Higher Education and Disaster

Capitalism in the Age of COVID-19

Marina Vujnovic
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PALGRAVE CRITICAL UNIVERSITY STUDIES

Higher Education and

Disaster Capitalism in the
Age of COVID-19
Marina Vujnovic · Johanna E. Foster
Palgrave Critical University Studies

Series Editor
John Smyth
University of Huddersfield
Huddersfield, UK
Aims of the Palgrave Critical University Studies Series
Universities everywhere are experiencing unprecedented changes and
most of the changes being inflicted upon universities are being imposed by
political and policy elites without any debate or discussion, and little
understanding of what is being lost, jettisoned, damaged or destroyed.
The over-arching intent of this series is to foster, encourage, and publish
scholarship relating to academia that is troubled by the direction of these
reforms occurring around the world. The series provides a much-needed
forum for the intensive and extensive discussion of the consequences of
ill-conceived and inappropriate university reforms and will do this with
particular emphasis on those perspectives and groups whose views have
hitherto been ignored, disparaged or silenced. The series explores these
changes across a number of domains including: the deleterious effects on
academic work, the impact on student learning, the distortion of academic
leadership and institutional politics, and the perversion of institutional
politics. Above all, the series encourages critically informed debate, where
this is being expunged or closed down in universities.
 Marina Vujnovic • Johanna E. Foster

Higher Education
and Disaster
Capitalism in the Age
of COVID-19
Marina Vujnovic Johanna E. Foster
Department of Communication Political Science and Sociology
Monmouth University Monmouth University
West Long Branch, NJ, USA West Long Branch, NJ, USA

ISSN 2662-7329     ISSN 2662-7337 (electronic)

Palgrave Critical University Studies
ISBN 978-3-031-12369-6    ISBN 978-3-031-12370-2 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12370-2

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To all those lost to COVID-19 and to disaster capitalism.
 Foreword

When the WHO first declared COVID-19 to be a global pandemic on

March 11th, 2020 (they had labeled it a “public health emergency of
international concern” as of January 30th, 2020), the world was already in
the midst of other global catastrophes—devastating effects of climate
change, technology advancing faster than ethical understandings of it,
ongoing military occupations and conflicts, and a litany of social and eco-
nomic problems wrought by some two centuries of global industrial capi-
talism. The ongoing pandemic has done as much to bring attention to
these social problems as it has done to exacerbate them. And, as Marina
Vujnovic and Johanna Foster argue in Higher Education and Disaster
Capitalism in the Age of COVID-19, it has also presented elites with an
opportunity to exploit them.
Vujnovic and Foster critically examine higher education in the context
of a capitalist economic system, especially “disaster capitalism.” Academia
is no exception to the use of a disaster-like COVID-19 to enhance capital-
ist interests. This is the case because capitalism and business interests have
increasingly shaped the academic world. Academia in the USA (and else-
where) is increasingly part of the global education system that, in turn, is
shaped by capitalism. In many ways, academia has become just another
industry controlled by capitalism and that operates with its business model.
It is a system for the mass production of ideas and students, both of which
exist, in the main, to buttress a capitalist economic system devoted to mass
production and mass consumption.

vii
viii FOREWORD

The academic world now has many characteristics that are in line with
those in the business world including an orientation toward expansionism,
outsourcing, the retailing of knowledge, among other factors. More spe-
cifically, during the pandemic, academia has become more oriented to
undercutting unions, reducing academic employment, freezing hiring,
threatening tenure, closing and downsizing many departments, increasing
tuition and reducing costly in-person education and replacing it with
online education (and related systems). In these and other ways, business’
stranglehold on academia has tightened. While most of those in the aca-
demic system have been victimized by such actions, those at the top of the
academic world, such as college presidents and athletic coaches have argu-
ably had their positions strengthened.
As the world moves toward “living with COVID-19,” it is imperative
that we take steps to better understand the impact the pandemic has had,
and will continue to have, on our world. As the pandemic has accelerated
assaults on learning, it has become more crucial than ever to understand,
and to protect the realm of education, especially its emphasis on “facts”
and science. This volume is a critical step in that process. It not only helps
us to understand the negative impacts of the pandemic on higher educa-
tion, it also recognizes the ways in which they have presented opportuni-
ties for improving it. We stand now at the crossroads in higher education.
The pandemic has helped to illuminate the grievances associated with the
path we have been on as well as the opportunities of the road less traveled.
Vujnovic and Foster have lit a torch on the latter and it would do us all
well to follow their light.

Paris, France J. Michael Ryan

Sarasota, FL, USA George Ritzer
May 2022
 Preface

(Foster)
Just weeks after winning the election as president of our faculty union, I
was greeted by an infestation of rats inside the living space of what I had
thought was at least a rat-free house, if not free of other infestations. Beside
myself with the sight and sound of rats literally coming out of the woodwork
over the course of a half-year campaign to batten the hatches, I had the gnaw-
ing thought that the unexpected rodent raid was also symbolic. A few months
into my new leadership role, I had already begun to feel as if my term as
union president was bringing all sorts of new and troubling visitations into
my professional space that would be equally impossible to accept. Three years of
faculty union organizing and a pandemic later, I realized my concerns were
just the tip of an iceberg. At times, my co-author and faculty council chair
would wonder if, in our roles at the helm of faculty leadership as the crisis
unfolded, we had been cast in The Truman Show. With each new challenge on
our own campus, and with political struggles on campuses all across the coun-
try resonating immediately with both of us as faculty leaders, we began to see
more clearly the contours of a global education industry spiderweb that had
been spun well before the pandemic, and was expanding right before our eyes.
It would also occur to us that many good colleagues on the academic side of
the house have been contributing to shared governance work on campuses
amidst these fateful entanglements in ways that continue to leave us unknow-
ingly outmatched in this expansion, and not so much that we “come with a
knife to a gunfight” but rather we come to the gunfight with a hacky sack—or
maybe a fish. In other words, we have been without a sense of the game we are

ix
x PREFACE

all now playing as we go about our lives as faculty and staff. We have been
unaware of what’s behind the woodwork in our own home. Equally devastat-
ing, we began to understand even more acutely the ways in which adminis-
trators, faculty and staff alike have been shills for what has been “laid bare”
for us during the pandemic, namely a global education industry takeover of
the relations of research, teaching and learning.
This book emerged out of the trenches in which we found ourselves
in our roles as president of our faculty union and chair of our faculty
council, shortly after the initial shock of images of people in hazmat
suits circulating around our campus in early March of 2020 had died
down and we were pressured to face the COVID-19 realities head on.
It was immediately clear to us that COVID-19 was presenting itself to
higher education top leadership as an opportunity to expand on disas-
ter discourse and austerity policies that have become so commonplace
in higher education, especially since the 2008 economic crisis. While
some things we have experienced in the last two years were predictable.
What we did not predict is the sheer extent to which neoliberal capital-
ism has come to be predatory in a way that it not only profits off peo-
ple’s misery, particularly people of color and women, but that human
life itself is seen worthy only as much as it can be made into a commod-
ity. It also became painfully clear that the institution of higher educa-
tion, the place we call home, has been, almost from its inception, on
the path of this very predation, allowing private interests to squeeze
out any remaining capacities within our institutions, particularly our
public higher education institutions, to be in the service of society and
democracy at large.
Hence, in this book, we begin from the position that despite the perva-
sive American myth of higher education as a set of institutions uniquely
situated in the spaces between the market and the state, colleges and uni-
versities in the United States have always been tied, more or less, to the
interests of capital (Geiger, 2016). In fact, if there is anything unique
about the role of higher education in the United States, it is precisely this
founding and ever-present entanglement with private interests compared
to colleges and universities around the world. Further, we take the stance
that the major role of colleges and universities in the U.S. past and pres-
ent, whether private or public, has been to serve as the ideological appara-
tus for the system of capitalism, and not, as is so often described, as
institutional locations of market-free, or even market-countervailing
 PREFACE xi

forces. To put it another way, we assert that higher education, like K-12
schooling, primarily works to reproduce unequal class, race, and gender
structures in the economy, and in society more generally. These processes
of social reproduction, as sociologists call it in one important usage of the
term, include the mediation of class, race, and gender conflict such that
class boundaries and ranks are continually sorted and resorted in shifting
and variable ways to protect elites as the economic, political, and social
landscapes change. While we recognize and appreciate that colleges and
universities have been critical sites of resistance and struggle in the United
States from their inception until today—sites that must be protected if we
intend to preserve democracies—we also take as axiomatic that U.S. higher
education is of and for the capitalist project, and continues to advance the
economic and political elite in at least three major ways: (1) in training
most students primarily for employment as semi-skilled, skilled, and also
obedient corporatized workers in a knowledge-based global economy; (2)
by preparing most students other than the elite to accept, through a largely
vocationalized, technocratic, and rationalized culture of skills training,
similar conditions of labor as future low to middle-earning workers in late
stage global capitalism; and (3) by inculcating the norms, values, beliefs
and practices of the elite classes that normalize the capitalist project,
including its particular expression in neoliberalism and neo-conservatism.
On top of this, although our own commitments as progressive scholars
and teachers lead us to wish it were otherwise, we are aligned with Clyde
Barrow (1990) in arguing that, by design, the notion of higher education
as organized by meritocracy with the goal of social equality and demo-
cratic citizenship has been a political construction—a kind of political
accommodation, Barrow claimed, to reconcile the contradictions, or pro-
vide an ideological cover, for institutional arrangements that fundamen-
tally have serve, and we will allege, continue to serve the corporate class.
A central part of this accommodation strategy is the co-optation of intel-
lectuals to the side of capital, and the acquisition of false consciousness
among the professoriate about the nature and conditions of their labor,
and their own class positions in the larger political economy.
Through our examination of the impact of COVID-19 on higher
education as an appendage of what is now postmodern transnational
capitalism, we have worked from the premise that capitalism itself neces-
sitates exploitation, opportunism, and crises in the ever-expanding prac-
tices of wealth accumulation. We are of the school of thought that
xii PREFACE

whether it is called “predatory capitalism,” “bandit capitalism,” “crony

capitalism,” “vulture capitalism,” all refer fundamentally to the same set
of systemic features, namely the brutal exploitation of human and ani-
mal labor; the unconscionable extraction of natural resources, the con-
sequences of which we have started to feel dramatically in 2021 as the
global pandemic continues to expand and the effects of climate change
are felt across the nations; and the calculated and opportunistic seizing
of public and social goods for private gain, often with the aid of ideolo-
gies of crisis, real or manufactured. In this book, we expand on previous
scholars’ study of capitalism and higher education and argue that
whether we refer to it as “the entrepreneurial university” (Etzkowitz
et al., 2000), “corporatized higher education” (Clay, 2008), “the neo-
liberal university” (Slaughter & Rhoades, 2009), “the gig academy”
(Kezar et al., 2019), “the imperial university” (Chatterjee & Maira,
2014), or “academic capitalism” (Slaughter & Leslie, 1997), here again,
all refer fundamentally to a new version of a very old beast, namely the
complicated intersections and overlaps between the capitalist class, state
actors, intellectuals, and a professional-­managerial class of technocratic
functionaries of varying numbers and power, all implicated in the busi-
ness of social reproduction. We have seen clearly how the “apparatus of
justifications,” as Giridharadas (2018, p. 268), borrowing from Piketty’s
critique of capitalism, has argued, allowed a new elite class of higher
education administrators to make decisions that dehumanize workers,
and sometimes even those who foot the bill, that is, students and their
parents, using disaster opportunities shrouded in the veil of humanitari-
anism and social change to advance neoliberal visions of society in which
“winners take all.” As such, it is in this larger context and history that
we will contend that the crisis of COVID-19 has laid bare the old and
new realities of U.S. higher education as a political construction to
accommodate the shifting needs of private interests, and to do so
through the exploitation of disaster, and the increasing reliance on con-
tinuous and constructed narratives of crisis.
Central to the book is our contention that higher education administra-
tors in the U.S. and other Western democracies have seized on the
COVID-19 pandemic as an opportunity to further advance a corporate
higher education agenda consistent with the principles, policies, and prac-
tices of what Naomi Klein has famously termed “disaster capitalism”
(Klein, 2007). More specifically, as our chapters unfold, we will show how
the “old beast” of the academic capitalist project is being reconfigured in
 PREFACE xiii

modes both similar to and distinct from previous periods in the history of
higher education in the U.S. In this case, we will show how attempts to
further align or realign higher education with the economic and political
goals of elites under the cover of COVID-19 are reflective of a particular
set of systemic features that have yet to be fully articulated by critical
scholars of higher education and also by scholars of contemporary
capitalism.
Particularly, the pandemic has exposed not just a familiar looting of the
“knowledge commons” by the capitalist class, but a new fusing of neolib-
eral and neoconservative philosophies and practices with widespread
populist politics that rely on, and are supported by, an expanded profes-
sional-technocratic class of higher education middle managers. In this
collision of structural and cultural forces, we argue, emerges a toxic nexus
with key features that is its own disaster. In the hyper privatization of
public colleges and universities; the transformation of non-profit privates
into what amounts to for-profits by another name; the de-­legitimization
of the liberal arts and criminalization of critical analyses of power; and the
growth of a bloated professional class of higher education bureaucrats
who play an increasingly central role in “capturing the academic state” on
behalf of elites and themselves, we are able to see a particular set of rela-
tionships between capital, the state, and non-profit sectors at this latest
crisis point in the history of higher education—a crisis point that, even
prior to COVID-19, has had grave consequences for students, faculty,
and for the university itself. Most consequentially, it has meant a blow to
the political accommodation of social equality and democratic citizenship
as the realignment of capital through increased corporatization and ratio-
nalization of higher education pre-COVID-19 has served as a powerful
backlash against the path to social mobility and class power for working
and middle-class Americans. Balthaser and Mullen (2020, para. 10)
remind us of the rise of “liberal multiculturalism” as the postwar logic of
academia to manage the “movements for Black liberation and revolution-
ary socialism” by “advancing policies of desegregation and multicultural-
ism and promoting a Black and brown professional-managerial class,
[whereby] liberal antiracism became the official language of the US impe-
rial state.” They argue that while that discourse has been explicit, it “qui-
etly implies… the necropolitical liberal management of racial violence,”
including the “administration” of COVID-19 and the management of
death by COVID-19.
xiv PREFACE

