Episode 139 - Jennifer Pitts: "It was a leap of faith."

Professor Jennifer Pitts from the Department of Political Science is on The Course this week to talk about her career journey from being captured by art history to working as a reporter to finally pursuing a graduate degree in political theory.  She also shares her recent focus on the international writings of W.E.B. Du Bois, and the most gratifying part of her job as a professor.

Transcript

Stephen00:00
Hello, and welcome to The Course. I'm your host, Stephen, and today I'm speaking with Professor Jennifer Pitts of the Department of Political Science. Professor Pitts is the chair of the Department of Political Science, as well as a member of the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought, and the author of Boundaries of the International and A Turn to Empire, The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France.

She's here today to talk with us about her journey into the field of political science, her recent focus on the international writings of W.E.B. Du Bois, and how she became a University of Chicago professor. 

Professor Pitts, welcome to The Course. How are you this morning? 

Jennifer Pitts 00:39
 I'm great. Thank you for having me. 

Stephen00:41
Much to get to. Just to start off, could you just, just briefly introduce yourself, tell us your name, titles and just a little bit in layman's terms about what you do at UChicago.

Jennifer Pitts 00:52
 Okay. My name's Jennifer Pitts. I'm a professor in the political science department and also in the committee on social thought. I'm a political theorist and I also describe what I do is the history of political thought, which is a field that kind of sits at the intersection of intellectual history and politics and philosophy.

So I'm interested in the way that people have thought about politics in society historically, you know, in the past. And I'm particularly interested in the history of thinking about empire and the international sphere, especially in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Stephen01:31
Thank you. we like to start all the way back chronologically. Typically I ask people what they wanted to be when they were kids, maybe like middle school, high school age. I've never heard anyone say they wanted to be a political theorist when they were that age. How about you? 

Jennifer Pitts 01:48
 I don't know that I had any idea when I was in middle school what I wanted to do. I would say. It was starting in high school maybe that I had an idea. I had a very inspiring art history teacher in high school and I fell in love with art history. My mother was a photographer and so I had kind of long been interested in photography through her and then I took this sizzling art history class and started to work in museums in the summer and just loved that.

So I went to college thinking that I wanted to study art history. So I did pursued that for about a year and a half or two years, took some, a lot of classes in art history, including some graduate seminars and then just decided as I got deeper into it, that it wasn't quite what I was looking for. And so it took me a while to settle on a discipline. I ended up being an English major as an undergrad. And I would say everything that I've always been interested in, just kind of the history of human culture, how people make sense of the world that we live in, how they express themselves, how to express their thoughts about that.

And, you know, I love the idea of interpreting visual expression and that I think was what drew me to art history. I love literature, but I found myself drifting in the of kind of more explicit discussion of politics. My first kind of introduction to politics, I guess, was through journalism in college. I was a reporter and then the editor of a news magazine called the New Journal that was, still is, a great magazine doing kind of long format journalism about, political issues, local issues in…I was a student at Yale so a lot of interest in New Haven as a city, the questions and problems facing urban government, and so that was kind of how I got really interested in politics and writing about politics. 

Stephen03:56
Yeah, did you just sort of happen to fall into covering politics? Did you like choose local politics as a beat? How did that come about?

Jennifer Pitts 04:04
 Once again, it was partly thanks to really inspiring teaching, Fred Strebe, who teaches nonfiction writing at Yale, was a genius of a professor and he introduced me to the kind of thrill of Nonfiction writing, let's say. I liked the idea that you could find a subject that was very local and learn a lot about it and kind of, you know, know everything that there was to know in a short time about a sub, sort of be the authority on a local subject, and try to understand how it bore on larger questions. I liked the idea of, you know, hunting for stories in my local neighborhood. 

Stephen04:45
From that experience and I don't know, you know, if there were others in undergraduate as well, did you, were you pretty sure that you wanted to pursue political science when you were leaving college or was that still up in the air? 

Jennifer Pitts 04:55
 No, I would say I had absolutely no idea. I wanted to make a go at journalism. So after I graduated, I first did an internship in the New York city government, a program called the Urban Fellows that is also still in existence. And I did that because I thought if I want to write, kind of muckraking journalism about, you know, city government or urban affairs, or just government in general, I should understand something about how government works from the inside because it felt very opaque, like a black box. You talk to people, but you don't really know what's going on. So I did that for a year and I was working there at the time of, so I'm dating myself. 

