Winter Break Movies

This is always a good season for movies, what with a bit of a break to view them as well as the run-up to the Oscars. I wonder what readers think of this year's crop?

I saw Clint Eastwood's Invictus last night. It is about Nelson Mandela (played by Morgan Freeman) reaching out to white South Africans through a rugby season. Freeman does an excellent job capturing Mandela's body language and personality. But all in all, it is really just an underdog sports movie parading around with the weight of history. I'm not arguing that sports are unimportant in history--they have been very influential in creating and destroying community, among other things. Michigan State has a historian of South Africa, Peter Alegi, that writes about the influence of soccer during and after apartheid. Invictus, though, in the end ignores a lot of racial nuance for the sake of the emotional high at the end of a rugby world cup. It starts off recognizing the problems between the races, but in the end has everyone dancing in the streets, uniting small black boy and white cops, mean white employer and black maid, black and white security details in a frenzy of happiness.

I guess those final images frustrate me because I do in fact study successful moments of race relations. They are so hard fought and layered with difficulty and only sometimes last beyond those moments. Movies like Invictus tend to say that all we need to overcome a long past of racial hatred is a successful sports season. Messages like that embed themselves into our psyche and make it much more difficult to participate in realistic discussions about race.

In contrast, I thought the BBC's and PBS's mini-series "Endgame" took on some of the same material (the end of apartheid) with more nuance and political savvy. Even though good white liberals had to be one of the main characters (as they seem to always have to be in white novels and movies about blacks), at least the miniseries showed realistically some of the fear and prejudice such whites have.

One of the best parts of these movies is the nuanced black characters. Chiwetel Ejiofor is amazing in Endgame as a leader in the ANC trying to figure out whether he should cooperate in diplomacy with the white power brokers, or continue to fight against the government from the outside.

As part of some break novel reading, my librarian aunt brought me The Help by Kathryn Stockett. It's on the NY Times best seller list. The story of the 1960s South is told through the perspective of two black maids and one privileged white woman. I hung with it for awhile, but got frustrated when the author, for as much nuance as she gave her black characters, insisted on the tremendous love they had for every white child they raised. And at the same time, the one major white character is questioning the racial and gender structures of her society. I wonder if it would be possible to ever write a novel about the south that is popular that does not include a liberal white character (the little girl in the The Secret Life of Bees also comes to mind).

As an interesting side-note, when I went hunting for reviews of Invictus they were generally good. Even the New York Times did not question the movie's historicity. But a Marxist reviewer sought out the aftermath of that rugby season, and wrote about all the racial violence that the players engaged in in subsequent years. Brought back memories of the Marxists I study in the 30s.

What messages about race do you sense in today's movies and films?

Winter Break Movies

This is always a good season for movies, what with a bit of a break to view them as well as the run-up to the Oscars. I wonder what readers think of this year's crop?

I saw Clint Eastwood's Invictus last night. It is about Nelson Mandela (played by Morgan Freeman) reaching out to white South Africans through a rugby season. Freeman does an excellent job capturing Mandela's body language and personality. But all in all, it is really just an underdog sports movie parading around with the weight of history. I'm not arguing that sports are unimportant in history--they have been very influential in creating and destroying community, among other things. Michigan State has a historian of South Africa, Peter Alegi, that writes about the influence of soccer during and after apartheid. Invictus, though, in the end ignores a lot of racial nuance for the sake of the emotional high at the end of a rugby world cup. It starts off recognizing the problems between the races, but in the end has everyone dancing in the streets, uniting small black boy and white cops, mean white employer and black maid, black and white security details in a frenzy of happiness.

I guess those final images frustrate me because I do in fact study successful moments of race relations. They are so hard fought and layered with difficulty and only sometimes last beyond those moments. Movies like Invictus tend to say that all we need to overcome a long past of racial hatred is a successful sports season. Messages like that embed themselves into our psyche and make it much more difficult to participate in realistic discussions about race.

In contrast, I thought the BBC's and PBS's mini-series "Endgame" took on some of the same material (the end of apartheid) with more nuance and political savvy. Even though good white liberals had to be one of the main characters (as they seem to always have to be in white novels and movies about blacks), at least the miniseries showed realistically some of the fear and prejudice such whites have.

One of the best parts of these movies is the nuanced black characters. Chiwetel Ejiofor is amazing in Endgame as a leader in the ANC trying to figure out whether he should cooperate in diplomacy with the white power brokers, or continue to fight against the government from the outside.

As part of some break novel reading, my librarian aunt brought me The Help by Kathryn Stockett. It's on the NY Times best seller list. The story of the 1960s South is told through the perspective of two black maids and one privileged white woman. I hung with it for awhile, but got frustrated when the author, for as much nuance as she gave her black characters, insisted on the tremendous love they had for every white child they raised. And at the same time, the one major white character is questioning the racial and gender structures of her society. I wonder if it would be possible to ever write a novel about the south that is popular that does not include a liberal white character (the little girl in the The Secret Life of Bees also comes to mind).

