In the wake of Trump’s first month in office, when his administration launched concerted attacks on education and research in every guise, it has been provoking to read the new edition of Martha Nussbaum’s Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities. Nussbaum first published this book in 2010 to fairly wide acclaim in the United States, somewhat middling acclaim in other democracies, and a few weary eyebrow raises in Australia. The reception for this edition looks set to be the same here and elsewhere, though how it will go down with Americans reeling from an authoritarian onslaught on their most hallowed public institutions is harder to say.
It’s not that the nub of Nussbaum’s argument is off-putting. It is music to most humanists’ ears. She makes a passionate and accessible case for the role of critical thinking and imagination in the development of all human beings. Who doesn’t want to read about Rabindranath Tagore’s breaking free of “Parrot Training” by encouraging a mind, via Socratic questioning, to form “its own standards of judgement and [produce] its own thoughts”? And what’s not to like about John Dewey’s advocating equal access to a pedagogy that rejects “passive and inert recipiency” and instead releases “buoyant outgoing energy”?
The problem is in Nussbaum’s equating of critical thinking and imagination with the humanities — of which we never, actually, get a clear definition. She makes a heartfelt plea for a type of rational, liberal, sympathetic and compassionate form of education. But this is not the same as arguing for the humanities per se — a set of disciplines that provide the means to analyse present human affairs, a body of knowledge about earlier and other human arrangements, and the tools to envisage better versions of the same. Nussbaum does the humanities a disservice by missing so widely a chance to speak of their particular, if contingent, merits.
This mismatch is not helped by a vague account of the nature of the crisis afflicting the humanities around the world or by an even vaguer gesture to possible solutions.
Nussbaum’s humanities
The humanities are sometimes presented in Not for Profit as “the arts and humanities” and sometimes as “the liberal arts.” Gradually we glean a kind of definition of these two fields via what they are not. They are not “science or social science.” In chapter II we learn that they also aren’t some versions of economics or, arrestingly, some versions of history. Apparently these two disciplines can be uncritical. Later in chapter V, we are told that an ideal humanities education would start with economics and history (the critical kinds), then add the study of religion and philosophy and finally bring in those disciplines that nurture a “narrative imagination” — the study of literature and the arts.
Such an education is crucial for instilling “an inclusive type of citizenship,” Nussbaum argues, because it fosters a reasoning approach, the ability to transcend the local, and a capacity to “imagine sympathetically the predicament of another person.” This in turn helps to keep “democracies alive and wide awake.” In a world seemingly driven by profit, Nussbaum makes a plea for those things that don’t appear profitable but are fundamental to a free society.
It’s a stance that most humanists, including myself, would broadly agree with. Nussbaum’s version, however, leaks almost immediately. First, she never deals with the unspoken question running through the book of why other disciplines don’t lead to critical thinking or imagination. Most astrophysicists would be surprised to hear they have not exercised reason or transcended the local. Students of law, social work, psychology, human biology or civil engineering might similarly question the notion that they lack sympathy for other people’s situations.
At one point, Nussbaum says she is not suggesting “leaving those studies behind,” because “when practised at their best” they can be “a friend of the humanities.” This seems both a dilution of her position and a stubborn refusal to accept that most studies “when practised at their best” can lead to critical thought and imagination. What she is in fact making a plea for is the value of higher education in whichever form best suits an individual. The travesty she never quite puts her finger on is the recent efforts of universities around the world to narrow the choices available to individuals.
A second problem, the flipside of the first, is how to account for all those authoritarian leaders currently trashing democracy who have been students of the humanities. Fair enough, Nussbaum didn’t know in 2010 that fifteen years later America’s vice-president, philosophy graduate J.D. Vance, would advocate for the criminalisation of trans minors, the restriction of women’s choices, a crackdown on universities and the abandonment of Ukraine to Russia. Nor might she have guessed that the majority of the authors of Project 2025, the now-evident blueprint for the Trump administration, studied history in college, or that its director pursued it at doctoral level.
She could, though, have wondered about her erstwhile neighbour, Robert F. Kennedy, Jnr, who is now Trump’s health secretary. RJK shared a building with Nussbaum in the 1970s and, while studying humanities, kept a puppy chained up on his porch. And she certainly knew about earlier authoritarians like the theological student Joseph Stalin and the well-known arts aspirant Adolf Hitler.
Sadly, as Niall Lucy commented in his review of Nussbaum’s book back in 2010, the humanities are “not inherently democratic, which is why fascist regimes could take root in countries (Spain, Italy, Germany) with rich literary histories.” The humanities, like most serious disciplines, can buttress democracies but their value is hugely shaped by context.
Nussbaum’s claim about why the humanities are good for democracy also leaks because of her swiftly added “secondary” argument, which is that the humanities are good for profits too. Sound economic growth, she states, relies on the ability to reason and to think outside one’s own small existence. Her book could have been titled Not For Profit, But Also For Profit, but I guess that doesn’t have such a compelling ring.
The nature of the crisis
Not for Profit first appeared in the wake of the global financial crisis, which wreaked far more havoc on the smaller American colleges familiar to Nussbaum than it did on Australian universities. All the same, she doesn’t mention the GFC when she explains the “silent crisis” of “massive proportion” facing the humanities. Where we might expect examples of the many American colleges that folded after 2008 — most of them liberal arts colleges — she instead lists five pieces of evidence for the crisis: the absence of the humanities in a 2006 US Department of Education survey report; the consensus in a 2004 Tagore symposium that profit-driven topics had taken over Indian education; the pressure in 2005 that teachers in an elite school in Chicago felt from parents who didn’t want their kids studying the humanities; the lack of any focus on the humanities in a 2005 search for a new dean at a prestigious university; and another prestigious university’s last-minute switch in 2006 from celebrating its liberal heritage to focusing on its technological future.
