Bob Lake's veil of ignorance

Abstract

Resist Bob Lake's theory of theory. And while his argument that he has no theory of theory is disingenuous, he is nonetheless right that it is no theory at all. It is a straw argument. And a dangerous one that suggests that ignorance is a value of the highest order. This commentary explains these claims and suggests a rather different view of what engaging with theory is all about than Bob Lake offers in his incredible caricature.

Now is definitely the time to resist the seduction of theory. Or rather, it is time to resist Bob Lake's (2025) theory of theory, which, as he indicates in his endnote 13 is, in fact, no theory at all. What it is instead is a series of hardly credible straw arguments. These straw arguments, and the edifice of pragmatic ‘doing’ that he builds out of them are not just flimsy, but rather dangerous as a prescription for political action – dangerous, that is, unless you are one of those (and apparently there are a lot of you around the world these days) who think that acting politically out of ignorance is a virtue.

These are strong words and I will explain them over the next couple of pages, but first it is imperative that I confess how much it pains me to write them (and how much it has pained me to think them over the nine or ten months that have passed since Bob first sent me his paper). It pains me because Bob is a mentor whom I deeply respect and have learned and continue to learn immensely from. Even before I started as a PhD student at Rutgers University at the end of the 1980s, Bob was helping to direct and shape my thinking. On visits to my girlfriend who had begun her doctoral studies in geography there, I would show up unannounced in Bob's office in an old military building on what was then called the Kilmer Campus to pick his brain about how best to understand the homelessness crisis exploding around us. He would send me away with an armful of books and a head full of hard questions that kept me thinking and searching out answers for days, weeks, years. Once I joined the Rutgers PhD program, Bob was a key member of my doctoral committee. In seminars he would push my thinking in new directions (and, especially, insist that any theoretical thinking I engaged in was fully grounded in the empirical realities – of homelessness, the geographies of protest, and workers' roles in shaping the agribusiness landscapes – I was interested in). The paper I wrote for one of his seminars – tracing the historical geography of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the origins of the People's Park riots – became under his tutorship, one of my first published papers (Mitchell, 1992). When it came time to write my comprehensive exams, Bob sent me away to the library to figure out – to develop a theory concerning – the role of the state in landscape production. For two weeks I read furiously in state theory and pounded out something like a paper seeking to theorise just that landscape-state connection. Doing so was invaluable. It helped me think about the questions I wanted to ask of the archival materials, what sort of dialogue I wanted to have with the historical realities the archives were reluctantly about to give up, when, only days after the oral portion of my exam was completed, I headed to California to try to figure out what was what. The exercise in theoretical thinking that Bob pushed me into through that exam allowed me to engage with the archival record in ways I never otherwise would have. This encounter, this reworking of theory through evidence, also became one of my earliest papers (Mitchell, 1993) and has shaped my scholarship ever since.

Then, when I defended my dissertation, at various conferences and workshops since, and in any number of more casual conversations, Bob has done me the immense favour of asking questions I simply cannot answer, certainly not at that moment, questions that have instead forced me to return to the books, to the depth of theory, to interrogating the empirical material I am working with – archival records, interview transcripts, observations – in new ways that, I hope, help me to better approximate reality in words such that we come to new understandings, that we catch glimmers of the truth, of the historical-geographical and political conjunctions in which we are currently living, or in the past have lived.

Bob has thus always done me what could be called the favour of theory: he has asked me to think hard and to think well, but only ever in close engagement, in deep dialogue with, the material realities I want to understand and that I think it is crucial for us, collectively, to understand better. This is the favour, and the promise, of theory.

But now Bob denies all that. Instead, he offers us a caricature of theory, a caricature that is completely at odds with how he taught me to think about theory, but especially with how he helped me to learn to work with theory. For Bob – or at least the Bob Lake of this paper – theory is pure contemplation, contemplation which itself is entirely divorced from the world. He argues that theorists are trapped in a Cartesian dualism in which there is thought in here and a world out there, and the one can only ever be – for the theorist and the reader of theory – a poor reflection of the other. Theory is the opposite of practice, the opposite of doing. Instead, theory is either god-like assertion of the Truth or a gross simplification passing as Understanding. But Bob's reasoning in both his prosecution of theory as Truth and his accusations against theory as Understanding is specious, little more than a flimsy straw argument.

