Section outline

  • Course description and requirements

    Instructor: Karl Hall

    Number of credits: 2

    Course level: MA

    Time: Thursdays at 15:40

    Location: D109

    Instructor's office hours: Tuesdays 13:00-15:00; Thursdays 14:00-15:00; and by appointment

    Zoom option: If you require Zoom access for visa reasons or other extenuating circumstances, use this link. Please alert the instructor beforehand if you will not attend in person; online access is only for special circumstances. 

    This course treats debates among and about intellectuals in Soviet history. Our investigation of the relations between scholarly expertise and state authority will be interspersed with conceptual debates from various disciplines. Rather than focus solely on canonical literary and political intellectuals, we will cast our nets more widely, studying the effects of specialization and "disciplinization" on intellectual life, as well as the changing composition of the white-collar class.

    Bazhenov, Dream of the manager who has not mastered technology, 1937When Julian Benda famously invoked La trahison des clercs (1927), he had in mind the French Dreyfusard consensus that intellectuals were capable of forming a class-in-themselves, and amid rampant cultural pessimism he faulted his postwar contemporaries for failing to defend "a corporation whose sole cult is that of justice and of truth." In the newly-formed Soviet Union many Old Regime intellectuals who had survived the disastrous Civil War might have subscribed to Benda's sentiments, referring to the Bolsheviks as "gorillas" and lamenting the new regime's contemptuous attitude toward "pure science." But the Bolsheviks were much more inclined to treat the intelligentsia suspiciously as bound by their (now-abolished) classes of origin, while many intellectuals gradually found new roles for themselves in a transitional white-collar "stratum," and a younger generation of scholars learned how to "re-bind" themselves to the class of the future. Karl Mannheim's Ideology and Utopia thus looms in the background of our discussions of Soviet intellectuals negotiating periods of optimism, crisis, and normalcy under state socialism. (Here "Soviet" is always understood as more than ethnically Russian.) Global configurations of knowledge production shifted dramatically in the course of the twentieth century, so the sociology of Soviet intellectuals must range widely if it is to generate a common framework for disciplines usually assimilated to the "universal" modern experience (the natural sciences), versus disciplines usually understood to be "distorted" or somehow distinctively "Soviet" under state socialism (humanities and social sciences). Recurrent tropes of genius on the one hand or collectivity on the other should thus be interrogated in a variety of academic fields, not least because the Soviet case can in turn shed light on historians' practices of "situatedness" (in Mannheim's sense).

    NB: there are presently 14 subject options for 12 weeks. We will decide which two topics to exclude based on the consensus of the current cohort.

    Grading: General participation: 25%. One formal presentation: 25%. Review essay: 50%. 

    Review essay length: 8-9 pages, double-spaced. Due on April 12. Topic chosen in consultation with instructor. Pragmatically speaking, the essay should take one of the session topics as a jumping-off point, but it is understood that prior research interests will shape the chosen emphases.