I graduated from college in 1992, and that, year, 92 to 93 was the year of the mayoral race between Mayor Jenkins, who was the mayor at the time, and Rudolph Giuliani, who was the challenger. And so I was asked to stay on to work on press affairs in the Economic Development Corporation, which was the portion of the city government that I worked for and that was a really exciting opportunity. I really believed in Mayor Jenkins. And so I wrote kind of press releases and speeches for Jenkins at little local events. Nothing, nothing really exalted, but it was fun and interesting. And I learned a lot about, I would say, you know, I think it served the purposes that I had gone in to serve, which was to try to understand something about how the city works from the inside.

I interned at the New Republic before that, And that gave me, a taste of a certain style of journalism that I decided I wasn't well suited for, kind of gotcha journalism that was, and I decided ultimately that I wasn't really constitutionally well suited to journalism, and that may be partly because of the kind of distinctive experience that I had at the New Republic.

But the feeling that you as a journalist have to kind of cultivate the trust of somebody and then turn on them in print bothered me, and I decided that, as important as it was, and I mean, I have more respect for great journalists than for just about anybody else, but I decided that I constitutionally couldn't handle that, the complexity of that relationship. 

So while I was there, Andrew Sullivan, whose politics were very different from mine, but who was a very charismatic figure, had done a PhD in political theory. And I was intrigued by the possibilities opened up both by working on historical figures rather than this, you know, process of cultivating the trust of people that, live people that you turn on, and also just started to see that political theory might be a way back to some of the interests in what I've been calling the history of human culture that I had had for a while.

But as I said, I really knew nothing about political theory, certainly in high school and largely in college too. I had taken one course with a great political theorist, Rogers Smith, who taught constitutional law among other things. But it was really reflecting on this possibility, as I was working at the New Journal and then in the city government in New York that I thought maybe political theory was a possible path, but it was really a leap of faith. 

Stephen08:21
That's a really interesting path. You mentioned, you know, feeling better about looking at historical figures and also some other questions that you had. Can you talk about like how those sort of crystallized during your graduate work? 

Jennifer Pitts 08:39
 Sure, so, as you will suspect from what I've said, I went into graduate school not knowing a huge amount about what political theorists did, what the sort of possible array of subjects were. I did freelance journalism for a year while I was applying to graduate school after working at the New York government. And I was working in D.C. and basically went to the Library of Congress and read as much political theory as I could. But still went to graduate school without a definite topic that I wanted to work on. 

Luckily, the program that I went to required a lot of coursework for the first two years of graduate school, so I spent those two years catching up, and one of the courses that I took was a brilliant course on political thought and empire by Pratap Bhanu Mehta, who's a great political theorist, who has broad interests in the history of thought.

He was, he wrote a dissertation on Adam Smith broad interest in the history of democracy and the history of liberalism. And so in his course, I wrote a paper on Edmund Burke's writings on empire and got just captured by that. And I mean, partly what captured me about Burke's work on Empire was just the brilliance of his writing.

He's an extraordinary writer, partly it was the moral passion of his critique of atrocities perpetrated by the British in India. And then partly it was, curiosity about the seeming disconnect between his reputation as a, you know, kind of heartless conservative who's happy to, you know, supporter of oligarchy, who's happy to consign the vulnerable in society to whatever misery, you know, falls their way.

It just seemed so out of step with what I was reading in the writings on India that I was gripped by the question of what's going on? Why this mismatch? 

And then, also, in that class, we read John Stuart Mill's writings on India, which presented, you know, in a way, seemingly the opposite conundrum, which is Mill is reputed to be and, you know, is evidently in some of his writings, a great champion of, you know, freedom, a great champion of self-government, you know, has a strong thread of socialism in his writings and yet, he was an unabashed defender of the exercise of despotism in the colonies.

And I thought, what's going on, you know, why is it that Burke is the one who sees and calls out the atrocities of the empire, and Mill seems to be fine with it. What's, you know, what is this story? So that was the kind of germ of the dissertation. I was assigned, as my third year advisor to Richard Tuck, who was newly arrived at Harvard, where I was a graduate student from Cambridge.

And I brought this idea to him and I said, you know, it's, I'm, I think it's really curious and interesting that the conservative is the critic of empire, the liberal is the enthusiast. And he said, I've had it exactly the same. I think that's great. You know, you should run with that. And I quickly decided that the conservative liberal framing was not a good way to think about it. And so I readjusted the argument, but that was the germ. 

And then, from there I, went to Stanley Hoffman, who was another extraordinarily inspiring professor who taught me in the international relations field seminar. I presented the idea to him, and he said, oh, you must look at Tocqueville on Algeria and so I did that. Tocqueville's writings on Algeria were very little known in the Anglophone world. There had been, you know, one or two articles about them, but, and he seemed to fit this portrait of liberal supporters of empire who appear to be, you know, supporters of democracy and self-government, and yet when you look at their writings about the non-European world, they seem to be saying something very different.

