Why is it an ivory tower that artists, philosophers, scholars, and scientists are supposed to be ensconced in, that separates them from and keeps them out-of-touch with the “real world”? How did this figure of speech become a pejorative for elitist artistic and/or intellectual seclusion—something to be gotten out of or pulled down for the good of the cause, the community, or, more recently, the all-encompassing market?

Historian of science Seven Shapin explores the changing meaning of the phrase from antiquity to the present as part of the age-old debate between the active and the contemplative life, between civic engagement and disengagement, and notes that what was a “finely poised classical conversation has turned into a monologue, even a rant” against the idea of an ivory tower.

“There never was an Ivory Tower,” Shapin states. It has always been metaphoric: ivory was entirely too rare and costly to be anything approaching a construction material. But it had its symbolic uses.

“Ivory seems classically to have been associated with the notion of fantasy, illusion, if not delusion,” writes Shapin. “The Greek word for ivory (elephas) played upon the word meaning to cheat or deceive (elephairo).” Penelope in the Odyssey says that dreams that pass through the gate of ivory are deceptive, while those that pass through the gate of horn are real.

In the Hebrew Bible, the Song of Songs’s catalogue of sexual desire includes this line: “thy neck is as a tower of ivory.” Perhaps drawing on this Old Testament usage, the Virgin Mary became closely associated with ivory from the twelfth century. By the sixteenth century, she was a “Tower of Ivory” as well as a “House of Gold.”

The secularization of the phrase can be dated to 1837, when Charles Augustine Sainte-Beuve criticized another French poet, Alfred de Vigny, for being too aloof: Vigny “more discreet/As if in his ivory tower, retired before noon.” Vigny did in fact abandon the literary rat race for his country estate and quit publishing while continuing to write for himself. Shapin writes that “every educated person in the French- and English-speaking worlds appears to have been familiar with” Sainte-Beuve’s line.

Artistic retreat or disengagement might be good or bad, but by the 1930s, it was generally thought bad. In that politically fraught decade, both anti-Fascists and Fascists decried the ivory tower. Americans “appropriated the tag in the first part of the twentieth century as and when it became an understood way of expressing anti-elitist sentiments.” The year 1939 marks the “first twentieth-century pictorial representation of an Ivory Tower,” as far as Shapin could find; it appeared on the cover of Direction, the magazine of the Communist Party-affiliated American Writers’ Congress.

In the late 1940s and 1950s, the locus of the isolated, irrelevant tower shifted from artists to academics: universities were the new ivory towers, ironically, given the history of universities as perennial “sites of power and of service to Church or state.” The Cold War siloed scientists, especially, into the ivory tower: they had to get out of it if we were to beat the Russkies. Years afterwards, Jane Wilson, wife of Manhattan Project physicist Robert R. Wilson, wrote that the tower at the Alamogordo test site that held the first atomic bomb was definitely “not made of ivory.”

The Thatcher-Reagan neoliberal counterrevolution combined with reactionary populist anti-intellectualism to seemingly seal the ivory tower’s fate—and to attack universities as bastions of campus revolt and as alternative centers of civil society.

You can’t find anybody saying much good about ivory towers these days, although the idea once had notable defenders as a necessary retreat from convention and conformity, a place to think and create away from the noise of society. In 1872, Gustav Flaubert wrote to Ivan Turgenev, remarking, “I have always tried to live in an ivory tower, but a tide of shit is beating at its walls, threatening to undermine it.” In his 1938 argument for the necessity of ivory towers, E. M. Forster cited tower inhabitants Marcus Aurelius, Machiavelli, John Milton, and Karl Marx.

The title of Henry James’s The Ivory Tower—an unfinished novel published posthumously in 1917—refers to a “an expensive tchotchke,” but a character does wonder if “living in an ivory tower just mean[s] the most distinguished retirement? I don’t want yet awhile to settle in one myself—though I’ve always thought it a thing I should like to come to…”

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