Democracy's promise and the politics of worldliness: implications for public intellectuals.

In the United States, a war is not only being waged abroad, but also at home. Young people increasingly find themselves out of work, warehoused in substandard schools, or under the jurisdiction of the criminal justice system; people of color are being incarcerated at alarming rates and immigrants are increasingly treated as criminals or threats to national security. However, these groups are not the only targets. Universities are accused of being soft on terrorism; dissident artists are increasingly branded as un-American because of their critiques of the Bush administration; homophobia has become the poster-ideology of the Republican Party; and a full-fledged assault on women's reproductive rights is being championed by Bush's evangelical supporters--most evident in Bush's two recent Supreme Court appointments. An incessant assault on critical thinking itself and a rising bigotry have undercut the possibility for providing a language in which vital social institutions can be defended as a public good. Moreover, as visions of social equity recede unfettered from public memory, brutality, self-interest, and greed combined with retrograde social policies make "security" and "safety" top domestic priorities. As the spaces for producing engaged citizens are either commercialized or militarized, the crushing effects of domination spread out to all aspects of society, and war increasingly becomes the primary organizing principle of politics. (1)

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Unfortunately, the university offers no escape and little resistance. Instead, the humanistic knowledge and values of academia are being excised as higher education becomes increasingly corporatized and stripped of its democratic functions. The appeal to excellence by university leadership functions as a corporate logo, hyping efficiency while denuding critical thought and scholarship of any intellectual and political substance. In the corporate university, academics are now expected to be academic entreprencurs whose value largely depends on the grant money they attract, rather than the quality of education they offer to students. (2) As the university is annexed by defense, corporate, and national security interests, critical scholarship is replaced by knowledge for either weapons research or commercial profits; just as the private intellectual now replaces the public intellectual, and the public relations intellectual supplants the engaged intellectual in the wider culture. In addition, faculty are increasingly downsized and turned into an army of part-time workers who are overworked and underpaid, just as graduate students are reduced to wage slavery as they take over many undergraduate teaching functions.

It is important to note that such attacks on higher education in the U.S. come not only from a market-based ideology that would reduce education to training and redefine schools as investment opportunities; they also come from conservative Christian organizations such as the American Family Association (AFA), as well as conservative politicians, and right-wing think tanks. These groups have also launched an insidious attack on peace studies, women's studies, Middle Eastern studies, critical pedagogy, and any field that challenges the "orthodoxy of the doctrinaire right-wingers" and is critical of the aims and policies of the Bush administration. (3) This is the same administration that alludes to gay married couples as "terrorists," while saying nothing about U.S. involvement in the torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib prison (or any of the other secret prisons run by the Central Intelligence Agency [CIA]) or the U.S. policy of "extraordinary rendition" that allows the CIA to kidnap people and send them to authoritarian countries to be tortured. (4)

The frontal nature of such attacks against both dissent and critical education can also be seen in attempts by conservative legislators in Ohio and a number of other states to pass bills such as the Academic Bill of Rights, which argues that academics should be hired on the basis of their conservative ideology not only in order to balance out faculties dominated by left-wing professors, but also to control what conservative students are taught, allegedly immunizing them against ideas that might challenge or offend their ideological comfort zones. Professors who address critical issues in their classrooms, push the borders of critical inquiry, and encourage students to question authority are condemned for teaching propaganda. For instance, the governor of Colorado called for the firing of Professor Ward Churchill because of an essay he wrote shortly after 9/11 in which he condemned U.S. foreign policy. Senator Rick Santorum introduced legislation that would have cut federal funding to universities that allowed faculty and students to criticize Israel. Additionally, U.S. Congressman Anthony Weiner from New York called for the firing of Joseph Massad, a Columbia University professor, who has been critical of Israeli policies against Palestinians. Under the guise of patriotic correctness, conservatives want to fire prominent academics such as Churchill and Massad because of their opposition to U.S. foreign policy while completely ignoring the quality of their intellectual scholarship. Of course, such attacks are not limited to academics. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman called upon the State Department to draw up a blacklist of those critics he calls "excuse makers," which included those who believe that U.S. actions are at the root cause of violence. According to Friedman, "These excuse makers are just one notch less despicable than the terrorists and also deserve to be exposed." (5) Challenging the current conservative wisdom--that is, holding views at odds with official orthodoxy--has now become the grounds for being labeled un-American, dismissed from one's job, or put on a government blacklist.