So that was the kind of core of the dissertation, and then I built it out from there when I tried to see what, you know, what questions do I need to be answering to tell the argument, you know, to make the argument that I want to make? 

Stephen12:54 
Yeah, that's, that's interesting as someone with no special expertise, but who's familiar with those names. Yeah, I absolutely would have assumed that those two guys would have, you know, those positions would have been flipped just based on what else I know about them. 

You know, asking people to break down their day to day? I realize it's not the right way of framing it, but the balance of your different roles, at the university now, like how are your kind of energies and time divided up?

Jennifer Pitts 13:23
 So I guess, I mean, if you break it neatly into four groups, I would say I have my undergraduate teaching, my graduate teaching, my research, and administrative duties. And normally the administrative duties wouldn't be anywhere near a quarter of my life, but I just started as chair of the political science department, so that's mainly what I've been doing for the last month or so is administrative work setting up committees for the year and doing the other things that chairs have to do…

Stephen13:53
Congratulation, on having that position and getting to do all that administrative work… 

Jennifer Pitts 13:57
 Thank you. It's an interesting way to you know, engage with everything that the department does, which you know, much of which one doesn't see as a faculty member, you know, outside the administrative role. That happened to me as well when I was director of graduate studies. I got very, I felt very connected to all the graduate students in a way that hadn't been the case so much before, where I was very devoted to my own graduate students in political theory, but less aware of what the others were doing, and being DGS made me feel kind of responsible for all the graduate students, and that was fun to get to get us as political science is a very kind of vociferous discipline where everybody's off, you know, the subfields do quite different things. Political theorists are sort of famously, notoriously, at the, you know, more at the fringes of the discipline than the others.

There's kind of empirical political science and, and political theory is often conventionally how it's understood. Although I think one of the great things about Chicago and this department is that there's always been a much more integrated relationship among the subfields and political theory has always felt much more a part of the department than is the case at a lot of institutions. 

Stephen15:09
Could you actually, I mean, I'm not sure that a lot of listeners will really have a great understanding of what either of those things are. Could you elucidate the distinction there a little bit?

Jennifer Pitts 15:20
 Of empirical versus normative? 

Stephen15:22
Well, specifically in your field. Yeah. Like political theory versus, 

Jennifer Pitts 15:26
 The, yeah. So, I mean, again, conventionally, I think it's not necessarily true because political theory. So the conventional distinction between empirical political science that you know, studies events in the world, phenomena, political trends, let’s say, or causal relationships in politics without taking a normative position. You know, there's a classically associated with Weber, the idea of a fact value distinction that the social scientist, you know, studies what happens, but doesn't inject their values into it. And then political theory is taken to be the normative side of the discipline where people are concerned with political values.

And, but maybe don't, you know, don't study the world as it is, but preach about the world as it should be, you know, that would be the, that would be the kind of caricature. You know, to some degree there's some truth to it, as there is to most caricatures in the sense that political theorists are tend to be more explicit about their normative commitments.

You know, the history of political thought isn't quite normative political theory in the way that, you know, a theory that develops an account of, you know, let's say like a John Rawls's theory of justice, a normative account of what ideal conditions of justice are history of political thought studies, how politics has been discussed by past thinkers.

But there is, political theory, maybe even increasingly. So in recent years, that is engaged with politics on the ground, social movements, learning, understanding what the political theory in a social movement is and in thinking theoretically about how social movements operate and I think a lot of empirical political science is done by people who themselves have normative commitments. Some of them are more explicit about them than others, but there's some truth to the distinction, but there's also ways in which it hides a lot of what's interestingly, you know, going on in the details. 

Stephen17:36
Also just wanted to ask a little bit about the future or just like what's exciting to you at the moment. Like, are there research projects that you are working on or involved in, that you're really excited about right now, or, you know, things that you are looking forward to doing when you have the time?

Jennifer Pitts 17:53
 Yes. So, I would say, a recent project that I have, that a piece of which is finished, but that, you know, may have a future is work that I've done with my colleague Adom Getachew on the international thought of W.E.B. Du Bois. He was, I came to think, you know, possibly the greatest international thinker of the 20th century.

And although he has, you know, long been renowned as a political and social thinker. His thought about the U. S. has been what's prominently been studied and taught of his work, and his vast really body of thinking about the imperial structure of the international order, about the kind of the ways in which European powers were both rival empires with one another, but also in a way kind of colluding to maintain an imperial order in the world. In the way in which democracy and the rise of democracy in Europe and the U.S. was deeply bound up with the entrenchment of racial hierarchy and imperial hierarchy. I think he's a brilliant analyst of all of that. 

