"This is an Odd Book" by Charles McClelland, H-Net Book Review, 22 May 2006
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Below is a line-by-line reply to McClelland’s review, with the review in italics and the reply in regular type.
H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-German@h-net.msu.edu (May 2006)
Reviewed for H-German by Charles McClelland, Department of History,
University of New Mexico
“This is an Odd Book”
As William Clark states in the first line, his “odd” book is “befitting the
subject” (p. 3).
The review thus begins with a sort of minor misquotation. But I do like the title of the review a lot.
In a time when universities are (judging by the titles published about them) being corporatized, McDonaldized,
diabolized (bycertain right-wing groups) or otherwise redefined in their purpose, a thorough look at the historical
habitus of universities and their quaint practices may indeed seem to swim against the current. At a time when
over half the “masters” in American universities (that is, the regularly-contracted professors) have been forced into the
cringing role of part-time or “contingent” faculty,
This is a nice statement of things that I only allusively deal with (pp. 474-75).
Clark’s central thesis – that it was professorial charisma that drove the rise of the modern research university – may
also appear quaint. It is, in any case, novel.
Alas, that is neither the central argument of the book nor really argued in the book at all. In a nub, the reviewer
mistakes an effect for a cause: professorial charisma in its current, non-traditional form is rather more an effect than a
cause of the forces that combined to produce the research university. The book argues that professorial charisma at
the traditional university was “crystallized” and “routinized” charisma, as vested in academic titles, professorial chairs,
rituals of graduation and promotion, canonical textbooks, and so on. Such “charismatic traditional” entities defined and
inhered in corporate, collegial, and collective bodies, as opposed to those of individual academics. The book further
argues that bureaucratic and mercantile processes of rationalization – ministries and markets – subverted corporate,
collegial and collective entities at German Protestant universities, and transformed academic charisma into
“charismatic rationality.” The latter defines and inheres in individual academics and their works, and is constitutive of
the modern “cult of academic personality” – the apotheosis of originality (in its modern sense) and the “man with a big
name” – at the research university. These points are so belabored in the book, that the reviewer’s essential misreading
is most curious.
And, despite the almost universal dead-earnestness with which the subject is taken (are our jobs not the most
important in the world?), Clark brings a wry humor to his analysis, as well.
If this is a compliment, it’s accepted.
First the argument. Clark proposes that the modern “research university” (which he agrees, conventionally , arose in
German-speaking Europe)
The reviewer does not indicate with whom I am agreeing here – him perhaps?
developed as part of a response by professors to a challenge from outside (the “rationalizing” and “bureaucratizing”
state, using Max Weber’s categories, as well as new challenges to “marketing services” to students and others).
The book does use metaphors of internal-external, perhaps to its detriment. But the argument is rather more as
stated above, as opposed to the way the reviewer puts it here. I do not think that professors “responded” to extramural
“challenges” and thus, voilà, the modern university. I’m afraid that the professors per se were rather more patients or
passive in the matter – were not reforming, but rather re-formed by forces largely beyond their control.
A reputation for originality and discovery, aided by public celebrity through publications, increasingly became the ticket
to professorial success after the end of the eighteenth century (ending what Peter Moraw has termed the “family
university” based chiefly on nepotism).
I regret failing to cite the valuable works of Moraw who, whoever, is by no means the first scholar to treat of the kin-
centered university. The first extensive treatment which I know and cite is by Johann Gisenius (1628). Alongside his
work, I cite relevant works by August Tholuck (1853-54), Friedrich Euler (1970), R. Steven Turner (1973), James Cobb
(1980), Gerhard Schormann (1982), and Hermann Niebuhr (1983), among others.
So far, the argument is nothing new.
This seems to presume that novelty is a virtue. Like Spinoza, I prefer saying true things. A further problem is that the
reviewer seems to have little grasp of the argument.
Clark’s contribution is to label this kind of innovation as “charismatic.” Lest one wonder just how Weber’s concept of
primitive leadership based on special individual holiness or heroism could apply to professorial bookworms,
The reviewer apparently has peculiar ideas about Weber’s notion of charisma. It is anything but a “concept of
primitive leadership.” The reviewer perhaps adheres to the view that Weber believes in an historical trajectory from
the charismatic to the traditional to the rational-rationalized? Weber does not believe that, and the main point of my
book (see above) is to use and extend Weber’s notion of charismatic rationality. The latter is what, for example, the
“genius” possesses, as well as, per Hegel, even the doctor of philosophy, albeit in small measure. Thus professorial
bookworms, as long as they also write books and the like (including nasty book reviews) may also possess a measure.