As an interesting side-note, when I went hunting for reviews of Invictus they were generally good. Even the New York Times did not question the movie's historicity. But a Marxist reviewer sought out the aftermath of that rugby season, and wrote about all the racial violence that the players engaged in in subsequent years. Brought back memories of the Marxists I study in the 30s.

What messages about race do you sense in today's movies and films?

history, interdisciplinarity and politics in the new republic

In the July 1 issue of The New Republic, that magazine’s crotchety Zionist neocon editor-in-chief, Martin Peretz, took a pot shot at the history profession. His real target was President Obama’s woeful (in Peretz’s view) understanding of Middle Eastern history, as evidenced by his then-recent Cairo speech. But in order to clearly articulate the mistaken paradigm in which he sees Obama thinking, Peretz registered a rather damning criticism of academic history itself.

[H]istory these days is no longer a discipline inclined to defend the truthfulness of its claims or the reasonableness of its arguments or the plausibility of its conclusions. More and more, history has become a competition between and among narratives, self-consciously disdainful or what we used to think of as fact. In this intellectual competition, the losers almost always win, or, at least, they win the “moral argument.” Not in real history, mind you, but in many a Western professor’s classroom.

Peretz’s caricature of history, however, is belied by the writing of two historians in his very own magazine. The issue in which appeared his diatribe also featured a Gordon Wood review of Eric Slauter’s The State as a Work of Art: The Cultural Origins of the Constitution, which Wood describes as “the first full-scale effort by a literary scholar to bring the special tools of his discipline to bear on the Constitution and its cultural origins.”

Wood’s reaction to this project is ambivalent, and often his moderate, restrained criticisms suggest that he is bending over backward not to impose historical standards on this non-historical project. He notes early on that the book finds “[t]he historian’s conception of causality…often bent out of shape,” but seems to register this observation as evidence of a difference between disciplines rather than something far more serious. Considering, for example, Slauter’s read on the sexual imagery of U.S. Constitution-building (e.g., the “erection” of a new government and the “impotence” of the Articles of Confederation), Wood notes only that “playing with images in this helter-skelter manner is bound to make the historian very uneasy” and that “[r]eaders will have to decide for themselves how much of these titillating connections they are willing to accept.” In another passage, Wood politely argues that Slauter elsewhere “pushes his literary techniques much too far, at least for this historian.” After considering some of the concluding chapters that he deems more successful, Wood can only muster the faint praise that Slauter has taken on “a laudable goal,” that the book shows “can sometimes be achieved.”

I will follow Wood’s own example by allowing the reader to decide for him/herself whether the historian’s measured criticism belies a more critical private take on Slauter’s book. But the more interesting point, I think, is that raised by Wood’s consistent invocation of his orientation as an historian as the reason for his occasional discomfort with the book. This line of reasoning suggests a kind of disciplinary relativism in which Slauter’s narrative might be compelling to literary critics, but not to historians. It therefore simultaneously refutes Peretz’s characterization and supports it. On the one hand, by suggesting that some claims that might fly in the English department would not be accepted among historians, Wood positions history as the more rigorous, even more objective, discipline. On the other, he pointedly characterizes his historical standards as merely different from, rather than better than, the literary ones implicitly invoked by Slauter. His larger understanding consequently seems to support Peretz’s characterization of historians as weavers of narratives rather than seekers of truth.

Of interest to me here is not the perennial battle between relativism and objectivity in the humanities. Instead, it is that very prominent historians are taking strong positions regarding the practice of history, and whether non-historians are capable of doing it well. Another compelling example of this trend did not take long to announce itself. In the very next issue of the same magazine (July 15), over a quarter of the issue’s pages were given over to a single essay by Sean Wilentz, one that excoriates a series of scholars for, essentially, writing history without being historians. Though neither article says so specifically, they both suggest (to varying degrees) an implicit pushback against the trend toward interdisciplinarity, on the grounds that disciplines (or, at least, the specific discipline of history) provide methodological standards that are uniquely appropriate for their subject matter. Abandon these standards, they seem to argue, and one is unlikely to find work of great value.

Wilentz’s specific topic here is the life of Abraham Lincoln, various aspects of which are covered in the seven books considered in his essay. Wilentz begins by recounting a speech that Lincoln gave when he was still a Whig, before the founding of the anti-slavery Republican Party in 1854. In this speech (which, in its original form, took two days to deliver!), Lincoln attacked the Democratic presidential candidate Franklin Pierce for being insufficiently dedicated to the cause of slavery. Pierce, according to Lincoln, despised the Fugitive Slave Law, which Honest Abe proceeded to defend while characterizing Pierce as a metaphorical “mulatto” for his contradictory positions. Wilentz does not introduce this story, he claims, to “debunk Lincoln’s reputation for probity and sagacity.” Indeed, the historian rejects both “the defamatory image of Lincoln as a conventional white racist” and “the awestruck hagiographies that have become ubiquitous in this anniversary year.” Instead, Wilentz claims that his “simpler and larger” argument “is that Abraham Lincoln was, first and foremost, a politician.”