Further, in this book, we extend Klein’s and others’ analysis and call on
an intersectional feminist political economy of disaster opportunism. More
specifically, we situate the current crisis in higher education more squarely
within a larger context of advanced global capitalism that is fueled by a
complicated web of variable and historically and socially situated racial
structures and also heteropatriarchies that sacrifice women, gender non-
conforming people, and individuals who identify as Black, Brown, and
Indigenous people of color. Using a frame of racialized disaster patriarchal
capitalism (see Foster & Foster-Palmer, forthcoming 2022; Luft, 2016),
we examine multiple opportunistic processes and practices of both reengi-
neering and retrenchment that are playing out in academic contexts that
Watermyer et al. (2021, in the title) have called “pandemia.” As we shall
see, along with the sedimentation of a racialized labor force and the deci-
mation of the middle classes, we also focus on the re-establishment of
gendered and unequal divisions of productive and social reproductive
labor. In doing so, we draw on the second important sociological meaning
of social reproduction, namely the social relations of labor, or the “care-­
taking” and “life-making” work (Bhattacharya, 2020) that produces and
reproduces people, communities, and the very social bonds that undergird
societies (see also Arruzza et al., 2019; Welch, 2020). Both, social repro-
duction in the form of the sedimentation of the class structure and social
reproduction in the form of care work are implicated in this story, and will
bring into focus the related and elevated extraction of income and wealth
from women, gender non-binary people, and individuals who identify as
Black, Brown, Indigenous, people of color. It is also a lens that will allow
us to highlight the recycling and repurposing of often contradictory racial-
ized and also patriarchal capitalist ideologies of accumulation and auster-
ity, competition and control, personal liberty and collective sacrifice.
Simply put, it is in this set of systemic features of “academic capitalism”
(Slaughter & Rhoades, 2009) as the capitalist class meets the “opportu-
nity” of the COVID-19 pandemic to consolidate class, racial, and gender
power for elites and their aspirants that we see the most recent operation
of higher education as an ideological apparatus.
While the American university has never existed outside of the interests
of capital (Geiger, 2016), resistance to the dominance of the market, and
a commitment to the pursuit of truth, creativity, innovation, and core
democratic principles are all also deeply rooted in the American academic
tradition and the latter are arguably threatened in the COVID-19 era like
 PREFACE xv

never before in our history. To fail to understand this threat and to protect
against it, also portends a failure of our democratic institutions themselves.
In taking this macro view, we also align ourselves with Barrow (1990) in
his own acknowledgment that his book, like ours too, is in the tradition of
Thorstein Veblen who described the failings of higher education in his
1918 book The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum on the
Conduct of Universities by Business Men. In that analysis, part of a so-­called
professor’s literature of protest (Teichgraeber III, in Veblen, 2015 [1918],
p. 7) now over a century old, Veblen sounded the alarm on the further
transplanting of the cultural logics of a business model into the university
during the First Gilded Age. The legacy of this early genre of professor
protest literature can be seen in the waves of books since then that have
emerged in clusters periodically over the course of the last 100 years.
Notably, these clusters of professor protest literature have coincided with
crises of capitalism and attendant class conflicts that manifest themselves
decisively in attempts to restructure higher education as a mechanism to
reengineer class relations, and to resort working class people, people of
color, women, and other non-elites into subordinate class positions. Our
book aims to contribute to that long history of professor protest literature
as yet another wave of analyses of higher education amidst a crisis of capi-
talism begins to form.
While there is already important commentary emerging on the impact
of COVID-19 on higher education, and surely more to come, this book is
written by people who remember a wholly different university than the
one that has been besieged by COVID-19, and those memories, if you
will, deeply shape our work. Both of us have benefited personally, profes-
sionally, and as members of a social class, from the massive expansion of
access to higher education in the U.S. for working and middle class stu-
dents, for immigrants, for people of color, and for women. Both of us
entered academia fully believing in our genuine entitlement to a cultural
and economic space once reserved largely for male children of white elites.
However unaware of it, we also entered as the promises of the mass demo-
cratic movement were under grave assault, and who watched, often not
knowing what we were seeing—or at least not fully aware of the magni-
tude, nature, and totality of it—the collapse of one of the most central and
beloved institutions in Western democracies just as, and arguably because
of, the very promise it was beginning to deliver on in the United States—
and to us. We have also come up alongside academics who have been
complicit, like ourselves, unintentionally or otherwise, in our failures to
xvi PREFACE

fully recognize and resist the people some of our professional leaders,
neighbors, and colleagues of the elite and not-so-elite have become: peo-
ple who had opened the door to thieves; who would hand out the robes,
literally, to plunderers intent on destroying the sanctuary; who would boil
us like frogs, as they say; who would wear other kinds of masks; who
would collude with old and new guards to relock the opening doors; who
would let us have our smaller and smaller corners of the playground until
the landscape had been transformed in their interests and there was noth-
ing left that resembled the place we had called our professional homes. We
write as academics, and for academics, who would wake up one day before
COVID-19 had befallen us, or maybe will now, and realize that the idea
of the university was one that has existed only, or at least only partially, in
our imaginations, and that if we looked closely and honestly, we would
have to admit that the university we inhabit today bears little resemblance
to the university that inspired us to choose a life of the mind.
This is not to be nostalgic, naïve, or uneducated about the history of
the university in American society and around the world. History, as we
will review in our first chapter, shows how, unlike early European universi-
ties, the American university, as Veblen (1918) would so passionately cri-
tique, has never been fully independent of business, or the interests of the
state, nor did he argue that such a relationship was possible or perhaps
even desirable. In the U.S., universities were, in fact, the first chartered
corporations (Eaton, 2021). Likewise, a voluminous body of sociological
theory and research has long taught both of us that schooling in capitalist
societies, no matter at what level, is fundamentally schooling that repro-
duces not only capitalism but the racial and gender order on which indus-
trial and now global capitalism thrives, as pioneers of this work in recent
decades, Bowles and Gintis (1977), outlined in their influential book,
Schooling in Capitalist America. Yet, the scholarly record will also show
that well before the horrors of COVID-19, there have also been distinc-
tive, profound, and wholesale shifts in the very cultural and structural
arrangements of higher education in the U.S. and their relationship to the
state and the market over the last half-century that have fundamentally
and devastatingly reconstituted the institution in ways that have further
compromised, if not mortally wounded, the core values and practices of
the traditional American university with consequences that are far-­
reaching, and also consistent with changes in the academy worldwide. As
Henry Giroux (1980, p. 329, as quoted in Pucci, 2015, p. 4) explains, the
 PREFACE xvii

traditional mission of the university has roots in classical Greece with a

purpose that was then, and for centuries:

[i]intrinsically political, designed to educate the citizen for intelligent and

active participation in the civic community. Moreover, intelligence was
viewed as an extension of ethics, a manifestation and demonstration of the
doctrine of the good and just life. Thus, in this perspective, education was
not meant to train. Its purpose was to cultivate the formation of virtuous
character in the ongoing quest for freedom. Therefore, freedom was always
something to be created, and the dynamic that informed the relationship
between the individual and the society was based on a continuing struggle
of a more just and decent political community.

As scholars and teachers committed to this centuries-old mission of col-

lege and university education as the unfettered practice of free inquiry,
invention, creativity, and critique as a deeply relational, humanizing,
democratizing, and even sacred endeavor, however nuanced and variably
manifested concretely, we have come to see a range of COVID-era policy
changes and shifting institutional practices in higher education as the latest
front in a 40-year bloodless war. This bloodless war has been waged in
order to dismantle a democratic socialist notion of the knowledge com-
mons, and the joyous pursuit of truth for its own sake, and with the goal
to replace it with the mass production and commodification of ideas in a
wholly consumer-oriented knowledge economy.

A View from Within

Throughout the book, we do, at times, set up Monmouth University, our
home institution, and our own pandemic experiences there, as the kalei-
doscope through which we view our analysis. We recognize that our expe-
riences, while perhaps similar to those found at other institutions of higher
education, cannot be completely generalized, nor is it our purpose to treat
our home institution as an ethnographic site. Rather, it is our intention to
offer readers a concrete path toward a better understanding of how the
mechanisms of opportunistic privatization of higher education under the
guise of catastrophe responses can manifest. We not only employ the ana-
lytical tools of critical sociology and a feminist political economy of higher
education, but do so as members of faculty leadership at a midsize,
regional, private university in the midst of the pandemic who are also
xviii PREFACE

concerned with structural changes, as well as the actors that propel those
changes in the context of higher education in the United States and
echoed in other Western democracies. We examine the ways in which
institutions of higher education have been shaped by more than forty years
of neoliberalism at this particular moment of acceleration of market-driven
thinking, a juncture where higher education met COVID-19, through a
systematic analysis of multiple categories of pre-existing, publicly available,
primary and secondary data on the state of higher education policy and
practice since the onset of the pandemic. We do not write as historians or
educational policy scholars, although we draw on their work extensively,
but as critical social scientists for those in academia and general critical
audiences who, like us, have believed in the promise of the university. Our
data sources included online reporting from the three major higher educa-
tion news sources in the United States, namely, The Chronicle of Higher
Education; Academe; and Inside Higher Education, from which we ana-
lyzed over 100 articles from March 2020 to March 2022 using the follow-
ing title keyword searches: academic freedom; austerity; budget cuts;
COVID; financial crisis; lay-offs; neoliberalism; protests; resistance; shared
governance; unions, among others. We also included the reporting on
higher education in the major American and European newspapers for
approximately the same period, including The New York Times; The
Washington Post; The Guardian, and independent critical journalism such
as The Huffington Post, and The Atlantic, among others. In addition to
pandemic era journalism within and outside of the industry, we relied on
publicly available data and published reports from U.S. academic labor
movement actors, and their observers, most notably the online repository
of the AAUP, and the National Center for the Study of Collective
Bargaining in Higher Education at Hunter College, City University of
New York, as well as data published by number of U.S. and global non-­
governmental and nonprofit organizations. Further, we included the texts
of U.S. state and federal higher education policy introduced or passed
during the first two years of the pandemic, as identified by searches of
U.S. state legislature and U.S. congressional website search engines. We
also reviewed publicly available governmental statistical data from govern-
ment sources such as the U.S. Department of Education, the United
States Census Bureau, and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. In addi-
tion, we drew on data from intergovernmental bodies such as the United
Nations, United Nations Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO),
 PREFACE xix

the World Health Organization (WHO), UNICEF, the World Bank, the
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)
among others. Finally, we also considered marketing and recruiting mate-
rials from select educational corporations as sources of data, materials we
received directly as academics targeted for promotional outreach as poten-
tial customers, and/or after we purposely signed up to receive marketing
materials, including information related to the content of commercial
webinars and trainings from proprietary agents.
In the reading of the documentation, particularly from the secondary
sources, we analyzed the authors’ interpretation of the empirical evidence
alongside conducting our own analysis of the original data used, whenever
possible, to guide our own interpretation. We fully recognize that no data
source is free of potential errors and biases. Certainly, our heavy reliance
on pre-existing reporting and secondary data means that our focus has
been set by observers before us, and in ways that we have foreclosed an
opportunity for a fuller or, at least, different, angle on the field in ways we
cannot know. Similarly, in no instances have our data sources been selected
randomly, nor are they representative of a universe of even secondary
sources. We also recognize that while this book includes global examples,
it is largely U.S. centric. We regret that the one year timeframe for this
project was largely insufficient for us to provide a more robust global over-
view. Additionally, given the timeliness and urgency of our analysis, it was
not possible to design our exploration around a comparative case study of
theoretically relevant institutions, as would be useful and provide a richer
exploration of the crises in more situated contexts. Instead, we have cho-
sen to take a first look at the patterns of the crisis from the 30,000 foot
view in this book in the hopes that cutting a broad swath will stimulate
opportunities for our colleagues to do deeper dives into the themes we
have identified, and using different methods to do so. Even with our lim-
ited scope, the story that emerged is one of a growing global education
industry, including a global “edu-political apparatus,” Ideland et al. (2020,
p. 2) overtaking institutions of higher education like spider webs that
overtake structures in ruin.
Our critical analysis did not only apply to the content we have read but
also to the methodology of the data we have analyzed. The historical
methodology we have used in this book allowed us to situate the current
moment in which higher education finds itself within the larger U.S. his-
torical context. Similarly, to Geiger (2019, p. x) we take a broad view of
xx PREFACE