These are good examples of the deflating anecdotes that humanists hear every day around the world. But they don’t precisely capture the agony of forced redundancies, the impoverishment of a slashed curriculum, and the very real threat to the humanities’ ability to instil its cherished skills and values when dealing with such dire cuts. Nor do they come close to explaining why this crisis has occurred.
This big question is attributed frequently but lightly throughout the book to an increased drive for profitability’s bulldozing of all other values in society. Such, one might say, is the nature of capitalist growth models, so it should not be surprising. But capitalism has been around for longer than our current system of higher education, so why could the humanities thrive before but not now?
A reply would involve a deeper dive into social conditions than Nussbaum is willing to take. Just to give two examples, it would involve investigating the idiosyncratic culture that arose in the Gilded Age of late-nineteenth-century United States and the profundity of the postwar social contract constructed in most Commonwealth countries. Nussbaum seems to think the American tradition of the super-rich giving to the arts is natural but work by historians — David Cannadine in his life of Andrew Mellon, for example — shows just how peculiar this religiously inspired behaviour was to the era of the robber barons. Nothing could endorse Cannadine’s findings more than a glance at how little today’s megarich — Musk, Zuckerberg, Murdoch — give to humanistic study.
Likewise, Nussbaum has very little faith in any “politicians” ensuring the health of humanities in universities, since they are always driven by “impact” over thought. But it was politicians who helped raise and fund humanities faculties all over Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and elsewhere after 1945. Political culture in the Commonwealth world has changed as drastically as has the personal culture of America’s wealthy.
Only a book that connects the dots between these changes and today’s disdain for the humanities could approach an understanding of what is now happening. And rather than being a declaration of despair, this kind of analysis would show that if things have shifted once in the past then they might shift again in the future.
Nussbaum’s solutions
In her final chapter, and in a new afterword written last year, Nussbaum turns to potential solutions. They are twofold. One, she concludes that since philanthropy forged Chicago, Brown, Harvard (the three places in which she has been employed) and America’s other great private universities, a quest for more of this kind of support seems a good bet. Two, she reaches for that old stand-by of self-flagellation: we need “to do a lot more to bring in the larger community, showing them what we do and why it is worthwhile and exciting.”
I feel the weariness of earlier Australian reviewers of this book descend upon me. Perhaps we can start with the specific ruthlessness, in both character and taxation system, that allowed robber barons like Mellon, Carnegie and Rockefeller to exist in the first place. All three of Nussbaum’s workplaces benefited enormously from the particular version of profiteering that reigned in America’s Gilded Age. Nussbaum wants countries today interested in receiving philanthropy for the humanities to create a “tax system that makes such donations attractive.” She neglects to mention that such a system also needs to permit multibillionaires to flourish at all, something that most other democratic nations, in the interests of equity, have worked hard to curtail. This is not even to raise the spectre of the slave-built capital that forged earlier colleges and for which Brown and Harvard especially have been at pains to atone.
It’s also hard to see how booming centres for the humanities in private colleges aid the three-quarters of American students who study in public colleges. For a scholar concerned with fair and wide access to education, this majority should surely occupy more of Nussbaum’s energies than those who get to enjoy the lasting legacies of unearned riches. They have more in common with students in places like Australia, where universities depend on at least a quarter of their funds coming from government.
Nussbaum is right to suggest that government funding has not only fallen since the 1990s or so but has also come with increasingly blinkered definitions of what matters. She is not right to assume it has always been this way and thus that governments will always fail the humanities. Social contracts can be renewed — possibly with more ease than turning around a culture addicted to oligarchic billionaires.
But it is the idea that humanists are grudging communicators partly to blame for the poor state of their sector that riles the most. Trump’s recent raids on the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which have shattered world-leading scientific, medical, and environmental research centres, should consign this tired line to the dustbin once and for all. It turns out that even those who communicate clearly, loudly and authoritatively about “what they do” are also vulnerable to attack. One might even speculate that in a society overrun by a billionaire oligarchy these people were targeted precisely because they were so eloquent.
If the humanities stand for something external to profit, or indeed something even more important, then we should have the courage to say so. We should not let the profit motive in by the back door, as both semi-justification for their existence and as foundational source of their sustenance.
We should use our critical reasoning and well-exercised imaginations to see that profiteers, though perhaps friendly at some times in some places, are in most ways far trickier to handle than governments. They are the ones who pushed, to Nussbaum’s chagrin, an econometric agenda on higher education. In the United States we are witnessing in real time what they can ultimately do to all spheres when granted undue power.
Governments offer much more varied histories and possibilities. Elected by and accountable to citizens, they can more readily be redirected to the social good, ideally by people steeped in reason and sympathy, however that has been acquired. The humanities may be as necessary, or as dangerous, as any other set of disciplines. They do, however, offer at least a means and a store of evidence for diagnosing our present discontents.
They also offer visions of better democratic futures, proof that things have not been and thus are not now inevitable. The power of the humanities to endorse the viability of change probably best explains why profiteers don’t like them. Certainly it is why they are worth fighting for. •
Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities
By Martha C. Nussbaum | Princeton University Press | $41.99 | 168 pages
