Globalisation, Comparative Education and Policy Research 27 Joseph Zajda W. James Jacob Editors Discourses of Globalisation and Higher Education Reforms Emerging Paradigms Chapter 4 The University and Globalisation as a New Mediaevalism Joshua Rust Abstract If early European universities played a key role in facilitating the rebalancing of power relations between ecclesiastical and civil authorities following the twelfth-century Papal Revolution, Hedley Bull’s characterization of globalisation as a “New Mediaevalism” raises the question as to whether or not contemporary universities are well-suited to play an analogous role in the present day. A brief history of the European university suggests that the scholastics’ use of dialectical reasoning methods was an essential tool in mediating jurisdictional disputes. While this fact strongly recommends that the university should be defined in terms of the deployment of such methods, it remains the case that scholasticism differs in important ways from the dialectical reasoning techniques characteristic of contemporary university scholarship. The question concerning the university’s role in mediating the paradoxes of globalisation can then be addressed by discussing the potential efficacy of contemporary methods of analysis. To this end I survey Max Weber’s, Jürgen Habermas’s, and Richard Bernstein’s pictures of de-scholasticized dialectical reasoning, and conclude that only Bernstein’s picture would render the university relevant to our New Mediaevalism. Keywords Contemporary university scholarship · Dialectical methods · Dialectical reasoning · Globalization · European universities · New Mediaevalism · Power · Power relations · University J. Rust (*) Department of Philosophy, Stetson University, DeLand, FL, USA e-mail: jrust@stetson.edu © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Zajda, W. J. Jacob (eds.), Discourses of Globalisation and Higher Education Reforms, Globalisation, Comparative Education and Policy Research 27, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83136-3_4 51 52 J. Rust The University and Globalisation as a New Mediaevalism: Introduction Globalisation portends what Hedley Bull calls a “New Mediaevalism” (1977, pp. 254–255; see also Held, 1997, p. 261), wherein the requirements of a politically and commercially interconnected world increasingly impugn on provincial authority. Brexit, Trumpism, and other nationalistic movements are not counterexamples to Bull’s claim, but vivid expressions of it. Bull’s reference is, of course, to the Papal Revolution (1075–1122), wherein the Church of Rome sought to assert centralized religious authority over Europe’s patchwork of emperors, kings, and feudal lords. These efforts culminated in the creation of what legal historian Harold Berman describes as “the first modern state” (2006, p. 4). While imperfect, the comparison between globalisation and the Papal Revolution is nevertheless productive. The first European universities arose in the context and aftermath of the Papal Revolution and played a central role in the continuous renegotiation of ecclesiastical and civil authority. Scholastic dialectical reasoning techniques enabled these scholars to produce new ways of understanding traditional power relations without denying the authority of the texts that would legitimize those relations. This, in turn, raises the question as to the possible ways in which the contemporary university might help us navigate the perils of globalisation. For reasons I describe, I remain cautiously optimistic about the university’s capacity to help reconcile tradition and innovation. However, its potential to do so requires a nuanced appreciation of the scope and power of the dialectical reasoning practices that are definitive of university scholarship. In section “The University, papal revolution, and legal positivism”, I locate the university’s role in the context of the Papal revolution. This discussion, in turn, allows me to define a university, as opposed to other schools of higher education, in terms of the institutionalisation of the dialectical reasoning practices—including, but not limited to scholasticism—that accommodated the transition from traditionalism to legal positivism. In section “The New Mediaevalism”, I develop and problematize the analogy between globalisation and the Papal Revolution, as suggested by Bull’s phrase. While disputants in the Papal Revolution agreed that their power was traditionally anchored in a shared set of authoritative texts (such as the bible, the Justinian corpus, and canon law), thus enabling the scholastics to play a key role in mediating jurisdictional disputes, if the authority of global actors are legitimized via legal-rational enactment, then they have no such recourse. If the dialectical reasoning practices which constitute contemporary university scholarship proceed without the substantive assumptions made by the scholastics, do we have any reason to think that the university can help us negotiate the perils of a New Mediaevalism? In section “What difference can the university make? Three pictures of what descholasticized, discursive reasoning might look like”, I consider Max Weber’s, Jürgen Habermas’s, and Richard Bernstein’s answers to this question. I argue that by partially dissolving the distinction between an Old and New Medievalism, upon which the question is founded, only Bernstein’s approach gives the university a 4 The University and Globalisation as a New Mediaevalism 53 clear path forward. I summarize my findings in section “Conclusion: tradition and traditionalism”. The University, Papal Revolution, and Legal Positivism While all universities are schools of higher learning, I use the word “university” in a quasi-stipulative manner to describe a particular type of school of higher learning that institutionalized dialectical reasoning practices, of which the early European universities of Bologna, Paris, and Oxford are exemplars.1 I also argue that universities play a key role in the establishment of non-traditionalistic modes of legitimate authority. The Origins of European Universities Medievalist Charles Radding describes changes in the practices of medieval scholarship from the eighth century to the late 12th and early 13th centuries, when the first European universities were established. Cathedral schools and monastic scholars in the eighth through tenth centuries focused on collecting, preserving, and arranging authoritative texts. However, the eleventh century saw what Radding calls a “professionalizing trend” in scholarship (1997, p. 1317), wherein some schools came to be seen as especially prestigious, masters began to relocate to such schools, scholarly reputation was increasingly correlated with student employment opportunity, and the opinions of other masters were