Western Imaginings. Rohan Davis

“the unexamined life is not worth living.”² Socrates’s point was the more you lead such a life, the more equipped you are to live a good life.

      Everything we know about Socrates as one of the first public intellectuals in the Western intellectual tradition tells us that he set loose several permanent puzzles for philosophy. One of the enduring puzzles was how we are to both examine our life and establish the veridicity or truth of the knowledge we claim to possess. This problem continues to haunt the sociology of intellectuals and provides something of the big puzzle sitting behind this book. Yet in this respect a nonremediable problem attends any such exercise. It does so in terms that echo the ominous question, who guards the guardians? When we ask, how are we to make sense of the sense-makers? This is a central question in the evolution of the sociology of intellectuals.

      In the twentieth century, Karl Mannheim did more than most to establish the modern contours of the sociology of intellectuals.³ Mannheim wrote between two world wars, when older and longstanding cultural values were being shaken profoundly and many of his fellow intellectuals were making dire predictions about the future of civilization. Mannheim understood his work in Socratic terms as a search for knowledge that would play a crucial role in helping construct an equal society with a tolerant citizenry. Mannheim argued that citizens developed their freedom through self-reflection and by understanding their cultural origins.⁴ This was not however meant to be an easy or effortless task undertaken by the individual. Mannheim pointed to the all-important role of the intellectual and to the intersection between the reflective practice of the intellectual and those decision-makers like politicians and policymakers who deal with day-to-day politics.

      Mannheim began his seminal work Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge by addressing the problem of how men think.⁵ He distinguished between everyday thinking and the kind that is done by philosophers, mathematicians, and physicists in special circumstances. Mannheim designed a critical method he believed intellectuals could draw on to help create a better society. This method acknowledged both the specificities of historical context and the need to achieve a certain objectivity that would enable us to see the world as uncontaminated by ideology, which he understood as the kind of knowledge shaped by social interests or partisan politics.⁶

      At the same time Mannheim saw the intellectual as charged with the responsibility of developing utopian ideals without retreating into a contemplative state completely removed from political life. However, Mannheim struggled to say how this would be possible. He argued that intellectuals necessarily enjoy a certain amount of freedom, because they are free-floating and the keepers of cultural standards, which allows them to operate freely from the constraints of ideology. Mannheim also offers important insights about dealing with competing value systems.

      Developing a sociology of knowledge was Mannheim’s method for arbitrating this competition. He argues that intellectuals capable of operating outside particular value and belief systems or ideologies could use this method to discover how and why particular individuals and groups see the world as they do. Mannheim writes:

      . . . [T]he sociology of knowledge regards the cognitive act in connection with the models to which it aspires in its existential as well as its meaningful quality, not as insights into ‘eternal’ truths arising from a purely theoretical, contemplative urge . . . but as an instrument for dealing with life-situations at the disposal of a certain kind of vital being under certain conditions of life.⁷

      Mannheim’s prescriptions are not designed to be “blueprints: it is neither a list of abstract desiderata for the philosopher nor a detailed program for the administrator.”⁸ Indeed, his work might be best understood as suggestions put forward with the intent of promoting discussion about the major political concerns of the moment. Whatever the success or failure of Mannheim’s own program, his thinking about the intellectual helped inspired the subsequent development of the sociology of intellectuals. His work poses important questions that have continued to be asked throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and which are still relevant today. His work raises difficult questions about the relationship between political partisanship and truth telling, the responsibilities of the intellectual, the relevant ethical and political motivations of intellectual practice, and the standards by which we should judge intellectuals’ claims to truth. Mannheim’s ideas about the roles of the intellectuals have sparked a robust debate helping inspire and legitimate this book.

      Mannheim’s ideas also point to the wider issue of sense-making with regards to the social world. The social world is distinguishable from what we typically refer to as the natural world where we can come to know reality by using scientific measures. Our major tasks as researchers when dealing with the natural world is to design and implement particular research methods that help us to understand its different elements and how they fit into the whole. Our roles as researchers are very different when dealing with things in the social world. Our understanding of it is observer-dependent. Unlike the natural world there is no objectivity in the social world. Instead it is characterized by what is usually referred to as subjectivity, or what writers like Alfred Schutz and Charles Taylor have insisted is a better way of denominating this, namely intersubjectivity.⁹

      This shift away from the notion of subjectivity is meant to highlight the role played by shared systems of belief, symbolic schema, and the various social practices we rely on to understand and live in our world. Writers as diverse as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Rudolf Carnap, and Nelson Goodman have pointed out that a variety of social and symbolic systems, including language, play a crucial role in both understanding and structuring the social world.¹⁰ Ferdinand de Saussure was among the first to highlight that it is our linguistic system that enables us to define concepts that we understand as existing in the social world.¹¹ Things like Wahhabism only exist because of our decision to use and manipulate symbolic systems.

      Intellectuals produce a lot of what we think we know about the social world, and hold privileged positions in society as the writers of scholarly articles, books, and newspaper and magazine articles. Their interpretations of concepts like Wahhabism are widely distributed and read by the general public and policy- and decision-makers, who may have never previously thought about this phenomenon. That is to say that we tend to rely on intellectuals’ representations to make sense of things like Wahhabism that we assume exist out there in the social world. This becomes extremely important when we consider that policy- and decision-makers can draw on these representations when making policies that have the ability to cause great harm and destruction, and that the public’s support for such policies can also rely on the same representations.

      To borrow a concept from Gilles Deleuze that has since been expanded by authors like Thomas Osborne, we can best understand intellectuals as mediators of ideas in today’s knowledge society.¹² Both authors emphasize the important role intellectuals play in communicating ideas about the social world to their audience. For Deleuze, the modern intellectual as a mediator is a creative catalyst of ideas. Osborne writes, “the mediator is interested above all in ideas . . . which are going to make a difference . . . in some later event.”¹³ However, the major issue with Osborne’s conception is that he considers the intellectual as a mediator to be “value-neutral,” unconcerned with “the ‘big ideas’ of the epoch of ‘grand narratives.’”¹⁴

      The important question I want to address, and which is at odds with the account offered by Osborne, is whether intellectuals are indeed value-neutral mediators communicating ideas about what is happening in the social world to their audience or whether there is something else going on? Additionally, we also need to establish whether Osborne’s claim that many intellectuals are not concerned with the big ideas and grand narratives of our time is adequate. As will become clearer throughout this book, a case can certainly be made that intellectuals representing Wahhabism are indeed concerned with promoting the big ideas and grand narratives associated with popular intellectual traditions like neoconservatism and liberalism. It is equally likely that many intellectuals are also unknowingly or unconsciously promoting key beliefs that resonate with or get their authority and appeal from these prominent intellectual traditions.

      In both instances the outcome is often