the university as the social institution that is “embedded in society,” and

“affected by the political, social, and intellectual currents that formed the
history of the United States,” as well as the changing culture in the cur-
rent moment that Giroux (2019) has argued is marked by the rise of neo-
liberal fascism. The work of critical political economists Scott Lash and
Celia Lury (2007) on the global culture industry helped us understand the
underlying economic approach that exposes the profit motive behind the
financialized-economic logic that drives the higher-­ education industry
today. We also recognize that with the spread of the global capitalist sys-
tem and with that, the dominance of the neoliberal view of higher educa-
tion, the institutions of higher education globally are being shaped by
both national social, cultural, political, and economic conditions, as well as
by the global neoliberal currents, as some of our examples will show. In
this book, we have also deeply engaged with an examination of the exist-
ing critical scholarship on higher education which served in part as the
theoretical foundation for our analysis. Aside from the scholars we have
raised up in these opening pages here, our analysis in the pages to follow
are informed by the work on commodification of knowledge in higher
education (Jacob, 2003) and the immaterial labor (Hardt & Negri, 2004)
that translates into a variety of unpaid labor practices and has helped us
understand underlying causes to a “diseased” higher education today.
Lastly, our analysis has been informed by our experiences as faculty
leaders drawn to resist disaster capitalism in higher education out of deep
concern for what might come of institutions like our own, and many oth-
ers, as a result of pandemic politics. That concern motivated us to consider
a broader, systematic investigation of the forces at work that are funda-
mentally reshaping our own lived experiences, and those of our colleagues
and students at similarly situated institutions. Monmouth University was
initially founded as an “Emergency Junior College” in the midst of the
Great Depression in 1933 as one of the first federally funded junior col-
leges in New Jersey whose goal was to employ unemployed teachers to
instruct high-school students who were unemployable (Lynch, 1970,
p. 10). When federal funding ended in 1936, the Board of Trustees
decided to continue Monmouth Junior College as an independent, non-
sectarian, co-educational college with the promise of small grants-in-aid
from the Monmouth County Board of Chosen Freeholders and a modest
tuition charge. In the 1960s, the New Jersey State legislature allowed for
the privatization of New Jersey colleges and universities and laid the
 PREFACE xxi

groundwork for the marketization of higher education. In our view, our

own institutions, like many others, have become, as Welch (2015, para.
28) might say, in-between and unsettled place[s],” institutions where “the
expansion of higher education across advanced capitalist countries” [has
helped bring about] the formation of a new social group of students whose
class position and prospects are not so clearly determined.” As is the case
for so many faculty teaching in the U.S., “most of [our] students were not
[and still are not] being groomed to exercise or serve as administrators of
power. They were instead [and still are] on track to ‘become some form of
work,’ their social location as students ‘transitional’” (Welch, 2015, para.
28). We share our institutional positionality here as backdrop for the read-
ers to better understand the experiential ground on which we examine the
wide range of archival materials, and the ways in which our analyses of
materials that profile a diverse set of institutions in the U.S. and across
select Western democracies such as Canada, the UK, Germany, and
Australia, for example, suggests larger patterns at work.
Finally, this book is a kind of real-time repository of unfinished analysis
that can set a framework for future documentation, analysis and interpre-
tation of what happened in this age of COVID-19, a historical moment
for disaster opportunism more broadly. Indeed, as we go to press, the
Russian war against Ukraine still rages, the U.S. Supreme Court over-
turned Roe v. Wade in a historic decision resulting in decimation of nearly
a half century of abortion rights, and Elon Musk has engaged in legal
battle over his 44 billion purchase of Twitter, initially pledging to create a
more “democratic” communication platform by easing limits on speech.
While this book is written by academics, and clearly for academics who are
also committed teachers and researchers, this book is also, and in no way
less so, for students and their families who find themselves victimized by a
system of higher education corporatization that is not disconnected from
these monumental moments of the pandemic era, among others, to the
extent that they are manifestations of a larger set of global relationships
implicated in racialized disaster patriarchal capitalism. Additionally, this
book is for staff and other essential low wage workers in higher education
that are important links to many other communities that find themselves
impoverished and victimized by the neoliberal response of higher educa-
tion leadership to COVID-19. In the end we find, much like journalism
before, that much has been “hollowed out” and transformed across a
range of sectors of society to serve private rather than public interests, with
xxii PREFACE

consequences that are hard to fathom. In the case of higher education, as

in the case of journalism gutted by the private equity and corporatization,
the ultimate victim of the grand project (Letizia, 2016), as this book
chronicles in the first two years of the pandemic, is democratic society and
democratic principles themselves. The hope remains, as we argue in our
closing remarks, that change is still possible through collective action
aimed at building, perhaps truly for the first time, universities for the peo-
ple as pillars of democratic life. We hope you’ll join us.

West Long Branch, NJ, USA Johanna E. Foster

May 2022 Marina Vujnovic

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 Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank all the friends and colleagues who offered
their expertise, insight, and solidarity over the course of the two years it
took us to conceptualize and complete this book. We are especially
indebted to our colleagues in FAMCO, our faculty union, and our Faculty
Council with whom we have had the honor of working, before and during
the pandemic, to protect and advance the ideals of a university in a demo-
cratic society. Our gratitude to J. Michael Ryan and George Ritzer for
graciously providing the Foreword, and to Stephanie Hall, Elizabeth
Tandy Sherman, and Nancy Welch, whose work we particularly rely on
throughout the book. We thank Ken Mitchell for setting us on the path to
Thorstein Veblen in the initial stages of our research, and to Nichole Smith
for her invaluable research assistance throughout. Our thanks also go to
our editors at Palgrave for seeing the value of the project, and for their
guidance and generosity along the way. Our deepest appreciation for our
families who, in a time when so many of us turned to those most dear in
the face of unthinkable challenges, made room for us to find our way
through, in part, by working on this project. Finally, we thank one another
for the encouragement, sisterhood, and camaraderie that set us on the
path of writing this book, a path that led to personal and scholarly discov-
eries that have been among the most eye opening of our lives. The journey
brought us closer together as scholars and friends, and made us more
determined than ever not to accept the status quo, but to fight for change
in our academic home and local communities in the hope that, shoulder
to shoulder, and joined with other kindred souls, we can make our small
contribution towards achieving a better society for all.

xxv
 Contents

1 Introduction:
 Disaster Capitalism Comes to Higher
Education  1

2 A
 Newer Version of an Old Beast: The Higher
Education Disaster Before COVID 29

3 Bringing the F.U.D to Thin the Ranks 57

4 “Cut
 to Grow” and the Spider Web of the New Global
TEMPS105

5 Laundering
 Coercion: Restart Planning, “Pandemic
Task Forces,” and the Dismantling of Shared
Governance145

6 Campuses
 Respond to COVID: “Pandemia”
Not Making the Science Grades155

7 Online
 Instruction and the “Hyflex Teaching ‘Shock
Doctrine’”167

xxvii
xxviii Contents

8 Ghosts
 of Intended Consequences: How OPMs’ Stealth
Business Model is Redefining Higher Education181

9 Aspiring Diploma Mills Don’t Stop for Pandemics203

10 Tuition
 Increases Also Don’t Stop for Pandemics:
Student Debt Realities in the Age of COVID-19219

11 Sacrificial Lambs233

12 Resisting the Spider Web of Pandemic Opportunism265

13 After Shock: Our Stories, Our Future287

References319

Index371
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Disaster Capitalism Comes

to Higher Education

The Eye of the Storm

As we write, not only have we weathered the most devastating global
storm in a century, but there seems to be no end in sight. As the virus has
plowed through populations across the planet, activists and scholars alike
have banged the drumbeat of analysis of the ways in which the pandemic,
in its disproportionate and deadly impact on Black and Brown people, on
working class and economically marginalized people, and undocumented
people, has laid bare the systemic inequalities that have long organized
American society, and now a global society. A combination of overrepre-
sentation as essential workers; the lack of access to healthcare and the
relationship to underlying health conditions; environmental racism and
workplace health hazards and the impact on exposure; the psychological
and emotional experiences of racism and classism and impact on health
that turns into pre-existing conditions; environmental racism and residen-
tial segregation as related to population density; the risk of exposure living
in multigenerational households; along with other persistent manifesta-
tions of racialized income and wealth inequality have devastated commu-
nities of color in the United States, and around the world. As we go to
press, inequality is playing out in real time with global disparities in access
to the COVID vaccine. While many people in the West are getting booster
shots, the vast majority of people of color in Africa, Asia and elsewhere do

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2022
M. Vujnovic, J. E. Foster, Higher Education and Disaster
Capitalism in the Age of COVID-19, Palgrave Critical University
Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12370-2_1
2 M. VUJNOVIC AND J. E. FOSTER

not have access to the life-saving vaccine, and The World Health
Organization (WHO) has called the crisis a “two-track” pandemic (UN
News, 2021, para. 5). Tedros Adhanom, WHO Director General, said,
“The biggest barrier to ending the pandemic remains sharing: of doses, of
resources, of technology” (UN News, 2021, para. 16).
Among the COVID-19 survivors, financial insecurity looms, and mil-
lions have faced crushing economic blows. According to the U.S. Bureau
of Labor Statistics (2020), the U.S. economy lost 22 million jobs from
February to April 2020, and the loss was greatest for low-wage workers
and among Black and Latinx populations, as well as among those who
were not born in the United States (also Handwerker et al., 2020; Center
on Budget and Policy Priorities, 2021). While some jobs have been
regained since, tens of millions of people have lost employment during
the two years of the pandemic, whether temporarily or permanently
according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (2021). The
report also found that the situation would have been much worse if fed-
eral, state, and local governments had not stepped in to ease the hard-
ship. Clear credit went to the American Rescue Plan Act enacted on
March 11, 2021 that especially helped people in low-income households
feel less housing and food insecure. Globally, according to the
International Labor Organization and reported by the United Nations,
the pandemic pushed global unemployment over 200 million (United
Nations, 2021).
Of all the people who have lost their jobs during the COVID-19 crisis,
women workers experienced a decidedly disproportionate loss in the
crosshairs of a global feminized service economy and the continuing
assignment of women to unpaid and otherwise devalued social reproduc-
tive labor. According to a report from Oxfam International published in
April 2021, women lost 64 million jobs, a whopping 5% of all jobs held by
women globally, compared to 3.9% held by men (Thériault & Sakakeeny,
2021). These data do not cover job alterations and changes for women in
jobs in the so-called informal economy such as domestic workers. In a
sobering study, The National Women’s Law Center found that 2.3 million
women in the United States left the workforce between February 2020
and February 2021 altogether so that they could perform unpaid care
work for their children, the elderly, and other family members during the
pandemic National Women’s Law Center (2021). The magnitude of the
impact of COVID-19 on women is, indeed, global. For instance, the
 1 INTRODUCTION: DISASTER CAPITALISM COMES TO HIGHER EDUCATION 3

Center for Sustainable Employment at the Azim Premji University in

India published a report titled State of Working India 2021 shows that
during the first lockdown in 2020, 47% of women were pushed out of
employment compared to 7% of men. The impact was also felt most
among the poor as rural women in informal jobs accounted for nearly 80%
of all job losses (Azim Premji University, 2021; UN Women, 2021). On
top of the hardships of unemployment and underemployment, millions
have been forced out of their homes through evictions, unable to make
the rent despite pandemic relief funding and rent freezes (Center on
Budget and Policy Priorities, 2021). The impact on economic security,
and social and personal stability and growth, is also evident in the millions
of school children in the U.S and around the world sequestered in remote
learning, an educational and also gendered social reproductive labor crisis
that continues to make headline news (Goldstein & Parlapiano, 2021).
The educational sector has been impacted in varied ways. For instance,
at the college level, the pandemic resulted in a drop-off in college enroll-
ment. This fact speaks to a significantly different and all-encompassing
impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, as it is typical in economic down-
turns for many to choose to return to school. For instance, the United
States Census Bureau reported that enrollment in postsecondary educa-
tion during the 2008 Great Recession actually grew (United States Census
Bureau, 2018). At the postsecondary education level in the U.S. alone, 16
million college students reported that they had to, or chose to, defer col-
lege in the fall of 2020 for financial or health reasons, or both (United
States Census Bureau, 2020). The United Nations Educational, Scientific
and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) estimated that more than 600 mil-
lion children were affected by school closures and the lack of technology
to access remote options even when available during 2020 (UNESCO,
2020). A more devastating report of the pandemic effects on education
was released in December of 2021 titled, The State of the Global Education
Crisis: A Path to Recovery jointly prepared by UNESCO, UNICEF, and
the World Bank. The report argued that the COVID-19 pandemic caused
global disruption in education that is unparalleled, affecting 1.6 billion
learners. In addition, the World Economic Forum (2022, para. 1), citing
this report argues, “this generation of students now risks losing $17 tril-
lion in lifetime earnings in present value, or about 14 percent of today’s
global GDP, because of COVID-19-related school closures and economic
shocks,” a number that is almost double the previous estimates.
4 M. VUJNOVIC AND J. E. FOSTER