Like the environmental determinists Carl Sauer (1925 [1963]: 349) inveighed against, Bob is busy ‘bagging his own decoys’. For what Bob describes in his discussion of theory as Truth is not theory, but bad theoretical practice. And what he offers as evidence against theory as Truth is rather evidence of the determinations at work in the sociology of knowledge production. Against theory as Truth, Bob offers the indisputable fact of the faddishness in the academy. But this is a decoy rather than evidence against the benefits of working theoretically, and it is a decoy for two reasons.

First, one would be very hard put to find any decent scholar in the social sciences or humanities (things might be different in the natural sciences: I am not qualified to say) who understands their engagement with theory to be a straightforward discovery and revelation of the Truth, even if longstanding arguments against the fallacies attendant upon adopting a god’s-eye view of social reality are well-grounded (Harding, 1991; Haraway, 1988). What they see instead is a more-or-less better way of explaining that reality, which, of course, they may defend to the hilt. As another of my mentors, Neil Smith, used to say, the struggle for ideas is too important to simply abandon to others. Ideas have consequences and there is a battle for and over them. Since ideas are fought over, ideas – theories – change. They develop; they evolve; they are sometimes abandoned, and perhaps for very good reason: they just are no longer adequate for explaining the reality they set out to explain. Such is the fate of ideas: as social reality changes, so too their worth. So, underneath the faddishness of theory, ideas change or are abandoned or supplanted for good reason.

At the same time, second, the churn of ideas, the faddishness of theory, is pushed – pushed to the point of metastasisation – by the fact that we, now, are fully subsumed within capitalist relations of knowledge production. New journals, many promising returns of 20% to 30% profit to their corporate owners, are launched every day, requiring ever more ‘content’ to fill their (e-)pages. As university employees our worth is measured by the degree of our ability to rapidly produce that content. Whether we get raises or not, whether our departments are shut down or merged or not, all depend on both the rate and the mass of our production of words – and this all the while research time dries up except insofar as we are successful in winning grants from external agencies (a game that has a 10–20% success rate at best, even for the most successful of scholars). Under these conditions not just the desire but the need to engage in rapid-fire theory-making is a matter of economic survival for many. Intellectual faddishness is a profit-making enterprise. What it is not, however, is proof that engaging with theory and working (well) with theory, that theoretical engagement, in and of itself, is profitless. Nor, perhaps more to the point, is it evidence that scholars, working against all these pressures, engage with theory because they think that it is just some sort of Truth, nor especially that they simply buy some sort of ‘spectator theory of the truth’, as Bob (Lake, 2025: 9) accuses us, through Dewey (1920 [2008]) of doing. They work with theory because it helps them think about, explain, and act in the world, typically in the hope that it will help others do so too.

They continue to work with theory because they know their understandings and interventions are always provisional, and necessarily so. Which is to say: Bob's arguments concerning theory as understanding is just as specious as his argument against theory as Truth, and initially for the same reason. Bob seems to think that theorists seeking to understand their objects of analysis are necessarily only engaged in contemplation. They sit, divorced from the world, trapped in their Cartesian dualism, staring out at the world, and can do nothing other than simplify. Then, once they have done that, they impose their simplifications on the world, unable to see the complexity that the world really is, whatever the evidence might say to the contrary. A more misleading image of intellectual work is hard to imagine. (Though it is an awfully good approximation of the kind of just-so stories about ivory-tower intellectuals that, for example, anti-intellectual politicians like to promote; it's also a pretty good image of the kind of decision-based evidence making that Tom Slater [2008] has done such a fine job naming and critiquing.) In this image of intellectual work, there is no room for the kind of practice many of us actually engage in: seeking, for example, to start with the concrete (in my case, the concrete as it is collected, however incompletely and with whatever biases, in various archives) and then working towards a set of more abstract propositions that help to interrogate that material – that is, the very kind of dialectical practice Bob led me towards when he asked me to begin unravelling the relationship between the state and landscape.