increasingly noted in commentaries. These changes appear to have been prompted by the eucharistic controversy, which concerned matters that could not be settled by appeals to authoritative texts (Radding, 1997, p. 1318). Additionally, the fact that Europe was fragmented and 1 That I treat the first European universities as exemplary should not imply that universities have not or could not have existed in non-European contexts. As documented by Roy Lowe and Yoshihito Yasuhara, the “received wisdom” is that the university is a uniquely European institution (2013; see also Peters, 2019). For example, Jacques Verger, in his contribution to the influential A History of the University of Europe, asserts that “[n]o one today would dispute the fact that the universities in the sense in which the term is now generally understood, were a creation of the Middle Ages…” (Verger, 1991, p. 35). If university is treated as a historical kind, then it is not implausible that all contemporary universities are historical descendants of the universities of Bologna, Paris and Oxford. However, even if this is the case, this is insufficient to demonstrate the truth of Verger’s claim, as it may be the case that these early European universities are themselves historical descendants of centers of learning in the Muslim word, as argued by Lowe and Yasuhara (2013) and Mehdi Nakosteen (1964). In what follows, I propose a non-historical definition of the university as a functional kind. Institutions might thus count as instances of a university even if there is no historical link, just as the cowrie shells as used by Oceanic communities and U.S. dollar might both qualify as money, even if these institutions originated independently. For a discussion of historical and non-historical institutional kinds see (Epstein, 2014). 54 J. Rust decentralized, and subject to multiple, overlapping legal jurisdictions (civil, canon, feudal, etc.) contributed to the increasing autonomy of these scholars. Relatedly, scholars showed a growing interest in and familiarity with Roman law, culminating with the 1070 rediscovery of the Justinian Digest. This established, in Radding’s words, a “self-regulating and self-sustaining intellectual environment,” in the sense that, first, there were implicit membership criteria which governed who could participate in the scholarly conversation and, second, that successive generations of students ensured the continued vitality of these discussions (Radding, 1997, p. 1321). These trends in scholarship were perpetuated by the Papal Revolution (1076–1122), wherein Pope Gregory VII sought to consolidate and centralize religious authority by undermining the ecclesiastical power of feudal and local rulers. The papal revolution was fueled by a new system of canon law, which lay authorities, in turn, countered by appeal to Roman law. As historian Tamar Herzog notes, a new legal science “was driven by the growing prominence of kings who sought to justify their extending powers, by new municipal corporations and agents who wished to do the same, by papal desires for primacy” (Herzog, 2019, p. 76). In the remainder of this section, I claim, first, that universities are defined in terms of the institutionalisation of dialectical reasoning practices, including scholasticism, and, second that the institutionalized deployment of such practices is a necessary but insufficient step towards legal positivism. Universities Necessarily Institutionalize Dialectical Reasoning Practices Peter Abelard (1079–1142), sometimes called the father of scholasticism, began to articulate a method of investigation which explicitly aimed to identify and resolve the appearance of contradictions in source texts. The twelfth century is characterized by the accelerated development and employment of this dialectical method of thinking and exposition. A core technique of dialectical reasoning is what medieval scholars called the distinctio. If two authoritative text fragments pointed to different solutions to what seemed like the same legal, philosophical, or theological problem, scholars would distinguish various senses of a disputed term in order to render the fragments more coherent. Given the distinction suggested by Radding’s history, which entails that the scholarly practices which characterize a cathedral school are importantly different than those that characterize a university, I make the quasi-stipulative claim that universities, including the first European studium generale at Bologna, are to be distinguished from other schools of learning insofar as they uphold dialectical reasoning as a core scholarly practice. Thus, the cathedral schools and monasteries that stressed the preservation and organization of authoritative texts would not qualify as universities in this sense. Nor would ordinary trade schools, including many ancient Roman and early European law schools. 4 The University and Globalisation as a New Mediaevalism 55 Radding’s history also briefly highlights an additional institutional feature of the university—namely, its relative autonomy from secular and religious authority structures. While European universities were sponsored by such authorities, the socio-political context was such that university scholars enjoyed a relatively high (but not unlimited) degree of autonomy or academic freedom from those sponsors, at least as compared to those who worked within cathedral schools and monasteries. In this way, the university was not simply conceived as an appendage of preexisting ecclesiastical or secular institutions. In summary, universities are (1) institutionalized schools of higher education (2) that stress the deployment of dialectical reasoning practices and (3) are relatively independent from secular and religious authority structures. These conditions enable the university to mediate high-order jurisdictional disputes, the existences of which are typically conditions for its initial creation.2 Note, as discussed in footnote 1, that this non-historical, functional definition of university does not preclude the inclusion of some non-European schools of higher learning that predated the creation of the studium generale at Bologna under the extension of the term. However, it is also the case that many schools of higher education, such as cathedral schools, will not qualify as universities. The Institutionalisation of Dialectical Reasoning Practices as a Step toward Legal Positivism For the traditionalist, social statuses are “perceived as natural” and anchored in “tradition: the validity of the ever-existing” (Weber, 1920a, p. 1007, b, p. 115).3 Thus, the contingency of a social status is masked and hidden, which has the effect of stabilizing the grounds of a status in a felt inevitability (see Rust, 2021). Of course, changes in social statuses are possible. But