Twilight of the Clerks

On David. A Westbrook’s ‘Social Thought From the Ruins: Quixote’s Dinner Party’

Wassily Kandinsky, Green Accent, 1935, Oil and tempera on canvas

Julien Benda published his most famous study Les Trahision des Clercs (The Treason of the Intellectuals) in 1927. His use of the derogatory French term clerc (a medieval scribe) to denote a mediocre intellectual careerist and bureaucratic functionary was perhaps Benda’s most memorable contribution to modern thought. Yet most have forgotten the prophetic content of the book itself, and its prediction that Europe was “heading for the greatest and most perfect war ever seen in the world.” Benda’s was an acerbic riposte to the intelligentsia of the early 20^th century who had gotten behind the pro-war revanchist cause in France leading up to the Great War. One of them was Édouard Berth, disciple of the arch-herald of political violence Georges Sorel, who in 1914 published Les Méfaits des Intellectuels — a choleric diatribe exhorting intellectuals to abandon their weakness and timidity and embrace the cause of nationalism and war. The bloody consequences of such invectives were borne mostly by France’s youth: 1.3 million of its young men were killed in the trenches. A shocking and little acknowledged statistic from the present internecine war in Ukraine, raging since 2022, is that it has reportedly led to almost as many casualties on both sides. This has also been a conflict partly fomented by the disingenuous and bellicose rhetoric of a similarly dubious array of self-serving clerks — “Atlanticist” liberals and neo-con functionaries. Bureaucrats of various persuasions, clearly motivated by obscure resentments and petty ambition, no longer securely ensconced in universities and dedicated to a “life of the mind,” they roam freely and effetely around Davos, beating the drums of war once again, making themselves agreeable and compliant to the powerful instead of questioning them.

Almost a century later, in a much less antagonistic, more noncommittal manner, legal scholar David. A Westbrook has attempted to broach a similar subject to Benda. A form of intellectual treason is the indirect, hidden theme of his Social Thought From the Ruins: Quixote’s Dinner Party. Its putative subject is the future of the university and the fate of the “North Atlantic” academic class within the humanities. Contrary to Benda, however, Westbrook is of the opinion that this class, to which he belongs, has become too content with viewing its role as one that should oppose power. He maintains that the “People’s University” — the institutions produced by the democratization of higher education since the Second World War — is suffering from a “polycrisis,” which can only be surmounted by reimagining itself as an institution that trains bureaucrats to function in harmony with institutions of hegemonic power rather than try to dismantle them — something more in line with the mission of the post-Enlightenment “Free University,” which sought to create autonomous intellectuals who were adaptable enough to change and shape their world from within institutions.

It would be fair to describe Westbrook ideologically as an enlightened centrist, which is unsurprising given that he is a tenured humanities academic in the U.S. — academic tenure often being a measure of political reliability as much as it is of scholarly merit. To his credit, he is more self-reflective, candid, and skeptical than others of his cohort. The result is a rather odd but nonetheless very fascinating and insightful work. Westbrook views contemporary events through a well-informed historical scope in search of the meaning behind the crisis of the contemporary clerk:

. . . if we look to the rise of the administrative state, the social democracy so beloved by symbolic manipulators like me, the problem deepens: across the North Atlantic, we are watching the delegitimization of the mandarin class, the class created through higher education. And I don’t see how the contemporary can be managed without good bureaucrats, which is what professors like me supposedly are making . . . . Our class has lost the Mandate of Heaven. This is a crisis of Western modernity, of the post-war order, and the University may be the best place to start understanding what has gone wrong.

Westbrook is certainly erudite and appears well read, but being a law professor and social scientist in the contemporary moment, his thought is inevitably too proximate to that genus of cultural anthropology practiced by the Grand Inquisitors of McKinsey & Co. The result is a style too comfortable with those torturous managerial buzzwords painfully familiar to anyone who has spent time around the corporate world. This is not merely a quirk of his style, however. At the book’s close, it will also present his solution to the impending “Twilight of the Clerks.” He proposes that the surfeit of humanities academics resulting from an extended period of overproduction in what he describes as the “critical social sciences” should go forth bravely into the very heart of the beast, offering their services in “para-ethnographic” research to all of the vast, powerful, and indomitable bureaucracies that will continue to dominate the modern world, and which he is adamant are not going anywhere anytime soon. The purpose of his mild PMC version of a “Down to the Countryside” movement is to “humanize” those bureaucracies, to make them more responsive to societal needs, to help them understand themselves and the world better.