Clark insouciantly advises readers not to worry about “the orthodoxy of my sketch and later use of ‘charisma’ relating
to academics” (p. 15).
The quotation is from pg. 14, not pg. 15. The point there was to say that I did not intend to become involved in
discussions about what Weber “really” meant. In The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, Emile Durkheim used
central notions taken from Immanuel Kant. Scholars of the latter would argue that Durkheim’s use of Kantian concepts
was not “orthodox” or true to what Kant meant. Durkheim scholars would say that, if so, then Kant’s work was only a
point of departure. For my book, Weber’s categories offer a similar point of departure; but the relevant concept of
“academic charisma,” both traditional and modern, is articulated through the book itself. That said, notes 18 to 23 (pg.
516) to pp. 14-16 at least make an attempt to situate my use of “charisma” and so on in Weberian primary and
secondary texts. Here are notes 18 to 23:
18: See Weber 1976a, esp. 140-48, 654-81 (= 1956, esp. 140-48, 662-89); 1956, 555-58 (omitted in 1976a); 2001. See also Parsons
1949, 564ff, 661ff; Alexander 1985, III, 84-88, 183-85; Becker 1988; Breuer 1991, esp. 35-67, 215-21; Schluchter 1979, esp. 180ff.
19: See esp. Weber 2001, 122-24, 161, 177-94, 242.
20: Citation from Weber 1976a, 726 = (1956, 734). See Schluchter 1979, esp. 184f – at 187ff, he makes a distinction between the
routinization, “Veralltäglichung,” and the crystallization, “Versachlichung,” of charisma, seeing the former as relevant to structural aspects,
and the latter as relevant to developmental, historical matters. The crystallization of charisma, he notes, does not necessarily entail a
depersonalization of it, as routinization typically does; rather, crystallization points to the transmission of charismatic powers from the
original figure to “Virtuosi,” whose extraordinary powers and abilities represent it.
21: See Weber 1976a [1921], 666ff (= 1956, 674ff), not about Hitler, but able to explain him in advance; 1976a, 725f (= 1956, 733f), as
cited above, indicates that Weber saw the processes leading to “the charismatic transfiguration of reason [die charismatische Verklärung
der Vernunft]” as also being amenable to bureaucratic and capitalist interests. The Romantic cult of the genius embodies such a
charismatic transfiguration of reason precisely because, contra the Enlightenment, it is a form of reason without rules, and that cannot be
acquired by rule-governed practice or training or discipline. Genius is a gift.
22: Note that, for Weber, part of the might of modern capitalism is that it avails itself of both bureaucratic and charismatic powers: see
Weber 1976a, 658f (= 1956, 666f). This is what, to echo Marx, makes capitalism’s wont to destroy traditional social orders nearly
unstoppable. The thesis of the charismatic within the rationalized is derived from Kant’s theory of freedom: autonomy exists within the
broader sphere of (bureaucratic) duty.
23: On the charismatic aspect of “recognition” and finding the “right one,” versus the different mentality of traditional voting, see Weber
1976a, 663 (= 1956, esp. 671); 1956, 556f (omitted in 1976a, but in 1988a, chap. 9).
If the reviewer indeed finds my attitude to Weber’s work “insouciant,” then I entreat him to instruct me in the proper
understanding of Weberian categories, and I will immediately post it on this website.
The problem with such “unorthodoxy” is that the suggested (if unproven) link between charisma and the various
innovations leading to the “research university” can also loosely apply to the countermodels cited by the author, such
as Oxbridge.
The reviewer again takes an effect for a cause here. Modern charisma did not lead to or produce, for example, the
modern research seminar or the modern doctoral dissertation. The charismatic aspects of the modern research
seminar (in chapter 5 of the book) and of the modern doctor of philosophy and the doctoral dissertation (in chapter 6)
were themselves rather induced by the forces of bureaucratic and capitalistic rationalization (à la Weber’s notion of the
essential fusion of the latter two) in Protestant German lands such as Hanover and Prussia.
While the ancient British universities unquestionably lagged behind the best German counterparts in the nineteenth
century in achieving what we now recognize as attributes of the “research university,” their dons cannot universally be
said to have lacked charisma. It was merely directed elsewhere.
Yes, the dons possessed much charisma. Before the 19th century, it was of the traditional sort, as crystallized in
costumes, titles, offices, command of Latin, and the like. And, indeed, during the 19th century, even at Oxbridge,
charisma began to mutate into its non-traditional, modern German form, as rationalized in publications and the like.
This is not a “countermodel” to my argument; it rather is part of my argument.