phenomenologically, such innovations feel like discoveries to the traditionalist (Weber, 1920a, pp. 227, 814–815). By contrast, legal positivists, such as ourselves, anchor the grounds of a status in explicit legal enactment. This mode of legitimization does not attempt to mask the contingency of social statuses, but anchors such statuses, following H.L.A. Hart, in 2 Note that, just as a vehicle can still qualify as a boat whether or not it is actually being used for aquatic transportation (Baker, 2007, p. 52), an institution of higher learning can still qualify as an university whether or not it is in fact involved in the mediation of such disputes. It is also worth re-emphasizing the fact that this functional role is not exclusive to universities; sufficiently independent legal guilds might, for example, also play such a mediating role. 3 The term “anchoring” is social ontologist Brian Epstein’s (2015, pp. 74–87, 2016, pp. 148–149). Anchors roughly correspond to the factors that would explain how Weber’s ideal types of authority are legitimated, and which include the “most varied motives for conformity: from dull habituation to purely purposively rational considerations” (Weber, 1920b, p. 338). For a discussion of the connection between anchoring and modalities of legitimate authority see (J. Rust, 2021, sec. 4). 56 J. Rust the collective acceptance of rules-for-rules—“the Ultimate Rule of Recognition” (Hart, 2012, pp. 94–116). For example, the key effect of England’s “Glorious Revolution” is the transformation of the Crown from an absolute monarchy to a constitutional monarchy. Prior to the Revolution, the authority of the crown was anchored in the traditionalist and absolutist assumption that God appoints the monarch to carry out His will on earth, so that the monarch’s authority is legitimated by this appointment and not through a social contract (Berman, 2006, pp. 234–238). After the Revolution, and from the internal point of view of those subject to the Crown’s authority, the Crown came to have the powers and functions it did in virtue of collective agreement and legal enactment; William III and his successors took an oath to govern “according to the Statutes in Parliament agreed on, and the Laws and Customs of the same” (see Berman, 2006, p. 228; Blackstone, 1872, p. 234). I have argued that universities necessarily involve the institutionalisation of dialectical reasoning practices as applied to authoritative texts, of which scholasticism is an instance. I now make a second claim: the institutionalisation of dialectical reasoning practices is an essential but insufficient step in the movement from traditionalism to legal positivism. Why? As discussed, traditionalism legitimizes hierarchically arranged statuses by appeal to their being natural and inevitable, as described by authoritative texts. Of course, traditionalism is most efficacious when authority and tradition is uncontested. Threats to the ubiquity of a given traditional anchoring regime were common in the ancient world and were typically resolved by forcibly eliminating competing (i.e., heretical) pictures. But there are also contexts, as exemplified in, but not limited to, eleventh and twelfth century Europe, wherein competing and incompatible traditionalist regimes come uneasily to coexist. And in this context, an increasingly institutionalized set of dialectical methods—in this case, scholasticism—emerged explicitly to recognize and address the resulting contradictions. These dialectical methods differ from traditionalist methods of adjudication. It is not, as H.L.A. Hart suggests (2012, pp. 92–93), that traditionalist legal systems are static or inflexible, but rather that any legal or social innovations had to be recast in terms of its having “always been what it is” (for discussion of this point see Rust, 2018, 2021; Weber, 1920a, pp. 814–815). That is, in a traditional order, “[r]ules which in fact are innovations can be legitimized only by the claim that they have been ‘valid of yore,’ but have only now been recognized by means of ‘Wisdom’” (Weber, 1920a, p. 227). By contrast, what the scholastics did was explicitly and selfconsciously surface contradictions in authoritative sources—what Weber calls the “documents of tradition” (Weber, 1920a, p. 227)—in such a way that allowed them to be systemically addressed. This methodology has a distancing effect, such that it becomes at least possible to see a status system as short of inevitable. And such distancing is necessary for legal positivism, which sees statuses as created or enacted, rather than as naturally self-evident or discovered. 4 The University and Globalisation as a New Mediaevalism 57 I have argued that development of a relatively autonomous institution, such as a university, that supports the engagement of authoritative texts by way of dialectical reasoning practices, is necessary for entry into a positivistic legal regime. However, the institutionalisation of such reasoning practices is not sufficient. This is because, while, as illustrated in Fig. 4.1, scholasticism is a version of dialectical reasoning that affords some distance from the authoritative texts so interpreted, it still, unlike other modalities of dialectical reasoning, “presupposes the absolute authority of certain books, which are to be comprehended as containing an integrated and complete body of doctrine” (Berman, 1983, p. 131). Scholastic inquiry, thus, proceeds on the assumptions that (1) there are a shared set of authoritative texts such as the bible, the Justinian corpus (Roman law), and canon law, (2) that these authoritative texts truly describe a naturalized moral and political order, and, so, (3) that any putative contradiction between and within such texts must be the result of a faulty interpretation rather than any flaw or contradiction within the source text itself. While dialectical methods allow scholars to distance themselves from the status systems under investigation, so illuminating the potential contingency of their various grounds, the scholastics’ background assumption that these documents and methods will eventually reveal a natural and coherent moral order entails that the revealed contingency of these statuses and their grounds is ultimately illusory or merely epistemic. Thus, scholasticism represents a kind of dialectically-informed traditionalism, albeit one that helps set the stage for legal positivism by enabling a degree of epistemic distancing. There must be additional factors that would explain the ascendancy of legal positivism. However, as this paper is focused on the university’s contribution to the establishment of legal positivism, I will not here speculate as to what those additional factors might be. Fig. 4.1 Scholasticism as a kind of dialectical reasoning practice dialectical reasoning practices scholasticism - a kind of dialectical reasoning practice that assumes the unassailable authority of shared source texts 58 J. Rust The New Mediaevalism Held (1997) and Bull (1977) observe that the social and political issues promoted by globalisation bear at least a passing resemblance to those raised by the Papal Revolution (1075–1122), which is the soil from which the first European university emerged. As noted, the Papal revolution sought to reclaim ecclesiastical authority from subservience to the dense and heterogeneous fabric of emperors, kings and feudal lords. Berman describes the resulting pan-European Church as “the first modern state” (Berman, 2006, p. 4). Today, as flagged by Brexit, Trumpism, and other expressions of virulent nationalism, it is the authority of the well-establish states that is threatened by globalising forces, formal and otherwise. Citing what Bull calls “A New Medievalism” (Bull, 1977, pp. 254–255), Held writes that. the operations of states in increasingly complex global and regional systems affect both [states’] autonomy (by changing the balance between the costs and benefits of policies) and their sovereignty (by altering the balance between national, regional, and international legal frameworks and administrative practices). … Against this background, it is not fanciful to imagine, as Bull once observed, the development of an international system that is a modern and secular counterpart of the kind of political organization found in Christian Europe in the Middle Ages, the essential characteristic of which was a system of overlapping authority and divided loyalties (Held, 1997, p. 261). Of course, there are important differences between the Papal Revolution and globalisation, beyond the fact that in the former the state was the unifying-agent rather than -patient. While the Papal Revolution set the stage for a centuries-long transition to legal positivism, the context within which that revolution took place was still thoroughly traditionalistic. As discussed, while universities emerged as an institution uniquely suited to adjudicate competing jurisdictional claims, the mode of dialectical reasoning—scholasticism—so employed proceeded on the traditionalist assumption that there are a shared set of authoritative texts that truly describe a naturalized moral and political order. While ecclesiastical and secular interlocutors might sharply disagree about important jurisdictional matters, the fact that such interlocutors worked within a shared horizon of assumptions gave scholastic practices a relatively robust path to conflict resolution. Indeed, the scholastic method was so successful that, over time, it became increasingly difficult to distinguish canon and civil (Roman) law. Applying the scholastic method and constantly conversing with their colleagues studying Roman law, canon-law jurists ended up glossing, commenting, and writing treatises on canon law. They developed vocabularies, extracted principles, and systematized the juridical thinking of the Church. As a result of these similarities in method and places of creation, over time canon and Roman law tended to fuse to such a degree that it was sometimes hard to distinguish between them (Herzog, 2019, p. 85). Because scholasticism is a dialectically-informed modality of traditionalism, it was well-equipped to resolve jurisdictional disputes cast in traditional terms. However, since the jurisdictional issues raised by globalisation assume that a disputant’s authority is anchored, not in the pronouncements of a shared, authoritative text, but 4 The University and Globalisation as a New Mediaevalism 59 in the collectively accepted enactments of a citizen body, what confidence can we have that the de-scholasticized dialectical reasoning practices characteristic of contemporary university scholarship can help resolve these transnational conflicts? In other words, while the university played an essential role in mediating sovereignty conflicts in traditionalist Europe, that the conflicts of a New Mediaevalism take place in a post-traditional context would seem to undermine the university’s continued relevance to resolution. Indeed, if scholarly debates about relatively trivial (or, at least, non-political) issues tend to end in a kind of dialectical stalemate, or else endure through the seemingly endless introduction of conceptual epicycles,4 then what confidence can we have that such scholarly methods could help resolve the pressing and politically fraught matters raised by globalisation? What Difference Can the University Make? Three Pictures of What de-Scholasticized, Discursive Reasoning Might Look like To review, in the context of the Papal Revolution, the university emerged as a relatively autonomous mediator. Thus, I define a university as a relatively independent institution of higher learning that stresses dialectical reasoning practices. Scholasticism represents a particular, traditionalistically inflected version of such reasoning practices, insofar as the scholar attempts to resolve putative contradictions against the background assumption that there are a shared set of authoritative texts that truly describe a naturalized moral and political order. I also claimed that the university was relatively successful—at least prior to the Protestant Revolution— it its ongoing efforts to revise the balance of power between ecclesiastical and civil authorities. But if, as suggested by Hedley Bull and David Held, there is an analogy between the conditions of the old and new Mediaevalism, the point of disanalogy suggest a diminished role for the university in mediating jurisdictional disputes. This is because the scholastic assumptions that were more or less shared by parties to the jurisdictional dispute no longer obtain when our political institutions are anchored in and legitimated by, not the authority of a shared text, but legal enactment. There are no shared substantive assumptions upon which such dialectical practices could operate. And the dialectical reasoning practices characteristic of contemporary university scholarship are too formal and thin—and perhaps too critical and adversarial—to provide much hope that the university will play a central role in helping us resolve the paradoxes of globalisation. In its place, one worries that these disputes 4 For example, philosopher David Chalmers worries that the lack of philosophical convergence on answers to the “big questions of philosophy” is an important indicator that philosophy does not make progress in the way that the natural sciences do (Chalmers, 2013). 