As data on health effects and economic consequences of the pandemic

on individuals and families are still being gathered, it would not be unrea-
sonable to predict that the impact on opportunities for social mobility and
wealth accumulation for ordinary people will continue to be foreclosed in
ways that may have lifelong and negative effects that reverberate for gen-
erations. Yet, while the U.S and global 99% are facing extraordinary risks
of downward mobility, and millions facing economic tragedy as a result of
COVID-19, we have seen the global 1% increase their wealth by a magni-
tude that is difficult to fathom intellectually and even more difficult to
digest morally. In perhaps one of the most explicit examples of disaster
opportunism in world history, the contemporary robber barons of global
capitalism’s Second Gilded Age, in their positions as captains of global
technology conglomerates, pharmaceutical giants, and here in the United
States, gun manufacturers, or gig economy moguls, for example, have
profited from the pandemic at the same time, and literally at the expense
of the majority of people suffering. Indeed, Forbes (2021) reported that
while 22 million Americans lost their jobs, 650 billionaires saw their net
worth increase by 1.2 trillion dollars, from 3.4 trillion at the beginning of
2020 to 4.6 trillion in April of 2021. A great irony of our daily existence
in the age of neoliberalism has come in the form of global titan spaceship
races from two of the biggest gainers out of the top 20. Jeff Bezos, the first
person in history to be worth more than 200 billion dollars, according to
Forbes’ estimates, and the top pandemic gainer, Elon Musk, the Tesla and
SpaceX chief, who in April of 2022 acquired Twitter for 44 billion dollars
promising more free speech, competed successfully for airwaves with their
space tourism joyrides designed just for the wealthy against the backdrop
of what was by then nearly one million people killed by COVID-19 at
home, and more than 6.23 million worldwide, according to data from the
World Health Organization. All the while the carnage of the Russian inva-
sion of Ukraine, arguably the largest war in Europe since World War II,
has allowed the rich to get richer from both war and pandemic profiteer-
ing that has brought death and misery to so many.
As the extraordinary gap between the astronomically wealthy and the
rest of us widened in the throes of the pandemic, more and more people
in the United States came to focus on the entrenched structural inequali-
ties that have long been right in front of our eyes. In the United States, a
nation in pandemic lockdown re-awakened to the ever-present realities of
white supremacy, also plainly evident, but continually unnoticed or unac-
knowledged by many American white people. Building on decades of
 1 INTRODUCTION: DISASTER CAPITALISM COMES TO HIGHER EDUCATION 5

post-Civil Rights era social movement work around police brutality, racial-
ized mass incarceration, and immigrant detention, a movement for racial
justice reignited in the United States summer of 2020 after the murder of
George Floyd by white police officers in Minneapolis.
In the midst of that, another movement, an anti-vaccine movement
loomed large and promised to define another anti-truth, anti-science
movement in American history, along with recently re-awakened anti-­
abortion movement reaching all the way to the United States Supreme
Court. Almost a year and a half after the COVID-19 vaccine first became
available in the United States at the end of April 2022, only 66.6% of the
population nationally, and 65.8% globally, were vaccinated according to
Ritchie et al. (2022) and we remain embroiled in a stunning national and
global debate over vaccine and mask mandates, with some U.S. states like
Florida and Texas going so far as to ban both at the time of writing. For
many critical analysts like ourselves, the discourse that undergirds the mass
refusals to be vaccinated or masked emerged as proxies for a commitment
to a kind of racist, nationalist masculinist libertarianism that in arguably
assuming no such thing as a social contract, poisons the foundations of
our democratic institutions, and threatens the very notion of a common
good like none the nation has seen outside of the context of overt civil war.
While there has been a good deal of analysis of the “twin pandemics” of
COVID and white supremacy (McCoy & Lee, 2021) in recent public
discourse, as well as their relationship to each other, the extent to which
these intertwined pandemics have enriched the already shamefully and
unimaginably wealthy robber barons, and the brutal logics of global capi-
talism at the bedrock of the latest chapter of their serial looting, has been
less so. Nonetheless, it would be difficult to point to a set of major insti-
tutional arrangements in the United States, or in other Western democra-
cies, that have not been significantly altered, at least temporarily if not
permanently, by the pandemic and the relations of predatory global capi-
talism that provided both the staging grounds and the battlefields for
opportunistic disaster response campaigns that are simultaneously racial-
ized and gendered, including the structural and cultural arrangements of
higher education. Indeed, in the same way that the global pandemic has
made it no longer possible for many in the U.S. to uphold the fantasy that
they live in a healthy post-Civil Rights era equal opportunity multiracial
democracy, the range of predatory and otherwise morally suspect
COVID-19 policy decisions executed by a consolidated class of higher
education administrators (Welch, 2015, para. 11) and allied state actors in
6 M. VUJNOVIC AND J. E. FOSTER

what we might call an “academic Hurricane Katrina,” have exposed long-­

standing structures and cultures of inequality in the academy that made it
difficult to maintain a related fantasy: the existence of such a thing as the
liberal arts university (Volk & Benedix, 2020), protected enough from the
intrusions of the market and also the state, governed by faculty, and with
the primary mission to promote the search for truth for its own sake as a
duty to the common good.
For example, and as we will explore at greater length in the chapters to
come, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP, 2021b)
has documented, among other deeply disturbing consequences for higher
education, the profound impact of purported COVID-related policy
changes on faculty compensation and benefits in the United States.
Findings from an analysis of The Annual Report on the Economic Status of
the Profession, 2019–2020, which included data from over 990 U.S. col-
leges and universities, showed that 55% of institutions had implemented
salary freezes or salary reductions since the pandemic began; 28% had
eliminated or reduced some kind of fringe benefits, and nearly 20% had
terminated appointments or denied contract renewals to at least some of
their full-time non-tenure-track faculty. Almost 5% had terminated the
appointments of at least some tenure-track faculty.
The realities of COVID-era salary freezes and reductions, furloughs,
and layoffs in the United States are not limited to faculty. Indeed, non-­
faculty employees across the country have also been hit hard. According to
The Washington Post analysis of federal labor data, office and administrative
staff in the U.S. that work in higher education and those with annual earn-
ings near $40,000 were the ones impacted the most by the pandemic
furloughs and cuts (Douglas-Gabriel & Fowers, 2020). Here, again, often
framed as pandemic-induced policy change necessities, these cuts have
occurred alongside other so-called austerity measure responses that have
made headlines, both inside and outside of higher education. The evi-
dence will show that the richest colleges and universities didn’t need to cut
budgets but they nevertheless did at the expense of their least paid employ-
ees (Svirnovskiy, 2021).
As we will also find, the AAUP has documented the impact on shared
governance, and the distorted bloom of opportunity the epidemic has
ostensibly brought forth to “right-size” faculty via downsizing, mergers
and acquisitions, or other institutional restructuring mechanisms that have
resulted in the firing of tenured faculty, the elimination of traditional lib-
eral arts programs not easily commodified, and even the shuttering of the
 1 INTRODUCTION: DISASTER CAPITALISM COMES TO HIGHER EDUCATION 7

institution’s doors altogether with little regard for the impact on students.
In their May 2021 report, the AAUP documented the shocking number
of assaults on shared governance, the keystone tenet distinguishing the
culture of academia from both the culture of the market and the state, in
just the first year of the pandemic alone. The report cited the troubling
number of cases in the United States where university administrators used
the pretext of the COVID-19 crisis to initiate or accelerate academic pro-
gram closures, mergers, and consolidations, and the termination of faculty
without the input and shared decision-making from faculty leadership
demanded by the long-standing central principles and practices of shared
governance. These practices as a set of normative standards, not coinci-
dentally, were established by the AAUP as part of its very founding in
1915 in response to increasing attacks on academic freedom that came on
the heels of the growing corporatization of the American Academy in the
wake of the First Gilded Age (Washburn, 2005). The Association acknowl-
edges that in many of the reported cases, their concern was not that the
economic realities underpinning the COVID-era policy changes were not
real, but rather that the established culture of shared governance had been
dispensed with in what has amounted to grave breaches of professional
ethics and established practice. In fact, in their disturbing review, they are
clear to assert that the COVID-19 wave of attacks on shared governance
in the United States is one that the AAUP has witnessed only two other
times in U.S. history, namely during the McCarthy Era, and then again in
the catastrophe of Katrina and the sickening disaster opportunism that
plagued New Orleans, including the disaster profiteering that would
engulf colleges and universities in the aftermath.
Also not coincidentally, as we will explore further, and in a frightening
echo of the McCarthy Era repression, these recent attacks on shared gov-
ernance have paralleled national and global assaults on academia and on
academic freedom. Most alarmingly, in the context of the rise of national-
ist white supremacist attacks on higher education, have been the attacks
on what is becoming popularly known as “critical race theory,” under-
stood across academic disciplines as short-hand for a wide-ranging and
long-standing set of critical social theories that have their roots squarely in
the nineteenth and early twentieth century sociological theories of racial-
ized and gendered capitalism (DuBois, 1903, 1940, 1945a, b; Gilman,
1898; Cooper, 1892; Wells-Barnett, 1892; Martineau, 1837), paradigm-
shifting ideas that would then sprout the powerhouse social and political
traditions of contemporary racial formation theories, as well as
8 M. VUJNOVIC AND J. E. FOSTER

intersectional feminist and queer theory. While these attacks, including

actions on the part of U.S. state legislators to ban the teaching of bodies
of knowledge that describe, explain and/or critique the power relations of
racialized and gendered capitalism, past or present, are not altogether new,
in chapters to come, we will explore them further and their connection to
seemingly unrelated COVID-19 responses in the academy.
On top of a wave of attacks on faculty job security, shared governance,
and academic freedom, U.S. colleges, and university executives, either as
accomplices to, or with their accomplices in, the political elite, have
responded to the deadly public health crisis in other ways that expose a
moral bankruptcy within many of our institutions of higher learning in
advanced stage global capitalism. Rather than moving swiftly to remote
learning, for example, or clear out dorms and athletic facilities as the virus
was detected, hundreds of colleges across the United States made Faustian
bargains, gambling with the lives of students, faculty, and staff by mandat-
ing or encouraging in-person instruction, promoting on-campus dorm-
ing, and continuing athletic competition in the throes of a worldwide
deadly outbreak. Simultaneously, and to the shock and outrage of many,
hundreds of colleges and universities refused to conduct mandatory
COVID-19 testing. Nadworny and McMinn (2020, para. 2) analyzed the
data from The College Crisis Initiative at Davidson College, and con-
cluded that “2 out of 3 colleges with in-person classes either have no clear
testing plan or are testing only students who are at risk.” In addition,
widespread inefficiencies in contact tracing systems prevailed on college
campuses and in the United States at large (Clark et al., 2021). Balthaser
and Mullen, in their fall 2020 article in Academe found that by mid-­
September 2020, the number of people on campuses reportedly infected
with COVID amounted to roughly the population of two large state uni-
versities, or five mid-size universities, or thirty small liberal arts colleges.
According to The New York Times interactive “Tracking Coronavirus
Cases at U.S. Colleges and Universities,” by May 26, 2021, 700,000 stu-
dents tested positive for COVID-19, 260,000 more cases since January 1,
which was a 64% increase since the end of 2020. In addition, The New York
Times identified 100 deaths on campuses in the United States that had
occurred primarily in 2020 and primarily among employees (NYT, 2021a,
para. 6). These numbers are surely undercounts given the anemic and
politically charged testing and tracing protocols which began disappearing
as many institutions of higher education dispensed with COVID
 1 INTRODUCTION: DISASTER CAPITALISM COMES TO HIGHER EDUCATION 9

monitoring, tracing, testing, and masking as we approached the end of the

spring 2022 semester.
Moreover, in what many considered an additional stomach-turning
attack, this time on the financial health of students and their families, the
COVID-19 crisis coincided with, increases in student tuition, and was even
cited as the reason why these increases were needed. Even if 2020–2021
tuition increases were historically low, those increases nonetheless came at a
time when 18 million adults in America, or 1 in 9, were reporting not hav-
ing enough food to eat (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 2021; Kerr
& Wood, 2021). Along with students and their families, faculty, university
staff, and the families of academic workers across the nation have also not
been spared the structural violence set in motion by these widespread, ethi-
cally suspect, and hotly contested, disaster capitalist policy decisions.
In the rest of this introduction, we revisit the tenets of disaster capital-
ism as outlined by Klein (2007), and others that followed her work. We
also set the stage for a more detailed analysis within the context of the
existing scholarship of neoliberalism and disaster capitalism in higher edu-
cation, expanding the conceptual framing of that work toward a feminist
intersectional political economy. We will also outline some key ways in
which racialized disaster patriarchal capitalism has played out in higher
education just prior to the outbreak of COVID-19, and we end with a
short preview of the book’s remaining chapters that dive more deeply into
what has unfolded in higher education since those fateful days in
March 2020.