Much in this work describes accurately the failings of the Atlanticist (i.e., American or Americanized) intelligentsia, but what limits his disparate treatise — and explains why it is written is such an odd, fragmentary, and perhaps intentionally circuitous way — is that Westbrook still wants to be in the club, to rub shoulders with the “great and the good,” to have some proximity to them and their amusing little dinner parties. He doesn’t subscribe to a universalist conception of humanity and is himself elitist in an almost inoffensive way. He believes that the role of the tenured academic ought to be akin to a sort of English Tory radical, a benevolent practitioner of noblesse oblige:

I am a product of a psycho/cultural/political/social project that has almost disappeared, the construction of what we might broadly call a literature . . . that expressed a culture . . . that edified its elites, positioning them to lead, or at least participate in responsible politics.

Such admissions could be construed as a little presumptuous were it not for the fact that Westbrook is so affable and disarmingly forthcoming when making them that we’re more than prepared to indulge him, if only to ascertain where he intends to go with his argument. Indeed, it is an argument I’ve heard many times before, almost exclusively from other tenured American academics, “good liberals” without exception, some of whom I consider to be good friends and colleagues. They often speak in hushed tones, expressing a timid though nonetheless strong conviction that there will always be a “class of elites,” so better that they are “good people” rather than scoundrels. Yet Benda, writing almost a hundred years ago, had already identified the insincerity of this tendentious rhetoric as a form of particularism that goes against the fundamental interests of a “Universal Humanity”:

The modern “clerk” denounces the feeling of universalism, not only for the profit of the nation, but for that of a class. Our age has beheld moralists who have declared to the bourgeois world (or to the working classes) that, far from trying to check the feeling of their differences from others and to feel conscious of their common human nature, they should on the contrary try to feel conscious of this difference in all its profundity and irreducibleness, and that this effort is fine and noble, whereas every desire for union is here a sign of baseness and cowardice, and also of weakness of mind.

It was Benda’s fervent belief that in denouncing the universal for the benefit of one’s class, the intellectual loses the most enduring claim he has to his honorable vocation in the eyes of the people, thereby reducing him to the reprehensible level of the clerk. It is a grave error for the intellectual to concern himself too much with the “Cult of Success.” Success for the intellectual — who is a caste apart from the warrior and the athlete, however he might wish otherwise — is seldom signified by material success, accolades, and the approbation of those who scarcely understand his vocation or the nature of his work. By “success,” Benda meant:

the teaching which says that when a will is successful that fact alone gives it a moral value, whereas the will which fails is for that reason alone deserving of contempt. This philosophy which is professed by many a modern teacher in political life . . . is also professed in private life, and has borne its fruits there. In the so-called thinking world today there are innumerable people who think they are demonstrating their aristocratic morality by declaring their systematic esteem for all who “succeed” and their scorn for all who fail.

Westbrook expresses his own affable aristocratic credo unevenly; he appears to be an intellectual with a rather tortured attitude towards the cult of success. He is torn between denouncing the obvious failures of elite credentialism, the differences in education given at elite intuitions and public ones — and his residual admiration for his own credentials and those of his friends and colleagues. He himself attended Harvard Law School, but teaches at the State University of New York at Buffalo, where by his own admission he “lies” and then listens to NPR on the drive home wondering “about the sorry state of our political discourse.” The problem seems to be that Westbrook would like to tell the whole unvarnished truth (to power, in fact), but he seems oddly constrained in his ability to do so, perhaps because he still likes being friends with the powerful.

One sometimes gets the feeling that Westbrook, though he would likely protest, is not completely averse to the discussions of “elite human capital” spouted by notable cretins like Curtis Yarvin, and which seem to inordinately preoccupy the emergent tech-nerd plutocracy’s abiding interest in a very peculiar form of eugenics (just don’t make them run or catch a ball). Yet an oversight that he makes throughout this work is that the purpose of the “mandarin class” is to train elite bureaucrats — glossing over the fact that a contemporary academic’s role is in fact no different from a functionary of the administrative state. In my view, the majority of tenured academics in what Westbrook describes as the “North Atlantic” elite are spiritual bureaucrats (“clerks”) as opposed to genuine intellectuals. Westbrook is an anomaly among them; a tenured academic who actively engages with the outside world, which he admirably does on Substack, and is attempting to do in this book. He is to be lauded for these attempts, but his loyalty and enduring fascination towards those whom he deems the intellectual elite shines through in his book. As a result, though it purports to be an excoriation of their failings and the universities they preside over, Quixote’s Dinner Party at times comes across as a strategy document, a memorandum for how this peculiar archetype of the modern clerk — the “Davos man” — might negotiate his continued existence against various existential threats:

Davos Man: I’ve come to the Alps to be an intellectual!