60 J. Rust will only be resolved through the brute and arbitrary exercise of political and physical power. Against this dispiriting conclusion, I survey three attempts to mitigate the displacement of dialectical reasoning practices. In so far as the university is a semiautonomous institution dedicated to the deployment of such practices, these attempts would also speak in favor of the university’s role in helping resolve the sovereignty conflicts associated with globalisation. Picture 1: Weber on Dialectical Reasoning as Instrumental Rationality Because non-scholastic dialectical reasoning does not have recourse to the substantive assumptions regarding the truth of a canon of authoritative texts and the naturalness of a political-social order implied therein, Weber argues that it reduces to “instrumentally-rational” (zweckrational) argumentation. While disputants in a jurisdictional conflict can no longer appeal to substantive considerations, as found in a shared set of “documents of tradition,” scholars can nevertheless trace the consequences and implications of a proposed set of policies and ideologies. This is, indeed, exactly the ideal of “clarity” that Weber would have the scholar embrace in the “Science as Vocation” (2004), which involves the capacity to intellectually explore the consequences of the practical standpoints (Weltanschauungen) advocated by different politicians within a given form of life (see J. Rust & Smallpage, 2020). The conceptual topography of a Weltanschauung consists in a network of conditionals which the scholar can make explicit and the politician can exploit. Where, according to Weber’s proposed division of labor, the politician’s domain is that of action (Arendt’s vita active (2018)), the teacher-scholar’s is that of possibility (vita contemplativa). Addressing the politician in the second-person, Weber writes: If you take up this or that attitude, the lessons of science are that you must apply such and such means in order to convert your beliefs into a reality. These means may well turn out to be of a kind that you feel compelled to reject. You will then be forced to choose between the end and the inevitable means. Does the end “justify” these means or not? The teacher can demonstrate to you the necessity of this choice (Weber, 2004, p. 26). On Weber’s picture of de-scholasticized dialectical reasoning, the scholar cannot take a stand on which of these Weltanschauungen to take up, as that requires, not an act of discovery, but an act of Nietzschean will. This is the politician’s task. Still, the hope is that mere instrumental rationality will show that certain standpoints and policies are self-evidently more attractive than others, based on their inferred effects. This is a fair description of how we, in fact, attempt to justify globalist or nonglobalist policies. Where pro-globalists describe the importance of transnational policies to solve global crises, such as climate change, or the productivity gains that come with free trade, anti-globalists cite the job losses that come as companies 4 The University and Globalisation as a New Mediaevalism 61 would export jobs to lower-cost countries. Each of these arguments appeal to the consequences and implications of a given standpoint. On the proposed Weberian view, insofar as the university remains a semiautonomous institution committed to de-scholasticized dialogical reasoning practices, then, and insofar as scholars continue to explore the implications of policy proposals, it would seem like the university remains relevant to our attempts to resolve the political conflicts raised by globalisation, just like the early European university’s deployment of scholastic reasoning was relevant to the resolution of ecclesiastical and civil jurisdictional conflicts. Unfortunately, there are good reasons not to be overly sanguine about instrumental rationality’s capacity to usher us into a new era of global political stability. Weber himself was highly doubtful that the mere scholarly exploration of consequences would yield self-evident solutions. Rather, most policy proposals yield an incommensurable combination of good and bad consequences, or else the long-term implications of a given policy proposal remain opaque due to the non-linear nature of social systems. Thus, Weber cynically embraced the conclusion that political “life is about the incompatibility of ultimate possible attitudes and hence the inability ever to resolve the conflicts between them” (Weber, 2004, p. 27). He characterized a disenchanted, instrumentally rationalized political order as a kind of return to polytheism, wherein multiple gods embody multiple and fundamentally incompatible Weltanschauungen: where instrumental rationality remains the only tool by which our fundamental disputes might be settled, the “numerous gods of yore … arise from their graves” to “strive for power over our lives, and resume their eternal struggle among themselves” (Weber, 2004, p. 24). If university scholarship involves, as Weber suggests, the mere drawing out of the entailments of a practical standpoint, then the university is unlikely to play a key role in the relatively peaceful realization of a post-national social order, because there is little reason to think that mere instrumental rationality provides a path to such order. The university, in other words, would appear less relevant to a New Mediaevalism than it was to the old Mediaevalism. Picture 2: Habermas and Dialectical Reasoning as Moral Discourse If Weber operates with a deflationary conception of non-scholastic dialectical reasoning and arrives at a pessimistic conclusion regarding our ability rationally to resolve the jurisdictional crises prompted by globalisation, Habermas is fairly cast as Weber’s inverse. Because of scholasticism’s substantive commitments to the authority of certain texts and the naturalisation of a given social order, Habermas would describe scholasticism as rationally discursive, but also as a variety of “ethical discourse.” Ethical discourses are such that they locate an individual within the horizon of a particular and contingent form of life. 62 J. Rust But of what use is the university in resolving jurisdictional disputes if the disputants no longer work within the same ethical horizon? We have surveyed Weber’s deflationary answer: de-scholasticized dialectical reasoning practices reduce to brute instrumental rationality, and instrumental rationality is insufficient to resolve the conflicts of sovereignty prompted by globalising factors. Thus, the university, as an institutional home of such practices, is rendered irrelevant, except as a manufacturer of ultimately inconclusive argumentation that politicians might use to advance their agendas (or else, simply be ignored or worse). Habermas offers a more cheerful solution. He outlines a third modality of dialectical reasoning that resists reduction either into the “ethical” (traditionalistic, including the scholastic) or the “pragmatic” (instrumental rationality)—namely, what he calls “moral discourse”. Moral discourse is, like