Disaster Capitalism: A Primer

In their chapter from Kenneth J. Saltman’s 2007 volume, Schooling and
the Politics of Disaster, Jane Anna Gordon and Lewis R. Gordon decon-
struct the Greek and Latin meanings of “disaster” and argue that “disas-
ter” refers to an event that was preceded by a warning that was not heeded,
particularly a prior warning from the planets or stars. Essentially, “disas-
ter” is the result of ignoring the signs. They also deconstruct the early
Greek and Latin meanings of “monster” as a figure that comes as a warn-
ing, or “monster” as another kind of sign, while further reminding us of
the roots of the meaning of “crisis” to be in “choice.” Nearly two decades
ago, in her path-breaking book, Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster
Capitalism, Naomi Klein (2007, p. 6) defined disaster capitalism as
“orchestrated raids on the public sphere in the wake of catastrophic events,
10 M. VUJNOVIC AND J. E. FOSTER

combined with the treatment of disasters as exciting market opportuni-

ties.” Enacted by capitalist elites and their apologists, “disaster capitalism”
is a particular manifestation of neoliberalism, or free-market fundamental-
ism, that, says Klein, has at its core the practice of the “policy trinity” of
deregulation, privatization, and cuts to social spending of the cruelest kind
under the cover of a collective crisis. The fuel for the policy trinity flame is
the use or creation of fear and chaos during times of disaster to coerce a
population to agree to what would otherwise be politically unacceptable
and morally unimaginable in times of stability. Whether it is a natural
disaster, an economic crisis, political unrest, or a pandemic outbreak, for
example, the goal of disaster profiteering is to capitalize, literally, on the
crisis by imposing “emergency measures” that are explicitly intended to
create what Klein (2007, p. 175) calls “democracy free zones” in the ser-
vice of essentially capitalist takeovers that Klein also wryly dubs “capitalist
makeovers” (Klein, 2007, p. 199). In her analysis of over 15 cases of disas-
ter capitalism at work all over the globe from the early 1970s to the mil-
lennium, Klein demonstrates the eerily similar ways in which capitalist,
political and intellectual elites have sought to deliberately destroy the eco-
nomic and political infrastructures of communities, and, indeed, entire
nations, in order to establish, through painful and often by brutal means,
“clean canvasses” for capitalist reconstructions that not only rely on the
state to do the bidding of corporate elites but, even more fundamentally,
to privatize governance itself.
More specifically, as Klein (2007) concluded, this deliberate ransacking,
or calculated taking of the commons of all kinds under the guise of “aus-
terity” or “structural adjustments” or, in the United States, for example,
the “War on Drugs” or the “War on Terror,” has unfolded in various ways
over the past 50 years, but with three main steps in a similar process. The
first step involves the occurrence of a disaster, the scale of which could vary
so long as there is enough fear, chaos, and break from the normal routine
of social life that an opening presents itself to prey on people’s confusion,
exhaustion, and understandable anxiety. It is sometimes enough to simply
have people hyper-focused on the crisis to be distracted from, or pragmati-
cally disinterested in, the mundane, technical, bureaucratic, overly ratio-
nalized, non-transparent, and, frankly, less “exciting” business of state
functions to commandeer governance and raid the public coffers while
Rome burns. The second step is the imposition of what Milton Friedman
termed “shock therapy,” or ruthless, “pure capitalist” economic policies,
and what Naomi Klein (2007, p. 8) termed “shock doctrine,” to raid the
 1 INTRODUCTION: DISASTER CAPITALISM COMES TO HIGHER EDUCATION 11

state of its public goods, and partially or fully privatize state functions and
thus governance overall. In effect, the second step, while billed as “recon-
struction,” is better understood as a capturing of the commons (Klein,
2007, p. 10). The most obvious, sinister, and “shocking” example of this
process, said Klein at the time of her writing, had been the outsourcing of
the U.S. military since 9/11 and the shift to constant privatized war. The
third step is to use the state apparatus, or a newly privatizing state appara-
tus, to deliver corporate-statist forms of torture to ensure the population
submits to the “shock therapy” of what is, in effect, state-­sanctioned loot-
ing. These torture regimes, enacted by militaries, police and secret police,
and death squads against one’s own people, are often precipitated by the
suspension of civil liberties as a “crisis accommodation” that legitimizes
mass surveillance of the population, round-ups, detentions, and mass
incarceration of dissenters and “surplus” populations, as well as targeted,
and often extensive, killings of pro-democracy and anti-corporate sover-
eignty resisters.
In Klein’s (2007) formulation, disaster capitalism as a set of morally
bankrupt economic and political practices is the enactment of market fun-
damentalism animated by the opportunity of a crisis. In short, disaster
capitalism is neoliberalism in a slightly different outfit. Described by Pierre
Bourdieu (1998) as the most dominant discourse of the twentieth cen-
tury, as powerful and totalizing as the discourse of Christianity in another
age, sociologist Lawrence Busch (2014) argues that neoliberalism itself
has been alternatively and simultaneously understood as an ideology, an
economic philosophy, a plan of action, and a social movement. As an “ide-
ological crusade,” argued Klein, it is a “shape-shifter, forever changing its
name and switching identities” (p. 17). Yet, underscoring all is a belief in
the primacy of markets over all other forms of social relations in promot-
ing human freedom and individual liberty, and the related belief that free-
dom is dependent on liberty defined as freedom from state imposition on
individual choice, as well as from state regulation of markets. In fact, the
faith in the power of a “free” market as the path to not only unbridled
wealth accumulation but personal liberty and a stable social order—to the
extent that neoliberalists believe there is such a thing as the “social”—is
both so strong and so void of the need of empirical evidence from their
adherents that numerous social theorists understand this ideological posi-
tion to be akin to a kind of religious fundamentalism. Hence the phrase
market fundamentalism.
12 M. VUJNOVIC AND J. E. FOSTER

Certainly, critical analyses of the centrality of what would become the

individualistic god-less worship of wealth accumulation and the sanctifica-
tion of the wealthy in American society are nothing new, among the most
famous of those early treatises coming from classical sociologist and politi-
cal economist, Max Weber, in his enormously influential study of early
American Calvinism, industrialization and increasing rationalization in The
Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905). Unlike the proponents
of the values and beliefs of the nineteenth and early twentieth century clas-
sical liberalism that Weber, along with, of course, Marx and Engels
(1845–1896) would also trounce, proponents of a more modern neoliberal
fundamentalism do not just eschew state intervention into the workings of
markets, or traffic in anorexic conceptualizations of “the social body,” but
also aim to apply market logics to the state itself, understanding governance
to be fair game to commodify. In this sense, neoliberalism, also called neo-
conservatism or Reaganomics in the U.S., and Thatcherism in the UK,
aims to “liberate world markets,” or “free corporations” from the state by
privatizing, or capturing the state itself. Pucci (2015, p. 9), following
Barber (1998), also argues that neoliberalism “amounts to the dismantling
of various national civic societies that are replaced by private enterprise.” In
other words, the state should not simply be hands-off but should be an
active engine of privatization, and ultimately outsourced as well.
Along with overvaluing profit over people, faith in competition, and
the principles of rationalization, neoliberalism also posits an essential irre-
futable logic that can overcome human knowledge, which neoliberalists
find to be always limited and inferior to “market order reasoning” (Busch,
2014). Pucci (2015) cites Bourdieu’s 1998 definition of neoliberalism
from Le Monde Diplomatique, and argues that

“it is clear from the outset that neoliberalism works as an all-encompassing

belief system. The claims that neoliberalism makes cannot be proven in a
traditional scientific sense, but it does inspire in its adherents a sense of sci-
entific precision in the claims of truth. Bourdieu (1998) stresses that beyond
the policies and rhetoric of neoliberalism, there is a near-spiritual commit-
ment to the principles of the private market that drives the neoliberal dis-
course and that the logic of the market is irresistible” (Pucci, 2015, pp. 6–7).

As a plan of action, neoliberalism thus demands that social institutions

be reshaped to fit a “logical” market model and that selves are to be recon-
structed as isolated and entrepreneurial. In both cases, those goals are met
by intervening institutionally to change laws, policies, administrations,
and technologies (Busch, 2014). In this way, we can understand David
 1 INTRODUCTION: DISASTER CAPITALISM COMES TO HIGHER EDUCATION 13

Harvey’s (2005) influential argument that neoliberalism is, in fact, a kind

of governance. Equally important here is Calhoun’s (2006) work on mar-
ket fundamentalism and the ways it promotes the privatization of risk with
brutal, and even life and death, consequences for ordinary people to whom
political and economic elites transfer, or offload, or externalize the costs of
their frontier speculations.
In addition, we find value in Bader’s (2020) commentary on the execu-
tion of neoliberal values and practices in the context of the pandemic. We
can also understand how market fundamentalism, as a social movement,
combined with ideologies and practices of white supremacy and Christian
fundamentalisms in the global crisis of capitalism, might evolve into a kind
of racist, evangelical, libertarian reordering of the empire, with “freedom
to profit” as its unifying cry. Short of that, there is no question that for
neoliberal true believers, “social justice as both a concept and a set of poli-
cies is rejected as a mirage” (Busch, 2014, p. 18) as the only freedom to
champion is the freedom to accumulate. There is no room to imagine a
cause for freedom “from,” say, hunger, poverty, unemployment, exploita-
tion, housing insecurity, wage theft; price gouging; educational malprac-
tice and inequality; reckless exposure to disease, or looting of one’s
precious resources, for example.
As we investigate how these tactics have been trained on institutions in
higher education in the United States and other Western nations during
the COVID-19 pandemic, it will be further troubling to learn that the
neoliberal ideas and values that undergird disaster capitalist attacks, includ-
ing the ones we argue are currently underway in higher education, were
birthed, in large part, by intellectuals themselves in the 1930s, gaining
traction in the 1950s postwar period. According to Busch (2014), the
origins of market fundamentalist programs can be traced to the inter-war
era in the United States. Those origins were a result of a combination of
concerns by the elites, including concerns about increasing state power in
relation to world authoritarianism, but also a crisis of capitalism brought
out by the compression of economic inequalities made possible by the
New Deal. Convening in Paris 1938, and again in 1947 in the form of the
Mont Pelerin Society in Switzerland, leading philosophers and econo-
mists, including University of Chicago economics professors, Milton
Friedman and his mentor Friedrich Hayek, fleshed out the vision of an
economic philosophy that, taken-for-granted today as gospel among
legions, was for many years considered too cruel and extremist to make for
legitimate economic policy (Klein, 2007).
14 M. VUJNOVIC AND J. E. FOSTER

Historian Nancy MacClean (2017) offers a somewhat different account

of the rise of market fundamentalism in the U.S., situating it in a radical
libertarian goal of “freeing” capitalism from democracy. It’s a goal that, as
MacLean so deftly tells, has been shaped by the truly extremist anti-dem-
ocratic and plutocratic ideas of University of Virginia economics professor,
James McGill Buchanan, who, in the 1950s, set sail to defend what he felt
was an increasingly tyrannical turn by the federal government away from
what he believed to be the unalienable right of the individual to be free
of the state’s imposition on the right to accumulate. It was a threat that
Buchanan foresaw as the State of Virginia was compelled by the
U.S. Supreme Court’s second Brown v Board of Education decision in
1955 to desegregate its public schools. Buchanan, MacClean takes care to
point out, espoused a philosophy of political economy not wholly mapped
on to Milton Friedman’s own extreme market fundamentalism so often
credited for policy changes that she argues are more closely traced to
Buchanan. More accurately, as she maps out, Buchanan, whose vision we
will later see has since been further transformed by the likes of the Koch
brothers, was an ideological descendent of James C. Calhoun, the early
nineteenth century political scientist, U.S. senator from South Carolina,
and later U.S. Vice President whom historian Richard Hofstadter called
“the Marx of the master class” (MacLean, 2017, p. 1). As MacLean’s
analysis of the rise of the radical libertarian right in the United States
makes evident, for a philosophical moment, radical libertarianism parts
ways with neoliberal market fundamentalism in its assertion that the power
of people to collectively organize against the unfettered wealth accumula-
tion of an oligarchy is the primary threat to social order. This point of
divergence will be crucial to understanding the tributaries of billionaire
power that would feed into command and control of the global educa-
tional market spider web during the pandemic.
In any case, the key tenets of radical libertarianism and neoliberalism,
which have now converged in the space of COVID disaster opportunism,
were eventually popularized by intellectual elites. For the Mont Pelerin
masterminds, it would take 30 years from their founding gathering for
ideas once assessed as brutal and crackpot to have their day in 1980 to
become the dominating political and economic philosophy on the globe.
But once they did, and with the concomitant rise of the Buchanan tribu-
tary of radical anti-democratic libertarianism, it would mean four more
decades of some of the most utterly reprehensible campaigns by corporate
elites, in partnership with state actors, to capture the public trusts of
 1 INTRODUCTION: DISASTER CAPITALISM COMES TO HIGHER EDUCATION 15

nations and peoples around the world in ways that have led to the massive
expansion of global inequalities, including a preventable plague of impov-
erishment, starvation, disease; harrowing political and social unrest; persis-
tent violence and war; and a worldwide climate crisis that adds the risk of
needless suffering and death to all that lives in our ecosystems on top of
the needless human suffering it has generated. But while they waited for
their faith in free-market fundamentalism to be embraced by a growing
number of political elites positioned to execute the looting of the com-
mons closer to home, the Friedman wing turned to the 1970s economic
disasters unfolding in Latin America to test out the neoliberal “capitalist
makeover” in the Southern Cone.
What is particularly disturbing for academics such as ourselves is to
learn that the core architects of these makeovers in Latin America, and for
decades to come around the world, were neoliberal economists from, or
affiliated with, the University of Chicago, now notoriously known around
the world as “The Chicago Boys,” and later neoliberal economists from
the University of California at Berkeley, to be known as the Berkeley
Mafia. The extraordinary half-century influence of this small group of aca-
demic elites, and their protégées worldwide, and their direct ties to both
the state and industry in engineering U.S.-led corporate campaigns to
privatize and loot nation-states in crises or that could be brought to crisis,
cannot be overstated. In her analysis of the deployment of “shock doc-
trine” in Chile, Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina, Klein describes how the
Chicago Boys were able to “junta-hop their way through the seventies,”
noting that “[a]lmost everywhere that right-wing dictatorships were in
power, the University of Chicago presence could be felt” (2007, p. 166).
Further, linking the practices of these first “successful” acts of disaster
practices to the larger playbook of neoliberalism Klein (2007) concludes:

In much of the Southern Hemisphere, neoliberalism is frequently spoken of

as ‘the second colonial pillage’: in the first pillage, the riches were seized from
the land, and in the second they were stripped from the state. After every one
of these profit frenzies come the promises: next time, there will be firm laws
in place before a country’s assets are sold off, and the entire process will be
watched over by eagle-eyed regulators and investigators with unimpeachable
ethics. Next time there will be ‘institution building’ before privatizations (to
use the post-Russia parlance). But calling for law and order after the profits
have all been moved offshore is really just a way of legalizing the theft ex post
16 M. VUJNOVIC AND J. E. FOSTER

facto, much as the European colonizers locked in their land grabs with trea-
ties. Lawlessness on the frontier, as Adam Smith understood, is not the prob-
lem but the point, as much a part of the game as the contrite hand-wringing
and the pledge to do better next time. (Klein, 2007, pp. 308–309)

