Academic rumspringa

Academic rumspringa describes a political paradox: an interval of apparent release from discipline may prepare people to return to, or become more fully integrated within, the order they seemed to leave behind. The Amish practice from which the concept takes its name presents freedom not as a simple escape from constraint, but as a choice shaped by the conditions under which it is offered. Applied to academic life and radical politics, the analogy asks whether transgression challenges a system or supplies it with a way to renew itself.

The Amish model and the problem of choice

In the Amish communities described here, young people remain under strict family discipline until the age of seventeen. They are then permitted, and even encouraged, to spend time in the surrounding English world: driving cars, listening to pop music, watching television, and encountering drinking, drugs, and sexual life. After a couple of years, they are expected to decide whether to rejoin the Amish community or leave it for ordinary American citizenship. The interval looks like a generous experiment in freedom, but the book argues that its conditions make the decision profoundly uneven.

The adolescents have spent years imagining the outside world as a realm of illicit pleasure, then enter it suddenly and without preparation. The resulting license can become excessive rather than genuinely exploratory: with no established limits or regulation, the experience generates anxiety. The choice between the community and the outside world is therefore formally open but practically biased toward return. The evidence gives the scale of that pattern directly: 90 percent of the children return to the Amish community.

This example complicates the liberal idea that a choice is free simply because no one has formally imposed its outcome. For the adolescents to understand both options from a position of genuine independence, they would have to be educated in the alternatives and removed from their embeddedness in Amish life. Yet that very separation would make them English in the relevant sense. The conditions for an uncoerced choice thus threaten to transform the chooser and the meaning of the choice itself.

Belonging, secular choice, and academic freedom

The argument extends from the Amish case to Muslim women who wear the veil. If wearing it is treated solely as an individual decision, the practice changes meaning: it becomes an expression of personal spirituality rather than a sign of substantial belonging to a community. The comparison is to a Chinese farmer eating familiar food as part of an inherited way of life, set against a Western city-dweller choosing a Chinese restaurant. What appears to be the same action can register either as ordinary communal belonging or as an elective display of individuality.

The deeper issue is that choice includes a meta-choice: the choice of how to choose and what kind of act the choice is supposed to be. In secular societies organized around individual choice, religious practice may be permitted so long as it is presented as private preference. When believers present it instead as a substantial form of belonging, they can be branded fundamentalist. The apparently tolerant subject of free choice is therefore not outside social pressure; that subject may be produced by severing people from their particular life-worlds and roots.

Academic freedom is placed within the same ambiguity, though the comparison does not make it automatically meaningless or co-opted. A radical past can become a route to proper integration into a hegemonic political community. The book points to U.S. neoconservatives, many of whom had been Trotskyists in their youth, and asks whether Parisian May 1968 also functioned as a collective rumspringa whose long-term effect was to contribute to the system’s capacity for reproduction. The point is not that every radical experience is secretly conservative, but that transgression may be absorbed, retrospectively recast, and made useful to the order it once opposed.

From local resistance to the risk of pseudo-activity

Simon Critchley offers one response to political limits. If the disappearance of the state cannot presently be achieved through anarcho-syndicalism, revolutionary proletarian action, or the party, politics can be pursued at a distance from the state: through independent work in particular situations and the construction of new political subjectivities and local political groupings. This account rejects reliance on a guaranteed historical process. Political action requires invention and practical work in concrete circumstances.

The book nevertheless questions whether this strategy risks becoming an ideal complement to the Third Way Left. Local revolt can make demands understood in advance as impossible to meet, staging opposition without seriously threatening the order. On this reading, the language of ethical protest may register the injustice of existing conditions while leaving the political structure that produces them intact. The criticism is directed not simply at local work, but at the possibility that a system can accommodate dissent as a managed supplement.

Revolutionary energy and the test of consequence

The discussion of revolutionary history supplies a related account of energy diverted rather than extinguished. Sheila Fitzpatrick’s argument places collectivization and rapid industrialization within the dynamic of the October Revolution: the revolutionary sequence, on this account, did not properly end until 1937, when the purges were curtailed and the Party nomenklatura stabilized as a new class. The social transformations of 1928–33 were not merely changes in government. They aimed to remake society itself, liquidating peasants as individual owners and replacing the old intelligentsia with a new one. A city recognizable to an emigrant returning in 1924 would, by 1934, have been transformed in the texture of its social life.

Isaac Deutscher’s account gives this inward turn a causal frame. Confined within the Soviet Union after revolutionary expansion failed, the force of the revolution turned inward; forced industrialization and collectivization became substitutes for revolution spreading abroad, and the liquidation of the kulaks stood in for the overthrow of bourgeois rule elsewhere. This is not identical to academic rumspringa, but it clarifies a shared question in the book: what happens when an impulse that cannot achieve its declared outward aim is redirected into a process that reshapes the existing field from within?

Against mere participation, the text warns that doing something can be easier than interrupting the routines through which power absorbs criticism. Academic debates and critical dialogue may serve as pseudo-activity when they reassure those in power that opposition has been engaged and contained. The proposed test is consequently not whether resistance looks radical or keeps people busy, but whether it produces a consequence the system cannot simply incorporate. Drawing on Bernard Williams’s distinction between ought and must, the book contrasts revolution treated as a moral obligation with a necessity that leaves no meaningful alternative. Academic rumspringa names the danger of mistaking a sanctioned rehearsal of freedom for that kind of break.