instrumental rationality, merely formal and, so, shorn of substantive, ethical, or traditional assumptions. It is, in other words, a de-scholasticised and de-ethicised mode of dialectical rationality which is not particularistic or limited to a historical group. However, unlike mere instrumental rationality and like ethical discourse, moral discourse has the capacity to bring well-meaning interlocutors to some kind of agreement. As such, moral discourse, unlike pragmatic (instrumentally rational) or ethical (traditional) discourse, is uniquely situated to serve: …a growing need for justification, which, under the conditions of postmetaphysical thinking … can be met only by moral discourse. The latter aim at the impartial evaluation of action conflicts. In contrast to ethical deliberations, which are oriented to the telos of my/ our own good (or not misspent) life, moral deliberations require a perspective freed of all egocentrism or ethnocentrism (Habermas, 1998, pp. 97–98). Moral discourse is guided by a commitment to certain communicative norms which, if followed, will organically orient citizens to the common good: according to moral discourse theory, “practical reasoning no longer resides in universal human rights, or in the ethical substance of a specific community, but in the rules of discourse and forms of argument…” (Habermas, 1998, pp. 296–297). Moral discourse theory involves an open, rule-governed, and critical examination of political and social possibilities and exemplify what Michelle Maiese and Robert Hanna describe as “libertarian-procedural democracy” (2019, pp. 163–164). If moral discourse, as defined by Habermas, is a possible mode of dialectical reasoning, then it also has the potential to revitalize the role and importance of the university as an institution that can mediate sovereignty disputes, as it did following the Papal Revolution, so long as scholars recognize and practice these morally inflected dialogical methods. The possibility of a set of procedural norms that would allow discussants to converge on a solution to fraught concerns about the scope of national sovereignty and other jurisdictional issues would appear to be exactly the antidote we need. Unfortunately, it would also appear to be a kind of chimera. If we consider simple democratic procedures, such as majority rule, it is easy to appreciate how the exercise of such procedures would not guarantee just outcomes; a majority could, for example, vote to strip basic rights from a dissenting minority. Of course, the procedural norms that Habermas promulgates are those which govern discourse. But even 4 The University and Globalisation as a New Mediaevalism 63 then, it remains unclear what would guarantee that such discursive procedures will issue in the promised consensus. After all, Robert’s rules of order also place systematic and agreed upon constraints on conversation, but are hardly a guarantor of just outcomes (Maiese & Hanna, 2019, p. 164). Moreover, as Habermas’ friend and critic Richard Bernstein argues, discourse theory has, despite its claims to substance-neutrality, smuggled in non-procedural, substantive, and non-universal commitments to a “democratic ethos:” To the extent that Habermas’s discourse theory is rationally persuasive, it is because he implicitly, and sometimes almost explicitly, builds substantial-ethical commitments into his theory. … Habermas’s references to good reasons and “the force of the better argument” presupposes such an ethos where participants debate and agree with each other in good faith. Without such an ethos, democracy is always in danger of becoming a mere sham—a set of mere “formal” procedures without any substantial-ethical content—without much democratic content (Bernstein, 1998, pp. 289, 291). More concretely, if there are traditionalists or pseudo-traditionalists who not only fail to share a commitment to scientific and rational norms of argumentation and discourse, but are—as the members of the nativist “Know Nothing movement” were during the U.S. Civil War era—actively and self-consciously skeptical of expertise, the merits of critical discussion, and the possibility of universal mutual regard, then this lays bare the substantive commitments tacitly embedded into the supposed merely procedural norms that constitute Habermasian moral discourse theory. And if this is the case, then moral discourse theory fails to be the promised panacea when it comes to the paradoxes of globalisation, at least insofar as key interlocutors’ social orders remain traditionally anchored. Picture 3: Bernstein and the Caricaturing of Tradition We have surveyed two opposing pictures of de-scholasticised dialectical reasoning and assessed their prospects in helping us resolve the jurisdictional issues raised by globalisation. So far, our answer has been decidedly skeptical. If, as Weber claims de-scholasticised dialectical reasoning is nothing more than instrumental rationality, then we have every reason to expect, as Weber did, perpetual political conflict. Against Weber, Habermas heroically resists the suggestion that de-scholasticized dialectical reasoning—reasoning shorn of the scholasticism’s substantive, “ethical” commitments—reduces to mere instrumental rationality (or what he calls “pragmatic discourse”). There is, on his view, a third modality of discourse—“moral discourse”—that is procedural in the way that pragmatic or instrumentally rational discourse is, but, unlike pragmatic discourse, is capable of issuing in consensus rather than perpetual conflict. However, I have followed Bernstein in arguing that the ideal of moral discourse smuggles in certain substantive notions of what counts as legitimate conversation—notions that some traditionalists explicitly reject—and so is an unpromising solution to the jurisdictional issues raised by globalisation. 