Such a claim hardly seems controversial, but Wilentz suggests it is lost on “some current writers” who “imagine” that Lincoln’s “every utterance” represents “a foray into moral philosophy or social theory.” Moreover, Lincoln’s speech, with its “casual racism” had little to do with “the major preoccupations of so much of today’s academic scholarship”: race and gender. Instead, the speech in question sought to accomplish several different political goals that would aid the ultimately unsuccessful Whig candidate (General Winfield Scott) against Pierce. Though this particular speech did not represent Lincoln’s “finest political hour,” Wilentz uses it as his opening example to forcefully argue that understanding the sixteenth president on his own terms requires that we represent him first and foremost as someone devoted to furthering specific political goals that included winning elections, maintaining power and governing an unruly electorate. Those who see him as racist or emancipator, philosopher or party hack, simply get him wrong.

Though these views of Lincoln differ significantly one from another, Wilentz seems to suggest that their misattribution stems from a common motivation: a lack of respect for politicians, who are viewed to be, by their very nature, “cautious and unreliable figures who must be forced by unruly events—and by outsiders—into making major reforms.” Under this interpretation:

Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights movement had to compel the southern wheeler-dealer Lyndon B. Johnson to support civil rights and voting rights for blacks. Thus John L. Lewis and the left-wing Congress of Industrial Organizations had to push a reluctant Franklin Delano Roosevelt into making and then enlarging the New Deal. And thus Frederick Douglass and the runaway slaves, not Abraham Lincoln, deserve the real credit for the Emancipation Proclamation.

Wilentz believes that this frame imposes preconceptions on those who write about history, and that it consequently tends to limit one’s ability to offer a sound assessment of the past. Those who cannot admire politicians cannot believe that politicians act admirably; consequently, when they do, they are acting in some capacity other than that of a political figure. In the case of Lincoln, this line of interpretation leads to a narrative in which Lincoln underwent a midlife epiphany regarding the injustice of slavery, after which the scales fell from his eyes and he ceased to allow political concerns to limit his moral disapprobation.

Wilentz argues that the frame itself is incorrect and distorting, and, consequently, so are any conclusions that follow from it. Wilentz blames this tendency to misread Lincoln on, overall, two different factors: one political and one intellectual. The political one is an age-old “hostility of some Americans toward partisan competition and political government,” which found its strongest expression in the late nineteenth century Mugwumps. Wilentz argues that this desire to view the actions of one’s heroes as above the political fray, “shows that Mugwumpery has

evolved, paradoxically, into a set of propositions and assumptions congenial to the contemporary American academic Left.” It is difficult to avoid the thought that Wilentz’s ire stems from the embrace by that same group of a more contemporary figure, one who consistently articulates a vision of an America that is far more united than divided, and who prefers the uplifting speech to the grubby political horse-trade. Wilentz, as is well-known, strongly supported Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama in last year’s Democratic primaries, and did not stop criticizing him even after Clinton (now, of course, Obama’s Secretary of State) conceded the race. (Wilentz himself responded to that charge rather angrily in his response to criticisms of the article: “I wrote a 25,000 word essay about Abraham Lincoln, not Barack Obama.”) Since there is no shortage of opinions on the influence of Wilentz’s politics on his scholarship, I instead want to turn to an implicit claim of Wilentz’s piece: that those who do not specialize in political history cannot successfully write about political figures.

The bulk of the article is given over to Wilentz’s treatment of seven books that represent different approaches to Lincoln himself. Taken as a whole, these books represent “an entirely new fashion in the historiography of Lincoln” in which is “diminishe[d] the importance of party politics and government in his career.” Instead, what makes Lincoln a truly great figure is his “literary sophistication and his empathetic powers.” Wilentz traces the vogue for this interpretive angle to Garry Wills’s 1993 Lincoln at Gettysburg; while magnanimously conceding that the Pulitzer Prize-winning book “has its merits,” he argues that because “Wills is more interested in doctrine and culture than in politics, his book elides the basic fact that the speech had…no immediately discernible political effect whatsoever.” In the wake of this treatment, more recent scholarship gives us a “politics that has been cleansed and redeemed, which is to say a politics that is unreal—a politics constructed out of words, just words.” Now Lincoln, writes Wilentz, “belongs to the English department.”

In the treatments that follow, Wilentz takes issue with every book that he mentions, almost all for exhibiting one (or both) of two seemingly interrelated flaws: treating Lincoln as something other than a politician, and failing to meet the historian’s standard of evidence. “Most historians would think twice,” for example, “about relying as much as” does Michael Burlingame in his Jungian biography of Lincoln “on second- and even third-hand testimony.” Fred Kaplan’s Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer, is one of the few to consider the “mulatto” speech with which Wilentz introduces his article. But because Kaplan is interested in a different aspect of the speech than is Wilentz, his analysis is inadequate. By tracing the origin of a literary trope that Lincoln used in that speech, Kaplan concludes that Lincoln’s racialist patterns of thought were typical of the time. For Wilentz, though, this analysis misses the point. “So the actual subject of Franklin Pierce and the speech’s actual politics have receded into a thicket or words and Lincoln’s misappropriated metaphors and the discursive practices of the 1850s.” Indeed, if there is a third theme here, it is Wilentz’s hostility toward literary criticism. He notes that the Library of America’s Lincoln Anthology, edited by Harold Holzer, fails to include a significant number of historians in its survey of the reactions of “great writers” to Lincoln. “[T]he exclusion…of these authors…who have actually known the most about the man and his times is stunning…As the practice of writing about Lincoln by non-historians continues…it will come as no surprise that English professors are at the head of the line, given the recent trend for literary critics to write about any subject they please, and in a tone of serene authority.”

