Luke Ford

Philosophers in the academy do not compete for authority by saying they want power. They compete by invoking moral and intellectual languages that frame their claims as fidelity to rigorous inquiry, loyalty to truth-seeking, or responsibility for sustaining philosophical seriousness inside a preposterous bureaucratic environment. This is the core insight of David Pinsof’s Alliance Theory. Moral vocabularies are coalition technologies. They recruit allies, define legitimacy, and justify control over institutions. In philosophy, the key language is not only epistemic. It is also practical and social. Being summoned. Doing real work. Maintaining intellectual independence. Pursuing genuine inquiry rather than fashion. These phrases do not merely describe practice. They define jurisdiction. They determine who gets to say what kind of philosophy the discipline can sustain, how demanding that work should be, and which forms of balancing still count as faithful.

Before the analysis proceeds, the framework needs a limit acknowledged. Alliance Theory, applied without restraint, becomes a closed system. When every position gets decoded as a power move, the analysis loses precision. The scholar who stays up until 2 a.m. revising a manuscript for the fourth time is not primarily executing a coalition maneuver. She is trying to maintain a form of intellectual life she genuinely values. The philosopher who structures her week around close reading of primary texts and careful argument years after tenure because she knows it sharpens her judgment inhabits a world whose demands are real, not merely performed. The virtues Susan Haack lists, industry, patience, persistence, judgment, integrity, focus, realism, impartiality, independence, consideration, courage, are not just a rhetorical structure and a coalition technology. They are an ethical and epistemic system with its own internal logic and its own genuine authority over the people who accept them. Alliance Theory names something real about how institutional authority functions in academic philosophy. It is not the whole picture.

Ernest Becker argues in The Denial of Death that human beings are unique among animals in their awareness of their own mortality, and that most of human culture, religion, and social life organizes itself to manage the terror that awareness produces. We construct hero systems, cultural frameworks that promise symbolic immortality, that tell us our lives participate in something larger and more permanent than our individual bodies. To be a faithful member of a hero system is to transcend death symbolically. To lose one’s hero system is to be thrown back against the terror it was built to contain.

The academic discipline of philosophy is a hero system of unusual density. It does not offer cosmic significance in the theological register, but it offers something structurally similar. To live as a serious philosopher is to participate in one of history’s most tested traditions of truth-seeking against fashion, ideology, and intellectual laziness. Every careful argument worked through, every seminar where sloppy thinking gets called out, every honest acknowledgment of a mistake in print, every refusal to chase the latest trend: these are not merely professional obligations. They are acts of fidelity to a Socratic and pragmatist heritage that has sustained honest inquiry through conditions far worse than the current publish-or-perish regime. That is a hero system. It recruits from the same psychological territory Becker describes. It promises that an individual life, lived seriously within this framework, participates in something that neither death nor the surrounding culture of metrics and rankings can fully dissolve.

Iddo Tavory’s concept of summons, developed in Summoned: Identification and Religious Life in a Jewish Neighborhood, adds a second theoretical layer. The world of academic philosophy is not simply a place where philosophers happen to work near one another. It is a network in which people are repeatedly called into being as serious philosophers through institutions, interactions, schedules, peer review, conferences, citations, and ordinary departmental recognitions. The discipline’s thickness is not just a matter of social ties. It is the product of repeated summons into philosophical being. To belong here is to be hailed, continuously and from multiple directions, as a particular kind of philosopher.

Through Becker’s lens, those summons are not merely social. They are the hero system doing its maintenance work. Each summons interrupts private drift, which in Becker’s terms means each summons interrupts the moment when the individual is thrown back toward unmanaged anxiety about irrelevance or intellectual failure. The community that summons its members reliably is the community whose hero system remains operative. The community that loses its summoning power is a community whose hero system has begun to fail, and whose members are left to manage existential terror through whatever substitute frameworks the metrics-driven academy offers.

That is why defection from the discipline’s standards carries such disproportionate social weight. The philosopher who stops reading carefully, or who begins softening her judgment to fit fashionable trends when her circle holds firm, is not merely making a lifestyle adjustment. He is, in the community’s felt logic, weakening the collective structure through which everyone present manages the terror that genuine inquiry was built to contain. This is not cynical. It is how hero systems function. The stakes feel existential because they partly are.

