Farewell to the Humanities

This paper discusses the use and "uselessness'' of the Humanities in the context of the marketization of higher education. The misapplication of economic rationality to and within the Humanities has, I argue, emptied intellectual autonomy of its erstwhile political and social significance and turned academic labor in the Humanities into sheer abstract labor, measurable only in terms of quantity. The cause of this transformation should not, however, be attributed to the development of the capitalist order alone. The postmodernist rejection of "truth'' and related concepts has helped to level the distinction between knowledge in the Humanities as an end in itself and knowledge for utilitarian purposes, and has thereby hastened the collapse of the raison d'etre of the Humanities.