Higher education has also been attacked by right-wing ideologues such as Lynne Cheney and David Horowitz, who view it as the "weak link" in the war against terror and a potential fifth column. (6) Horowitz, in particular, acts as the figurehead for various well-funded and orchestrated conservative student groups such as the Young Americans for Freedom and College Republicans, which perform the groundwork for his "Academic Bill of Rights" policy efforts that seek out juicy but rare instances of "political bias" in college classrooms. (7) These efforts have resulted in considerable sums of public money being devoted to hearings in multiple state legislatures, most recently in Pennsylvania, in addition to helping impose, as the Chronicle of Higher Education put it, a "chilly climate" of self-policing of academic freedom and pedagogy. (8) At the University of California, Los Angeles, the Bruin Alumni Association has posted on its Web site an article called "The Dirty Thirty" that targets the university's "most radical professors" and states as its mission the task of exposing and combating "an exploding crisis of political radicalism on campus." (9) The Bruin Alumni Association does more than promote a "McCarthy-like kind of smear," intolerance, and anti-intellectualism through a vapid appeal for "balance"; it also offers $100 prizes to students willing to provide information on their teachers' political views. (10) Rather than genuinely protest pedagogical demagoguery, such tactics not only inject a climate of fear and suspicion in the classroom, they also discredit the spirit of critical inquiry and legitimize a deadening conformity. Within this discourse, education becomes the measure by which critical thought and social responsibility can be escaped.

In spite of their present embattled status and the inroads made by corporate power, the defense industries, and the neoconservative Right, universities and colleges remain uniquely placed to prepare students to both understand and influence the larger educational forces that shape their lives. As Edward Said observed, "It is still very fortunately the case, however, that the American university remains the one public space available to real alternative intellectual practices: no institution like it on such a scale exists anywhere else in the world today." (11) Such institutions--by virtue of their privileged position, division of labor, and alleged dedication to freedom and democracy--also have an obligation to draw upon those traditions and resources capable of providing a critical, liberal, and humanistic education to all students in order to prepare them not only for a society in which information and power have taken on new and potent dimensions, but also for confronting the rise of a disturbing number of anti-democratic tendencies in the most powerful country in the world and elsewhere across the globe.

Part of such a challenge means that educators, artists, students, and others need to rethink and affirm the important presuppositions that higher education is integral to fostering the imperatives of an inclusive democracy and that the crisis of higher education must be understood as part of the wider crisis of politics, power, and culture. Jacques Derrida argued that democracy contains a promise of what is to come and that it is precisely in the tension between the dream and the reality of democracy that a space of agency, critique, and education opens up and signals both the normative and political character of democracy. (12) But, as Derrida is well aware, democracy also demands a pedagogical intervention organized around the need to create the conditions for educating citizens who have the knowledge and skills to participate in public life, question institutional authority, and engage the contradiction between the reality and promise of a global democracy. For Derrida, democracy must not only contain the structure of a promise, but it must also be nurtured in those public spaces in which "the unconditional freedom to question" becomes central to any viable definition of individual and social agency. (13) At stake here is the recognition that if democracy is to become vital, then it is imperative to create citizens who are critical, interrogate authority, hold existing institutions accountable for their actions, and are able to assume public responsibility through the very process of governing. (14) In Derrida's perspective, the university "should thus be a place in which nothing is beyond question, not even the current and determined figure of democracy, and not even the traditional idea of critique." (15) The role of the university in this instance, and particularly the humanities, should be to create a culture of questioning and resistance aimed at those ideologies, institutions, social practices, and "powers that limit democracy to come." (16) Derrida's views on higher education and democracy raise important questions not only about the purpose of higher education, but also what it means for academics to address what the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman calls taking "responsibility for our responsibility." (17)