64 J. Rust Fortunately, Bernstein’s critical assessment of Habermas’s solution includes an (arguably underappreciated) alternative to the possibility of moral discourse. I shall survey that alternative and draw out its implications as a potential paradigm of higher education. Bernstein’s critique of discourse theory and formulation of an alternative builds from the observation that Habermas’s proposal begins with his drawing an unjustifiably sharp distinction between the ethical (the substantive or traditional) and moral (the merely formal but not instrumentally rational). The core of Bernstein’s thought is this: rather than divide the discursive field into the substantive, traditional, and culturally contingent, on the one hand, and the procedural, moral, and universal, on the other, let us remain open to the possibility that these traditions against which the moral is compared are significantly less provincial and nativist than Habermas appears to think they are. Of course, traditions have this dimension, and some are exhausted by this dimension, but many traditions are also rich enough to include the idea that we might also have obligations to those who are not us. In other words, Bernstein compellingly draws our attention to the caricature of the traditional upon which Habermas’s distinction between the ethical and the moral is founded: Consider “actually existing” ethical traditions. Embedded in their historical contingency are universal demands and obligations. If I identify myself with the Jewish people, I am not limited in my ethical reflections to questions of shared intersubjective values with my fellow Jews. It would make a mockery of this tradition if I did not recognize that I have obligations and responsibilities that transcend my fellow Jews and are relevant to all human beings. … It is a fiction—and indeed a violently distortive fiction—to suggest that ethical discourse is limited to discourse about particular historical groups—that ethical discourse qua ethics never has a genuinely universal scope. It is a fiction to suggest that there are, or ever were, two separate types of discourse—ethics and morals, with two independent logics. Such a dichotomy falsifies both ethics and morals—utilizing Habermas’s terms of art (Bernstein, 1998, p. 301). It is not that Bernstein denies that there are different varieties of obligation that are usefully flagged by the terms, “ethical” and “moral.” Traditions do differentiate an “us” and a “them.” It is rather that he denies that (1) these varieties are categorically distinct and (2) that traditions only acknowledge our provincial, local, or tribal obligations. Rather, most traditions acknowledge that our tribal obligations radiate outward in degrees and are weighted differently under different circumstances. Thus, we should see that within most traditional schemas, “we can distinguish more particularistic and more universal concerns” (Bernstein, 1998, p. 302), rather than simply and a aprioristically identifying tradition with the particularistic. This nuanced description of “actually existing” traditions is lost under Habermas’ ideally typical, mutually exclusive, and exhaustive distinction between the ethical and the moral. This, in turn, has important implications for what de-scholasticised dialectical reasoning might look like. It is not, qua Weber, mere instrumental rationality nor is it, qua Habermas, universally applicable constraints on the possibility of moral discourse. Rather such reasoning processes must involve the patient, thoroughgoing, and historically-informed investigations of the normative topography of “actually existing” human traditions. 4 The University and Globalisation as a New Mediaevalism 65 Of course, the aim of such inquiries cannot be guided by the a priori assumption that every such tradition contains the seeds of a set of political prescriptions already discovered by Western luminaries, as when an undergraduate thinks she has identified the prefigurings of our modern scientific outlook in the fragments of the preSocratic philosophers. While certain parallels of thought might be identified, the investigator must be equally concerned to preserve the distinctiveness of the tradition under investigation. For this reason, ideally, such investigations are spearheaded by those with a felt commitment to, rather than mere interest in, the tradition under investigation. To the extent that we might come to agree on a path forward, we also need to recognize that agreement might be anchored in importantly different ways, so limiting the scope of that agreement. Traditions are complex and often exist in tension with themselves, so a tradition that permits, e.g., female genital cutting might have the resources also to see the practice curtailed, but in a way that makes no reference to universal human rights (e.g., Gruenbaum, 2005). Of course, Bernstein’s prescription that we take tradition seriously does not guarantee consensus. It may be that the implications of some traditions will come to be recognized as simply irreconcilable. But while agreement is not guaranteed, nor is it foreclosed, offering interlocutors a modicum of hope. Moreover, and against Hart’s assumption that traditions are static things (2012, pp. 92–93), traditions not only change, but have within them the resources to understand the possibility of change, although traditionalists also have reasons to avoid describing such changes as “innovations” (Weber, 1920a, p. 227). Thus, an investigation into the nature of a tradition might also prompt welcome changes to that tradition, although such changes must be understood in ways that are internal to that tradition. If Herzog is correct, this was exactly the result of the scholastics’ attempt to better understand the heart of their own traditions: From the twelfth to the sixteenth century (considered the formative period of this new European legal science), scholars (now identified as jurists) debated the principles, terminology, and structures of Roman law. Though they were trying to explain ancient texts, their endeavor did not revive the ancient law of Rome, but instead reinvented it (Herzog, 2019, p. 79). I draw three concluding implications from Bernstein’s suggestion that descholasticized dialectical reasoning must remain profoundly attentive to the substantive or ethical commitments embedded in the traditions of those who would be affected by globalising tendencies. A Revised Paradigm of University Scholarship Bernstein’s outlook preserves a role for the university, so long as it accommodates the comparative and non-comparative investigations of the various substantive traditions which would partially anchor the globe’s various systems of norms and 66 J. Rust statuses. While such investigations need not necessarily take place within the framework of the university, the university provides a serviceable forum within which cross-traditional dialogue might ensue. What this means, however, is that scholars would do well to place less emphasis on the critical, adversarial dimensions of discursive reasoning. We cannot critique a text, tradition, or Weltanschauung until it is understood, and when too much stress is placed on critique, the temptation to mimic understanding through caricature is evidently too great. For this reason, I concur with Kyla Ebels-Duggan’s suggestion that university scholars should be more concerned to foster, both in themselves and in their students, the intellectual virtues of charity, intellectual humility, and tenacity—as captured by HansGeorg Gadamer’s notion of the “anticipation of completeness” (1992)—in addition to the critical and anti-traditional intellectual virtue of autonomy (EbelsDuggan, 2015). Taking History Seriously An outlook that would stress the difference between the ethical-traditional, on