Three master domains organize the struggle over institutional authority in philosophy. The first is moral authority over what counts as serious philosophy. The second is the organizational structure of departments, journals, conferences, hiring, tenure, and graduate programs. The third is the everyday network through which philosophical distinction gets reproduced in seminars, citations, collaborations, and the mundane problem of navigating the academy without becoming intellectually porous.

The hardline-traditional coalition, concentrated in circles that still prize Haackian virtues, uses the language of full seriousness, rigorous argument, and separation from preposterous metrics or ideological dilution. Its claim is that philosophy’s value lies precisely in its capacity to sustain demanding intellectual work against the bureaucratic academy and the broader culture of productivity. In Becker’s terms, this coalition defends the integrity of the hero system against the accommodations that slowly evacuate it. Every softening of the summons is experienced not merely as a social adjustment but as a threat to the structure through which the community manages its existential stakes.

Against this stands a pragmatic-engagement coalition, strongest among those navigating the job market, junior faculty, and more flexible departments trying to build sustainable careers in a highly competitive, resource-scarce discipline. Their language is balancing, context, workability, and livable productivity. Their claim is not that rigor should be abandoned. It is that philosophical life in the modern university cannot be governed as though it were a nineteenth-century German seminar or a small liberal-arts idyll. Once one side defines the discipline’s purpose as sustaining maximal seriousness, flexibility begins to look like drift. Once the other side defines the discipline’s purpose as making philosophical work sustainable under current conditions, maximal seriousness begins to look like burnout or status competition masquerading as virtue. Neither side says it is fighting over prestige, citations, grants, hiring lines, or institutional influence. Each says it is protecting genuine philosophy.

Stephen Turner‘s critique of essentialism explains why the fight never resolves. There is no single stable essence of authentic philosophy being transmitted intact. There are competing reconstructions. One faction reconstructs the discipline around seriousness, depth, and stricter epistemic standards. Another reconstructs it around sustainable balancing, selective relevance, and workable career fidelity. Both claim continuity with the tradition. Both select from the same dense world of texts, history, and practice to support present needs. What gets transmitted is not a stable essence but a body of material from which each coalition selects the passages and emphases that authorize its current position.

Authority in this context is not primarily about formal rank. It is atmospheric. It lives in who gets platformed at conferences, who trains graduate students, which journals are quietly recommended, and which ones are spoken of with hesitation. Haack notes the etymological connection between prestige and prestidigitation, sleight of hand, and the observation cuts. Prestige works as a jurisdictional marker before a word is spoken. Minute variations in practice, whether a department emphasizes close textual analysis or interdisciplinary impact, whether hiring prioritizes genuine judgment or publication counts, how publicly independence from fashion gets maintained, signal which authority structure a person has accepted as binding and which summons he or she is available to receive.

This internal structure now operates within a global philosophical landscape that has shifted considerably. For most of the twentieth century, Anglo-American philosophy stood as a relatively coherent field. That coherence has eroded under the pressures Haack diagnoses: the rise of professional administrators who treat faculty as employees and students as customers; the ever-stronger insistence on publication, now extending to graduate students; the growing emphasis on grants even in the humanities; the obsessive concern with rankings; and the view of higher education as primarily a credential rather than an intrinsic good. Chairs competing for scarce resources want to impress deans with how research-active their faculty are. Faculty jockeying for promotions want to impress chairs with their productivity. Professors adapt by giving more priority to research than to teaching, more priority to graduate than to undergraduate students, and more energy to applying for grants and promoting their departments.

Publication shifts from communication to certification. As Haack notes, it becomes a credentialing system rather than a medium for ideas. When everyone publishes, no one’s anybody. Distinction moves instead to citation cartels where insiders validate each other and outsiders fade from sight. The philosophy job market is brutal: hundreds of PhDs awarded annually against a tiny number of tenure-track positions. The system rewards fluency in fashionable topics, good contacts, and the ability to produce blandly pseudo-technical prose that passes for sophistication far more readily than the slow, patient, independent work Haack celebrates. Reliance on surrogate measures, volume of output, grant dollars, rankings, replaces informed judgment. It is preposterous, Haack argues, echoing Jacques Barzun: judging the real work of a university by the weight of publications churned out is like the Soviet factory manager who met his quota by making heavier chandeliers, until the ceilings collapsed.