Another commonplace taken up and reworked by Clark is the supposed leadership of Protestant German universities
(the counterfoil here is provided by the Jesuit influence emphasizing collective over individual/charismatic academic
performance) on reformed Catholic institutions.
Since what I argue is a “commonplace,” I suppose we are back again at the putative virtue of novelty, that is, the
modern notion of “originality.” The role of the German Protestant universities is central to my argument, which
announces itself as a reworking of Weber’s “Protestant Ethic” (but as a rival story to “Merton’s Thesis”).
He also applies an interesting argument regarding the shift from predominantly oral to writtenforms to spread
knowledge, implying a significant shift of reach beyond the walls of the traditional medieval or Renaissance university to
the wider bourgeois public of the Enlightenment and beyond. This is dubbed the “dominion of the author and the
legible” (p. 29).
The latter notion forms one of the central pillars of the book, so it is gratifying to see that it did not wholly elude the
reviewer’s grasp. I have no idea what “implying a significant shift of reach beyond the walls of the traditional medieval
or Renaissance university to the wider bourgeois public of the Enlightenment and beyond” means in regard to the
thesis of the eclipse of oral culture by writing.
Leaving aside such interpretative speculations or assertions, the bulk (two thirds) of this lengthy book is devoted to a
loving and often minute examination of various academic rituals and institutions, tracing their transformation over many
centuries.
So, the two thirds of the book that makes the central argument is understood and explicated by the reviewer as “a
loving and often minute examination …” I guess the reviewer did not get the sort of book here that he desired.
Unfortunately this narrative does not include much of the last century and a half, precisely the era of the rising
“research university.”
Well, if the book is “original” in the modern sense of novel, this lies – as the title indicates – in a project to exhibit the
origins of the research university. Origins usually come before the thing, here the research university, and I
endeavored to trace the origins beginning in the Renaissance and late Scholasticism.
Here we can learn about (and even see reproductions or traces of) the early modern lecture catalogue and the lecture
form itself; disputations, examinations, and the research seminar; the rise of the Dr. phil. degree and dissertation as
well as the library catalog.
The seven chapters dealing with these issues constitute the core and principal part of the book (pp. 33-335), which
the reviewer dispatches with this list. Does this fulfill the ethical obligation of a reviewer to indicate the contents of the
book fairly? Or is this insouciance?
Some of these chapters are further bolstered by a series of appendices that are (like the archives that provided them)
somewhat hit-or-miss in their coverage, not to say eccentric or merely suggestive. (Many other books, especially over
the last quarter century, deliver far more comprehensive statistical data, for example.)
The reviewer seems to have curious ideas about the nature of research and argument. The appendices (pp. 477-
513) contain data that several chapters use as the empirical bases to make their arguments. The bases were laid only
as to be sufficient to warrant the arguments. The press printed the appendices at some significant expense. Perhaps
the reviewer will offer to find a monetary subvention for the press to expand the appendices to suit his desires in a
future edition? And also provide some detail beyond the metaphor of “hit-or-miss” and “eccentric” in regard to the
appendices? Appendix 2, for example, is an attempted documentation of all known lecture catalogues for German-
speaking universities before the 19th century. I would be most interested to know which work has done that more fully,
and what is eccentric about the survey. Appendix 4 is a list of German philology seminars and their directors and co-
directors up to the 1830s, which chapter 5 draws on. If the reviewer knows of a more complete list, I’d like to know it.
Appendix 5 is a survey of doctoral dissertations written at a number of universities from the 1770s to the 1830s, which
chapter 6 draws upon to make some of its arguments. If the reviewer knows of a substantively larger survey of doctoral
dissertations, I would love to be able to use it for a future edition of the book.
By the way, the appendices are largely based on printed sources, not on archival sources, as the reviewer seems to
think. The archival sources are rather listed as the Abbreviations (pp. 565-66), an apparatus, which the notes use to
cite archival sources.
One quickly becomes accustomed to the style and approach of the author: a few thought-provoking assertions,
followed by citations that provide a rich textural background but rarely sufficient convincing foreground evidence to
back the assertion, then a shift to a new topic.
That’s just what I was thinking of the reviewer's style – without the citations.
In discussing the innovation and later decline of the ritual of disputations, for example, Clark asserts that the form
derived from the medieval mock combat of jousting (p. 74). There is no mention of the tradition of dialogue (for
example, the Platonic method) thoroughly familiar to medieval professors of philosophy and theology, who derived
much of their knowledge from classical antiquity.
This is just nonsense. The least “original” (in the modern sense) part of the book is the discussion of the medieval
formal or solemn disputation, which was not a “dialogue” in any sense, Socratic or otherwise. The book deals in detail
with the conduct of informal disputation in the late medieval period, for which it even offers illustrations (pp. 143-46).