Sadly, the Chicago Boys and Berkeley Mafia continued to prescribe

their “shock therapy” all across Europe in the early 1980s, including in
Bolivia, Poland, and China, and by the early 1990s, disaster struck South
Africa and Russia, and the U.S.-backed team of the capitalist makeover
and takeover economists were ready. Soon after, as we entered a new mil-
lennium, the events of September 11 would set the stage for the extreme
capitalist makeovers in Iraq and the United States’ longest war in
Afghanistan to do the same. In the midst of these takeovers framed as
political disasters only, Chicago-style “makeovers” would get underway
following the tsunami in Sri Lanka in 2004, and in what is now the well-­
documented case of disaster plundering in New Orleans in 2005 after
Hurricane Katrina.
Following Klein (2007), investigative journalist, Anthony Lowenstein
(2015, p. 9), has extended the empirical analysis to focus not only on
“environmental catastrophe, war, and the hidden costs of foreign aid but
also what happens when the resources sector and detention centers are
also privatized.” Lowenstein examines, among other cases, the 2011
earthquake and tsunami response in Japan, mining in Papa New Guinea
since the early 1980s, the full privatization of Australia’s detention centers
by 2014, and the estimated 4 trillion dollar price tag of the war on terror,
including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which, as others have also
shown, has gone largely to private contractors and is described by
Lowenstein as “one of the largest transfers of wealth in American history
and yet [one that] has gone largely unnoticed” (2015, p. 11). Lowenstein
(2015, p. 9) goes on to argue that his “definition of ‘disaster’ has deep-
ened to include companies that entrench a crisis and then sell themselves
as the only ones who can resolve it. […] Whether we call this disaster capi-
talism or just a product of the unavoidable excesses and inequalities of
capitalism itself, the end result is still a world ruled by unaccountable mar-
kets.” We find this argument equally as important for our framing of the
patterns of corporate higher education’s COVID-19 responses.
Klein (2007) asserts that while it is tempting to characterize these cases
as simply examples of corruption, “gangster capitalism,” or “casino capi-
talism,” it is more accurate to understand these phenomena as indicative
 1 INTRODUCTION: DISASTER CAPITALISM COMES TO HIGHER EDUCATION 17

of the very features of corporatism, or a kind of statist capitalism, and akin

to new frontier capitalism. In the same way that Marx and Engels argued
that crisis is not anomalous to capitalism but embedded in it as inevitable
and necessary, Klein (2007, pp. 302–303) lands here, too, in part, in her
critique of narratives of “cultures of corruption” to explain away depraved
systemic logics of neoliberalism. We saw the same argument after the 2008
financial collapse where the blame was put on “a few bad actors,” and in
the claims that the collapse was preventable as corrupt capitalists were let
loose unchecked in a particular historical moment, rather than also a col-
lapse embedded in the very mechanisms of capitalism.
In her examples of how extreme neoliberal values and practices mani-
fested in the Chicago Boys and later Berkeley Mafia economic policy-­
backed coups, Klein (2007) makes the core point that disaster capitalists
have been successful in distracting resisters from the link between political
struggles and economic struggle such that pro-democracy activists and
international human rights activists have allowed themselves to sever a
class fight against global neoliberal corporate elites from a political fight
against state violence and tyranny and repression. The pro-­democracy left
has often been unable or unwilling to answer the question of why corpo-
ratist elites are using state violence to terrorize, imprison, torture, and kill
their own people. Even further, the failure to connect the assaults on
human rights and civil liberties to the fundamentalist agenda to “free cor-
porations” and capitalist elites to accumulate unfettered power has been a
deadly misunderstanding of power on the part of the pro-­democracy left
for nearly a half-century.
Moreover, as its raison d’être is to plunder, disaster capitalist agendas,
like neoliberalism itself from which it is borne, is inherently violent, says
Klein (2007, p. 157; see also Harvey, 2020), though physical violence
need not always be unleashed in the course of disaster capitalist raiding.
Indeed, in some cases, as we will discuss below, the passive refusal to assist
during a catastrophe, to sit back and watch the chaos unfold, to fan the
flames of a crisis using sophistry to dismantle institutions, or to actively
engineer destabilization (real or imagined) to engage in mass theft and a
reorganization of the very normative foundations of institutions can hap-
pen without explicit interpersonal violence or warfare. In these cases,
disaster capitalist raids can be understood as “civilian coup d’états” (Klein,
2007, p. 193). To say that the hijacking of the commons through disaster
opportunism need not involve warfare or physical torture is not to suggest
there is no structural and institutional violence that injures people
18 M. VUJNOVIC AND J. E. FOSTER

physically, emotionally, economically, and spiritually. Nor is it to say that

these “capitalist makeovers” accomplished without warfare do not also
kill people.
As we previewed in the preface, and extending Klein, as capitalism is
racialized, heterosexualized, and gendered, such “capitalist makeovers”
must also be understood in the context of complicated, global, and inter-
secting systems of race, sexuality and gender, ones that are historically
constructed by, and simultaneously inform, ideologies, interactions and
institutional arrangements that continually sacrifice women, LGBTQ indi-
viduals, gender nonconforming people, and individuals who identify as
Black, Brown, and Indigenous, people of color. Adjusting the analytical
frame to one of racialized disaster patriarchal capitalism (see Foster &
Foster-Palmer, forthcoming; Luft, 2016), we can begin to see the multiple
opportunistic processes and practices of not only what Klein would call the
process of destruction for a “clean capitalist canvas,” but also processes
and practices of retrenchment that re-establish repressive social orders
through crisis (Luft, 2016, emphasis added). For example, as we shall see,
along with the reproduction of a racialized labor force and the further gut-
ting of the middle classes, the pandemic’s impact on education globally
has also meant a re-establishment of gendered and unequal divisions of
productive and social reproductive labor, and the related intensified extrac-
tion of income and wealth from women and people of color. With this
exacerbation of racialized and gendered economic inequality has come the
deployment of neoliberal and radical libertarian narratives of accumula-
tion, austerity, competition, personal liberty, freedom and the very mean-
ings of “individual” and “society” that cannot be understood outside of
Western notions of racialized hetero-patriarchy that co-construct them.
Explains Nancy Welch (2020, para. 14–15) on her academic union col-
league’s assessment that they are at war with their institution’s administra-
tors over the university’s pandemic response:

I understand the larger war to be over social reproduction. [The social rela-
tions of caring for people and communities] on which capitalism depends—
no labor power, no profit—but is also loathe to provide. Especially under
the terms of do-it-yourself, you’re on your own neoliberalism, capitalist accu-
mulation is assisted by commodifying education, childcare, eldercare, trans-
portation, and the like […] and offloading the bulk of these needs onto
families and women in particular within them […] driven to overcome per-
sistent and worsening economic crises by any means—including exhausting
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 XI
Briefly, then, there are two ways of regarding the Classical—the
materialistic and the ideological. By the former, it is asserted that the
sinking of one scale-pan has its cause in the rising of the other, and
it is shown that this occurs invariably (truly a striking theorem); and in
this juxtaposing of cause and effect we naturally find the social and
sexual, at all events the purely political, facts classed as causes and
the religious, intellectual and (so far as the materialist tolerates them
as facts at all) the artistic as effects. On the other hand, the
ideologues show that the rising of one scale-pan follows from the
sinking of the other, which they are able to prove of course with
equal exactitude; this done, they lose themselves in cults, mysteries,
customs, in the secrets of the strophe and the line, throwing scarcely
a side-glance at the commonplace daily life—for them an unpleasant
consequence of earthly imperfection. Each side, with its gaze fixed
on causality, demonstrates that the other side either cannot or will
not understand the true linkages of things and each ends by calling
the other blind, superficial, stupid, absurd or frivolous, oddities or
Philistines. It shocks the ideologue if anyone deals with Hellenic
finance-problems and instead of, for example, telling us the deep
meanings of the Delphic oracle, describes the far-reaching money
operations which the Oracle priests undertook with their
accumulated treasures. The politician, on the other hand, has a
superior smile for those who waste their enthusiasm on ritual
formulæ and the dress of Attic youths, instead of writing a book
adorned with up-to-date catchwords about antique class-struggles.
The one type is foreshadowed from the very outset in Petrarch; it
created Florence and Weimar and the Western classicism. The other
type appears in the middle of the 18th Century, along with the rise of
civilized,[21] economic-megalopolitan[22] politics, and England is
therefore its birthplace (Grote). At bottom, the opposition is between
the conceptions of culture-man and those of civilization-man, and it
is too deep, too essentially human, to allow the weaknesses of both
standpoints alike to be seen or overcome.
The materialist himself is on this point an idealist. He too, without
wishing or desiring it, has made his views dependent upon his
wishes. In fact all our finest minds without exception have bowed
down reverently before the picture of the Classical, abdicating in this
one instance alone their function of unrestricted criticism. The
freedom and power of Classical research are always hindered, and
its data obscured, by a certain almost religious awe. In all history
there is no analogous case of one Culture making a passionate cult
of the memory of another. Our devotion is evidenced yet again in the
fact that since the Renaissance, a thousand years of history have
been undervalued so that an ideal “Middle” Age may serve as a link
between ourselves and antiquity. We Westerners have sacrificed on
the Classical altar the purity and independence of our art, for we
have not dared to create without a side-glance at the “sublime
exemplar.” We have projected our own deepest spiritual needs and
feelings on to the Classical picture. Some day a gifted psychologist
will deal with this most fateful illusion and tell us the story of the
“Classical” that we have so consistently reverenced since the days of
Gothic. Few theses would be more helpful for the understanding of
the Western soul from Otto III, the first victim of the South, to
Nietzsche, the last.
Goethe on his Italian tour speaks with enthusiasm of the buildings
of Palladio, whose frigid and academic work we to-day regard very
sceptically: but when he goes on to Pompeii he does not conceal his
dissatisfaction in experiencing “a strange, half-unpleasant
impression,” and what he has to say on the temples of Pæstum and
Segesta—masterpieces of Hellenic art—is embarrassed and trivial.
Palpably, when Classical antiquity in its full force met him face to
face, he did not recognize it. It is the same with all others. Much that
was Classical they chose not to see, and so they saved their inward
image of the Classical—which was in reality the background of a life-
ideal that they themselves had created and nourished with their
heart’s blood, a vessel filled with their own world-feeling, a phantom,
an idol. The audacious descriptions of Aristophanes, Juvenal or
Petronius of life in the Classical cities—the southern dirt and riff-raff,
terrors and brutalities, pleasure-boys and Phrynes, phallus worship
and imperial orgies—excite the enthusiasm of the student and the
dilettante, who find the same realities in the world-cities of to-day too
lamentable and repulsive to face. “In the cities life is bad; there are
too many of the lustful.”—also sprach Zarathustra. They commend
the state-sense of the Romans, but despise the man of to-day who
permits himself any contact with public affairs. There is a type of
scholar whose clarity of vision comes under some irresistible spell
when it turns from a frock-coat to a toga, from a British football-
ground to a Byzantine circus, from a transcontinental railway to a
Roman road in the Alps, from a thirty-knot destroyer to a trireme,
from Prussian bayonets to Roman spears—nowadays, even, from a
modern engineer’s Suez Canal to that of a Pharaoh. He would admit
a steam-engine as a symbol of human passion and an expression of
intellectual force if it were Hero of Alexandria who invented it, not
otherwise. To such it seems blasphemous to talk of Roman central-
heating or book-keeping in preference to the worship of the Great
Mother of the Gods.
But the other school sees nothing but these things. It thinks it
exhausts the essence of this Culture, alien as it is to ours, by treating
the Greeks as simply equivalent, and it obtains its conclusions by
means of simple factual substitutions, ignoring altogether the
Classical soul. That there is not the slightest inward correlation
between the things meant by “Republic,” “freedom,” “property” and
the like then and there and the things meant by such words here and
now, it has no notion whatever. It makes fun of the historians of the
age of Goethe, who honestly expressed their own political ideals in
classical history forms and revealed their own personal enthusiasms
in vindications or condemnations of lay-figures named Lycurgus,
Brutus, Cato, Cicero, Augustus—but it cannot itself write a chapter
without reflecting the party opinion of its morning paper.
It is, however, much the same whether the past is treated in the
spirit of Don Quixote or in that of Sancho Panza. Neither way leads
to the end. In sum, each school permits itself to bring into high relief
that part of the Classical which best expresses its own views—
Nietzsche the pre-Socratic Athens, the economists the Hellenistic
period, the politicians Republican Rome, poets the Imperial Age.
 Not that religious and artistic phenomena are more primitive than
social and economic, any more than the reverse. For the man who in
these things has won his unconditional freedom of outlook, beyond
all personal interests whatsoever, there is no dependence, no
priority, no relation of cause and effect, no differentiation of value or
importance. That which assigns relative ranks amongst the individual
detail-facts is simply the greater or less purity and force of their form-
language, their symbolism, beyond all questions of good and evil,
high and low, useful and ideal.
 XII
Looked at in this way, the “Decline of the West” comprises nothing
less than the problem of Civilization. We have before us one of the
fundamental questions of all higher history. What is Civilization,
understood as the organic-logical sequel, fulfilment and finale of a
culture?
For every Culture has its own Civilization. In this work, for the first
time the two words, hitherto used to express an indefinite, more or
less ethical, distinction, are used in a periodic sense, to express a
strict and necessary organic succession. The Civilization is the
inevitable destiny of the Culture, and in this principle we obtain the
viewpoint from which the deepest and gravest problems of historical
morphology become capable of solution. Civilizations are the most
external and artificial states of which a species of developed
humanity is capable. They are a conclusion, the thing-become
succeeding the thing-becoming, death following life, rigidity following
expansion, intellectual age and the stone-built, petrifying world-city
following mother-earth and the spiritual childhood of Doric and
Gothic. They are an end, irrevocable, yet by inward necessity
reached again and again.
So, for the first time, we are enabled to understand the Romans as
the successors of the Greeks, and light is projected into the deepest
secrets of the late-Classical period. What, but this, can be the
meaning of the fact—which can only be disputed by vain phrases—
that the Romans were barbarians who did not precede but closed a
great development? Unspiritual, unphilosophical, devoid of art,
clannish to the point of brutality, aiming relentlessly at tangible
successes, they stand between the Hellenic Culture and
nothingness. An imagination directed purely to practical objects—
they had religious laws governing godward relations as they had
other laws governing human relations, but there was no specifically
Roman saga of gods—was something which is not found at all in
Athens. In a word, Greek soul—Roman intellect; and this antithesis
is the differentia between Culture and Civilization. Nor is it only to the
Classical that it applies. Again and again there appears this type of
strong-minded, completely non-metaphysical man, and in the hands
of this type lies the intellectual and material destiny of each and
every “late” period. Such are the men who carried through the
Babylonian, the Egyptian, the Indian, the Chinese, the Roman
Civilizations, and in such periods do Buddhism, Stoicism, Socialism
ripen into definitive world-conceptions which enable a moribund
humanity to be attacked and re-formed in its intimate structure. Pure
Civilization, as a historical process, consists in a progressive taking-
down of forms that have become inorganic or dead.
The transition from Culture to Civilization was accomplished for
the Classical world in the 4th, for the Western in the 19th Century.
From these periods onward the great intellectual decisions take
place, not as in the days of the Orpheus-movement or the
Reformation in the “whole world” where not a hamlet is too small to
be unimportant, but in three or four world-cities that have absorbed
into themselves the whole content of History, while the old wide
landscape of the Culture, become merely provincial, serves only to
feed the cities with what remains of its higher mankind.
World-city and province[23]—the two basic ideas of every
civilization—bring up a wholly new form-problem of History, the very
problem that we are living through to-day with hardly the remotest
conception of its immensity. In place of a world, there is a city, a
point, in which the whole life of broad regions is collecting while the
rest dries up. In place of a type-true people, born of and grown on
the soil, there is a new sort of nomad, cohering unstably in fluid
masses, the parasitical city dweller, traditionless, utterly matter-of-
fact, religionless, clever, unfruitful, deeply contemptuous of the
countryman and especially that highest form of countryman, the
country gentleman. This is a very great stride towards the inorganic,
towards the end—what does it signify? France and England have
already taken the step and Germany is beginning to do so. After
Syracuse, Athens, and Alexandria comes Rome. After Madrid, Paris,
London come Berlin and New York. It is the destiny of whole regions
that lie outside the radiation-circle of one of these cities—of old Crete
and Macedon and to-day the Scandinavian North[24]—to become
“provinces.”
Of old, the field on which the opposed conception of an epoch
came to battle was some world-problem of a metaphysical, religious
or dogmatic kind, and the battle was between the soil-genius of the
countryman (noble, priest) and the “worldly” patrician genius of the
famous old small towns of Doric or Gothic springtime. Of such a
character were the conflicts over the Dionysus religion—as in the
tyranny of Kleisthenes of Sikyon[25]—and those of the Reformation in
the German free cities and the Huguenot wars. But just as these
cities overcame the country-side (already it is a purely civic world-
outlook that appears in even Parmenides and Descartes), so in turn
the world-city overcame them. It is the common intellectual process
of later periods such as the Ionic and the Baroque, and to-day—as in
the Hellenistic age which at its outset saw the foundation of artificial,
land-alien Alexandria—Culture-cities like Florence, Nürnberg,
Salamanca, Bruges and Prag, have become provincial towns and
fight inwardly a lost battle against the world-cities. The world-city
means cosmopolitanism in place of “home,”[26] cold matter-of-fact in
place of reverence for tradition and age, scientific irreligion as a
fossil representative of the older religion of the heart, “society” in
place of the state, natural instead of hard-earned rights. It was in the
conception of money as an inorganic and abstract magnitude,
entirely disconnected from the notion of the fruitful earth and the
primitive values, that the Romans had the advantage of the Greeks.
Thenceforward any high ideal of life becomes largely a question of
money. Unlike the Greek stoicism of Chrysippus, the Roman
stoicism of Cato and Seneca presupposes a private income;[27] and,
unlike that of the 18th Century, the social-ethical sentiment of the
20th, if it is to be realized at a higher level than that of professional
(and lucrative) agitation, is a matter for millionaires. To the world-city
belongs not a folk but a mass. Its uncomprehending hostility to all
the traditions representative of the Culture (nobility, church,
privileges, dynasties, convention in art and limits of knowledge in
science), the keen and cold intelligence that confounds the wisdom
of the peasant, the new-fashioned naturalism that in relation to all
matters of sex and society goes back far beyond Rousseau and
Socrates to quite primitive instincts and conditions, the reappearance
of the panem et circenses in the form of wage-disputes and football-
grounds—all these things betoken the definite closing-down of the
Culture and the opening of a quite new phase of human existence—
anti-provincial, late, futureless, but quite inevitable.
This is what has to be viewed, and viewed not with the eyes of the
partisan, the ideologue, the up-to-date novelist, not from this or that
“standpoint,” but in a high, time-free perspective embracing whole
millenniums of historical world-forms, if we are really to comprehend
the great crisis of the present.
To me it is a symbol of the first importance that in the Rome of
Crassus—triumvir and all-powerful building-site speculator—the
Roman people with its proud inscriptions, the people before whom
Gauls, Greeks, Parthians, Syrians afar trembled, lived in appalling
misery in the many-storied lodging-houses of dark suburbs,[28]
accepting with indifference or even with a sort of sporting interest the
consequences of the military expansion: that many famous old-noble
families, descendants of the men who defeated the Celts and the
Samnites, lost their ancestral homes through standing apart from the
wild rush of speculation and were reduced to renting wretched
apartments; that, while along the Appian Way there arose the
splendid and still wonderful tombs of the financial magnates, the
corpses of the people were thrown along with animal carcases and
town refuse into a monstrous common grave—till in Augustus’s time
it was banked over for the avoidance of pestilence and so became
the site of Mæcenas’s renowned park; that in depopulated Athens,
which lived on visitors and on the bounty of rich foreigners, the mob
of parvenu tourists from Rome gaped at the works of the Periclean
age with as little understanding as the American globe-trotter in the
Sistine Chapel at those of Michelangelo, every removable art-piece
having ere this been taken away or bought at fancy prices to be
replaced by the Roman buildings which grew up, colossal and
arrogant, by the side of the low and modest structures of the old
time. In such things—which it is the historian’s business not to praise
or to blame but to consider morphologically—there lies, plain and
immediate enough for one who has learnt to see, an idea.
 For it will become manifest that, from this moment on, all great
conflicts of world-outlook, of politics, of art, of science, of feeling will
be under the influence of this one opposition. What is the hall-mark
of a politic of Civilization to-day, in contrast to a politic of Culture
yesterday? It is, for the Classical rhetoric, and for the Western
journalism, both serving that abstract which represents the power of
Civilization—money.[29] It is the money-spirit which penetrates
unremarked the historical forms of the people’s existence, often
without destroying or even in the least disturbing these forms—the
form of the Roman state, for instance, underwent very much less
alteration between the elder Scipio and Augustus than is usually
imagined. Though forms subsist, the great political parties
nevertheless cease to be more than reputed centres of decision. The
decisions in fact lie elsewhere. A small number of superior heads,
whose names are very likely not the best-known, settle everything,
while below them are the great mass of second-rate politicians—
rhetors, tribunes, deputies, journalists—selected through a
provincially-conceived franchise to keep alive the illusion of popular
self-determination. And art? Philosophy? The ideals of a Platonic or
those of a Kantian age had for the higher mankind concerned a
general validity. But those of a Hellenistic age, or those of our own,
are valid exclusively for the brain of the Megalopolitan. For the
villager’s or, generally, the nature-man’s world-feeling our Socialism
—like its near relation Darwinism (how utterly un-Goethian are the
formulæ of “struggle for existence” and “natural selection”!), like its
other relative the woman-and-marriage problem of Ibsen, Strindberg,
and Shaw, like the impressionistic tendencies of anarchic
sensuousness and the whole bundle of modern longings,
temptations and pains expressed in Baudelaire’s verse and
Wagner’s music—are simply non-existent. The smaller the town, the
more unmeaning it becomes to busy oneself with painting or with
music of these kinds. To the Culture belong gymnastics, the
tournament, the agon, and to the Civilization belongs Sport. This is
the true distinction between the Hellenic palæstra and the Roman
circus.[30] Art itself becomes a sport (hence the phrase “art for art’s
sake”) to be played before a highly-intelligent audience of
connoisseurs and buyers, whether the feat consist in mastering
absurd instrumental tone-masses and taking harmonic fences, or in
some tour de force of colouring. Then a new fact-philosophy
appears, which can only spare a smile for metaphysical speculation,
and a new literature that is a necessity of life for the megalopolitan
palate and nerves and both unintelligible and ugly to the provincials.
Neither Alexandrine poetry nor plein-air painting is anything to the
“people.” And, then as now, the phase of transition is marked by a
series of scandals only to be found at such moments. The anger
evoked in the Athenian populace by Euripides and by the
“Revolutionary” painting of Apollodorus, for example, is repeated in
the opposition to Wagner, Manet, Ibsen, and Nietzsche.
It is possible to understand the Greeks without mentioning their
economic relations; the Romans, on the other hand, can only be
understood through these. Chæronea and Leipzig were the last
battles fought about an idea. In the First Punic War and in 1870
economic motives are no longer to be overlooked. Not till the
Romans came with their practical energy was slave-holding given
that big collective character which many students regard as the die-
stamp of Classical economics, legislation and way of life, and which
in any event vastly lowered both the value and the inner worthiness
of such free labour as continued to exist side by side with gang-
labour. And it was not the Latin, but the Germanic peoples of the
West and America who developed out of the steam-engine a big