Mephistopheles: It’s not that hard to be a real intellectual. You don’t need to go to the Alps, in fact, it’s not recommended. All I want is your immortal soul. But I should tell you, nobody cares if you’re an intellectual.

Davos Man: You don’t understand, I’m an intellectual with money (power, a huge internet following, etc.)! I’m important!

Mephistopheles: But if it is really about the money, and if you really have money, why do you want to be an intellectual?

What Westbrook implies here, but doesn’t concede completely, is the rich philistinism that permeates this cohort of Atlanticist clerks. Very few are as well read and curious as he is; few are willing to engage in any meaningful forms of public discourse. As he well notes, the majority seem content to wallow in their detached, self-congratulatory, and secure mediocrity, to run out the clock away from public scrutiny. Most don’t strike the public as that impressive or worthy. In previous eras, it was perhaps this sense of worthiness that inculcated trust. The loss of this trust between the public and institutions filled with clerks, such as universities, may partly be due to the fact that those who the public are commanded to respect as their intellectual superiors don’t seem particularly exceptional, or indeed superior. The internet and social media have had a hand in this. The era of “Blue Tick” hegemony, of “huge internet followings” as indicators of merit, seems to have thrown back the veil on the most brash and tryhard among the self-appointed clerk elite, revealing their jockeying for position within a trivial “marketplace of ideas,” exposing petty vanities and paltry motivations far removed from the rarefied decorum previously associated with the noble and virtuous of a bygone era who, despite their own shortcomings, understood instinctively that entering the “public square” without proper poise and attitude exposed one to the possibility of being soiled. Westbrook is, once more, unsure of his appraisal of the contemporary elites that are his friends and colleagues, of whether they should be praised or condemned:

A friend (wealthy, Harvard, etc.) told me the other day, there are only 200 people, right? Well, kinda. Personally, I think this gives too much agency to elites. In particular, I think it endows elites with levels of wisdom about the world and the capacity to shape it that they don’t have, as the historical record pretty clearly shows. So, you have the great and the good, running around Davos repeating the self-evident, until something else becomes self-evident, due to events, changes in fashion, whatever.

The aspiration to become an intellectual, to live a “life of the mind” in the simple sense of reading books and devoting oneself to contemplation, to the possibility of attaining meaning and truth — perhaps even “enlightenment” — was perhaps Westbrook’s own motivation to enter academia. However, he seems uncomfortable with admitting to this directly. He appears to require an additional qualification: the fantasy of being a power broker, a mover and shaker, a “paladin” among the elites, shaping them in something that he calls “responsible politics.” But the contemplation of truth is already the highest pursuit of human existence — against which all others seem trivial in comparison. And to admit to such abstractions is to draw suspicion from one’s petty and politicking academic peers, who consider it naïve and unbecoming to contradict the instrumental justifications they’ve invented for their continued existence to themselves and to the outside world. The problem is that academia has become a system filled with such people; those solely motivated by the fading shimmer that still attaches to status, titles, and credentials. The clerk assumes that respect can be conferred by bureaucratic fiat, rather than a worthiness borne of an unfailing commitment to truth. Westbrook maintains that the academic who still strives to live a simple life of the mind is akin to Don Quixote, trying to become a knight errant in a world where chivalry has ceased to exist. But Westbrook’s Don Quixote is more in the manner of a re-working by that bloviating fictional scholar Pierre Menard (conceived by the incomparable imagination of Jorge Luis Borges) who tried to rewrite Cervantes’ tale line by line from memory, badly and inelegantly. Westbrook, for all his claims to broad erudition, seems to read literature as a social scientist, requiring it only adhere to a singular and narrow instrumental purpose that, rather ironically, is more quixotic than he perhaps realizes. Perhaps the knight errant of La Mancha should have tried, post-PhD, to get himself a cushy ethnographic consulting job at the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund?