Part of the struggle for viewing the university as a democratic public sphere and a site of struggle against the growing forces of militarism, corporatism, neoconservatism, and the religious fundamentalism of the Christian Right demands a new understanding of what it means to be a public intellectual, which in turn suggests a new language for politics itself. Central to such a challenge is the necessity to define intellectual practice "as part of an intricate web of morality, rigor and responsibility" that enables academics to speak with conviction, enter the public sphere in order to address important social problems, and demonstrate alternative models for what it means to bridge the gap between higher education and the broader society. (18) This is a notion of intellectual practice that refuses both the instrumentality and privileged isolation of the academy while affirming a broader vision of learning that links knowledge to the power of self-definition and the capacities of administrators, academics, students, and artists to expand the scope of democratic freedoms, particularly as they address the crisis of the social as part and parcel of the crisis of democracy itself. This is the kind of intellectual practice that is attentive to the suffering of others and "will not allow conscience to look away or fall asleep." (19)

Cornel West has argued that we need to analyze those dark forces shutting down democracy, but "we also need to be very clear about the vision that lures us toward hope and the sources of that vision." (20) In taking up this challenge, I want to examine Said's notion of worldliness and analyze its implications for both the nature of what it means to be a public intellectual and what it would mean to make the pedagogical more political. Said is particularly relevant here because his work embodies both a particular kind of politics and a specific notion of how intellectuals should engage public life. For Said, worldliness connected texts, knowledge, representations, and intellectual practice to the world. He wrote:

  Worldliness--by which I mean at a more precise cultural level that all
  texts and all representations were in the world and subject to its
  numerous heterogeneous realities--assured contamination and
  involvement, since in all cases the history and presence of various
  other groups and individuals made it impossible for anyone to be free
  of the conditions of material existence. (21)

Few intellectuals have done more within the last four decades to offer a politics of worldliness designed to confront the crisis of democracy under the reign of neoliberalism, neocolonialism, and the emerging fundamentalisms throughout the world than Said, one of the most widely known, influential, and controversial public intellectuals of the latter part of the twentieth century.

In what follows, I want to connect the promise of democracy to Said's notion of worldliness and how it shaped both his important consideration of academics as oppositional public intellectuals and his related emphasis on cultural pedagogy and cultural politics. (22) From the time of his own political awakening after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, Said increasingly became a border crosser, moving between his Arab past and his New York present, mediating his fierce defense of Palestinian rights and the demands of a university position. His academic post gave him the freedom to write and teach, while at the same time, represent an institutional power that sought to depoliticize the politics of knowledge or, to use Said's terms, to "impose silence and the normalized quiet of unseen power." (23) Said embraced the idea of the "traveler" as an important metaphor for engaged intellectuals. As Stephen Howe points out, for Said,

  It was an image which depended not on power, but on motion, on daring
  to go into different worlds, use different languages, and "understand
  a multiplicity of disguises, masks, and rhetorics. Travelers must
  suspend the claim of customary routine in order to live in new rhythms
  and rituals ... the traveler crosses over, traverses territory, and
  abandons fixed positions all the time. (24)

And as an intellectual and traveler, Said embodied the notion of always "being quite not right," evident by his principled critique of all forms of certainties and dogmas and his refusal to be silent in the face of human suffering.

Said's view of the engaged public intellectual, particularly his admonition to intellectuals to function within institutions, in part, as exiles, "whose place it is publicly to raise embarrassing questions, to confront orthodoxy and dogma (rather than to produce them), to refuse to be easily co-opted by governments or corporations," (25) offered a model of social engagement that redefined the role of the oppositional and public intellectual. This politically charged notion of the oppositional intellectual as homeless--in exile, and living on the border, occupying an unsutured, shifting, and fractured social space in which critique, difference, and a utopian potentiality can endure--provided the conceptual framework for generations of educators fighting against the deadly instrumentalism and reactionary ideologies that shaped dominant educational models at the time. (26) Said provided many of us both in and out of the academy with a critical vocabulary for extending the meaning of politics and critical awareness. In part, he did this by illuminating the seductions of what he called the cult of professionalism with its specialized languages, its neutralizing of ideology and politics through a bogus claim to objectivism, and its sham elitism and expertise rooted in all the obvious gendered, racial, and class-specific hierarchies. He was almost ruthless in his critique of a narrow ethic of professionalism with its "quasi religious quietism" and its self-inflicted amnesia about serious sociopolitical issues. (27)

