Paul Rabinow interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 31st October 2008

0:09:07 Born in 1944 on an army base in Florida but raised in New York City; my parents thought my first word had a southern accent, and since they detested the American South at that point they sent my mother back to New York; did not know my grandparents; I was one of those cosmopolitan New York, 100% non-religious Jews, cut off from my past; my grandparents emigrated from various parts of the Russian Empire and came to the States in the 1890's; I have heard some stories about them but nothing in any great detail; my father's family was in Upstate New York and my mother's family was in the City; I did not have any historical connections and simultaneously have felt no great desires to search for my roots; feel very settled about my identity; my wife, Marilyn, is a Chinese-American and we have a son, Mark, who is now at New York University; he is Californian, Chinese-American, Jewish-American, and some of the ancestral complexity comes up more with him than anything I have ever felt; his maternal grandparents are in San Francisco so he has more of a connection with the Chinese-American side than to the New York side

3:37:00 Both of my parents were psychoanalytically oriented social workers; my mother worked in various places but basically was quite socially committed although not very politically active; my father worked first for the Veterans' Administration after the War and then for an organization called the Jewish Childcare Association; I had a very strong set of connections intellectually; I have never been interested in psychoanalysis; I didn't believe in it and, as an adolescent, thought it hypocritical; inward looking depth analysis by itself has never been my interest; my parents were also very strongly anti-Communist although they were leftists, so I grew up with foundation myths that on the one hand in our neighbourhood, Sunnyside and Queens, which was a garden city, where Lewis Mumford lived and Hildred Geertz grew up, was a mix of socialists and communists, with the communists being somewhat higher in social class; the two founding experiences, one before my birth was the Hitler-Stalin pact in which the Daily Worker ceased publication for a week because they simply didn't know what the party line was; my parents repeated this story to me many times as a reason for why they didn't trust communists; the other experience was McCarthyism in the 1950's in New York, an atmosphere of fear, not personal but a general mood; then, I am told, many communists moved out of the city to the wealthier suburbs and became bourgeois as a protection; these were a central part of my political formation which I still adhere to; I have never been a Marxist or a Communist although I locate myself on the left; my parents were also simultaneously completely Jewish, not religious - I did not have a bar mitzvah - and anti-Zionist; so I had a mixed combination of strong standards and attachments, but not connected to big movements; maybe New York City is the core of that; I have challenged many things in my life, but those still stand

8:13:11 Parents had no sympathy with McCarthyism despite their dislike of communism; I was brought up to believe that America was simultaneously probably the best place in the world to be for a Jew but also not very trustworthy and not very safe; I was of America but not fully American; the experience in the South when my father was in the army of blatant racism; he was an Officer and in Kansas, at one point, they lived off base in the house of a woman who was a blatant anti-Semite; since there was no other place to live they never broached it with her until they left; this sort of despisement which I was raised with and which I accepted is certainly one of the strong roots of why I became an anthropologist and why I continue in many ways to identify with being an anthropologist, even if my anthropology is a bit unorthodox; personally and existentially that's the connection; I am a citizen of the world but don't totally really belong anywhere; the only places I feel at home are New York and Paris; even though I have lived in California for thirty years, it is not the same; I agree with the feeling expressed by Simon Schaffer of the Jew as outsider, but in New York City as there were so many Jews and there were so many kids in many ways like me, I didn't feel like many kids who grew up in other settings, that I was isolated; I went to Stuyvesant High School, a public high school for science and math, in the late 1950's; there was a city wide competition for the two of these in New York City; at the time it was 90% Jewish, now it is much more mixed, so I was always with several of my friends from the neighbourhood and I still know most of the people I grew up with, which is very unusual in America; the school was in Manhattan and I went to school from an early age on the subway therefore the urban dimension was very strong, but I also completely agree that the core community sense in the traditional mould was something I never had; for reasons that I don't fully understand, since I was quite young I have been attracted to Paris and France more generally; it has formed an important part of my life; when I speak French something changes and I feel comfortable in it; that is a sort of second home though I am clearly an outsider there, and have always felt that I was an American in Paris which was an excellent place to be; during the Vietnam War I was certainly not going to serve in the United States army; there were still deferments for people who were in university; I was at the very edge of the time as I got my PhD when I was very young; I considered leaving the United States at that point; considered going to France or, Nur Yalman made discrete enquiries with Leach; the response was a quiet if need be we will do something, in other words, if it had come to it this is where I would have come; fortunately the final deferment came through and I stayed in the States; that being said, my attachments are still to France rather than anywhere else; combination of philosophical and intellectual connections which in the 1950's and 1960's were very distinctive and strong, without comparable traditions either in the States or England; Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, also people like Jean Lacouture and other journalists from 'Le Monde'; then a certain form of sociability, conversation and elegance in Paris; the connection to the larger colonial world, global politics, literature, cinema, was unabashedly present in France and was not in the United States; beyond that I don't really know, except that I have always been comfortable there; people understand my French because I know what is going on with them - an anthropological dimension; we raised our son bilingually in Berkeley; Marilyn speaks better French than I; over the last years the intellectual dimension has diminished as the philosophic and scientific scenes in Paris are now rather dismal; French molecular biology is not at the competitive scale of the States or England; they know it and it is hard for them; philosophically there is not much going on and it is the same for anthropology, which has stayed rather traditional and dominated by Levi-Strauss