All of these strains come together in a lengthy attack on Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the co-editor of Lincoln on Race and Slavery. (For reasons that are not explained, the other editor of this book, Donald Yacovone, is essentially ignored in this article.) Gates, argues Wilentz, misunderstands Thomas Jefferson’s position on blacks. He treats Lincoln unfairly by emphasizing his objections to slavery as a threat to white “free labor” rather than the inviolable human dignity of blacks. He ignores the nineteenth century Constitutional restrictions on ending slavery and consequently fails to understand the limitations on Lincoln’s ability to oppose the practice. Gates—the literary critic—overemphasizes the effect of a book (by abolitionist George Livermore, who was in turn inspired by black abolitionist William C. Nell) and underestimates the significance of the political and military situation, on Lincoln’s move toward recruiting blacks into the Union army. (This one Wilentz treats at great length, calling it an “outlandish claim” and “a counterfeit.”) Here Wilentz’s criticism of the historical efforts of non-historians dovetails with his disdain for what he views as the naïveté of those who insist on philosophical purity from their political figures. “In effect, Gates—and he is not alone—holds that the radical abolitionist view of slavery and its immediate and total eradication is the only one worthy of respect, let alone serious consideration…This may express a noble morality, but it is bad history.”

John Stauffer also comes in for a sustained criticism, for his book Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, which, in Wilentz’s view, “ends up maligning as well as misunderstanding Lincoln’s anti-slavery politics.” The article concludes, however, with a brief meditation on Barack Obama, whose similarities to Lincoln have been noted by many, including the president himself. Despite these similarities, Wilentz sees a problem with a pattern of thinking that trumpets the humble virtues of the non-politican to be found in, of all people, the president of the United States. In his view, this dynamic not only threatens our understanding of history, but also compromises our practice of politics. “The Obama campaign, with its talk of repudiating politics as usual…aroused liberal anti-politics to a fever pitch.” This approach, argues Wilentz, is not that of Abraham Lincoln, who “was never too good for politics” and “would never renounce who he was.” On this view, the idealistic visions of today’s “earnest liberal writers,” are not idealistic at all; instead the insistence on moral purity impedes any politician's ability to accomplish real good.

There is a lot going on in this essay, and even this very lengthy summary leaves much of it untouched. Certainly parts of Wilentz’s article read like it is time for its writer to move beyond throwing darts at pictures of Ralph Nader every morning, but I am less interested in Wilentz’s personal politics than in what might emerge from considering his two theses together. Wilentz argues that political historians possess a clearer understanding of political actors than do scholars working in other academic fields. He also, strongly if implicitly, believes that there is some relationship between the desire for intellectual and moral purity in one’s political heroes, and a tendency to see those qualities when they may not, in fact, exist. While many might argue with the first statement, something like it must at least be plausible if academic specialization is worth anything at all. The second is unassailable. Nonetheless, there is something in the article that is not entirely clear, and that is what, specifically, Wilentz believes to be the relationship between these two propositions. Is it necessarily true that historians see politics more clearly than do literary scholars? Might not historians have their own blinders, biases or preconceived notions with regards to politics, or any other subject? And must it be the case, as Wilentz implies, that historians are more likely to see politics for what it is, while others only view it through the lens of moral purity? That tendency would seem to reflect one’s political, rather than disciplinary, orientation. Is Wilentz suggesting a link between one’s politics and one’s field of study? He is not entirely clear on this point, but something like that seems to be the case.

Wilentz could therefore be accused of smuggling in his own disciplinary biases and political preferences under the guise of an objective quest for standards of greater rigor, and such turf battles seldom showcase anyone at their best. But I personally might prefer such a full-throated defense of one's own intellectual commitments to the kid-glove approach to other disciplines that Gordon Wood’s review suggests. Wood’s model is certainly more defensible: the standards of history are merely different from, not more accurate than, those of literary criticism. How does one respond, then, to Martin Peretz’s caricature of the history profession as laughably mired in relativism? Richard Rorty argued that the “postmodern bourgeois liberal” is one who recognizes the need to “realize the relative validity of one’s convictions and yet stand for them unflinchingly.” As an inspiring slogan, "postmodern bourgeois scholarship" admittedly lacks something. But it may be the best work that can be done.

history, interdisciplinarity and politics in the new republic

In the July 1 issue of The New Republic, that magazine’s crotchety Zionist neocon editor-in-chief, Martin Peretz, took a pot shot at the history profession. His real target was President Obama’s woeful (in Peretz’s view) understanding of Middle Eastern history, as evidenced by his then-recent Cairo speech. But in order to clearly articulate the mistaken paradigm in which he sees Obama thinking, Peretz registered a rather damning criticism of academic history itself.