For Said, the cult of professionalism separated culture, language, and knowledge from power and in doing so avoided the vocabulary for understanding and questioning how dominant authority worked through and on institutions, social relations, and individuals. Rooted in narrow specialisms and thoroughly secure in their professed status as experts, many full-time academics retreated into narrow modes of scholarship that displayed little interest in how power was used in institutions and social life to include and exclude, provide the narratives of the past and present, and secure the authority to define the future. (28) Said was particularly critical of those intellectuals who deny the possibility of linking understanding and critique to the ability to intervene in public life. He was insistent that many intellectuals had become prisoners of their own specialisms, insularity from public life, and distorted sense of professionalism. As such, they not only undermined the space of the university as a democratic public sphere but exhibited a slightly disguised disdain for those oppositional intellectuals dedicated to locating the energy of resistance in their own teaching and cultural work. Said argued, instead, against the insularity of such positions, one that has a tendency to ignore questions of intervention and degenerate into scholasticism, formalism, or career opportunism. We can get a glimpse of how this discourse plays out politically in a New York Times op-ed article in which Stanley Fish urged academics "to just do their jobs, to keep their intellectual work within the ivory tower, and to avoid crossing," as he put it, "the boundary between academic work and partisan advocacy." Oddly reversing one of Marx's most important ideas, Fish argues, "Our job is not to change the world, but to interpret it." (29) This is also a far cry from John Dewey's call to link education to the creation of an articulate public. In opposition to Fish's retreat from understanding education as a moral and political practice rather than a merely contemplative one, Said's view of education links knowledge and learning to the performative and worldly space of action and engagement, energizing people to not only think critically about the world around them but to also use their capacities as social agents to intervene in the larger social order and confront the myriad forms of symbolic, institutional, and material relations of power that shape their lives. In my view, it is precisely this connection between pedagogy and agency, knowledge and power, thought and action that must be mobilized in order to confront the current crisis of authoritarianism looming so large in the U.S. and elsewhere around the globe today.

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Said was especially critical of those intellectuals who slipped into a kind of professional somnambulism in which matters of theory had less to do with a conscious challenge to politics, power, and injustice than with either a deadening scholasticism or a kind of arcane cleverness--a sort of narcotic performance in fashionable irony--which, as he suggested, neither threatened anyone nor opposed anything. He was especially ill at ease with what he called the "special private languages of criticism and professionalism" and thought "it was much more important ... that people write in order to be understood than write in order to be misunderstood." (30) He was extremely disheartened by the academic turn in literary theory and cultural studies toward a depoliticized postmodernism in the 1980s, and he viewed such a turn as an unacceptable retreat from one of the primary obligations of politics and intellectuals, "to reduce the violence and hatred that have so often marked human social interaction." (31) He was extremely critical of a kind of religious model of criticism, which amounted to an "elaboration on elaboration" on sacred texts rather than a critical commentary on the power and authority that made such texts possible. (32)

Refusing to separate learning from social change, he constantly insisted that we fail theory when we do not firmly grasp what we mean by the political. To Said, theorizing politics of and for the twenty-first century was one of the most challenging issues facing the academy. He urged us to enter into a dialogue with ourselves, colleagues, and students about politics and the knowledge we seek to produce together, and to connect such knowledge to broader public spheres and issues. He argued that the role of engaged intellectuals was not to consolidate authority but to understand, interpret, and question it. (33) According to Said, social criticism had to be coupled with a vibrant self-criticism, the rejection "of the seductive persuasions of certainty," and the willingness to take up critical positions without becoming dogmatic or intractable. (34) Moreover, he insisted that critical intellectuals pluralize the sites of resistance and social change.

Accepting the demands of worldliness, for Said, implied giving voice to complex and controversial ideas in the public sphere, recognizing human injury beyond the privileged space of the academy, and using theory as a form of criticism to redress injustice. (35) Worldliness required not being afraid of controversy, making connections that were otherwise hidden, deflating the claims of triumphalism, and bridging intellectual rigor and clarity, on the one hand, and civic courage and political commitment on the other. Worldliness as a pedagogical construct meant using theory as a resource, recognizing the worldly space of criticism as the democratic underpinning of publicness, and defining critical literacy not merely as a competency, but as an act of interpretation linked to the possibility of intervention in the world. Worldliness pointed to a kind of border literacy in the plural in which people learned to read and write from multiple positions of agency; it was also indebted to the recognition forcibly stated by German political theorist Hannah Arendt that "Without a politically guaranteed public realm, freedom lacks the worldly space to make its appearance." (36)

What is particularly important about Said's work is his recognition that intellectuals have a special responsibility to promote a state of wakefulness by moving beyond the language of pointless denunciations. As such, he refused to view the oppressed as doomed actors or power as simply a crushing form of oppression. For Said, individuals and collectivities had to be regarded as potential agents and not simply as victims or ineffectual dreamers. It is this legacy of critique and possibility, of resistance and agency, that infuses his work with concrete hope and offers a wealth of resources to people in and out of the academy who struggle on multiple fronts against the rising forces of authoritarianism.