To my mind, the most effective contemporary intellectuals across the political divide, both compelling and risible, are in their own ways admirably quixotic. They are typically scholarly misanthropes or dropouts, precarious and lapsed academics temperamentally incapable of the requisite deference and obsequiousness. They read too much and too widely, are far too promiscuous in their intellectual curiosity (a grave sin in the eyes of the specialized clerk). They don’t pay enough lip service to the value of teaching and “shaping young minds.” They are usually graphomaniacs with a penchant for belligerence and antagonism, always spoiling for a fight, never settling down. They exist on the peripheries, at odds with the institution of academia because they can’t keep their mouths shut long enough to get on. Their commitment to intellectualism as a vocation always overrides the bureaucratic mindset required for a traditional career within the modern university system. Some of them have been the most culturally significant thinkers and philosophers of the past few decades, and a similar pattern is evident even looking back across the period of the People’s University described by Westbrook, and even further back to the 19^th century and beyond. Posterity is rarely kind to the materially secure careerist clerk whose ultimate fate, more often than not, is that of relative obscurity. There are already enough overeducated and underemployed scholars out in the world writing and thinking interesting things, mostly without material compensation. They work because they feel an overwhelming need to work — not because they are paid to. It is my impression that they will continue to exist in spite of universities, not because of them. To ask these intellectual eccentrics, cranks, and oddballs to attach themselves to central banks, tech companies, sovereign wealth funds, and corporations so that they may engage in “para-ethnography” can only be detrimental to the vitality of their unorthodox thought. They will not benefit from writing consultancy reports, neither will the bloated bureaucracies that mysteriously possess sufficient resources to engage them, and nor will society at large.

Once, as a postdoctoral researcher at an Institute for Advanced Studies, I was invited to an all-expenses-paid conference for “Leaders of the Next Generation” held in Switzerland. My institute had wanted to send their most brilliant researcher, a prodigious and award-winning biochemist — but since he was unavailable (or as I suspect, unwilling), they decided that the next best thing was to send me, an unremarkable and somewhat indolent scholar of comparative literature. According to their bureaucratic, institutional logic, although I was far from prodigious, I did possess the distinct semiotic advantage of being what was decorously referred to back then as a “visible minority.” None of this was made explicit to me, of course, but it seems to make sense in retrospect. It remains the only time I’ve benefitted from that curious type of “affirmative” largesse, which I’ve never consciously sought and don’t care for at all. However, I wasn’t one to argue against a free jolly to Switzerland to fraternize with bankers, business executives, and think-tank functionaries — who despite their remarkably consistent personality type, tend to be passably fun to drink and hang out with. This was in the years following Trump’s first election, and many of them were still trying to make sense of the resulting atmosphere of impending doom. One of the keynote speakers was a four-star American general once tipped to be a foreign secretary in the nearly-won Democratic administration and now president of an august policy institute. He was, he claimed, a liberal, a feminist, and a patriot. He had something stereotypically picturesque in his aspect; the gruff bearing common to a career military man, an admirable dependability, a nondescript air of danger — he was large and unwieldy with closely cropped hair. One could easily imagine him in the smoke-filled war rooms of a bygone era, waxing lyrical about the philosophical pursuit of war alongside mythological warriors such as General Patton. He seemed quite ill at ease in his new role as a clerk, but determined to make a go of it. It is easy to forget that the most decorated graduating officer of West Point in 1915 (“the class the stars fell on”) was Dwight D. Eisenhower. Despite rising to become Supreme Allied Commander during World War II, the first Supreme Commander of NATO, and the 34^th President of the United States, he was also a man who deeply regretted not seeing action in the First World War, or indeed any “action” at all. His widely acknowledged talent was for logistics, organization, and administration. Eisenhower was the man for a new era — the soldier clerk, in a manner of speaking. And yet his parting warning that the encroachment of corporate interests into the national defense would create a monstrous military-industrial complex ought to have been heeded, since it came from a bureaucrat with intricate knowledge of how such things worked. Eisenhower, in the end, had a commitment to truth and so was a world apart from the clerk.