21:54:07 I went to Morocco because of Geertz; I was originally interested in Buddhism and had done a lot of work with Eliade on the history of religion, and with Yalman and Barny Cohn; for a variety of reasons, various places that seemed possible closed down politically for a while; then Geertz suggested Morocco; of course there was a political connection to Algeria and colonialism, but I did not know much about Morocco per se; on religious belief - don't believe in God; there are passages in 'Triste Tropiques' on Buddhism which are relatively close to what I felt much more strongly as a younger person; this question is interesting because in recent years I have been working with a student who has just finished   a degree in theology and is now doing a degree in anthropology; he is a practising Christian and we get along remarkably well, discussing ethics etc., but it is clear that the larger theist dimensions are radically disparate; this is an interesting anthropological dimension where ethically this seems to not cause any problem; I frequently related to people with strong religious beliefs but they are quiet; Michel de Certeau was a Jesuit and I had a number of Jesuit friends; I think it is the fact that they care and are thoughtful, committed and concerned, and I don't have to share other parts of their belief system while finding them humanly worthy of friendship; I am uninterested in the Dawkins' argument of science disproving religion, I am not a positivist, there is a big difference between this form of nineteenth century militant positivism and a Weberian position in which science does not answer ultimate questions; when science becomes a world view, a cosmology, it seems to part company with its deep critical functions; I may not be a believer or theist, but I am not a militant atheist; on a philosophic level with people like Habermas or Charles Taylor who feel that unless we have sure foundations for our ethical life that we flounder, which seems wrong; no one has ever proved the ultimate foundations of anything to everyone's satisfaction yet ethical life and decent human relations seem to me not all that common, but not impossible either; I am not looking for ultimate stopping points, and there is some anthropological dimension to that through respect for the complexity of different commitments; cosmopolitan enlightenment sense that we have to live with difference which can be a good thing, and that intolerance is not so admirable

29:40:14 As a child I was passionately involved in sports, roller hockey in particular; a strange obsession as it was mainly played by Irish Catholics and the Jews played basketball; I was the only Jew in a Catholic youth organization; meant I was outside home a lot as we went to parks to play; later I was a swimmer and a runner; fairly early I was interested in literature; I found mathematics easy when young but by high school found that I was not particularly good at it; I liked exploring the city; school was easy and boring so had interests outside the institution; there were books in the house; classical music was always important to me, I couldn't live without Bach; this morning I was listening to Rameau and find music deeply important and satisfying; in 'Triste Tropiques', Levi-Strauss talks about wandering through Brazil with Chopin and Wagner; there is some sense that there is something that is not discursive, that produces beauty and harmony, and I often do write with music; find it spiritual in the Foucault sense, and a great solace; other arts are important to me, architecture in particular, also modern dance; I was obliged to play the clarinet but was not gifted; one of the things that happened in the United States in the last few decades has been the big separation between private and public schools, and the general decline in the public school system; that was not the case when I was at high school; in this all boys school I had many good teachers and I really enjoyed learning; there was no stigma to just being smart; we had good literature teachers; that was a great take-off point for me; then Chicago University was just a vast expansion of learning; my mother had wanted me to stay in New York but I met some people from Chicago University and knew instantly that I had to go there; it was the right decision; Stuyvesant High School and then Chicago were both deeply rewarding for me; many don't have that joy of having encountered that form or learning so I am very grateful to both those institutions; at Stuyvesant it was more a general mood that affected me; we had some old maths teachers who would tell us that one of us would solve Fermat's theorem, which was considered the ultimate thing human beings could do; I did have some good literature teachers, but no one spectacular; at Chicago there were; the Hutchins College curriculum was still in existence and was tremendously rewarding for me; then Richard McKeon, a great Aristotle specialist, broad thinker and great teacher; we were studying a general curriculum so McKeon taught one term on the physical sciences, one on the social sciences, and one on humanities - Aristotle provided distinctions between them; you could take exams when you entered Chicago and had places in all the sciences and math; I took a little more math but never took science in college, so this turn to molecular biology later in life in a way came out of the blue, but I have never been afraid of science; McKeon's philosophy was neither analytic nor continental, but a strange mix of classically based, very large perspective on all thinking, which was very enabling, and still is; McKeon was certainly the major intellectual influence; his son, Michael, is now quite a well-known historian of the novel; McKeon was not a very nice person, in some ways like Foucault, there was not a warm relationship, which was in many ways freeing because it wasn't personal; I could flourish with this, as I did with Foucault; they were both complicated men and I was comfortable with that

