“The clincher,” she writes, “was theory. I had had enough of it.”
“Theory”, the name given in the US to an intellectual movement that emerged in France in the 1960s, would change the face of the humanities in American universities and in the process become a casus belli during the early skirmishes in what were later dubbed the “culture wars”.
Eakin, who first fell “under the Frenchmen’s spell” as an undergraduate at Harvard, traces theory’s origins to the structuralist revolution in the human sciences, which, she asserts, was “really two revolutions in one”. First, the structuralists replaced Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialist notion of a self imbued with agency and the capacity to choose with the idea of the impersonal system. And second, they anointed language the master system above all others. They took from the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure the view that language is a system without positive terms, in which the meaning of words derives entirely from their relation to one another.
The increasingly rancorous battles over the significance and implications of theory in the 1980s weren’t confined to the academy. In 1987, for example, the conservative philosopher Allan Bloom topped the bestseller lists with The Closing of the American Mind, a book that railed against the corrupting effects of “jargon derived from the despair of European thinkers”. Today, Bloom’s jeremiad continues to influence many of those who criticise the state of American universities from the political right.
