JOHN R. SEARLE
701
engaged in the political indoctrination of generations of young people
so that they will continue to accept a system of hegemonic, patriarchal
imperialism. The challengers, on the other hand, think of themselves as
accepting the inevitably political nature of the university, and they want
to use it so that they and their students can be liberated into a genuine
multicultural democracy. When they say that the purpose of the univer–
sity is political, this is not some new proposal that they are making. They
think of themselves as just facing up to the facts as they always have been.
Once you understand that the challengers regard the university as es–
sentially political, then several puzzling features of the present debate be–
come less puzzling. Why has radical politics migrated into academic de–
partments of literature? In my intellectual childhood, there were plenty
of radical activists about, but they tended to operate in a public political
arena, or, to the extent they tended to be in universities at all, they were
usually in departments of political science, sociology, and economics.
Now, as
f.u
as I can tell, the leading intellectual centers of radical politi–
cal activity in the United States are departments of English, French, and
comparative literature. We are, for example, in the odd situation where
America's two "leading Marxists" are both professors of English. How
did this come about? What would Marx think if he knew that his main
impact was on literary criticism? Well, part of the reason for the migra–
tion of radical politics into literature departments is that Marxism in par–
ticular and left-wing radicalism in general have been discredited as theo–
ries of politics, society, and historical change . If ever a philosophical the–
ory was refuted by events, it was the Marxist theory of the inevitable
collapse of the capitalist economies and their revolutionary overthrow by
the working class, to be followed by the rise of a classless society.
Instead, it is the Marxist economies that have collapsed and the Marxist
governments that have been overthrown. So, having been refuted as the–
ories of society, these views retreated into departments of literature,
where to some extent they still flourish as tools of "interpretation."
There is a more important reason, however. During the 1960s a
fairly sizable number of leftist intellectuals became convinced that the best
arena of social change was culture, that high culture in general and uni–
versity departments of literature in particular could become important
weapons in the struggle to overcome racism, imperialism, et cetera. We
are now witnessing some of the consequences of this migration . As
someone - I think it was Irving Howe - remarked, it is characteristic of
this generation of radicals that they don't want to take over the coun–
try, they want to take over the English department. But, I would add,
they think taking over the English department is the first step toward
taking over the country.
So far, then, I have tried
to
isolate four presuppositions of the chal-
