a journey across the United States. Observing the Indians’ threshing with primitive tools, Ransom commented that it “‘feels’ right, it has aesthetic quality.”³⁴ Once labor becomes conventional, it loses its character as mere work and turns into folk art, liberating the peasant’s aesthetic faculties. Moreover, it lends to the society as a whole an aesthetic unity derived from that society’s adaptation to its local environment. The agrarian lifestyle, Ransom explained in the introduction to I’ll Take My Stand, is “not an abstract system, but a culture, the whole way in which we live, act, think, and feel. It is a kind of imaginatively balanced life lived out in a definite social tradition.”³⁵ Ransom’s agrarianism culminates in a nostalgic and sociological vision of a perfectly integrated community, which forms the basis for his regionalist version of identity politics.

The Agrarians, then, were distrustful of modern forms of technique, which were destructive of the ontologically richer knowledge embodied in poetry and traditional communities. The opposition the Agrarians constructed was between the humanistic intellectual as traditional craftsman, akin to Ransom’s Pueblo Indians, and the technical intelligentsia as mass producer. This notion of humanist as craftsman was connected to the Agrarians’ strong sense of regional identity; both the poet and the peasant experience lived particularity by subjecting themselves to their local customs and environment. Already in this early work, however, we can see inklings of the New Critical notion of academic professionalism, which entailed the Agrarians abandoning their early regionalism, reconciling themselves to their position within the new class, and focusing on the cultivation of a pure or intrinsic theory of literary language. They could not become like the Pueblo Indians from Ransom’s nativist fantasy, working the land with crude implements. Embedded in the modern university, they were more like Ransom’s narrator, watching the vanishing agrarian past through the windows of an industrial-era train as he makes his way to another conference. The proper site for critics was not the Old South but rather the modern academy, a shelter from industrial society in which they could recollect a lost cultural innocence.

This awareness was already implicit in “The Aesthetic of Regionalism,” in which Ransom invoked an elaborate architectural analogy to explain the difference between industrialism and regionalism. Industrialism, Ransom argued, produces a debased form of architecture that reflects its effacement of regional particularities. Ransom’s example is the state capitol at Baton Rouge. The building accurately represents the “power and opulence” of the state of Louisiana. However, when the state planned the building, it “took its bag and went shopping in the biggest market; it came back with New York artists, French and Italian marbles, African mahogany, Vesuvian lava for the paving.” Regional motifs appear only “in some bas-reliefs and statues, and in the alligators, pelicans, magnolias, sugar canes, and cat-tails worked in bronze in the gates and door-panels.”³⁶ In an industrial society, the regional environment no longer determines all aspects of local culture. Rather, the region becomes merely ornamental, etched onto a characterless economic market that is global in scope.³⁷ Ransom’s contrasting example of regional architecture perfectly adapted to its environment is the building in which he first read “The Aesthetic of Regionalism” as a lecture—one of the new buildings at Louisiana State University:

The old buildings still stand, or at least the “Barracks” do, in the heart of the city; the others had to go, since the city needed their room, and the University, with four thousand students, needed still more room and larger buildings. The old buildings are simple, genuine, and moving; precisely the sort of thing that would make a European town famous among the tourists. When the much larger plant of the new university was constructed it seems probable that buildings on the order of the Barracks but on the new scale would not have been economical, nor successful; therefore the builders conceived a harmonious plan for the campus in a modified Spanish, and it suits the regional landscape, and is not altogether foreign to the regional history.³⁸

Unlike the state capitol, the university successfully embodies its region; however, it does so by compromising with the industrial economy that devoured the old campus. The architects’ new plan is not a rejection of the city’s modernization. Rather, it is an attempt to complement it aesthetically, already an attenuation of Ransom’s regionalist ideal. The architecture of Louisiana State University is no more indigenous to Baton Rouge than the architecture of the state capitol is. The buildings to which Ransom refers were designed by a Massachusetts firm in an Italian style in imitation of Stanford University.³⁹ If they signify anything, it is not the local region but rather the history of the research university in the United States.