The growth data and the internal struggle are not separate phenomena. They illuminate each other. The hardline-traditional coalition reads modest departmental successes or citation longevity as confirmation that seriousness works, that a hero system maintained with genuine rigor will sustain the discipline in ways that accommodated or metric-driven versions cannot. The pragmatic-engagement coalition reads the same data as evidence that workable sustainability, not maximal virtue, drives long-term participation, especially among those who must navigate the real conditions of the modern academy. Each coalition uses the same institutional realities to argue for its own prescription.

Across all three master domains, the same pattern holds. Traditionalists claim fidelity to uncompromising intellectual standards and the full list of Haackian virtues. Pragmatists claim fidelity to sustainable philosophical life under actual academic conditions. Organizational leaders claim the coordinating power needed to sustain a thick network of research-active output. None presents its position as interest-driven. All present it as what authentic philosophy requires. That convergence of form with divergence of content is precisely what Pinsof’s framework predicts. Moral language is the medium through which coalitions compete because it is the only language that converts a bid for institutional control into a legitimate claim on collective identity.

What makes academic philosophy especially revealing within the sociology of knowledge is that authority here operates less through formal decree than through repeated social summons. The discipline works because private drift is constantly interrupted. There is always another seminar, another referee report, another citation opportunity, another job-market ritual, another moment in which one is hailed as a certain kind of philosopher. Through Becker’s lens, those interruptions are the hero system defending itself against the entropy that threatens every collective framework for managing mortality. The community’s power lies in making philosophical seriousness difficult to forget and difficult to privatize, because a hero system that can be privatized has already begun to fail.

The jurisdictional war in philosophy is a struggle over who gets to define what being summoned really requires. Beneath that, it is a struggle over which version of the hero system is strong enough to keep the terror contained. The expansion of philosophy into new subfields, interdisciplinary ventures, and global networks does not dissolve that internal tension. It amplifies it, because every new department or journal that enters the serious coalition becomes a new arena in which the same question must be answered. How demanding must the summons be to remain credible? Where is the line between a discipline that sustains genuine inquiry and an accommodation that hollows it out? Philosophy has been arguing over that line for decades. The rest of the academy is now beginning to argue over it too.

The late philosopher Susan Haack often discussed the cliquishness of the philosophy profession, particularly regarding her time at Oxford. Her essay “Out of Step: Academic Ethics in a Preposterous Environment” was later included in her book Putting Philosophy to Work: Inquiry and Its Place in Culture (2008, expanded 2013).

Haack was not a sociologist mapping the network from outside. She lived inside the network and named what she saw, at professional cost. That makes her a useful witness precisely because she cannot be dismissed as someone who never submitted to the protocols. She submitted, she saw, and she dissented. The clique still ignored her, which is itself a data point.

It is not that Oxford philosophers reasoned badly in the ordinary sense. They reasoned well by the internal standards of the game. The fakeness is that the reasoning served social sorting rather than inquiry. The conclusions were predetermined by who was allowed into the conversation. The demand for moral clearance precedes the description and determines whether the description will be taken seriously. People inside the institutions feel the demand for moral clearance, deploy it, and benefit from it. Susan Haack’s observation about Oxford philosophy captures the British version, where a small clique simply decides who counts, with no particular ideological dressing required.

At the real top, the mechanism disappears because it becomes unnecessary. Nobody at that level needs to invoke moral language as a barrier. The barrier is pedigree, which is to say, demonstrated submission to the right protocols at the right institutions. You either ran the gauntlet or you did not. If you did not, you do not count, and there is nothing personal about it. They simply have the power to ignore.

This is a more austere version of the protection mechanism. It does not need ideology. It does not need virtue signaling. It runs on credentialing and the authority that credentialing confers. The moral language is what middle-level gatekeepers use when they cannot simply ignore someone. The top tier rarely has that problem.