And Professor Adom Getachew and I wanted to make these writings available to particularly to students, but to the kind of public more generally in a way that they weren't quite scholars were starting to write about these things it had been for maybe the last decade, you know, to some degree, this has always been known about, but there's material that's known about by those in the know, but not really more widely available, and I think, I think Du Bois's international thought would fall into that category. 

And so we edited a volume of his international thought that's in a series published by Cambridge University Press, called the Blue Book Series, which is designed for students, and so our hope was that in making a volume of, you know, the most exciting and kind of representative sample of these pieces, we would get this material into the hands of students and hopefully change the way people think about anti colonial thought, about politics in the 20th century more generally.

One of the great, he was a great thinker. That's the main reason to read him. But he also lived an extraordinarily long life and had an active career from the 1890s to the 1960s and he's interested in the way that he maintained consistent commitments over a long period of time, but also changed his views as the global situation changed.

So, and he's a beautiful writer, to go back to something I said earlier about Berk, so I got very invested in Du Bois's thought for some time, and I'm not sure where that might go, but it led me into the 20th century, which I hadn't written about before, and to the very powerful thought of an array of anti-colonial thinkers with whom he was engaged.

So that's one set of interests that I will carry forward in some way that I haven't quite sorted out yet. This past year I was on leave in Paris and I was working on a project with another colleague who's a book historian, Michael Suarez, at the University of Virginia, and we've been working on a project about an anti-colonial, anti-slavery text from the 18th century.

The author is Ottobock Guguano, who was the first Afro British. writer, former enslaved, formerly enslaved person to write a kind of full-fledged anti-slavery treaty, treatise, which he wrote in 1787. And we've been interested in the French translation of it because one puzzle about this remarkable book, which is a, you know, very elaborate argument against slavery that draws on English law and the Bible. And it involves economic analysis and, you know, quite a well worked out view of the global economy and the way in which slavery is central to the economic power of the British Empire, the collective responsibility of the British people for slavery. It's really a remarkable text, but it was not, it seems to have been hardly read at all in England. It wasn't advertised. It was, and what we think happened is that the British anti-slavery movement kind of kept it at arm's length because it was quite a bit more radical than where they were at the time.

They were pursuing a very moderate strategy of abolition of the slave trade and gradual abolition of slavery, and he was calling for immediate abolition of slavery. So, and then, and this text was translated into French the following year, and we got there seemed to be signs that it had been translated by Condorcet, the Marquis de Condorcet, who was probably France's most prominent anti-slavery writer at the time, in addition to being, you know, major philosopher, mathematician, major figure of the French Revolution.

And the idea that Condorcet had possibly, you know, seen the brilliance of this text decided to invest the time and financial resources into translating it and making it available to the French public in the course of his efforts, his anti-slavery efforts in the early years of the revolution seemed very exciting.

So that's, sorry for the long wind up, but that's what I've been doing spending time on, good deal of my time in Paris was researching that, working through the Condorcet papers and thinking about his anti-slavery project more generally, but more specifically trying to document, make the case that he was, if not the sole translator, the kind of major agent responsible for bringing this text to the attention of the French public. 

Stephen23:42
Yeah, I mean, that sounds like a fascinating text and you know, a post publication life of the text. That's really cool. We always end with a big question. what would you say you find most fulfilling about what you do? 

Jennifer Pitts 23:57
 Oh, I would say, gosh, I mean, I think engaging with students is what I find most fulfilling. I love doing research. I don't love writing. I love having written, but I find the writing process hard. And I find engaging students, both undergraduates and graduate students, maybe in slightly different ways, incredibly gratifying.

And when I wonder, you know, what the point of what I do is I feel that at least if I'm teaching, then I'm, you know, contributing to the good of the world in some way. So, and teaching at the University of Chicago is extraordinarily gratifying because the students are so engaged and so much fun to teach, and so, curious and imaginative.

So it really is, the teaching is the best part thing that sustains me. And I've had graduate students, a phenomenal group of graduate students over the last 10 years or so, who are, you know, share my interests, but have realms of expertise that are totally different from mine and are taking, you know, the things that I, that I'm interested in utterly new directions, especially in terms of 20th century anti colonial thoughts and wonderful work being done on that.

So the, yeah, the teaching undergraduates and graduate students has different pleasures and rewards, but they're both great. 

Stephen25:25
Thank you, Professor Pitts, for your time today. And Course Takers, if you enjoyed today's interview, please check out the others. Leave us a comment, subscribe, follow, and share this episode with your friends and family. You can find out more about the University of Chicago through uchicago.edu or the University's campus in Hong Kong through uchicago.hk. Stay tuned for more, and thanks for listening.