During the conference small group discussions, we could choose to work with one of the keynote speakers, and naturally I chose the general. The other members of my group were bankers, management consultants, CEOs, startup founders, leaders of NGOs, fast-rising government functionaries from the peripheries of the expansive global “West.” The majority were European but very much “Atlanticist” in affect, always appropriately deferential to our esteemed speaker. I can still remember how grating it was to hear a sycophantic German risk analyst, replete with a comically heavy Bavarian accent, preface his softball question toward our beloved Generalissimo with the phrase “Thank you for your service.” The topic was Trump’s election, the coming age of geopolitical strife, and how best to navigate this atmosphere among the managerial elite, to which everyone present (with the exception of myself) could be assured they belonged. They happened upon several reasons, both implicit and explicit; too much choice, too much internet, too much democracy, too much information, too much “populism.” How could Pax Americana act in ways that were so contrary to its vaunted ideals, its mission, and its interests? “I’m not sure what has happened to my country,” the general declared, a little exasperated, almost apologetically. “But I also don’t understand why the younger generation is so apathetic to what’s happening.” For my part, since my being there was already absurd, I decided to follow the logic of that scenario and not hold anything back. When there was a lull, I calmly offered an explanation.

I told the general that I was only a teenager when his country, with mine dutifully in tow, had invaded Afghanistan and Iraq. Politicians, media commentators, and clerks of every description wholeheartedly supported those invasions and “interventions,” and few, if any, recanted this support. Those actions achieved nothing of note, and in fact made life in those counties immeasurably worse. They made the world by orders of magnitude more dangerous, more violent, and more hateful. They cost obscene amounts of public money, led to the deaths of millions of people, and displaced countless others. They were based on lies, fabrications, untruths, and hypocrisy. None of this was acknowledged, and no one was held to account. This cycle of ridiculous military adventurism was followed by the biggest financial crisis in living memory — a failure of greed, hubris, and spectacular incompetence on an epic scale. It was rewarded with one of the biggest transfers of wealth in human history from the public to the private spheres. None among the “elite,” aside from the occasional scapegoat, was held accountable for their criminal incompetence. Why then are these rather simple causations ignored in discussions of how Trump came to power and of the erosion of trust between the public and institutions and experts?

There were a few sighs, a sharp intake of breath here and there. Then silence. Eventually, the general spoke. He conceded that these were all very good points, and well made, but he also swiftly suggested that we should move on to something else. Later, when smoking a cigarette outside the hotel bar, he gave me a card for the think-tank he presided over, implying that I should get in touch. I understood then that the things that seemed obvious to me were plainly obvious to those among the “elite,” but that if one wished to get on, to perhaps one day become elite oneself — it was necessary not only to accept those things, but to wholeheartedly embrace a degree of mystification towards them, which was necessary to insulate those responsible from any sort of real accountability. However, I also understood that such cynical thinking ought to be abhorrent to anyone who considers themselves an intellectual. The “Mandate of Heaven” ought to belong only to those who strive in all things for the truth, and those incapable of being truthful, particularly to themselves, should not be surprised when they lose the trust of the people. That business card sits on my desk at this very moment, a little worn by age and now out of date. I never did write to the general, who I gather later resigned under a cloud of suspicion. I believe Westbrook when he says that he is, in his own way, striving for truth, but I cannot agree that this is a motivation common to the modern-day class of clerks that infest Davos and elsewhere. I suspect deep down that he is perfectly aware of this.

In his brief postmortem of the failures of the People’s University, Westbrook believes that the humble American scholar of the new People’s University was fatally seduced by the importation of a decadent and activist “French Theory.” More plausible, to my mind, as well as to others more brilliant such as Richard Rorty, was that the pragmatic analytical tradition native to the Anglo-American sphere had hit upon an impasse and a crisis of legitimacy of its own. This was no doubt precipitated by the actions of a state acting far from rationally or pragmatically, and often hypocritically. If the natural and experimental sciences were compelled to throw themselves into service of the government to build guns and bombs, or more sophisticated ways to maim, kill, or psychologically torture and manipulate enemies and citizens alike (these things are a matter of public record) — it was incumbent upon the humanities, still vaguely aware of the lessons inculcated by Benda, to exercise the freedom of intellectual expression they were guaranteed to question why such activities were deemed necessary by the powerful. This was, and remains, an admirable vocation for the intellectual — the truest expression of his raison d’être, even if this purpose has become diluted and thoroughly confused in recent years. And yet, Westbrook also tends to overstate the importance and influence of French Theory in America — which only became a product to export as the result of the French intelligentsia’s own failed revolution, and a subsequent collapse in domestic consumer demand for their theoretical products.