Some of these informal disputations, as the book argues, may have become more like conversations or dialogues in
the early modern era, and thus relevant to the origins of the seminar (which chapter 5 discusses). But the formal
disputation (which chapter 3 discusses) had the agonistic structure of a joust or trial by combat, taken as it was largely
from medieval judicial practices. If anything is a “commonplace” in the book, it’s this point – at least for anyone who
knows anything about the Middle Ages.
Before the “hero” jouster (here Abelard) nothing; after him, everything.
Abelard is treated mostly on pg. 75. He is placed in the context of the new military orders, the Templars and
Hospitallers. The book does not suggest that he invented medieval disputation. It rather uses him as an emblem and –
in part – a vehicle of the transformation in the twelfth century that led to the emergence of Scholasticism and its
rejection of monastic habits, which the book discusses briefly. The formal disputation in its canonical form emerged with
the scholastics. This, again, is a commonplace for anyone who knows anything about the Middle Ages.
One sometimes gains the impression that the author is so enamored of his theme of scholarly “originality,” starting with
the search for student “applause” and later (with a shift from the oral to written/published transmission of knowledge, to
good reviews and notices) as a motor dragging into being the modern research university that he tends to
favor it in his own explanations.
The author may or may not be enamored of this theme – but this is the best statement that the reviewer has made
indicating that he has an inkling of the argument.
To do so, he often ignores or downplays both continuities and standard interpretations (as well as leaving out many
important works in an otherwise vast –54-page – bibliography).
Would the reviewer mean that I seem to have largely ignored the standard interpretation given in the 1980 book
State, Society, and University in Germany 1700-1914 written by one Charles E. McClelland? I would appreciate
knowing the “many important works” that the bibliography is missing, in order to include them later. As to continuities,
tell me more, tell me more. The book does try to show that large and significant parts of the traditional university – such
as academic titles as well as voting for academic appointments – persist at least in part in the modern research
university.
The remaining third of this long book’s principal text deals with “Narrative, Conversation, Reputation” – starting with a
“crucial” microanalysis of only two records of formal “visitations” or inspections of two universities spaced some two
centuries part.
Attempted mockery and distortion of meaning by insertion of “crucial” here? This word, as far as I remember, was
used only in reference to an analysis of a ministerial journal, which some readers of the manuscript did not care for,
but which I thought crucial for subsequent analyses in the book (pg. 353), not per se.
(The commentary duplicates material printed elsewhere.)
Does the reviewer attempt to insinuate plagiarism by the author of himself? The acknowledgements detail at length
the provenance of the materials in every chapter, most of which are indeed based on previous publications, but offer
significant rewritings and – hard to believe! – some corrections. The press was fully appraised and witting of this.
The argument becomes so obscure here that only a determined effort can follow it, but it appears to be that
government or church bureaucracies attempted to exploit the rumors and mutual denunciations by professors that they
picked up but ultimately could do little with.
The arguments here and in later chapters are not easy, but the reviewer seems not to have made a “determined
effort” to follow them, for what he writes is nonsense. I guess it’s not like the 1950s “manpower sociology” that the
reviewer, judging by his relevant works, understands and desires, and which he conflates with the book under review.
A few lines, slightly edited to expose the basic syntax, will give a flavor of the conclusions: “Much of the bureaucratic
distance imposed by [the visitor’s] prose aimed at obscuring relations between hearsay and reputation. He [the visitor]
nevertheless registered a tension between ocular-scribal versus oral-aural traces of academics.... The charismatic
aspect of the academic voice, registered by local applausum and circulating chatter, mattered much in ministerial ears.
The ministry’s procrustean plots foundered on the protean nature of academic babble” (p. 372).
Bravo! The copyeditor especially liked the last sentence. And here ends the reviewer’s feigned analysis of the other
third of the book (pp. 339-476).
The “oddness” continues into the footnotes, which could have benefited from a thorough editing.
Despite the copyeditor’s valiant efforts, problems arose, rather, from an over-editing of the book, which ended up
introducing some errors while correcting or even missing others. The copyeditor, per a communication to me, also
seems to have overly enjoyed reading parts of the book, which proved, however, detrimental to the task.