This identification of regionalism with the university prefigured Ransom’s abandonment of agrarianism. In letters and essays after “The Aesthetic of Regionalism,” he increasingly imagined that the academy rather than any particular region is the critic’s primary community. In a 1936 letter to Allen Tate, he confessed, “patriotism has nearly eaten me up, and I’ve got to get out of it.” As an alternative to agrarianism, Ransom proposed the development of an “American Academy of Letters,” devoted to securing “an objective literary standard” in the United States.⁴⁰ This proposal was perhaps an allusion to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s solution to the British Industrial Revolution—the creation of a “Clerisy” or national church devoted to the cultivation of British culture.⁴¹ The Academy of Letters would be a new cosmopolitan community, no longer rooted in region. It would be a community of diverse writers held together by their professional interest in literature. After listing about thirty qualified and almost qualified names (including his own and Tate’s), Ransom explained, “[A]n Academy has got to be pretty catholic; a lot of them will necessarily be strange bedfellows. If too many alien persons seem to go into any nationalist list, our only alternative would be a Southern Academy.”⁴² Ransom’s academy thus seems to be the literary equivalent of the state capitol in Baton Rouge—a hodgepodge of writers and critics ranging from Theodore Dreiser to Marianne Moore. Shortly after writing this letter, Ransom put his new eclecticism into practice. He abandoned his regional roots in Tennessee and moved to Kenyon College in Ohio. His primary accomplishment there, editorship of the Kenyon Review, approximated his Academy of Letters. One of the reasons this journal was so influential was its inclusiveness; it published nonsouthern critics such as Lionel Trilling, Irving Howe, and Leslie Fiedler. As Ransom explained to Tate in a 1937 letter, his purpose in establishing the journal was to avoid partisan politics altogether; “it seems to me our cue would be to stick to literature entirely. There’s no decent consistent group writing politics.… In the severe field of letters there’s vocation enough for us: in criticism, in poetry, in fiction.”⁴³

This turn from the Old South to the cosmopolitan academy was the context for Ransom’s effort to transform his theory of poetry and method of close reading into a new disciplinary paradigm capable of imitating the rigor and consistency of the sciences and social sciences. “Criticism must become more scientific,” he argued in his aptly titled “Criticism, Inc.,” “or precise and systematic, and this means that it must be developed by the collective and sustained efforts of learned persons—which means that its proper seat is in the universities.” Criticism will never become a very exact science, “but neither will psychology, if that term continues to refer to psychic rather than physical phenomena; nor will sociology.”⁴⁴ Ransom’s basic conception of literature, at this point in the late 1930s, had not changed. Poetry still embodies an ontologically distinct type of knowledge, one that aims at recovering the particularity of lived experience; “We live in a world,” he argued in “Wanted: An Ontological Critic” (1941), “that must be distinguished from the world, or the worlds, for there are many of them, which we treat in our scientific discourses. They are its reduced, emasculated, and docile versions. Poetry intends to recover the denser and more refractory original world which we know loosely through our perceptions and memories.”⁴⁵ However, in his later work, he abandoned the notion that this original world can be recovered by nonprofessionals, such as his Pueblo Indians. Rather, the ontological experience of poetry can be recovered only by the professional critic working within the academy and only through the scientific technique of close reading, whose exactitude enables it to trace the “desperate ontological or metaphysical maneuver” by which poetry evades the conceptual drive of scientific thought.⁴⁶

Ransom’s animus against the sciences and industrialism also shifted. He became reconciled to the existence of an industrial economy and thus to the existence of the technical intelligentsia; “without consenting to a division of labor,” he argued in a 1945 essay that disavowed his former politics, “and hence modern society, we should have not only no effective science, invention, and scholarship, but nothing to speak of in art, e.g., reviews and contributions to reviews, fine poems and their exegesis.” Poetry and criticism, he concluded, at best constitute “beautiful expiations” for the horrors of industrialism.⁴⁷ Instead, his diatribes against scientific rationality began to focus on threats internal to his discipline. Graff has reconstructed the debates into which the New Critics inserted themselves in the mid-1930s. In his account, the discipline at this time was divided between two groups—literary historians and generalist critics. The historians embodied the discipline’s technique, which consisted of positivist research into biographical and textual facts. The generalists, among whom the New Critics once ranked, embodied its traditional moral concerns. Literary studies, in other words, replicated within itself Gouldner’s distinction between technical intelligentsia and humanistic intellectuals. The New Critics’ accomplishment was to present both of these groups as insufficiently professional and to synthesize their competing claims; both the scholars and the critics neglected the aesthetic dimension proper to poetry itself. For Ransom, these disciplinary others replaced the northern industrialists and carpetbaggers of his early essays; they threatened the identity of literary studies in the same way that industrialism, he once believed, threatened the South. They threatened to dissolve literary criticism’s boundaries, fusing it into the other disciplines, especially the social sciences.⁴⁸ Literary studies could preserve its distinctive disciplinary culture only if it embraced close reading as its new tradition or custom.

