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The University of Scranton Press may be one of the least well-known academic publishers in the United States. But for my money, it has stepped right into the big leagues by deciding to reissue, in a revised edition, historian Christopher Shannon's extraordinary 1996 book Conspicuous Criticism: Tradition, the Individual, and Culture in American Social Thought, from Veblen to Mills, originally published by the John Hopkins University Press. (The subtitle of the new edition is slightly altered.) Scranton is thereby performing a public service, and a courageous one, at a time when economic pressures are forcing university presses to become very nearly as bottom-line conscious as commercial houses. A book like Conspicuous Criticism will never be a bestseller. But one dares to hope that with this new edition, Conspicuous Criticism will, after a decade of languishing in the shadows, emerge from its status as a bit of an underground classic, with a following among young Christian intellectuals in particular, and at last begin to get the kind of respectful attention across the intellectual spectrum that it deserves.
Conspicuous Criticism: Tradition, the Individual, and Culture in Modern American Social Thought
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Shannon's book remains as fresh today as when it appeared, an unusually penetrating and challenging rebuke to the social-scientific outlook on human existence. The social sciences, he argued, have used the anthropological idea of "culture" to unsettle the very basis of everyday life, promoting "a destabilization of received social meanings." Critical social-scientific analysis, which so presents itself as the heroic antidote to the ravages of "the market," is in fact in "the vanguard of extending the logic of commodification to the most intimate aspects of people's lives." If Shannon is right, the most celebrated critiques of modern American society, from Veblen to Mills, are pernicious failures, launched in the name of a thin and debased understanding of "culture," and imposing an obsolete and misleading apparatus for thinking about society and culture. If Shannon is right, we will need to change, and change radically, the way we are doing things in the study of human life and thought, if we expect to proceed beyond the current impasse.
Small wonder, then, that the book was almost completely ignored by the relevant tribes of academics and social critics when it appeared. What else were they likely to do with a book that calls them on the carpet, along with everything they do? For all that we academics claim to relish provocative analyses and paradigm-shifting arguments, the truth of the matter is much less flattering to our amour propre. Such claims are often just little more than a rhetorical flourish, or even a self-deluding fantasy. We pretend to love change, and may even believe that we do. But in practice, we have little patience for it, particularly if we are the ones required to do the changing.
As a matter of brute fact, there is no force in the institutional world of ideas more powerful than the inertia of business-as-usual, the familiar pattern of expectations revolving around the core activities of paper-giving, journal-editing, lecture-giving, conference-attending, monograph-publishing, and hiring and tenuring, all under the surprisingly powerful conforming influence of peer review. Even the advent of postmodernism and its avatars has for the most part taken place in a smooth, untroubled, institutionally conservative manner, changing very little about this core structure. Notwithstanding the roiling that always seems to be occurring on the academy's surface life, or the constant charges of political and cultural radicalism coming from the outside, or the faculty's proud boasts of "transgressivity" and willingness to "think the unthinkable," the truth of the matter is that the academy is one of the most procedurally conservative institutions in modern life. By challenging the professional canons, and the assumptions behind them, a book like Shannon's took a position that is almost unassimilable, hence more easily ignored than engaged.
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