So much of what Said wrote and did with his life offers both a model and inspiration for what it means to take back politics, social agency, collective struggle, and the ability to define the future. Said recognized with great insight that academics, students, and other cultural workers had important roles to play in arousing and educating the public to think and act as active citizens in an inclusive democratic society. Most importantly, he called upon such groups to put aside their petty squabbling over identities and differences and to join together collectively in order to become part of what he called a fully awakened, worldly coalition that would be actively opposed to those forces at home and abroad who are pushing us into the age of totalitarianism without anyone even complaining or, for that matter, even noticing. (37) Near the end of his life, Said argued that the U.S. government was in the hands of a cabal, a junta "dominated by a group of military-minded neoconservatives," that posed a grave threat to world peace and global democracy--a sentiment now being echoed by Seymour Hersh, Robert Kennedy Jr., and Gore Vidal. (38)

Both Said and Derrida insisted rightly that democracy demands the most concrete urgency. Of course, urgency is not only a response to the crisis of the present, increasingly shaped by the footprint of an emerging authoritarianism wielded through the anonymous presence of neo-liberal capitalism and a number of other anti-democratic tendencies, but also connected to the future that we make available to the next generation of young people. How much longer can we allow the promise of democracy to be tainted by its reality?

Making pedagogy and education central to the political tasks of reclaiming public space, rekindling the importance of public connectedness, and infusing civic life with the importance of a democratic worldly vision is at the heart of opposing the new authoritarianism. Arendt recognized that any viable democratic politics must address the totality of public life, refusing to withdraw from such a challenge in the face of totalitarian violence that legitimated itself through appeals to safety, fear, and the threat of terrorism. (39) She writes: "Terror becomes total when it becomes independent of all opposition; it rules supreme when nobody any longer stands in its way. If lawfulness is the essence of non-tyrannical government and lawlessness is the essence of tyranny, then terror is the essence of totalitarian domination." (40) The promise of a better world cannot be found in modes of authority that lack a vision of social justice, renounce the promise of democracy, and reject the dream of a better world, offering instead the pale assurance of protection from the nightmare of an all-embracing terrorism. Against this stripped down legitimation of authority is the promise of public spheres that in their diverse forms, sites, and content offer pedagogical and political possibilities for strengthening the social bonds of democracy, new spaces from which to cultivate both the capacity for critical modes of individual and social agency and the crucial opportunities to form alliances to collectively struggle for a biopolitics that expands the scope of vision, operations of democracy, and the range of democratic institutions--that is, a biopolitics that fights against the terrors of totalitarianism. In a complex and rapidly changing global world, public intellectuals are confronted with the important task of taking back control over the conditions of intellectual production in a variety of venues and forms in which the educational force of the culture takes root and holds a powerful grip over the stories, images, and sounds that shape people's lives throughout the globe. Such sites constitute what I call "new spheres of public pedagogy" and represent crucial locations for a cultural politics designed to wrest the arena of public debate within the field of global power away from those market forces that endlessly commodify intellectual autonomy and critical thought while appropriating or undercutting any viable work done through the collective action of critical intellectuals. Such spheres are about more than legal rights guaranteeing freedom of speech; they are also sites that demand a certain kind of citizen informed by particular forms of education, a citizen whose education provides the essential conditions for democratic public spheres to flourish.

Cornelius Castoriadis, the great philosopher of democracy, argues that if public space is not to be experienced as a private affair, but as a vibrant sphere in which people experience and learn how to participate in and shape public life, it must be shaped through an education that provides the decisive traits of courage, responsibility, and shame, all of which connect the fate of each individual to the fate of others, the planet, and global democracy. (41) Artists, cultural workers, youth, and educators need to create new discourses of understanding and criticism, but also offer up a vision of hope that creates the conditions for multiple collective and global struggles that refuse to use politics as an act of war or markets as the measure of democracy. Democracy's promise demands more justice, not more ritual. Democracy is a site of struggle whose outcome is always uncertain but whose future should never remain in doubt.