The virtue signaling version is the retail operation. The wholesale version, and it has less friction because it requires no justification at all.

Haack described the Oxford of her student days as a place where a small, powerful group determined the boundaries of legitimate inquiry. She argued that the fragmentation of modern philosophy into these small sub-specialties or cliques leads to fake reasoning and careerism.

Haack claimed that she remains beholden to no clique or citation cartel, preferring the respect of serious thinkers over the flattery of disciples.

She writes:

[W]e have seen the rise and continuing growth of a new class of professional academic administrators, who perceive themselves as managers and faculty as employees (and sometimes, students as “customers”);
• the insistence on publication for career advancement has become ever stronger, and by now extends even to graduate students;
• even in the humanities where research doesn’t require large sums of money for equipment and such, there is ever-growing emphasis on grants and research projects;
• concern about “rankings” is growing ever more insistent;
• students (and their parents) increasingly think of higher education as an essential credential for getting a decent job, rather than as having value in itself…

A new-style dean focused on climbing the administrative ladder will almost inevitably be much preoccupied with raising money, with presenting the institution (and especially his school) in the best possible light, and with impressing his bosses with the new programs he has introduced, the new “stars” he has hired and so forth. And because he is likely to have put his own academic work on permanent hold, and to be less closely in touch with peers engaged in serious academic work of their own, he may well feel he has no option but to rely less on his own judgment of the quality of a department’s program or of a person’s mind than on surrogate measures:22 a department’s position in some ranking the worth of which he cannot judge for himself; the sheer number of a person’s publications-perhaps, if he is scrupulous, adjusted by some weighting of journals or publishers the wm1h of which, again, he cannot judge for himself; or, better yet so much simpler and more “objective”!-on how much grant money a person, or a department, brings in; or, in the case of hiring, on the prestige of candidates’ home institutions. But systematically deferring judgment like this can have disastrous consequences-especially when, as we shall see, some of the people on whose opinions the whole edifice of deferred judgment depends may have built their reputations on relatively small contributions to a short-lived “niche” literature. (Many, it seems, have forgotten, if they ever knew, the etymological connection of “prestige” with “prestidigitation;’ “sleight of hand.”)

Judging a professor or a department by volume of publications is-well, as Jacques Barzun put it, it is preposterous. “Valuing knowledge, we pre-posterize the idea, and say … everybody shall produce written research in order to live, and it shall be deemed a knowledge explosion.”23 Of course, since Barzun wrote this in 1968, the pressure to publish has become much more severe. By 1994, Gary Gutting (then editor of the American Philosophical Quarterly) could write that publishing in philosophy journals had become less a way to communicate significant ideas than a form of professional certification. And indeed, it is hard to deny that credentialing professors, and would-be professors, is now the prime function of academic publication; communicating with others in the field runs a very poor second at best. When chairs boast that their faculty are “researchactive,”
what they mean, apparently, is that they run around to a lot of conferences (generally at the university’s expense), and publish a lot of books and articles. And by this time, even graduate students-who are, with luck, just beginning to find their philosophical feet-are also expected to present and publish papers.

But as W. S. Gilbert taught us, “when everyone is somebody, then no-one’s anybody.”25 When everyone publishes, other ways are needed to distinguish the somebodies from the nobodies. One way is to give greater weight to publications in journals, or with publishers, deemed “prestigious.”26 Another is to look to success in the game of grants-and-research-projects. And a third is to rely on others’ judgments in the form of departmental rankings.

But reliance on these surrogate measures is a very poor substitute for the informed judgment of someone in close touch with the demands, the temptations, and the pitfalls of intellectual work. That X has published a lot, even in supposedly prestigious journals or with supposedly prestigious presses, is absolutely no guarantee of the quality of his work; to build such a record, good contacts and a good sense of what topics are fashionable, along with fluency in that blandly chewy, pseudo-technical writing style that seems increasingly de rigeur, are likely to be at least as useful as just (just!) doing genuinely good, creative, careful, illuminating work-I suspect, more so. Neither is the fact that Y is good at getting grants; to build an impressive portfolio of grant money received, a knack for writing appealing proposals and, again, good contacts, are likely to be
at least as useful as just (just!) doing genuinely good, creative, careful, illuminating work-again, I suspect, more so.

