Sometimes Luck Really Makes a Difference (On Mentors, and Senior Scholars)

Some senior scholars have an annoying tendency to pretend as if the new kids on the block simply do not exist. I found it hard to keep spirits up when I was struggling to find a permanent position and I was unsure about even belonging in the field; I found it shattering that people, whom I admired, and whom I knew had read (say because they had explicitly commented on) my work, refused not just to engage my material when dealing with the same subject, but couldn't even cite it in a passing footnote in their latest publication. There was also always a nagging suspicion that they were also the hostile referees that slowed down publication altogether. (I could go into a lot more infuriating detail, of course.) The sad thing is that such behavior is then emulated by others, more junior and the cycle continues.

There are alternative ways of being senior. In September 2001, after I returned from Las Vegas, where I had been stuck due to travel cancellations after 9/11, Warren Samuels -- a wonderful economist and a giant scholar on the history of economics -- forwarded me (without permission) some papers by Leonidas Montes, then a PhD student at Cambridge University (in economics, I think) with the suggestion to get in touch with Montes. Now even before we met, Warren had praised my research in a keynote he gave at a conference, and he became a wonderful encouraging mentor. At the time I was in the closing year of my PhD, which was on the reception of Newton by Hume and Smith. My research had taught me that my main thesis was ill-conceived, and I was struggling to make the material (including some stuff on Rousseau, modern Libertarianism, etc.) cohere. I had learned to listen to Warren's suggestions.

Reading Montes's material was a real shock. Here was somebody who was working on the very same topic, had articulated more or less the same positions, and his material definitely looked more polished than mine. One paper was already forthcoming in a very good journal. Now, the official self-conception that had sustained me through graduate school was that 'even if I was not the most precise, clear, and technical of my peers, I was not afraid to share my work because I had plenty of ideas.' I already knew the self-conception was a bit delusional (albeit useful) because I had turned to history, in part (see also), because I was uncertain about the worth of any of my ideas. Faced with Montes's papers I felt shattered: by the time I could submit my papers, I thought, I would be lucky to be more than a few epicycle footnotes to Montes (2002a, 2000b, etc.).

 

I wrote Montes a polite note, mentioning Samuels, congratulating him on his fine work, and asking him for more material and sending him the key chapters of my dissertation. I even added wistfully, "Luckily our approach is somewhat different, and we have enough disagreements & differing interests not to feel threatened." (Obviously, I was very threatened.) I received a very generous note back with this memorable line, "It is very encouraging to find somebody under similar circumstances with similar interests." Within a few days, we basically exchanged dissertations, and started commenting on each other's work, offering suggestions, asking for clarifications, and pointing each other to relevant secondary literature. It was exhilarating because I finally had found somebody to really talk to about my research, and it was utterly depressing because he had clearly beat me to the punch. This first flurry of emails came to a close with Montes's magnanimous expression: "In general terms, after reading your stuff, and comparing it to mine, I agree that we have some very similar conclusions, but your work is definitely much more philosophical, and mine is perhaps more like a sort of  history of ideas."

We stayed in touch, and Montes defended at Cambridge about half a year before I did, and returned to his native Chile. He had a nice surprise for me. When I received the complimentary copy of his first major publication on Smith and Newton, it included a very generous sentence about my work in the acknowledgments. Anyway, to cut a long story short, Leon and I happily edited a volume together that we gratefully dedicated to "Warren Samuels, whose invisible hand promotes the best kind of exchange."

(here and here),

Comments

[Chris Brooke]

Leon and I happily edited a volume together

And it's a good book, too.

[ingrid robeyns]

This is a wonderful story. And it's even more wonderful for me because Leon and I were fellow students at Cambridge, and I am not the least surprised that he did what you described here. He was officially in the "Faculty of Economics and Politics", but was doing what he found most interesting - history of economic thought in his case. At the time it was still possible to do various types of heterodox economics at Cambridge, as well as history of economic thought and economic philosophy; I am not sure what the situation is now in that faculty. Say hi to Leon from me next time you see him (or: Leon, if you read this: hi!).

As to the substance: I agree that senior people should support young people. But many only support their own PhD students. Of course, there are limits to what one can do given time scarcity (which, in my experience at least, becomes worse the higher up the tree you are); but you are absolutely right that there is a tendency not to refer to the work of younger people. I think in philosophy in particular, this is in part due to the tendency to believe something that may be roughly this: if you only cite the perceived canon/influential papers, your paper aspires to be in the same league and otherwise not; if such tendency exists (there is at least lots of empirical observation that confirms that hypothesis), it may also contribute to explaining why junior people do not get the recognition they deserve. Of course it doesn't explain the entire professional culture we have, but some of it perhaps.

[Eric Schliesser]

Yes, Ingrid, I think you must be right that in philosophy citation is used as a kind of aspirational signaling device. This reinforces other patterns of systematic exclusion (gender, race, pedigree, etc.).

[Bruce Janz]

Hi, Eric. Yes, this is the best form of collegial relationship, and I'm glad to see it worked here. To your point about people not citing the work of more junior scholars (and we could add women, non-whites, etc.), you're quite right about that too. Sometimes I think it's because people don't read, or don't do the groundwork of canvassing an area to see who else has written on something. In my area of African philosophy, sometimes it's because those literatures are hard to come by, but other times it's because there's an unofficial canon of "important" and "not important" people. I do think that anyone, senior or not, should have some sort of mechanism to break the comfortable pattern of defaulting to their version of the canon all the time. One of mine is as simple as a Google Scholar search on concepts and word strings that are as specific as possible. I regularly turn up work in other disciplines, and by scholars, I never would have come across otherwise. That's only a partial solution, of course - Google Scholar doesn't catalog everything, especially in African philosophy, so I also need to find other ways of hearing what writers on the continent are saying. It all takes work, but it's worth it.

[Leon Montes]

Working with Eric on that volume "New Voices on Adam Smith" was not only fun, but academically quite challenging. And it is tyche all around!!!!

After reading Eric's reflections with all those good memories, I was surprised and thrilled to find below Ingrid Robeyns comments. Hi Ingrid! Ingrid wrote her thesis with Amartya Sen, and while we were together at the Faculty of Economics & Politics in Cambridge University (they finally ended up calling it only Faculty of Economics, quite a historical and strategic mistake, in my view), we wrote a letter called the 27 Cambridge Students(I found it with google: http://www.paecon.net/PAEtexts/Cambridge27.htm). After re redading it, I believe that much of what we said almost 13 years ago, is still true.
This letter, which was signed by a majority of 27 Cambridge PhD students in Economics at that time, had some impact. In my case, it was the closest I have been to a revolution. After a strike of economics PhD students in Paris, who had also read the letter, but were more radical, I decided it was better to come back to good old Adam Smith...

[Roland Pierik]

Sometimes generosity of senior scholars makes all the difference. After I finished my PhD I was somewhat lost and a colleague gave me a post-doc, trust and the time to rearrange myself and my research. it worked out and after a while I was back on track.