industry that transformed the face of the land. The relation of these
phenomena to Stoicism and to Socialism is unmistakable. Not till the
Roman Cæsarism—foreshadowed by C. Flaminius, shaped first by
Marius, handled by strong-minded, large-scale men of fact—did the
Classical World learn the pre-eminence of money. Without this fact
neither Cæsar, nor “Rome” generally, is understandable. In every
Greek is a Don Quixote, in every Roman a Sancho Panza factor, and
these factors are dominants.
 XIII
Considered in itself, the Roman world-dominion was a negative
phenomenon, being the result not of a surplus of energy on the one
side—that the Romans had never had since Zama—but of a
deficiency of resistance on the other. That the Romans did not
conquer the world is certain;[31] they merely took possession of a
booty that lay open to everyone. The Imperium Romanum came into
existence not as the result of such an extremity of military and
financial effort as had characterized the Punic Wars, but because the
old East forwent all external self-determinations. We must not be
deluded by the appearance of brilliant military successes. With a few
ill-trained, ill-led, and sullen legions, Lucullus and Pompey
conquered whole realms—a phenomenon that in the period of the
battle of Ipsus would have been unthinkable. The Mithradatic danger,
serious enough for a system of material force which had never been
put to any real test, would have been nothing to the conquerors of
Hannibal. After Zama, the Romans never again either waged or were
capable of waging a war against a great military Power.[32] Their
classic wars were those against the Samnites, Pyrrhus and
Carthage. Their grand hour was Cannæ. To maintain the heroic
posture for centuries on end is beyond the power of any people. The
Prussian-German people have had three great moments (1813,
1870 and 1914), and that is more than others have had.
Here, then, I lay it down that Imperialism, of which petrifacts such
as the Egyptian empire, the Roman, the Chinese, the Indian may
continue to exist for hundreds or thousands of years—dead bodies,
amorphous and dispirited masses of men, scrap-material from a
great history—is to be taken as the typical symbol of the passing
away. Imperialism is Civilization unadulterated. In this phenomenal
form the destiny of the West is now irrevocably set. The energy of
culture-man is directed inwards, that of civilization-man outwards.
And thus I see in Cecil Rhodes the first man of a new age. He stands
for the political style of a far-ranging, Western, Teutonic and
especially German future, and his phrase “expansion is everything”
is the Napoleonic reassertion of the indwelling tendency of every
Civilization that has fully ripened—Roman, Arab or Chinese. It is not
a matter of choice—it is not the conscious will of individuals, or even
that of whole classes or peoples that decides. The expansive
tendency is a doom, something daemonic and immense, which
grips, forces into service, and uses up the late mankind of the world-
city stage, willy-nilly, aware or unaware.[33] Life is the process of
effecting possibilities, and for the brain-man there are only extensive
possibilities.[34] Hard as the half-developed Socialism of to-day is
fighting against expansion, one day it will become arch-expansionist
with all the vehemence of destiny. Here the form-language of politics,
as the direct intellectual expression of a certain type of humanity,
touches on a deep metaphysical problem—on the fact, affirmed in
the grant of unconditional validity to the causality-principle, that the
soul is the complement of its extension.
When, between 480 and 230,[35] the Chinese group of states was
tending towards imperialism, it was entirely futile to combat the
principle of Imperialism (Lien-heng), practised in particular by the
“Roman” state of Tsin[36] and theoretically represented by the
philosopher Dschang Yi, by ideas of a League of Nations (Hoh-
tsung) largely derived from Wang Hü, a profound sceptic who had no
illusions as to the men or the political possibilities of this “late”
period. Both sides opposed the anti-political idealism of Lao-tse, but
as between themselves it was Lien-heng and not Hoh-tsung which
swam with the natural current of expansive Civilization.[37]
Rhodes is to be regarded as the first precursor of a Western type
of Cæsars, whose day is to come though yet distant. He stands
midway between Napoleon and the force-men of the next centuries,
just as Flaminius, who from 232 B.C. onward pressed the Romans to
undertake the subjugation of Cisalpine Gaul and so initiated the
policy of colonial expansion, stands between Alexander and Cæsar.
Strictly speaking, Flaminius was a private person—for his real power
was of a kind not embodied in any constitutional office—who
exercised a dominant influence in the state at a time when the state-
idea was giving way to the pressure of economic factors. So far as
Rome is concerned, he was the archetype of opposition Cæsarism;
with him there came to an end the idea of state-service and there
began the “will to power” which ignored traditions and reckoned only
with forces. Alexander and Napoleon were romantics; though they
stood on the threshold of Civilization and in its cold clear air, the one
fancied himself an Achilles and the other read Werther. Cæsar, on
the contrary, was a pure man of fact gifted with immense
understanding.
But even for Rhodes political success means territorial and
financial success, and only that. Of this Roman-ness within himself
he was fully aware. But Western Civilization has not yet taken shape
in such strength and purity as this. It was only before his maps that
he could fall into a sort of poetic trance, this son of the parsonage
who, sent out to South Africa without means, made a gigantic fortune
and employed it as the engine of political aims. His idea of a trans-
African railway from the Cape to Cairo, his project of a South African
empire, his intellectual hold on the hard metal souls of the mining
magnates whose wealth he forced into the service of his schemes,
his capital Bulawayo, royally planned as a future Residence by a
statesman who was all-powerful yet stood in no definite relation to
the State, his wars, his diplomatic deals, his road-systems, his
syndicates, his armies, his conception of the “great duty to
civilization” of the man of brain—all this, broad and imposing, is the
prelude of a future which is still in store for us and with which the
history of West-European mankind will be definitely closed.
He who does not understand that this outcome is obligatory and
insusceptible of modification, that our choice is between willing this
and willing nothing at all, between cleaving to this destiny or
despairing of the future and of life itself; he who cannot feel that
there is grandeur also in the realizations of powerful intelligences, in
the energy and discipline of metal-hard natures, in battles fought with
the coldest and most abstract means; he who is obsessed with the
idealism of a provincial and would pursue the ways of life of past
ages—must forgo all desire to comprehend history, to live through
history or to make history.
Thus regarded, the Imperium Romanum appears no longer as an
isolated phenomenon, but as the normal product of a strict and
energetic, megalopolitan, predominantly practical spirituality, as
typical of a final and irreversible condition which has occurred often
enough though it has only been identified as such in this instance.
Let it be realized, then:
That the secret of historical form does not lie on the surface, that it
cannot be grasped by means of similarities of costume and setting,
and that in the history of men as in that of animals and plants there
occur phenomena showing deceptive similarity but inwardly without
any connexion—e.g., Charlemagne and Haroun-al-Raschid,
Alexander and Cæsar, the German wars upon Rome and the Mongol
onslaughts upon West Europe—and other phenomena of extreme
outward dissimilarity but of identical import—e.g., Trajan and
Rameses II, the Bourbons and the Attic Demos, Mohammed and
Pythagoras.
That the 19th and 20th centuries, hitherto looked on as the highest
point of an ascending straight line of world-history, are in reality a
stage of life which may be observed in every Culture that has
ripened to its limit—a stage of life characterized not by Socialists,
Impressionists, electric railways, torpedoes and differential equations
(for these are only body-constituents of the time), but by a civilized
spirituality which possesses not only these but also quite other
creative possibilities.
That, as our own time represents a transitional phase which
occurs with certainty under particular conditions, there are perfectly
well-defined states (such as have occurred more than once in the
history of the past) later than the present-day state of West Europe,
and therefore that
The future of the West is not a limitless tending upwards and
onwards for all time towards our present ideals, but a single
phenomenon of history, strictly limited and defined as to form and
duration, which covers a few centuries and can be viewed and, in
essentials, calculated from available precedents.
 XIV
This high plane of contemplation once attained, the rest is easy. To
this single idea one can refer, and by it one can solve, without
straining or forcing, all those separate problems of religion, art-
history, epistemology, ethics, politics, economics with which the
modern intellect has so passionately—and so vainly—busied itself
for decades.
This idea is one of those truths that have only to be expressed
with full clarity to become indisputable. It is one of the inward
necessities of the Western Culture and of its world-feeling. It is
capable of entirely transforming the world-outlook of one who fully
understands it, i.e., makes it intimately his own. It immensely
deepens the world-picture natural and necessary to us in that,
already trained to regard world-historical evolution as an organic unit
seen backwards from our standpoint in the present, we are enabled
by its aid to follow the broad lines into the future—a privilege of
dream-calculation till now permitted only to the physicist. It is, I
repeat, in effect the substitution of a Copernican for a Ptolemaic
aspect of history, that is, an immeasurable widening of horizon.
Up to now everyone has been at liberty to hope what he pleased
about the future. Where there are no facts, sentiment rules. But
henceforward it will be every man’s business to inform himself of
what can happen and therefore of what with the unalterable
necessity of destiny and irrespective of personal ideals, hopes or
desires, will happen. When we use the risky word “freedom” we shall
mean freedom to do, not this or that, but the necessary or nothing.
The feeling that this is “just as it should be” is the hall-mark of the
man of fact. To lament it and blame it is not to alter it. To birth
belongs death, to youth age, to life generally its form and its allotted
span. The present is a civilized, emphatically not a cultured time, and
ipso facto a great number of life-capacities fall out as impossible.
This may be deplorable, and may be and will be deplored in
pessimist philosophy and poetry, but it is not in our power to make
otherwise. It will not be—already it is not—permissible to defy clear
historical experience and to expect, merely because we hope, that
this will spring or that will flourish.
It will no doubt be objected that such a world-outlook, which in
giving this certainty as to the outlines and tendency of the future cuts
off all far-reaching hopes, would be unhealthy for all and fatal for
many, once it ceased to be a mere theory and was adopted as a
practical scheme of life by the group of personalities effectively
moulding the future.
Such is not my opinion. We are civilized, not Gothic or Rococo,
people; we have to reckon with the hard cold facts of a late life, to
which the parallel is to be found not in Pericles’s Athens but in
Cæsar’s Rome. Of great painting or great music there can no longer
be, for Western people, any question. Their architectural possibilities
have been exhausted these hundred years. Only extensive
possibilities are left to them. Yet, for a sound and vigorous
generation that is filled with unlimited hopes, I fail to see that it is any
disadvantage to discover betimes that some of these hopes must
come to nothing. And if the hopes thus doomed should be those
most dear, well, a man who is worth anything will not be dismayed. It
is true that the issue may be a tragic one for some individuals who in
their decisive years are overpowered by the conviction that in the
spheres of architecture, drama, painting, there is nothing left for
them to conquer. What matter if they do go under! It has been the
convention hitherto to admit no limits of any sort in these matters,
and to believe that each period had its own task to do in each
sphere. Tasks therefore were found by hook or by crook, leaving it to
be settled posthumously whether or not the artist’s faith was justified
and his life-work necessary. Now, nobody but a pure romantic would
take this way out. Such a pride is not the pride of a Roman. What are
we to think of the individual who, standing before an exhausted
quarry, would rather be told that a new vein will be struck to-morrow
—the bait offered by the radically false and mannerized art of the
moment—than be shown a rich and virgin clay-bed near by? The
lesson, I think, would be of benefit to the coming generations, as
showing them what is possible—and therefore necessary—and what
is excluded from the inward potentialities of their time. Hitherto an
incredible total of intellect and power has been squandered in false
directions. The West-European, however historically he may think
and feel, is at a certain stage of life invariably uncertain of his own
direction; he gropes and feels his way and, if unlucky in environment,
he loses it. But now at last the work of centuries enables him to view
the disposition of his own life in relation to the general culture-
scheme and to test his own powers and purposes. And I can only
hope that men of the new generation may be moved by this book to
devote themselves to technics instead of lyrics, the sea instead of
the paint-brush, and politics instead of epistemology. Better they
could not do.
 XV
It still remains to consider the relation of a morphology of world-
history to Philosophy. All genuine historical work is philosophy,
unless it is mere ant-industry. But the operations of the systematic
philosopher are subject to constant and serious error through his
assuming the permanence of his results. He overlooks the fact that
every thought lives in a historical world and is therefore involved in
the common destiny of mortality. He supposes that higher thought
possesses an everlasting and unalterable objectiveness
(Gegenstand), that the great questions of all epochs are identical,
and that therefore they are capable in the last analysis of unique
answers.
But question and answer are here one, and the great questions
are made great by the very fact that unequivocal answers to them
are so passionately demanded, so that it is as life-symbols only that
they possess significance. There are no eternal truths. Every
philosophy is the expression of its own and only its own time, and—if
by philosophy we mean effective philosophy and not academic
triflings about judgment-forms, sense-categories and the like—no
two ages possess the same philosophic intentions. The difference is
not between perishable and imperishable doctrines but between
doctrines which live their day and doctrines which never live at all.
The immortality of thoughts-become is an illusion—the essential is,
what kind of man comes to expression in them. The greater the man,
the truer the philosophy, with the inward truth that in a great work of
art transcends all proof of its several elements or even of their
compatibility with one another. At highest, the philosophy may
absorb the entire content of an epoch, realize it within itself and then,
embodying it in some grand form or personality, pass it on to be
developed further and further. The scientific dress or the mark of
learning adopted by a philosophy is here unimportant. Nothing is
simpler than to make good poverty of ideas by founding a system,
and even a good idea has little value when enunciated by a solemn
ass. Only its necessity to life decides the eminence of a doctrine.
For me, therefore, the test of value to be applied to a thinker is his
eye for the great facts of his own time. Only this can settle whether
he is merely a clever architect of systems and principles, versed in
definitions and analyses, or whether it is the very soul of his time that
speaks in his works and his intuitions. A philosopher who cannot
grasp and command actuality as well will never be of the first rank.
The Pre-Socratics were merchants and politicians en grand. The
desire to put his political ideas into practice in Syracuse nearly cost
Plato his life, and it was the same Plato who discovered the set of
geometrical theorems that enabled Euclid to build up the Classical
system of mathematics. Pascal—whom Nietzsche knows only as the
“broken Christian”—Descartes, Leibniz were the first mathematicians
and technicians of their time.
The great “Pre-Socratics” of China from Kwan-tsi (about 670) to
Confucius (550-478) were statesmen, regents, lawgivers like
Pythagoras and Parmenides, like Hobbes and Leibniz. With Lao-tsze
—the opponent of all state authority and high politics and the
enthusiast of small peaceful communities—unworldliness and deed-
shyness first appear, heralds of lecture-room and study philosophy.
But Lao-tsze was in his time, the ancien régime of China, an
exception in the midst of sturdy philosophers for whom epistemology
meant the knowledge of the important relations of actual life.
And herein, I think, all the philosophers of the newest age are
open to a serious criticism. What they do not possess is real
standing in actual life. Not one of them has intervened effectively,
either in higher politics, in the development of modern technics, in
matters of communication, in economics, or in any other big
actuality, with a single act or a single compelling idea. Not one of
them counts in mathematics, in physics, in the science of
government, even to the extent that Kant counted. Let us glance at
other times. Confucius was several times a minister. Pythagoras was
the organizer of an important political movement[38] akin to the
Cromwellian, the significance of which is even now far
underestimated by Classical researchers. Goethe, besides being a
model executive minister—though lacking, alas! the operative sphere
of a great state—was interested in the Suez and Panama canals (the
dates of which he foresaw with accuracy) and their effects on the
economy of the world, and he busied himself again and again with
the question of American economic life and its reactions on the Old
World, and with that of the dawning era of machine-industry. Hobbes
was one of the originators of the great plan of winning South
America for England, and although in execution the plan went no
further than the occupation of Jamaica, he has the glory of being one
of the founders of the British Colonial Empire. Leibniz, without doubt
the greatest intellect in Western philosophy, the founder of the
differential calculus and the analysis situs, conceived or co-operated
in a number of major political schemes, one of which was to relieve
Germany by drawing the attention of Louis XIV to the importance of
Egypt as a factor in French world-policy. The ideas of the
memorandum on this subject that he drew up for the Grand Monarch
were so far in advance of their time (1672) that it has been thought
that Napoleon made use of them for his Eastern venture. Even thus
early, Leibniz laid down the principle that Napoleon grasped more
and more clearly after Wagram, viz., that acquisitions on the Rhine
and in Belgium would not permanently better the position of France
and that the neck of Suez would one day be the key of world-
dominance. Doubtless the King was not equal to these deep political
and strategic conceptions of the Philosopher.
Turning from men of this mould to the “philosophers” of to-day, one
is dismayed and shamed. How poor their personalities, how
commonplace their political and practical outlook! Why is it that the
mere idea of calling upon one of them to prove his intellectual
eminence in government, diplomacy, large-scale organization, or
direction of any big colonial, commercial or transport concern is
enough to evoke our pity? And this insufficiency indicates, not that
they possess inwardness, but simply that they lack weight. I look
round in vain for an instance in which a modern “philosopher” has
made a name by even one deep or far-seeing pronouncement on an
important question of the day. I see nothing but provincial opinions of
the same kind as anyone else’s. Whenever I take up a work by a
modern thinker, I find myself asking: has he any idea whatever of the
actualities of world-politics, world-city problems, capitalism, the