HENRY A. GIROUX is the Global Television Network Chair in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada.

NOTES

1. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin Press, 2004).

2. See Henry A. Giroux and Susan Searls Giroux, Take Back Higher Education (New York: Palgrave, 2005).

3. Con Lehane, "An Interview with Noam Chomsky," Thought and Action (Fall 2005), 94.

4. Jane Mayer, "Outsourcing Torture," The New Yorker (February 14, 2005).

5. Thomas Friedman, "Giving the Hatemongers No Place to Hide," New York Times (July 22, 2005).

6. This charge comes from a report issued by the conservative group, American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), founded by Lynne Cheney (spouse of Vice President Dick Cheney) and Joseph Lieberman (Democratic senator). See Jerry L. Martin and Anne D. Neal, Defending Civilization: How Our Universities Are Failing America and What Can Be Done About It (February 2002). Online: www.goacta.org. ACTA also posted on its Web site a list of 115 statements made by allegedly "un-American Professors."

7. Horowitz's book trades in racist accusations, the ongoing claim that almost anyone who criticizes the Bush administration hates America, and accuses critics of the Iraq war of getting Americans killed in Iraq. His latest book, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America (New York: Regnery, 2006), purports to name and expose those left-wing professors who hate America and the military, and give comfort to terrorists.

8. See "Forum: A Chilly Climate on the Campuses," Chronicle of Higher Education (September 9, 2005), B7-B13.

9. See "The Dirty Thirty": www.uclaprofs.com/articles/dirtythirty.html.

10. Piper Fogg, "Independent Alumni Group Offers $100 Bounties to UCLA Students Who Ferret Out Classroom Bias," Chronicle of Higher Education (January 19, 2005).

11. Edward Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 72-73.

12. Jacques Derrida, "The Future of the Profession or the Unconditional University, Derrida Downunder, Laurence Simmons and Heather Worth, eds. (Palmerston North, New Zealand: Dunmore Press, 2001), 253.

13. Ibid., 233.

14. Cornelius Castoriadis, "Democracy as Procedure and Democracy as Regime," Constellations 4:1 (1997), 10.

15. Derrida, 253.

16. Ibid.

17. Cited in Madeline Bunting, "Passion and Pessimism," The Guardian (April 5, 2003).

18. Arundhati Roy, Power Politics (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2001), 6.

19. Said, 143.

20. Cornel West, "Finding Hope in Dark Times," Tikkun 19:4 (2004), 18.

21. Said, 48-49.

22. See Henry A. Giroux, Against the New Authoritarianism (Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring, 2005).

23. Edward Said, "The Public Role of Writers and Intellectuals," The Nation (October 1, 2001), 31.

24. Stephen Howe, "Edward Said: The Traveler and the Exile," Open Democracy (October 2, 2003).

25. Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures (New York: Pantheon Books, 1994), 8-9.

26. See Henry A. Giroux, Border Crossings: Cultural Workers and the Politics of Education (New York: Routledge, 2005).

27. Abdirahman Hussein, Edward Said: Criticism and Society (New York: Verso, 2004), 302.

28. Stanley Aronowitz, How Class Works: Power and Social Movement (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 53.

29. Stanley Fish, "Why We Built the Ivory Tower," New York Times (May 21, 2004). See also Robert Ivie, "A Presumption of Academic Freedom," The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies 27 (2005), 4.

30. Gauri Viswanathan, ed., Power, Politics, and Culture: Interviews with Edward Said (New York: Vintage, 2001), 176.

31. Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin, 1977), 149.

32. Edward Said, "The Public Role of Writers and Intellectuals," The Nation (October 1, 2001), 31.

33. Edward Said, "On Defiance and Taking Positions," Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 501.

34. Hussein, 297.

35. See Giroux, Border Crossings.

36. Arendt, 149.

37. Edward Said, Culture and Resistance: Interviews with David Barsamian (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2003), 167.

38. Ibid.

39. Hannah Arendt, Totalitarianism: Part Three of the Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, 1976), 162.

40. Ibid.

41. See, especially, Cornelius Castoriadis, "The Greek Polis and the Creation of Democracy," Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy: Essays in Political Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 81-123.