The Limits of Scholarly Activism

Abstract

It is only fair to begin with an admission that a few years ago I would have regarded the title of this paper as an impossible self-contradiction. Scholarship was one concept; activism another. In those days, the two concepts appeared to me to be incompatible. One could, of course, expect to encounter activists who had been scholars, or who had at least received scholarly training; but one would not expect to find a scholar who was an activist at the same time. In the simplest and most general terms, scholarship implied withdrawal, and activism meant involvement. This, at least, was the tradition with which I was familiar. True, there was such a thing as it applied scholarship, but this applied to subjects with which I was not very familiar, nor was I very comfortable with the concept. It seemed to me that the scholar who was overly concerned with the application of his scholarship was not a true scholar and that he stood in danger of compromising his scholarly objectivity and integrity. Obviously, this was the point of view of a rather standard traditionalist, trained in a study of government which had deep roots in the orthodoxy of the humanities and – in my case — lesser roots in the social sciences, which in my student days still seemed more social than scientific.