[H]istory these days is no longer a discipline inclined to defend the truthfulness of its claims or the reasonableness of its arguments or the plausibility of its conclusions. More and more, history has become a competition between and among narratives, self-consciously disdainful or what we used to think of as fact. In this intellectual competition, the losers almost always win, or, at least, they win the “moral argument.” Not in real history, mind you, but in many a Western professor’s classroom.

Peretz’s caricature of history, however, is belied by the writing of two historians in his very own magazine. The issue in which appeared his diatribe also featured a Gordon Wood review of Eric Slauter’s The State as a Work of Art: The Cultural Origins of the Constitution, which Wood describes as “the first full-scale effort by a literary scholar to bring the special tools of his discipline to bear on the Constitution and its cultural origins.”

Wood’s reaction to this project is ambivalent, and often his moderate, restrained criticisms suggest that he is bending over backward not to impose historical standards on this non-historical project. He notes early on that the book finds “[t]he historian’s conception of causality…often bent out of shape,” but seems to register this observation as evidence of a difference between disciplines rather than something far more serious. Considering, for example, Slauter’s read on the sexual imagery of U.S. Constitution-building (e.g., the “erection” of a new government and the “impotence” of the Articles of Confederation), Wood notes only that “playing with images in this helter-skelter manner is bound to make the historian very uneasy” and that “[r]eaders will have to decide for themselves how much of these titillating connections they are willing to accept.” In another passage, Wood politely argues that Slauter elsewhere “pushes his literary techniques much too far, at least for this historian.” After considering some of the concluding chapters that he deems more successful, Wood can only muster the faint praise that Slauter has taken on “a laudable goal,” that the book shows “can sometimes be achieved.”

I will follow Wood’s own example by allowing the reader to decide for him/herself whether the historian’s measured criticism belies a more critical private take on Slauter’s book. But the more interesting point, I think, is that raised by Wood’s consistent invocation of his orientation as an historian as the reason for his occasional discomfort with the book. This line of reasoning suggests a kind of disciplinary relativism in which Slauter’s narrative might be compelling to literary critics, but not to historians. It therefore simultaneously refutes Peretz’s characterization and supports it. On the one hand, by suggesting that some claims that might fly in the English department would not be accepted among historians, Wood positions history as the more rigorous, even more objective, discipline. On the other, he pointedly characterizes his historical standards as merely different from, rather than better than, the literary ones implicitly invoked by Slauter. His larger understanding consequently seems to support Peretz’s characterization of historians as weavers of narratives rather than seekers of truth.

Of interest to me here is not the perennial battle between relativism and objectivity in the humanities. Instead, it is that very prominent historians are taking strong positions regarding the practice of history, and whether non-historians are capable of doing it well. Another compelling example of this trend did not take long to announce itself. In the very next issue of the same magazine (July 15), over a quarter of the issue’s pages were given over to a single essay by Sean Wilentz, one that excoriates a series of scholars for, essentially, writing history without being historians. Though neither article says so specifically, they both suggest (to varying degrees) an implicit pushback against the trend toward interdisciplinarity, on the grounds that disciplines (or, at least, the specific discipline of history) provide methodological standards that are uniquely appropriate for their subject matter. Abandon these standards, they seem to argue, and one is unlikely to find work of great value.

Wilentz’s specific topic here is the life of Abraham Lincoln, various aspects of which are covered in the seven books considered in his essay. Wilentz begins by recounting a speech that Lincoln gave when he was still a Whig, before the founding of the anti-slavery Republican Party in 1854. In this speech (which, in its original form, took two days to deliver!), Lincoln attacked the Democratic presidential candidate Franklin Pierce for being insufficiently dedicated to the cause of slavery. Pierce, according to Lincoln, despised the Fugitive Slave Law, which Honest Abe proceeded to defend while characterizing Pierce as a metaphorical “mulatto” for his contradictory positions. Wilentz does not introduce this story, he claims, to “debunk Lincoln’s reputation for probity and sagacity.” Indeed, the historian rejects both “the defamatory image of Lincoln as a conventional white racist” and “the awestruck hagiographies that have become ubiquitous in this anniversary year.” Instead, Wilentz claims that his “simpler and larger” argument “is that Abraham Lincoln was, first and foremost, a politician.”

Such a claim hardly seems controversial, but Wilentz suggests it is lost on “some current writers” who “imagine” that Lincoln’s “every utterance” represents “a foray into moral philosophy or social theory.” Moreover, Lincoln’s speech, with its “casual racism” had little to do with “the major preoccupations of so much of today’s academic scholarship”: race and gender. Instead, the speech in question sought to accomplish several different political goals that would aid the ultimately unsuccessful Whig candidate (General Winfield Scott) against Pierce. Though this particular speech did not represent Lincoln’s “finest political hour,” Wilentz uses it as his opening example to forcefully argue that understanding the sixteenth president on his own terms requires that we represent him first and foremost as someone devoted to furthering specific political goals that included winning elections, maintaining power and governing an unruly electorate. Those who see him as racist or emancipator, philosopher or party hack, simply get him wrong.