And neither, in my judgment, is the fact that a department is highly ranked any guarantee that its faculty produces genuinely fine work, or that it offers its students a genuinely fine education. At any rate, the self-styled Gommet Report that has such an influence (I am tempted to say, such a stranglehold) on the philosophy profession not only has a structural tendency to sideline the most seriously cross-disciplina1y work and to encourage departments to over-specialize, but also concems itself far too much with what supposed “star” has moved from A to B, and far too little with how adequate, how effective, how realistic how serious-the education a department offers;29 which depends, rather, on a high preponderance of people strongly imbued with those academic virtues. Something I learned in a long-ago course on comparative political systems keeps coming· to mind: under the first Soviet Five-Year Plan, which set production targets by weight, one fact my manager realized that the easiest way to meet his target was to make heavier chandeliers-as a result of which several fashionable Moscow ceilings collapsed. It is no less bizarre to judge the real work of a university-educating intelligent young people and keeping the flame of inquiry alive-by numbers of students graduated, the amount of grant money brought in, its standing in this or that ranking, or (I can’t resist) by the weight of the publications its faculty chums out.

But chairs competing for scarce resources want to impress deans with how “research-active” their faculty are; faculty jockeying for promotions and raises want to impress chairs with their “productivity.” No wonder, then, that many professors soon adapt to the reliance of deans, etc., on rankings, number of publications, amount of grant money, and so forth: by giving more priority to their research than to their teaching, and more priority to graduate than to undergraduate students, by presenting and publishing more, and by putting time and energy into applying for grants and “promoting their department.” (Probably they also spend more time on that “other stuff,” since the more administrators there are, it seems, somehow the more administrative work there is for professors, too. Funny, that.)

And many professors, consciously or not, surrender their own judgment of the quality of a department’s program or a person’s work to the same surrogate measures on which deans, etc., rely. A couple of years ago, for example, the colleague who introduced the historian from another university giving a guest lecture admiringly listed all the grants she had been awarded, but said essentially nothing about the substance of her work. (Had I been the speaker, I would’ve been ve1y cross; but either our visitor didn’t mind, or else she had one heck of a poker face.)

Inevitably, the quality of teaching suffers: more and more introductory teaching is handed over to teaching assistants and ad hoc lecturers; and more and more graduate classes (and sometimes even undergraduate classes) are designed around “what I’m working on at the moment” rather than what aspiring professors of philosophy really need to learn. Graduate students may find the idea that they are “helping professors with their important research” flattering; and undergraduates who are too naive to know they’re being fed intellectual junk food, or who are too timid to protest, or who care more about getting a degree than about learning things worth learning, won’t complain-provided they get good-enough grades.

And as the quantity of research burgeons, its quality declines. Ever more journals are flooded with ever more submissions; the peer-review system (far from perfect even in the sciences, where it originated, 30 and much less effective as a quality-control mechanism in a field of schools and cliques) comes under intolerable strain. Inevitably, the average quality of what is published tends to fall; and sifting the good stuff from the dreck gets harder and harder. “Niche publishing” is on the rise: more and more work seems to be focused on what X said about Y’s criticism of Z’s interpretation o fW’s ideas about a question,31 and less and less directly on substantive issues. It’s easier, for one thing (and perhaps some are subliminally aware that, if they spell X’s, Y’s, Z’s, and W’s names right, one of them might recommend the paper for publication-lmowing that if it is
published, this will make him better known). Anyone with enough frequent-flyer miles to upgrade to publication-by-invitation does so; and many soon realize that you can quadruple those miles in no time if you join the right clique.

Conferences seem to become more and more occasions for making contacts, for networking, and for talking yourself, or your department, up; and less and less occasions for the serious exchange of ideas. At one recent meeting, for example, I was struck by the frequency of mutually reassuring references from one speaker to others, and of shorthand phrases alluding to the very narrow seam of literature familiar to almost everyone present. Nor could I fail to notice that, though contextualism was much-discussed, David Armis-author of a pioneering 1976 article on the subject-was never mentioned. I shouldn’t have been surprised by any of this; in a discipline increasingly fragmenting into small circles, it is only to be expected that insiders’ work will take center stage, and outsiders’ contributions tend to fade from sight.

