Intellectuals as experts

As I am writing this chapter, the news is heartbreaking: floods in India, Nepal and Bangladesh displacing millions and killing thousands – a taster of climate change to come; the resurgence of fears of nuclear war and ill-chosen jokes about Armageddon from those who have not experienced this fear as real; a US president who equates armed neo-Nazis in Charlottesville with anti-fascist protesters and sanctions police brutality; a UK prime minister who imposes austerity on the vulnerable and disabled at home and turns away those fleeing war abroad; and universities capitulating to a regime of targets and managerialism without a fight. And what are scholars doing in the face of all this? What can we do? In February 2003, Steve Smith gave his Presidential lecture at the Annual Convention of the International Studies Association, meeting in Portland, Oregon. He courted controversy by arguing that scholars of international relations were complicit in singing into existence a world in which the events of September 11 could take place. He pointed out that ‘the social world ... is not something that we observe, it is something we inhabit, and we can never stand in relationship to it as neutral observer’.3 Of course, as mentioned in the previous chapter and discussed more fully in the next, neither is the ‘natural’ world. The two cannot be distinguished in any case. Smith called on us not to evade our inevitable ethical responsibility but to speak truth to power, whilst at the same time quoting Max Weber on the dangers of political intervention: ‘whoever wants to engage in politics at all ... lets himself