Though these views of Lincoln differ significantly one from another, Wilentz seems to suggest that their misattribution stems from a common motivation: a lack of respect for politicians, who are viewed to be, by their very nature, “cautious and unreliable figures who must be forced by unruly events—and by outsiders—into making major reforms.” Under this interpretation:

Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights movement had to compel the southern wheeler-dealer Lyndon B. Johnson to support civil rights and voting rights for blacks. Thus John L. Lewis and the left-wing Congress of Industrial Organizations had to push a reluctant Franklin Delano Roosevelt into making and then enlarging the New Deal. And thus Frederick Douglass and the runaway slaves, not Abraham Lincoln, deserve the real credit for the Emancipation Proclamation.

Wilentz believes that this frame imposes preconceptions on those who write about history, and that it consequently tends to limit one’s ability to offer a sound assessment of the past. Those who cannot admire politicians cannot believe that politicians act admirably; consequently, when they do, they are acting in some capacity other than that of a political figure. In the case of Lincoln, this line of interpretation leads to a narrative in which Lincoln underwent a midlife epiphany regarding the injustice of slavery, after which the scales fell from his eyes and he ceased to allow political concerns to limit his moral disapprobation.

Wilentz argues that the frame itself is incorrect and distorting, and, consequently, so are any conclusions that follow from it. Wilentz blames this tendency to misread Lincoln on, overall, two different factors: one political and one intellectual. The political one is an age-old “hostility of some Americans toward partisan competition and political government,” which found its strongest expression in the late nineteenth century Mugwumps. Wilentz argues that this desire to view the actions of one’s heroes as above the political fray, “shows that Mugwumpery has

evolved, paradoxically, into a set of propositions and assumptions congenial to the contemporary American academic Left.” It is difficult to avoid the thought that Wilentz’s ire stems from the embrace by that same group of a more contemporary figure, one who consistently articulates a vision of an America that is far more united than divided, and who prefers the uplifting speech to the grubby political horse-trade. Wilentz, as is well-known, strongly supported Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama in last year’s Democratic primaries, and did not stop criticizing him even after Clinton (now, of course, Obama’s Secretary of State) conceded the race. (Wilentz himself responded to that charge rather angrily in his response to criticisms of the article: “I wrote a 25,000 word essay about Abraham Lincoln, not Barack Obama.”) Since there is no shortage of opinions on the influence of Wilentz’s politics on his scholarship, I instead want to turn to an implicit claim of Wilentz’s piece: that those who do not specialize in political history cannot successfully write about political figures.

The bulk of the article is given over to Wilentz’s treatment of seven books that represent different approaches to Lincoln himself. Taken as a whole, these books represent “an entirely new fashion in the historiography of Lincoln” in which is “diminishe[d] the importance of party politics and government in his career.” Instead, what makes Lincoln a truly great figure is his “literary sophistication and his empathetic powers.” Wilentz traces the vogue for this interpretive angle to Garry Wills’s 1993 Lincoln at Gettysburg; while magnanimously conceding that the Pulitzer Prize-winning book “has its merits,” he argues that because “Wills is more interested in doctrine and culture than in politics, his book elides the basic fact that the speech had…no immediately discernible political effect whatsoever.” In the wake of this treatment, more recent scholarship gives us a “politics that has been cleansed and redeemed, which is to say a politics that is unreal—a politics constructed out of words, just words.” Now Lincoln, writes Wilentz, “belongs to the English department.”

In the treatments that follow, Wilentz takes issue with every book that he mentions, almost all for exhibiting one (or both) of two seemingly interrelated flaws: treating Lincoln as something other than a politician, and failing to meet the historian’s standard of evidence. “Most historians would think twice,” for example, “about relying as much as” does Michael Burlingame in his Jungian biography of Lincoln “on second- and even third-hand testimony.” Fred Kaplan’s Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer, is one of the few to consider the “mulatto” speech with which Wilentz introduces his article. But because Kaplan is interested in a different aspect of the speech than is Wilentz, his analysis is inadequate. By tracing the origin of a literary trope that Lincoln used in that speech, Kaplan concludes that Lincoln’s racialist patterns of thought were typical of the time. For Wilentz, though, this analysis misses the point. “So the actual subject of Franklin Pierce and the speech’s actual politics have receded into a thicket or words and Lincoln’s misappropriated metaphors and the discursive practices of the 1850s.” Indeed, if there is a third theme here, it is Wilentz’s hostility toward literary criticism. He notes that the Library of America’s Lincoln Anthology, edited by Harold Holzer, fails to include a significant number of historians in its survey of the reactions of “great writers” to Lincoln. “[T]he exclusion…of these authors…who have actually known the most about the man and his times is stunning…As the practice of writing about Lincoln by non-historians continues…it will come as no surprise that English professors are at the head of the line, given the recent trend for literary critics to write about any subject they please, and in a tone of serene authority.”

