A Scholar, An Expert, An Intellectual | Easily Distracted - The Diigo Meta page

• 22 Aug 12
  

  Jonathan Becker

  scholar expert intellectual scholarship

• 

  Todd Suomela

  Comment on Niall Ferguson, pundits, and historiography.

  scholar experts intellectual credential roles history historiography pundits media public-intellectual

  • What I was annoyed by at Cliopatria was simply that Ferguson didn’t engage a huge corpus of both specific and general work by other scholars that sees British imperialism very differently, essentially almost the entire historiography between Gann and Duignan’s book and today. There’s a very brief bit of hand-waving and that’s all. This strikes me as a typical rhetorical move by a certain kind of contrarian: that all other scholarship is politically motivated, and hence need not really be discussed. That is both self-indicting (because if scholarship which is politically motivated need not be engaged, surely the contrarian is equally culpable) and unscholarly (much that other work, whatever its politics, rests upon extensive craftwork by historians, anthropologists and others which requires presumptive respect until such time as the specific craftwork of an individual scholar can be critiqued as wanting or flawed).
  • Sure, I get frustrated too and blow off steam at times. We’re all human. But when we’re trying to be both (or either) scholars and intellectuals, at least, we have some other responsibilities that kick into gear. Equally, when we’re asked to render expert opinion, it has to be based on something other than our gut reaction, though expertise is sometimes legitimately derived from very quick processing and inference based on long experience. But it is for this reason that I’m not sure I have space for Ferguson any more as a peer, a professional, someone who is living up to the minimal norms and responsibility of any of these three roles.

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