To take one random example, Notes 26 and 27 on page 556 contain respectively an apology for not being able to find
a reference in the author’s notes
Yes, this was a joke in homage and reference to a similar note once made by Braudel (the reference to which I can
no longer find). The relevant anecdote was fully evidenced by the first source cited, Johann Michael von Loen’s Der
redliche Mann am Hofe (1742), in note 26 (pg. 556). The second source is the missing one: I remember it being
Conrad Bornhak’s Geschichte der preussischen Universitätsverwaltung bis 1800 (1900), but, due to my impecunious
state, some of my xeroxes are stored in boxes elsewhere, and the Bornhak is there. Perhaps the reviewer has it at
hand.
as well as the odd bilingual appellation “Friedrich [sic] the Great.”
This is my protest against the erstwhile translation of (German) proper names. Why not John Jack Rousseau? John
Kepler (as he was once called)? John Goethe? Godfrey William Leibniz? Kaiser William? So why Frederick? You say
tradition? I say forget it. Johannes Kepler was once John Kepler in English, and now he’s not.
It is not easy to imagine what audience the publisher (which apparently did not edit the manuscript carefully enough to
note that it is cited in bibliographical notes variously as “University of Chicago Press” as well as “Chicago University
Press”) had in mind for this work.
About typographical and similar infelicities, see a note above. Regarding the audience envisaged by the press, here
is the brief initial list of the journals and papers to which the press sent the book for review:
American Anthropologist
American Historical Review
American Scientist
American Sociological Review
Annales
Annals of Science
Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte
British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies
British Journal for the History of Science
British Journal for the Philosophy of Science
Change
Chronicle of Higher Education
Chronicle Review
College and Research Libraries
Configurations
Eighteenth-Century Life
Eighteenth-Century Studies
Endeavour
English Historical review
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
German History
German Studies review
H-Net Reviews
Hermenaut
Histoire
Historische Zeitschrift
History of Education Quarterly
History of European Ideas
History of Science
International Studies in Philosophy of Science
Isis
Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies
Journal of Early Modern History
Journal of European Studies
Journal of Higher Education
Journal of Interdisciplinary History
Journal of Modern History
Journal of the History of Ideas
Journal of Victorian Culture
London Review of Books
Metascience
Minerva
Nature
Neue Züricher Zeitung
New Books in Nineteenth-Century Studies
New Scientist
New York Review of Books
Nineteenth-Century Contexts
Nineteenth-Century Studies
Perspectives on Science
Philosophy of Science
Public Understanding of Science
Raritan Quarterly Review
Renaissance Studies
Representations
Reviews of Higher Education
Review of Metaphysics
Science
Science as Culture
Science in Context
Scientific American
Social Studies of Science
Sociology of Education
Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science
Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History
Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching
Süddeutsche Zeitung
Synthese
Teaching in Higher Education
Times Education Supplement
Times Literary Supplement
Victorian Literature and Culture
Victorian Review
Victorian Studies
Victorian Studies Bulletin
The dissertation on which it is based (UCLA, 1986) has of course been updated, but most of the chapters have been
already published in journals.
Very little in the book comes from my dissertation (“a work of the night”). The latter was rather the basis for the
present book’s indirect Urtext, The Hero of Knowledge, which is to date unfinished. As to the prior publication of the
materials, see a note above.
As a reference work (with its voluminous if somewhat unsystematic appendices), particularly for those whose German is
weak, it has some value,
Neither the press or I envisaged the book as a reference work. As the German of most people in the world is
probably “weak,” I am more than happy with that envisaged audience, although the reviewer’s implications here are
more than condescending.
but serious students of university history will still need to consult the growing and much less “odd” corpus of secondary
works coming out of Germany itself,
The book is not a “university history” so serious students of the latter have no need to trouble themselves about it –
and their German is apparently strong. The book is rather a history of the academic and certain relevant practices – a
history, not the history.
not to mention the original archival sources to which this is a somewhat eccentric guide.
Why in the world would anyone read this book as a “guide” to archival sources?
For the sophisticated scholar versed in (or depressed by) the postmodern nonsense increasingly slipping into and
even substituting for serious scholarship, the book may offer an occasional weary smile,
I am delighted if I made the reviewer smile, if only wearily. That makes my day.
but it should probably not be recommended to undergraduates or non-experts without a preliminary cautioning word.
Yes, it is a subversive book, to be kept from uncorrupted youth and incomptent reviewers, but not non-experts.
Despite a desperate search for originality,
But “originality” in what sense? I do not search for “originality” in the modern sense of novel, but rather in the
traditional or original sense of stemming-from-the-origin. The modern inversion of the original meaning of “originality” is
one of the central points of the book and, although also a sort of commonplace, seems to have eluded the reviewer.
it deserves in the end the description “a very erudite oddity.”
Bravo! Description accepted – it fits as well one of my favorite books in the English language: Robert Burton’s The
Anatomy of Melancholy. I hope and pray that my book is as erudite and as odd in the end as his.