All of these strains come together in a lengthy attack on Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the co-editor of Lincoln on Race and Slavery. (For reasons that are not explained, the other editor of this book, Donald Yacovone, is essentially ignored in this article.) Gates, argues Wilentz, misunderstands Thomas Jefferson’s position on blacks. He treats Lincoln unfairly by emphasizing his objections to slavery as a threat to white “free labor” rather than the inviolable human dignity of blacks. He ignores the nineteenth century Constitutional restrictions on ending slavery and consequently fails to understand the limitations on Lincoln’s ability to oppose the practice. Gates—the literary critic—overemphasizes the effect of a book (by abolitionist George Livermore, who was in turn inspired by black abolitionist William C. Nell) and underestimates the significance of the political and military situation, on Lincoln’s move toward recruiting blacks into the Union army. (This one Wilentz treats at great length, calling it an “outlandish claim” and “a counterfeit.”) Here Wilentz’s criticism of the historical efforts of non-historians dovetails with his disdain for what he views as the naïveté of those who insist on philosophical purity from their political figures. “In effect, Gates—and he is not alone—holds that the radical abolitionist view of slavery and its immediate and total eradication is the only one worthy of respect, let alone serious consideration…This may express a noble morality, but it is bad history.”

John Stauffer also comes in for a sustained criticism, for his book Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, which, in Wilentz’s view, “ends up maligning as well as misunderstanding Lincoln’s anti-slavery politics.” The article concludes, however, with a brief meditation on Barack Obama, whose similarities to Lincoln have been noted by many, including the president himself. Despite these similarities, Wilentz sees a problem with a pattern of thinking that trumpets the humble virtues of the non-politican to be found in, of all people, the president of the United States. In his view, this dynamic not only threatens our understanding of history, but also compromises our practice of politics. “The Obama campaign, with its talk of repudiating politics as usual…aroused liberal anti-politics to a fever pitch.” This approach, argues Wilentz, is not that of Abraham Lincoln, who “was never too good for politics” and “would never renounce who he was.” On this view, the idealistic visions of today’s “earnest liberal writers,” are not idealistic at all; instead the insistence on moral purity impedes any politician's ability to accomplish real good.

There is a lot going on in this essay, and even this very lengthy summary leaves much of it untouched. Certainly parts of Wilentz’s article read like it is time for its writer to move beyond throwing darts at pictures of Ralph Nader every morning, but I am less interested in Wilentz’s personal politics than in what might emerge from considering his two theses together. Wilentz argues that political historians possess a clearer understanding of political actors than do scholars working in other academic fields. He also, strongly if implicitly, believes that there is some relationship between the desire for intellectual and moral purity in one’s political heroes, and a tendency to see those qualities when they may not, in fact, exist. While many might argue with the first statement, something like it must at least be plausible if academic specialization is worth anything at all. The second is unassailable. Nonetheless, there is something in the article that is not entirely clear, and that is what, specifically, Wilentz believes to be the relationship between these two propositions. Is it necessarily true that historians see politics more clearly than do literary scholars? Might not historians have their own blinders, biases or preconceived notions with regards to politics, or any other subject? And must it be the case, as Wilentz implies, that historians are more likely to see politics for what it is, while others only view it through the lens of moral purity? That tendency would seem to reflect one’s political, rather than disciplinary, orientation. Is Wilentz suggesting a link between one’s politics and one’s field of study? He is not entirely clear on this point, but something like that seems to be the case.

Wilentz could therefore be accused of smuggling in his own disciplinary biases and political preferences under the guise of an objective quest for standards of greater rigor, and such turf battles seldom showcase anyone at their best. But I personally might prefer such a full-throated defense of one's own intellectual commitments to the kid-glove approach to other disciplines that Gordon Wood’s review suggests. Wood’s model is certainly more defensible: the standards of history are merely different from, not more accurate than, those of literary criticism. How does one respond, then, to Martin Peretz’s caricature of the history profession as laughably mired in relativism? Richard Rorty argued that the “postmodern bourgeois liberal” is one who recognizes the need to “realize the relative validity of one’s convictions and yet stand for them unflinchingly.” As an inspiring slogan, "postmodern bourgeois scholarship" admittedly lacks something. But it may be the best work that can be done.

Tim's Light Reading (12/17/2009)

1. What Today's Philosophers Think: Although I understand some of the questions given here by The PhilPapers Surveys, another subset are beyond me---at least as of today. The authors of the quiz concede that they framed many of the questions within the analytic tradition, and my strengths (the few I possess) do not lie in the history of that era, or in its terminology, so my ignorance should not have surprised me. Still, I'm intrigued by what I do know of the issues. The demographics portion of the survey included a question (at the bottom) about the non-living philosophers with which today's group identified. Notice Foucault garnered only 11 votes, and Adorno only 6. I was shocked to see Hume at the top, as well as Aristotle---one of my favorites---still holding at #2. My other favorite is Aquinas, who came in at #24 with 69 votes. Dewey, Sellars, and Peirce came in at 29, 30, and 31 with 31, 30, and 28 votes, respectively. James entered at 34 with 22 votes. Based on my more recent, less historical observations of Catholic thought and the analytical framework of the questions, I'm somewhat surprised to see neither this guy nor this movement on the lists. I figured one or the other would get the 5 minimum nods to be counted.