42:37:02 Nur Yalman took me under his wing; he was avuncular and supportive; the social science world included Geertz and Barney Cohn, but they were a bit more distant and I encountered them later on; however, Yalman was not only important as I was interested in structuralism at that point, but was generous with his time; not sure I learnt that much from him but he connected me to anthropology; the anthropology department was a very distinguished place which meant that they didn't teach very much; I was interested in Indian civilization - McKim Marriott and Milton Singer, Yalman and Cohn were there; I took basic courses and since they were not offering any others, Nur got me permission to take the basic graduate sequence; persuaded them that I took the exams and I came out first, so I was finished with my doctoral exams as an undergraduate; hence it made sense to go to graduate school in Chicago; anthropology offered me intellectual depth, staying within the university, exoticism and challenge, and a lot of smart people doing exciting things; I was the first undergraduate to be admitted to graduate school; we made a deal that if I went to Paris for a year I could come back to graduate school; in Paris I listened to Levi-Strauss and Louis Dumont; went back to Chicago and was tentatively a physical anthropologist; Clark Howell kindly suggested he didn't think I had the temperament, and Geertz asked if I wanted to go to Morocco and off I went; I maintained a strong connection with the College and McKeon and that type of thinking throughout graduate school, so I have never been full socialized in anthropology, which explains some of the things that I have done

47:39:19 Levi-Strauss was extremely fond of and kind to young Americans; in 1965 his seminar had two hundred and fifty people in it, and he was extremely nasty to most of them but very kind to the three young Americans; several times he came through Chicago; I talked to him but he was not the kind of person you chatted with; Dumont was a much more complicated figure; his seminar had four people in it; he was very bitter about this; the course was the two thirds of kinship course; I was young, I introduced myself, he gave me a several hour lecture basically on 'Homo Hierarchicus', why the Nazis had motivated his thought, and his problem with trying to explain the West, and a good deal about his life; unfortunately the four students comprised two Tamil specialists, a Scot and myself; it developed into a discussion of Tamil kinship terminology and we two disappeared; Dumont was very grumpy about this and told David Schneider that I was not a nice person; several years later at a New Year's Eve Mozart concert in Carnegie Hall, saw Dumont and greeted him; at first he ignored me but his wife encouraged him to shake hands and I was forgiven; saw him at Chicago several times after that; I actually think that his thought and work is extremely important and in some ways, more complicated and interesting, and wider than Levi-Strauss's; I also went to several philosophy lectures at College de France, such as Jean Hyppolite on Hegel, so a tradition which played in later to the work that I did