And it particularly does not have any room for any kind of historical analyses and reasoning. Anyone who works historically knows that history is a mess. Making sense of it absolutely requires simplification, but these simplifications are not ‘self-serving for the theorist … rather than serving the purpose of the case seeking to become a better version of itself’ (Lake, 2025: 12). I am not entirely sure what that second phrase means; I do not know how the kinds of historical ‘cases’ I am interested in can ‘become better versions’ of themselves. History, instead, is – or rather was. The point of theorising, for me, is to better understand – yes, understand – why that history unfolded as it did (in its complexity) and what it has meant. Theory is the means by which one interrogates the evidence of the past (and for many who do not share my historical inclinations, the present). This requires not contemplating the evidence but working with it. It requires, precisely, doing. That doing is itself often collective. As the reader of any academic book's acknowledgements will attest the work of doing scholarship, though at times lonely, is a collaborative and collective exercise, a dialogic one, and cannot be otherwise.

The separation Bob asserts between ‘theory’ or ‘knowing’ and ‘doing’ is a false one. And it is also a dangerous one. Bob sent me a copy of his paper, along with several others, after reading a couple of recently published works of mine seeking to reconceptualise – that is retheorise – justice in geography. He thought, in those papers, that I worked with a ready-made theory of justice into which I was seeking to squeeze the world. This is a misreading. What I was doing instead was arguing for geographers to reengage in the hard work of developing a positive theory of justice (i.e., a theory of justice that did not simply define justice as the opposite of injustice) so as to do a better job of engaging with injustices and struggles for justice in the world (Mitchell, 2024a, 2024b). The goal here has been to develop a conceptual apparatus by which and through which questions of justice could be worked, by which and through which thinking about justice in its complexity could be done. In order to develop my arguments I had to clear a lot of ground, particularly working through geographers' past engagement with justice theory, and there primarily to understand geographers' fixation with John Rawl'’s (1971 [1999]) famous ‘thought experiment’ relating to subjects shrouded in a ‘veil of ignorance’ who, at the dawn of society, were tasked with creating a (distributively) just world, a fixation that seemed to blind them to Rawls's perhaps even more important development of the concept of ‘basic structure’. Why basic structure is valuable to work with is a discussion for another day. The point here instead is that I had to re-read Rawls's work, questioning it anew, wondering about how it was received in geography and why it was so thoroughly abandoned (assuming it was not just the faddishness of ideas that led to this abandonment). I had to read all over again about the veil of ignorance.

It's a remarkable thought experiment. The subjects of justice – those people in what Rawls called the ‘original position’ – were disallowed from knowing anything about society or their place in it. They were disallowed from knowing about history. They were disallowed from knowing about geography. They were disallowed from knowing about skill and gender and age and difference of any other sort and how these were and were not valued (and why). They were disallowed from knowing about the constitution of the society they were inheriting and about to enter. They were meant to just do, and preferably collectively, dialogically. In Rawls's thought experiment, these subjects came up with a lovely, just, liberal society. In reality, of course, ignorant subjects have more often come up with systems of oppression, or at best simply allowed such systems to be reproduced. They have fought to protect their own advantages, no matter how small they have been. Shrouded in ignorance they have relied on commonsense (this is why Rawls's experiment is so intuitively attractive) rather than forced themselves to think well, which is the opposite of commonsense (Gramsci, 1971).

Bob Lake's invitation to resist the seduction of theory is asking you to do exactly the same thing. To be ignorant; to act in ignorance. He wants us all to be shrouded in a veil of ignorance and just do it, and thereby, somehow, ‘build the world we want to collectively inhabit’ (Lake, 2025: 12) – that is, build a world without having any idea whatsoever what we are building it out of (we have been disallowed from understanding, much less from seeking out what is true in the world we inhabit) or what the constituents of that future might be (we have been disallowed from knowing). This is a recipe for disaster, especially since, on the one hand, Bob wants us to offer ‘hypotheses for improvement to be tested against their consequences for the future’ (Lake, 2025: 13) while, on the other hand, arguing that developing a basis in knowledge – that is engaging in the hard, dialogic work of theory-building – from which to derive those hypotheses is just what we should not be doing.

I do not want to live in this brave new world Bob Lake is proposing we build together. I do not want to live out my life shrouded in a veil of ignorance. I want to live in a world that values good scholarship and not one defined by straw arguments. I am happy to continue working with you, Bob, against the faddishness of theorising, in favour of the dialogic, against bad scholarship that sees theory as a framework to be imposed, in favour collectively imagining better futures. But I am not willing to do so at the cost of an enforced ignorance, a kind of anti-intellectualism that I hardly ever thought I would hear coming from a mentor who has so often forced me to think hard and to question deeply, and yes, to continue to contemplate the difficult, important questions that he has so often asked me, often decades earlier.