Timur Kuran is a libertarian-leaning economist at Duke. His most-cited book, Private Truths, Public Lies, is about preference falsification: why people misrepresent their political views in public, and how those misrepresentations destabilize societies that depend on them. His second book, The Long Divergence, asks why the Islamic world fell economically behind Europe over six centuries and lands on an answer about institutional rigidity. He is not a man with a soft spot for the contemporary humanities.
Last month Kuran posted this:
“The humanities shine when they illuminate civilizational transitions, such as the spread of agriculture or industrialization. Now, as we navigate the uncertainties of AI-based existence, they should be drawing on their accumulated scholarship to help us understand the present.”
Worth taking seriously, because of who said it. Kuran is not a humanities partisan trying to defend his tribe. He is an economist/analyst who spends his career asking how institutions go bad and stay bad. When he points at a discipline that’s failing to do something he thinks it was built to do, the diagnosis carries a weight (at least it should, in my estimation) it wouldn’t from inside the humanities or from culture-war media.
What Kuran is pointing at is real. The humanities have done some of their most lasting work at moments of civilizational reorganization. Erasmus and the early modern humanists made sense of the printing press and the Reformation. The encyclopedists made sense of the industrial threshold. Hannah Arendt, Reinhold Niebuhr, Lewis Mumford, and Stephen Toulmin made sense of the post-war reckoning with industrial-scale violence and technological power. The work that came out of those moments is what most of us still read, decades or centuries later, when we want to understand how the present took its shape.