51:56:06 Clifford Geertz was not a warm human being, and even less so in the 1960's; contact with him was minimal, it was intellectual but not much else; he facilitated things so there was a young Moroccan who taught some Arabic, but basically I was on my own; I flew into Rabat and my first experience in Morocco was astonishment at the beauty of Rabat which nobody had ever talked about before; the main thing was how difficult Arabic was; Morocco itself was difficult and a testing experience in many ways; I would never say that I became deeply enamoured or engaged with Morocco; Clifford was in the city and pretty much absent; Hildred was more accessible and helpful, but I did not have a big connection there either; I wanted to be an anthropologist and do something like that, I did it, but knew that I did not want to do that again; I should have gone to Fez and lived there rather than the countryside and I think my experience would have been richer, though whether that would have ultimately changed things, I don't know; I wrote 'Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco' partly because of 'Triste Tropiques' as that was one of the vectors that brought me into anthropology; then the experience of fieldwork itself was troubling, confusing and lonely; I was interested in the question of what kind of knowledge is anthropological knowledge, and what it was that I was learning, which seemed to be one of the important dimensions of what was going on; the real structure of the book in Hegel's 'Phenomenology of Spirit', an unfolding of knowledge in various stages; people read it as a personal book which in many ways it is; its intent was not that at all; it was an attempt to stay sane, figuring out what I had been going through, and did I want to continue to do this; I wrote it very quickly after finishing my thesis; I wrote it in about a month; Cliff hated it and told me it would ruin my career and it was rejected by six presses; I had almost given up when Robert Bellah got it published by the University of California Press; it is still in print thirty years later; Ernest Gellner worked in Morocco and the first book review I ever had was a full page in the TLS attacking my book 'Symbolic Domination'; I called Cliff, thinking this was terrible, but he and everybody else said it was the best thing that could have happened; Gellner no doubt thought me to be in his debt so had attacked me publicly in an important place; he came to Berkeley some time later and he did seem to consider me in his debt; I took him out to lunch and we talked; that was perfectly cordial although later he got nasty again; I came to Cambridge once but he didn't come to my lecture; I thought his book 'Saints of the Atlas' very British, more about British anthropology than about Morocco; Jacques Berque and some other French anthropologists who had worked in some of those regions in detail had somewhat different views of how the tribes worked; like a lot of good anthropology it was a demonstration of a certain analytic tradition rather than ultimately being about Morocco

Second Part

0:09:07 In 1971, after Morocco and the subsequent book on fieldwork, I had a position in New York; at the time there were lots of jobs around; I had written my thesis in New York living three houses down from Auden; I took a job at an experimental school in New York City as part of the City University without thinking about it very much; I then spent a year at the Institute for Advanced Study which turned out to be quite a momentous year; I had very little to do with  Cliff, but Robert Bellah was there; it was a complicated and tragic year for him as they had proposed him for a professorship there but the mathematicians and others turned it down; also one of his daughters committed suicide; he was friendly, and it turned out to be an important avenue of development for me; also, Pierre Bourdieu was there that year; at first he did not speak English very well and we spent an enormous amount of time together talking; he outlined in great detail how he was going to get into the College de France, and the entire sociology of the French field in every possible dimension; he did exactly what he said he was going to do, and it worked out in the way he said it would; that was the next wave of French connection after Dumont; I then went back to New York and the fiscal crisis hit; what had been an experimental school, and fun, stopped being experimental and was not fun; Bellah ran a seminar in Berkeley and he accepted me; that was a kind of turning point where he helped me get the book published, where I met Hubert Dreyfus, and a whole range of other connections opened up; I discovered California, which seemed an exotic and foreign land; that led into my learning from Dreyfus about Heidegger and Wittgenstein at that point; that set the scene for the entry of Foucault into the picture; I got a job at Berkeley; they wanted a Chicago anthropologist so I was competing against several of my classmates

5:21:19 Unlike Dumont, Bourdieu was an overtly passionate and direct person; he also demanded a loyalty which after a while became a bit of an issue; I compare him to Flaubert's 'Sentimental Education' or 'The Red and The Black', a self-styled provincial who mythologized his marginality, comes to Paris, fights his way to the top, and becomes increasingly unhappy; an extremely intense and brilliant character but one who truly wanted power and recognition, and was overtly plotting and strategizing to achieve it; having achieved it, there was always more, and like so many French novels, having reached the summits was still not happy; increasingly in his latter years when he become militantly political, I saw him less and did not agree with his politics or his approach to intellectual life; would always assume that he was right and everybody else, wrong; on Edmund Leach - there was a Wenner-Gren conference in Fez; we were in a luxurious setting overlooking Fez; among the distinguished people were Leach, Geertz, Sahlins, and a range of younger people; Geertz and Sahlins fought with each other and by the second day Leach, who was obviously ill, turned his back to the table, gazed out over Fez, read the newspaper, and interjected from time to time that it was rubbish; no one knew what to do so ignored it; then Sherry Ortner tried to mediate this impossible situation and everyone then turned on her; it was a difficult event