Indeed, in his later work Ransom used much the same language to describe his new cosmopolitan, literary communities as he had earlier used in his Agrarian polemics. In a late essay, “The Communities of Letters” (1952), written at the height of the New Criticism’s influence in the academy, he imagined that works of art create alternative communities of critics within industrial society: “there comes into existence among readers, clustered of course round the presiding genius of the author, a community of a sort which could scarcely have been contemplated in the formal organization of society, a community of letters based on a common sympathy.” Because there are many authors, there are also many reader communities, each one akin to “one of those minority cultural groups which have their rights in a free society as surely as individuals do.”⁴⁹ These communities parallel Ransom and other Agrarians’ proposal in I’ll Take My Stand that the South join together with other regional cultures and minority groups to combat industrialism. In Ransom’s later work, however, the reader communities are no longer opposed to industrial society. Rather, they together form another society within society: “if in some rude sense we add all the communities up, we will have, in theory at least, a total community having a peculiar role. It may be regarded as a secondary society, branching off from the formal or primary society, and easing its requirements, compelling its members to approach to the sense of a common humanity.”⁵⁰ Ransom envisaged the academy as a republic of letters, bound together by the professional activities of a national clerisy consisting of himself and other critics and sheltering the society’s common morality from the effects of industrialization.

Ransom’s project of disciplinary professionalization, like Parsons’s, ends in a fantasy of the academic department as an ideal community. These two fantasies, however, differ in their imagined effects on the broader public. For Parsons, the academic department is a harbinger of a liberal revolution in industrial society, one that will transform society into a perfected form of the modern welfare state. Parsons’s model is an evolutionary one; it requires students to leave the academy and transform business and government in its image. In his university, students are trained to become wise and humane professionals ready to take over key positions in society at large. Ransom, in contrast, envisaged the “communities of letters” as retreats from industrial society; the critic escapes into the academy to keep aesthetic experience alive in a society hostile toward it. However, both fantasies involve similar mutations of social trustee professionalism. Both appropriate the social trustee emphasis on technical expertise and its argument that the professional is the caretaker of public morality. But both undercut the essential assumption of the social trustee—the idea that disciplinary knowledge can or should be used to reform society actively in accordance with that morality. Instead, professionalism becomes reflexively oriented toward the self-perpetuation of the discipline itself, which becomes increasingly isolated from other disciplines and from the public it is supposed to educate and reform. Both structural functionalism and the New Criticism exemplify the ways in which professionalism’s moral claims became fastened to a process of institutional routinization that often voided those claims of specific content.

The disciplinary consensuses represented by Parsons’s sociology and the New Criticism lasted until the mid-1960s, when the next generation of intellectuals rebelled against them in the name of a more politicized sociology and literary studies. These rebellions culminated in the American Sociological Association and Modern Language Association conferences of 1968, each of which was disrupted by a “Radical Caucus” of younger professors and graduate students with ties to the New Left. They also culminated in the publication of a variety of texts that challenged the disciplinary status quo. In sociology, for instance, Gouldner’s The Future of Intellectuals replaced Parsons’s notion of the university as guarantor of social cohesion with Gouldner’s own notion of the university as the center of the disruptive culture of critical discourse. Literary critics similarly abandoned the New Critics’ fideism, instead emphasizing literature’s deconstructive impact on established constructions of social reality. In many ways, these internal rebellions were efforts to revive and radicalize the moral function of professional work and to reconnect with a broader public. As Louis Kampf and Paul Lauter argued in The Politics of Literature (1972), one of the texts that emerged from the 1968 Modern Language Association disruption, “our classroom objective is to make literature a vital part of students’ lives, rather than an antiquarian or formal study or a means of forcing them into feelings of ‘cultural deprivation.’” ⁵¹

The effects of these paradigm shifts on each discipline’s politics and imagined relation to the new class cannot be overestimated. In the long term, however, literary critics and sociologists became increasingly skeptical about whether their disciplines did indeed play any useful role in U.S. society or whether they had merely replaced one set of disciplinary fantasies with another. By the 1990s, these doubts had generated an extensive literature in each field. Donald Levine, for instance, describes “a reduction in public deference shown to the social science enterprise, following a period in the 1950s to early 1960s when virtually all branches of the U.S. federal government—from the Supreme Court to Congress to many executive departments—made unprecedented use of social scientists in such areas as the fight against segregation, analysis of foreign elites, international economic development, and domestic antipoverty programs.” The backlash against the social sciences, he continues, originated in the sense that their techniques had failed; “the demand for solutions to social problems far exceeded the capacity of the social sciences to deliver them. There grew a sense that the social sciences have not been and do not seem likely to produce the kinds of results their earlier proponents anticipated.”⁵² Literary critics similarly questioned the continued viability of their discipline in the face of the emergence of expert professionalism and the growing prominence of the technical intelligentsia. As Guillory argues in Cultural Capital, there was a “large scale ‘capital flight’ in the domain of culture”⁵³ away from the humanities. This capital flight made the political commitments of literary intellectuals seem increasingly unreal.