By the same token, we are also witnessing a growing “parochialism of the recent. The graduate student who told me, in all seriousness, that he had been taught that nothing published before 199434 was worth reading was only naively saying aloud what seems more and more to be taken implicitly for granted. Do I really need to say how utterly bizarre the notion is that what Joe Blow and Jane Doe published in the last decade or two is more significant than all the work of Plato, Aristotle, … , Descartes, … , Kant, … , Frege, Peirce, … , etc., etc., put together? It would be different if, like some areas of the sciences, our subject were advancing so fast that earlier work really was soon out of date. To the contrary, however: at the moment it sometimes seems that attention-grabbing niche problems-or even old problems in twenty-first century dress, as with the recent
revival of the “Gettier paradoxes”-are welcomed much more warmly than work that makes lasting headway on substantial issues. And now I’m reminded of Peirce’s complaints about the literary dilettanti of his day, who have “so perverted ‘thought to the purposes of pleasure that it seems to vex them to think that the questions upon which they delight to exercise it may ever get formally settled”; so that “a positive discovery which takes a favorite subject out of the … debate is met with ill-concealed dislike.”

Graduate students are caught in the middle. They are indulged: by ”recruitment” efforts that feed their self-regard; by inflated grades and over-praise; and by the ever-commoner practice of relating to them as if they were already junior colleagues, rather than still students.36 But they are also exploited: often offered a smorgasbord of whatever their professors are working on rather than the genuinely rigorous, systematic, durable philosophical education they need; often carrying the most burdensome undergraduate teaching; sometimes acting as ·unpaid research assistants; sometimes waiting an unconscionably long time for input from faculty members preoccupied with their own agenda of presentation and- publication; sometimes obliged to do the scut work of organizing conferences for which a faculty member will take the credit; and generally faced by a conspiracy of silence and half-truths37 about how many of those who begin a PhD program ever finish, how many of those who finish ever get a real academic job, and how many of those real jobs will allow time for the important research agenda they have all been encouraged to imagine they will undertake.

It should come as no surprise that-dissipating the time and energy they should be spending exploring new ideas, building and stretching their intellectual muscles, trying and failing and learning from the failure how to do better-many graduate students become no less anxiously obsessed than their teachers with those wretched rankings, scrounge shamelessly for money to attend conferences, strain to publish, and stress over building their resumes or impressing visiting speakers who might conceivably give them a leg-up. In my experience, some thrive having already internalized distorted values; some don’t survive to complete the PhD; some are corrupted, sooner or later, in greater or lesser degree; and only a few-for whom I have nothing but admiration-somehow survive with their integrity, and even their idealism, intact. Sadly, not many of those admirable
few will be the somebodies of the next generation. Those, more likely, will be the confident products of “prestigious” departments, well-trained in survival tactics for the current climate: ambitious philosophical go-getters, capable, clever, quick, fluent, fully au fait with intellectual fashion-but blithely oblivious to the deeper demands, and rewards, of mature reflection.

The erosion of the academic virtues is gradual: at first, some succumb to the temptation to cut comers in their teaching just a bit; rush to publish the paper or the book that could be made much richer or more rigorous with a little more time; write an easy critique of a wild idea rather than struggling to identify and build on the tiny grain of truth it contains; or persuade themselves that they really have made the remarkable breakthrough they promised in their grant application, or that the most recent fad coming down the pike really is worth their and everyone else’s attention; and so on. Judgment is weakened as more and more defer to surrogate measures; integrity is weakened as more and more embroider their achievements to others and then, almost inevitably, in their own minds; focus is weakened as the “narcissism of small differences” within a clique looms large,
and the dubious shared assumptions fade from notice; realism is weakened by more and more preposterous announcements of supposedly stunning breakthroughs; independence, consideration, and courage are weakened with every small compromise to careerism. And as time passes, the erosion feeds on itself, and the pace of decline quickens.