In the wake of the failure of 1968, many radicals entered the universities to begin what they quietly hoped to be a long march through institutions, to change them from within — motivated by an optimistic strategy strangely akin to that of Westbrook’s “humanizing” proposal. They soon discovered, however, that as they aged and mellowed, the desire for safety, security, and stability won out over the appetite to enact revolutionary change. Those same radicals became seduced by their institutions, which flattered and assured them that they could still be “radical” in word (and not radical in deed). They were provided with leadership roles, sinecures, positions of cultural influence, and eventually compelled to abandon any effort at affecting broad material social change in exchange for the illusion of individual participation, for what Jean Baudrillard described as the “bribe of subjecthood.” This was amply reflected in the type of theory that emerged in America from the 1980s to the present — solipsistic, insular, subjective, identitarian — and that mostly left intact the fundamental base of social relations, namely a society’s economic structure, which was rarely if ever brought into question. Capitalism is ethically Protestant, as Max Weber posited, and America remains an ethically Protestant polity even within the catechisms of its secular political theology, which despite an emphasis on democratic principles, still sanctifies individual ambition over and above any notion of universal humanity. Thus, long after any spiritual sense of the moral value of hard work and duty have been vacated from public institutions, their less desirable byproduct still remains — an avaricious pecuniary logic lurking in the shadows, the persistent and poisonous idea that individual worldly salvation (qua “self-actualization”) can be bought and sold, at whatever cost to wider society. Indeed, among the myriad explanations Westbrook gives, the untrammeled marketization and financialization of higher education since the 1980s is given relatively short shrift.

An American academic editor at a big university press once candidly informed me that it’s advisable to give the entire thesis — or “pay-off” in his words — for an academic monograph within the first ten pages of the introduction, since most scholars don’t read beyond this point. It should be noted that academic monographs are usually a requirement for a permanent position within a modern university, and the quality of this output is judged mostly on the ranking and reputation of the university press that publishes it. It is also worthwhile to note that these monographs sell at most a few hundred copies to research libraries, and usually cost upwards of $80, priced out of reach for everyday readers. The authors rarely, if ever, receive any money for this effort — which they typically spend five years researching and writing, usually indirectly funded by public money. The academic monograph is less a work for public consumption, or indeed a piece of work aimed at one’s scholarly peers — who apparently only skim the introduction. It is a rite of passage, an initiation (part potlatch, part humiliation ritual) into a guild that in this day and age rarely guarantees a secure job or a livelihood.

I was pleased to see that Westbrook’s book, weird and refreshingly unscholarly as it is, has been published via an academic “open access” license agreement. This means that he has managed to pay $13,500 in additional publications fees to his publisher, Routledge, so that this book (perhaps the fruit of years of contemplation within publicly funded institutions and grants) can be glanced at by a handful more readers among a largely indifferent and oblivious reading public than usual. Academic publishing is a racket, a cartel that makes vast profits from privatizing access to knowledge and research produced by public money. Much like legacy media publications, and universities themselves, these publishers exist on the remnants of prestige and brand loyalty, which younger generations thankfully feel no inclination to respect. This model is self-evidently unsustainable, and to my mind its continued existence is indefensible. But it is the inevitable result of a certain economic logic; a process of borderline criminal financialization, of asset-stripping as a legitimate business model, consistently present in the economic landscape common to the “North Atlantic” presided over by the Davos clerk, and particularly within the monolithic corporate bureaucracies that Westbrook opines academics should be trained to serve.