10:12:12 I had heard of Foucault before but was never very interested in his work; Dreyfus, John Searle and I talked a lot and in my first year at Berkeley, Dreyfus and Searle were giving a seminar on Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Foucault and Derrida; Dreyfus and Searle interpreted Foucault as a structuralist which I didn't think was right; Dryfus and I talked about that and decided to write an article together when I began to convince him that what he said should be nuanced and made a little more complicated; at that point someone mentioned that Foucault was coming to Stanford; suggested calling him and asking him to talk with us; he agreed and we went to fetch him; Dryfus tape records everything that he does as he claims not to have a memory; that opened a discussion and we talked for eight hours that day; I have written an article on this which is yet to be published; basically, Foucault, like Bourdieu and Dumont, had no one to talk to; this is very strong in France where the boundaries of who you can talk to and confide in are rigorously policed, isolating people the higher they go; Foucault was suffering from this; so there we were, neither of us particularly interested in his work or had any stakes in the matter, but thought he was confused about some things and needed to clarify, and he just responded extraordinarily well; it was a gift for him to actually engage in discussion without being so guarded; he said once that if in Paris you said that you were talking about the Enlightenment, the one thing you could be sure of was that was not what you were talking about; in Berkeley the opposite is the case; a strong intellectual connection developed in which Foucault really needed this sort of exchange; my then wife and I became good friends with Foucault and his partner, Daniel Defert, and spent a year and a half in Paris at that point; Foucault was coming back to Berkeley regularly until his death; during the course of these discussions the structuralism issue fell away, and another way of putting together rigorous concept work with detailed empirical work began to be exciting to me; that is what I like about anthropology and why I am an anthropologist and philosopher, but very few if any philosophers ever put the two together; Foucault really exemplified the real turn that philosophic thinking in modernity could take; since what he and I were doing was never the same, and because he was a very complicated human being, it was possible to work alongside him and also to be independent at the same time; that was a tremendous turning point for me; I didn't want to go back to Morocco and was attempting to go to Vietnam; during this period, and through discussions with Foucault, had begun to be able to think about a conceptual framework which would be a kind of archaeological history of the present; I continue to think he was a great thinker but also that what he did had its limits; much of the Foucault literature I find wrong, especially British; many things continue to be opened up by Foucault; like McKeon, he was a great influence but impossible for me to be a disciple, and that is the position that I want; Foucault also wanted people to govern themselves and it was very hard to take that seriously as he was so overpowering and brilliant; Bourdieu wanted you to be part of his state, Foucault hated that; that suited me so I have continued with that as one of the things that I do; personally, Foucault was a very unhappy, deeply private man; he was extremely kind, and very attentive to small human things; at that level he was comfortable to be around; on the other hand you always had the sense that he was somewhere else; he was quasi-suicidal during these years, deeply in the process of changing his thought, and his relationship with Daniel was not good; I was not really close to him, and I wasn't homosexual, but was deeply fond of him; if you buy the argument that with Heidegger and Wittgenstein traditional Western metaphysics was over, then those people who wanted to continue to do philosophy or to lead a philosophic life had to figure out a different form; Richard Rorty tried and didn't know how to do it because most philosophers can only do traditional philosophy even though they know that that tradition is over; Foucault, on the one hand, figured out a different way of leading the philosophic life which included a Nietzschean, but also anthropological, attention to detail; in his case art and historical archaeological detail, but he spent his life not arguing concepts with people but working through material; reading Foucault's books and some of the lectures, their engagement with detailed historical context, with options and constraints, with settings and milieu, that combination of attention to detail combined with a passion for conceptual clarification, seems to me unique; with Dumont, you knew what his theory was, similarly with Bourdieu, theory and examples; Foucault developed a very different relation between theory and examples; I know he didn't have any theory; this is in the tradition of concepts, experiments and results which then become problems; for me his was a philosophic life and, in many ways, a deep anthropological life, always engaged outwards while thinking all the time; hence one needs to read his books, and particularly the recent lectures, as examples of experiences and experiments rather than theory or doctrine