the one hand, and a thinner and purer, less substantive notion of either instrumental rationality (Weber) or moral discourse (Habermas) on the other, is one that would diminish the importance of history in understanding ourselves and others. Rationality, on this view, transcends the provincialism of custom. But Bernstein’s positive outlook would have us take history—both our own and others’—seriously. Following in the footsteps of Sir Edward Coke (1552–1634) and anticipating arguments to be advanced by Edmund Burke (1792–1797), the English Jurist Sir Matthew Hale (1609–1676) argues, against Thomas Hobbes (1588–1697), that it is history and not reason alone that imbues law with its force and validity. This suggestion does not stem from an antiquarian or romantic instinct that would mechanically identify the good with the old, but from the thought that laws and policies which endure do so because they reflect, not the exceptional wisdom of one legislative genius, but the cumulative, judicial, and largely unthematized wisdom of countless generations of jurists and juries: “it is a reason for me to prefer a law by which a kingdom hath been happily governed four or five hundred year than to adventure the happiness and peace of a kingdom upon some new theory of my own, tho’ I am better acquainted with the reasonableness of my own theory than with that law” (Berman, 2006, p. 259; Hale as quoted in Holdsworth, 1924, p. 504). To be clear, Hale articulates a historically sensitive form of dialectical reasoning which remains open to change by way of thoroughgoing engagement with a community’s history. He famously compares the law to “the Argonauts Ship” which “was the same when it returned home, as it was when it went out, tho’ in that long Voyage it had successive Amendments, and scarce came back with any of its former Materials” (Hale, 1971, p. 40). 4 The University and Globalisation as a New Mediaevalism 67 In the field of comparative education, Val Rust (2006) uses the notion of restoration, along with receptivity and resistance, to gesture to a version of Bernstein’s historically-informed conception of dialectical reasoning. Where “[m]ainstream ‘modern’ scientists assume that their knowledge has universal validity, and they take for granted that indigenous knowledge is usually community based and context specific” (V. Rust, 2006, p. 29), the scholarly virtue of restoration, so central to the work of the comparativists, challenges this Habermasian assumption. Thus, comparative education’s historical focus itself emerges as a kind of paradigm that ensures the university’s relevance within a New Mediaevalism: “Comparative educators have long been cognisant of the difficulties involved in proposing the adoption of and resistance to policies and procedures beyond a country’s own national context” (Rust, 2006, p. 30). From Tradition to Legal Positivism? Bernstein’s positive suggestion also compels us to reevaluate the terms of the question which initiated the present inquiry. That question was, If the scholastic dialectical reasoning practices of the medieval university helped resolved the jurisdictional conflicts that would undermine the pan-European Church as “the first modern state” (Berman, 2006, p. 4), and if contemporary universities are characterized in terms of the exercise of “de-scholasticized” dialectical reasoning practices, can the university help negotiate the jurisdictional paradoxes prompted by globalisation? This question makes sense if we assume, with Weber and Habermas, that the reasoning practices which characterize contemporary university scholarship are, and unlike those as practiced by the scholastics, entirely devoid of any substantive commitments. However, if Bernstein is correct, this is a false assumption. Dialectical reasoning is always already imbued with substantive commitments. There is no such thing as Kantian-Rawlsian-Habermasian “pure” or “thin” reasoning practices, entirely divested of the ethical. And if this is the case, then we should not sharply distinguish between the dialogical reasoning practices of the scholastics and those which have been “de-scholasticized.” Nor, for the same reason, should we speak simply and without qualification about an anchoring regime change from traditionalism to legal positivism. If there is a difference between what contemporary scholars do and what the scholastics did, it is not that we have unmoored ourselves from the “documents of tradition.” It is only that we have come to better appreciate how our political commitments might be variously but traditionally and ethically anchored in a wide variety of different traditions, including those of which are our own. The solution to this polytheism of anchors is not to leave this polytheism behind, as Habermas would have it, but to dive much deeper into the particulars of these traditions to see if there are any points of overlap between their respective horizons. 68 J. Rust Conclusion: Tradition and Traditionalism I have followed Bernstein in arguing that if the university no longer appears relevant to the jurisdictional disputes that characterize the “New Medievalism” of globalisation, it is because we have too sharply distinguished our “thin” and “formal” dialectical reasoning practices from the “thick,” “ethical,” and “substantive” reasoning practices that are characteristic of scholastic scholarship. As such, these morally or instrumentally rational practices, now devoid of ethical or traditional encumbrances, would seem too airy to help us negotiate the paradoxes of globalisation. Bernstein’s prescription might be summed up with a phrase used by Wittgenstein in a different, but not unanalogous context: “Back to the rough ground!” (Wittgenstein, 1958, sec. 107). Of course, the claim is not that we resume the exact posture of the scholastics. The ethical horizons of those who are subject to the forces of globalisation are not constrained by a shared set of authoritative texts, as was the case in medieval Europe. There is no promise of resolution in a traditionalism that is alternatively called originalism, antiquarianism, romanticism, and reactionism. Instead, Bernstein would have us face the hard truth that our various social orders are anchored, not just in positivistic enactment (although that is not untrue), but in a cornucopia of seemingly incompatible traditions. And those traditions need to be taken seriously if there is any chance that we will find a relatively peaceful way of resolving the jurisdictional disputes that come with globalisation. This is, arguably, part of the force of historian Jaroslav Pelikan’s claim—so often cited by Harold Berman—to the effect that “Tradition is the living faith of the dead, traditionalism is the dead faith of the living” (1986, p. 65). 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