Tuition fees at Harvard University are $89,000 per year. This is, of course, an elite institution and apparently worthy of the price tag. And yet, at Westbrook’s own SUNY Buffalo, where the curriculum appears to consist of teaching students that “they are weak and their world is shit,” the price of that invaluable wisdom seems also to be quite steep at $32,366 per year. I need only note that for my undergraduate degree at the University of Glasgow (established in 1453 and alma mater of Adam Smith, the “Father of Capitalism”), I was rather oddly charged nothing in tuition fees. I note also that this is the case at the vast majority of European universities, particularly in Germany where I’ve worked, where students usually pay €250 in admin and registration fees and where humanities academics — like school teachers — are paid a decent middle-class salary by the government as civil servants. They manage to write, think, and produce research generally on a par with what is produced in the U.S. This is not to say that a country like Germany, particularly cloying and slavish in its cultural Atlanticism, doesn’t have its own share of egregious, petty, politicking clerks and intellectually irrelevant mediocrities. But that, even within the confines of the North Atlantic capitalist system Westbrook admires, the financialization model of higher education in America (like its monstrous healthcare system, pharmaceutical industry, and for-profit prisons), is obviously stupid, unproductive, and clearly designed and championed by incompetent and rapacious morons. It is quite plainly a much bigger factor in the cultural degradation of universities, and the lives of academics, than Westbrook allows.

That Westbrook wrote some years before a spirited “defense” of capitalism goes some way to explaining why, within the disorientating array of complex analyses that make his study at times a tad overdetermined, the relatively straightforward example of the privatization and financialization of education receives only brief attention. For him, the 2008 financial crisis was pointedly a failure of bureaucracy and bad ideas, not a problem of greed. The crisis of the university, and thus of the Western “administrative state,” can therefore be solved by academics training more and by better bureaucrats. It is the nature of bureaucracies to proliferate themselves, and this is the case for academia as it is for any other bureaucracy. But the problems of moribund bureaucracies, and the palpable anomie and misery they produce, can never be ameliorated by a more sophisticated, enlightened, and intellectual bureaucracy. It would better suit our intellectuals to commit themselves to truth, to the cause of a universal humanity, despite the consequences it might have for their individual “career.”

Overall Quixote’s Dinner Party is an informative work though it isn’t, unfortunately, a particularly compelling read. At times quite inelegant in his phrasing, Westbrook consistently succumbs to the temptation for quips, puns, and asides that, after the first dozen attempts, cease to be endearing and quickly become cumbersome. The introduction takes great pains to communicate the work’s form as an unorthodox text, experimental in nature, based on that time-honored ritual of dignified middle-class agápē: the dinner party. This framing device might seem at first to be satirical, since in Britain at least the image of the dinner party crowd forms the most memorable source of public contempt and mockery towards the frivolity of the “chattering class.” This isn’t intended as satire, however. Westbrook genuinely believes in the world-historical import of the conversations that take place at the clerks’ table. In truth, the author’s voluble conversational style, undoubtedly pleasant in his teaching practice, isn’t becoming of the weightiness he wishes to endow his topic. One reviewer charitably pointed out that the form might be taken as an attempt at Bakhtinian heteroglossia, but this isn’t convincing. My feeling is that the subject matter would have been far better served by a more straightforward style. This is, after all, an intellectual work aimed at a certain reader, who being an academic clerk, is likely a skimmer. Such a reader will probably succumb to the temptation to gloss over Westbrook’s more trenchant criticisms of their own failings, and arrive instead at the book’s general thrust, which ends as a rather benevolent apologia for a class of functionaries whose signal characteristic is an undue sense of their own value and importance, and whose motivation appears to be survival at all costs — at least until retirement.

It is a work aimed at the “wealthy, Harvard, etc.” philistine, the middling North Atlantic clerk poncing around the unkempt “Gardens of the West,” perhaps waxing lyrical about the lowly hospitality they received at Davos and aspiring only for more, brandishing near-worthless credentials in lieu of substance or compelling thought; puzzlingly bemoaning that the public no longer respects them or their positions, flattering the actions of an increasingly unhinged and brazen coterie of plutocrats, all the while tacitly endorsing and defending a demonstrably compromised and morally bankrupt political order and its catabolic economic system, to which they owe their careers and consequently their entire sense of self-worth. This suicidal system will eventually fail them too; it appears to be circling the drain, enmeshed in a death spiral of legitimacy, more fatally wed to self-serving hypocrisy than the fundamental values it was supposedly founded upon. The “Davos Man” thinks him some sort of fateful Faustian figure, and not some forgettable and middling buffoon, worthy only of faint ridicule and mild derision, if he is thought of at all. Let us hope that he is made to suffer the disconsolate fate of obscurity worthy of all clerks.

Udith Dematagoda is an author, literary scholar, and publisher of Hyperidean Press. He writes about literature, philosophy, and contemporary culture on the Substack Immanent Dissolution.