Several months ago, Manchester University Press published the second book I’ve written, titled Confiscating the Common Good: Small Towns and Religious Politics in the French Revolution. Rather than summarize the book in a shameless ploy to sell more copies, I want to do something different here; over three commentaries on Tri States Public Radio I will use my book as a springboard for raising issues that not only relate to what I wrote but even important, are germane to us all.
This commentary considers how my book came to be, specifically the experience of writing the book and the context in which I did it—the latter of which I call academic time and space. I publicly want to reflect on this time and space because I think many within and beyond the academy have lost sight of its highest purpose and value. Academic time and space is difficult to characterize due to the many disciplinary practices pursued within it. But if pressed to give a concise definition, I would say this: academic time and space is the context in which scholars explore the complexity of our universe.
The complexity I explored while writing my book entailed much specialized knowledge and abstract thought. But one small example of this complication would illustrate my point. As I researched what happened in five small towns of France during its eighteenth-century revolution, I found two competing facts. On the one hand, none of the small towns I studied was entirely unrelated to another; they were all from one nation, were subject to analogous social and economic forces, and answered to the same centralized government. On the other, for a variety of reasons—including human agency and other contingencies—each of these towns had a distinct and singular iteration of revolutionary politics.
Tracing such complexity within academic time and space nonetheless led me to something more: a questioning of my own place in the world. Recognizing how each of these small towns was typical but also unique prompted me to look at such characteristics within myself. In an experience now rare in academic time and space, inspecting my own complexity raised the most fundamental moral questions we might dare ask ourselves, including one above all: how should we live our lives? Delving even deeper into historical complexity, however, I sometimes found another dimension—one in which I felt an overwhelming awe for what I studied, and with it a profound sense of humility. Once I peered within this complexity, I was stunned by not only how sublime and exquisite this history was but also how trifling I was by comparison.
This last experience made possible by academic time and space—a transcendence in which complexity at once connects, differentiates, embodies, and reveals—is what our world needs most from today’s academy, for such encounters commit us to sustain, rather than destroy, the wonders of our world. Conversely, when we in the academy view its time and space as merely a job-training scheme; when we see nothing wrong with spending, on average, seven hours a day on screens, devices, and media intentionally designed to divert us from deep and prolonged contemplation; when we, in sum, fail to consider complexity and thereby forestall the moral transformation and transcendence it can foster, we do all these things at our existential peril.
In this vein, one person who recognized the quintessential value of academic time and space was Rachel Carson—a marine biologist, author of Silent Spring, and a literal voice in the wilderness for what we now call environmental sustainability. “The more clearly we can focus on the wonders and realities of the universe about us,” she declared in a 1954 speech, “the less taste we shall have for destruction.” Perhaps no better description of what academic time and space is all about has ever been evoked.
Lifted by Carson’s words, I derive some hope from the historical “wonders and realities” that my book uncovers, if only because they offer more reason for sustaining the earth amid our countervailing march to destroy it. Nevertheless, Confiscating the Common Good is also a book with a practical lesson about improving our community’s prospects for a greener future, and yet a more democratic one as well. In a second commentary soon to come, I will outline what that lesson is; please join me.
Ed Woell is a Professor of History at Western Illinois University
The opinions expressed are not necessarily those of the university or Tri States Public Radio.
Diverse viewpoints are welcomed and encouraged.