Graduation address: Professor Anthony Lang
Tuesday 25 June 2019
Vice-Chancellor, ladies and gentlemen, friends and graduates, I am honoured to stand before you today on this momentous occasion. First, and most importantly, to you graduates, congratulations! You have worked hard here at St Andrews, and you should be proud of what you have achieved.
What exactly is that achievement? What have you gained from all your hard work? In the few minutes I have with you today I want to suggest that you now have something special. You now have authority.
As you know, authority today is under attack. Political leaders seem incapable of actually doing anything with their authority, and when they do use it, their efforts too often devolve into assertions of power, or even violence. Even the authority that comes with knowledge has been dismissed by politicians who claim that the people ‘have had enough of experts’.
So, what is authority? Political theorists distinguish between two kinds: the first derives from being appointed or elected to a position in which you govern others, which we can call practical authority. The second derives from knowledge or skills that enable you to inform and educate others, which we can call theoretical authority. And if I may, as an aside, we're lucky to have with us someone who seems to embody both forms in our Honorary graduate today.
You graduates might well attain positions of practical authority in your lives. I am sure we have many here who will go on to be leaders in the world of politics. But the University, in awarding you a degree, is not giving you that kind of authority. Rather, the University is signifying that you have the second kind of authority, the theoretical kind.
For those of you with degrees in International Relations, this kind of authority can be a challenge at times. Everyone is entitled to, and indeed encouraged to have views and ideas about our shared political life. This is what it means to be a citizen. But that is where the difficulty comes in for those of us who study politics. Do we somehow know more than other citizens?
I am sure you have all had conversations at a family party with that uncle or aunt or cousin (or even mum and dad, who may be sitting behind you today) who are ready to debate with you on any and every political point you make. When I go to America to see my own father, I have exactly these kinds of conversations, especially when he makes me sit and watch Fox News with him.
It is those situations where you need to think carefully about your authority. In response to those family members, you could simply assert that you are a graduate of St Andrews, or a professor at St Andrews, and so that family member just has to listen to you. But, believe me, that will not work very well; my father does not really respond well when I simply assert my professorial authority. So what gives us our authority?
Your authority, along with all graduates from any School or Department within the University, begins with the facts. For you, that might include facts about terrorist attacks, military interventions, international organisational structures, international law, or the political and economic systems of various countries around the world, but that factual knowledge alone is not what gives you authority.
Your authority comes from three ways of seeing the world. First, you have learned that facts need to be interpreted. Interpretation means organising facts within theoretical frameworks, thinking critically about those frameworks, and exploring how facts become political realities.
The second basis of your authority comes from putting facts in dialogue with normative standards. That is, you have come to learn that politics is not simply about the way the world is; it is also about the way the world should be. Those standards are not just subjective feelings. Instead, they result from deliberative efforts to advance ideas in a complicated world, ones that are not true due to their correspondence with facts alone but due to their logic, coherence, and feasibility.
The third basis of your authority means thinking about politics globally. A graduate from other universities in this country or in much of the world might study the politics of a single country or single region; in fact, most people focus primarily on the politics of the country in which they attend university. You come from a School of International Relations that forces you to think globally, to understand not just your own country, but other countries and the politics that takes place between, around, above and beneath them. As I hope you have learned, there is no way to understand politics today unless you understand it globally.
So, your theoretical authority relies on more than just knowing facts about the world. There are too many people today who believe just getting the facts right is the answer to our political problems. Getting the facts right is indeed the first step. But if that is your only criterion for understanding the political world, then politics becomes a matter of factual battles in which labelling an opponent’s views as ‘fake news’ can become a way to dismiss the other side. The study of politics has to be about more than facts. Those of you who can interpret, evaluate and locate those facts in a global order have something others do not. Your theoretical authority comes from your ability to see the political world as more than just the facts.
And, finally, with your authority comes a responsibility. Your responsibility is not to assert your authority in a crass and domineering way; we see this kind of politics far too often. It is to publicly think, deliberate, and advocate for ideas that are based in fact, interpreted through theories, evaluated through standards, and placed in a global context. If you can do this in the years to come, I will be proud to say we have given you an authority you deserve and which you can use to make our shared world a better place.
Professor Anthony Lang
School of International Relations