23:54:10 French Modern took the category society and nominalised it; it showed that what was taken to be a universal had a history to where the term emerged in the cholera epidemics of the 1830's and then was involved in long, complicated elaborations in pragmatic and political contexts; the next set of projects was suggested by George Canguilhem, the great French historian of science, to take life as a similar kind of concept, not history of ideas, but as a practise and knowledge production venue, and to look at the emerging genomic sciences which were clearly transforming the biological understanding of what life was; to do it in detail in terms of where and how this knowledge was being produced, and how it was being circulated; that is what I have continued to do although the shift now is from life to anthropos; one way of characterising what I have been saying is that anthropos is that being who lives through logoi (speech and truth); we understand ourselves as beings who say true things about ourselves and about the way we and others live, one form of what anthropology is; currently one of the main groupings of logoi which tell us who we really are, are the biosciences; I am not interested in the truth claims per se, like Dawkins and others, but in the way that shapes us as human beings; I am currently working in synthetic biology and am interested how it and synthetic anthropos might converge in various arts and techniques, like Youtube, which are going to in part to form how we understand ourselves, who we are, and how we will shape the environments we find ourselves in; there is a kind of long trajectory there which I believe has some coherence; I think Foucault provided tools to do history of the present but wasn't an anthropologist, and never wrote about contemporary reality per se; the question for the rest of us is what is anthropology if not that, and there are many answers to that; I am trying to articulate one version of what that might look like, with a combination of reflective and conceptual work with deep commitment to an empirical closeness to practices going on in the world, not just in discourse

29:19:10 Bruno Latour has substituted one theory for another so he and Bourdieu hated each other; Bourdieu thought the universal category was society, Latour has argued that it is actor network and there is no society; he has a single universal answer for everything that is going on; he does it brilliantly but to me it is totally boring because, after you know the moves, nothing new emerges; this is to a degree his mode of production; Latour worked in the École des Mines for many years, very theoretical, and they would have contracts when they would do short term field work and write a report; he developed a methodology that works extremely well for that; that is one side, it is a theory and not concept work; I have respect for John Law, but like a lot of other people in science studies, has an ironic attitude towards science which I don't share; I think we are in the most exciting period of understanding living beings since Darwin; I am not looking to be distant from it but wanting to understand it, to protect and promote enlightenment which is under attack in the United States and in many other places, then also to think about it in a second order way; think in many of the science and technology studies, much of the work is interesting but I don't share the project; the person I am closest to is Steven Shapin; we have had very good discussions, and this book that came out a month or so ago was somewhat of a product of our discussions; book is on science and biotechnology as a vocation in the twentieth century, with a detailed study of the changing position of the scientist and their moral credibility, and how that shifted in the twentieth century - an excellent piece of work

32:43:01 On my own anthropological work - two framing ideas; George Marcus and I have been talking for some time and a book will be out any day now on our conversations; there is a space between biological laboratories and architectural or artistic design studios in which collective criticism of individual projects had been articulated and developed; this allows something like ferocious criticism that is depersonalized and enables collective work to go forward; I think that this is one of the great inventions of the biosciences; Shapin's 'Social History of Truth' is some of it, but there is not a history of lab meetings, for instance, which I think are extremely important technology; somewhere between the human science and anthropology, in particular, it seems that we should be trying to articulate ways in which we can both work on individual projects but work critically in a collaborative sense in developed venues in which a certain form of criticism in which multiple projects could go on without it become the Bourdieu and Geertz divisions; given that careers are still individual and in the human sciences, as opposed to the biosciences, are still based on individual publications, this is a dilemma although I think that will not continue; I am interested in trying to develop venues in which a form of collaborative work can go on; it has the self-formative and pedagogical dimension that I have talked about, but also the sorts of objects and projects that we are interested in, their temporality and complexity, is such that the traditional anthropological methods need to be modified if we are going to continue as a relevant discipline in the twenty-first century; broadly speaking that is what I am attempting to do; of course there is some observation but I don't do any more laboratory studies; now I am the principal investigator in this synthetic biology centre so I have a different relationship there as well

36:51:18 I think it extremely important to defend learning; in the United States there are anti-intellectual pressures, but in the U.K. as well, as Marilyn Strathern and others have shown, pressures of audit society need to be resisted; one of my politics of truth is to convince some of the scientists that they are much more vulnerable than they think; that if the university is going to reinvent itself as a place of somewhat disinterest in learning, which I think is precious, then we need to defend this in a more articulate fashion; I think if you look around for defences of science you will find very few of them; I was at a meeting with Phil Campbell the editor of 'Nature' and others; people get up and give eloquent speeches about science and society and truth, and it is not true; if I have a cause it is some kind of cosmopolitan enlightened curiosity and defensive venues which will make that flourish in the twenty-first century; I feel Berkeley is a great research university but, unlike Chicago was, is not a great teaching university