2. Livingston At HNN: Here's a partial reprise of James Livingston's USIH address, which is also an excerpt from his new book, The World Turned Inside Out: American Thought and Culture at the End of the 20th Century. And here's his new blog address. There he takes on the criticisms of Eric Alterman given during the conference, and reveals---at the end of the post---that he told a (white) lie to Alterman and the rest of us during Q&A.

3. Culture Wars at "The Great Books College of Chicago": As an observer and student of trends in the history of the great books idea, I can't resist bringing to your attention a story out of Chicago. The gist is this: Some faculty and and students at Shimer College are worried that the administration, headed by President Thomas K. Lindsay, is engineering a conservative take over of the institution. A bit of background is necessary. Shimer began as a small liberal arts college in Illinois, originally located in Mount Carroll, that took on a great books curriculum in the 1950s. That curriculum derived from the thinking of Robert Maynard Hutchins, former University of Chicago president, and probably Mortimer J. Adler, Hutchins's friend and intellectual advisor. The college's great books list originally looked a lot like the one comprising Britannica's 1952 Great Books set, but evolved to something more liberal and inclusive as time passed. With regard to its staff, faculty, and students, Shimer became known, especially in the 1970s, for its liberal social and cultural atmosphere. This was evident not just in behavior (which hearsay has probably amplified) during the "Me Decade," but also---and more importantly---in Shimer's radically democratic shared governance scheme, the "Assembly," discussed in the first link above. While some comments to the article express dismay at the culture wars overlay in the piece, saying this is an administrative issue only, there does appear to be a right-ward trend in relation to new Board of Trustees members. This weblog is documenting student, faculty, and staff resistance to the changes. There's a lot to say about this story, but my biggest surprise is that this political-social tug-of-war is only just now hitting Shimer. I'm shocked it didn't happen in the 1980s or 1990s, well before its move to Chicago.

4. The Great Books College of C.S. Lewis: Thanks to John Fea, I have learned that a C.S. Lewis-inspired, ecumenically Christian college is opening in Northfield, MA. The curriculum is, of course, to be based on the great books idea. John didn't say which version of the great books idea they'd be utilizing, but I can imagine a Britannica connection. I'd have to explore their website to learn more. I'll wait on that project, however, until they actually open and host a first class.

5. So you read the Encyclopedia Britannica?: Continuing the great books/Britannica subtheme of today's entries, A.J. Jacobs reflects on the proportion of things-remembered to things-learned after having read the Encyclopedia Britannica near the beginning of this decade. He recorded much of that endeavor in his 2004 book, The Know-It-All. Two parts from the Youtube clip caught my attention. Jacobs emphatically declares that he's forgotten "a huge amount" right off the bat-- about 97-98 percent he thinks. But he also reflects, around the 55 second mark, on the fact that he's gained a deeper, more useful-than-trivia kind of knowledge from that reading. For instance, he cited a justified, affirming optimism about humanity's ability to adapt and grow (my words) that has resulted from his survey of the accomplishments of human civilization.

6. Midsouth Philosophy Conference: I bring this to your attention because of the openness of the call---meaning historians of the Lovejovian variety might be welcome: "The thirty-fourth annual Midsouth Philosophy Conference is scheduled for Friday afternoon and Saturday, March 5-6, at The University of Memphis. Papers in any area are welcome. There will be a $25 registration fee, payable by cash or check at the conference (but not by credit or debit card). Alastair Norcross (University of Colorado at Boulder) will deliver the keynote address."

Tim's Light Reading (12/17/2009)

1. What Today's Philosophers Think: Although I understand some of the questions given here by The PhilPapers Surveys, another subset are beyond me---at least as of today. The authors of the quiz concede that they framed many of the questions within the analytic tradition, and my strengths (the few I possess) do not lie in the history of that era, or in its terminology, so my ignorance should not have surprised me. Still, I'm intrigued by what I do know of the issues. The demographics portion of the survey included a question (at the bottom) about the non-living philosophers with which today's group identified. Notice Foucault garnered only 11 votes, and Adorno only 6. I was shocked to see Hume at the top, as well as Aristotle---one of my favorites---still holding at #2. My other favorite is Aquinas, who came in at #24 with 69 votes. Dewey, Sellars, and Peirce came in at 29, 30, and 31 with 31, 30, and 28 votes, respectively. James entered at 34 with 22 votes. Based on my more recent, less historical observations of Catholic thought and the analytical framework of the questions, I'm somewhat surprised to see neither this guy nor this movement on the lists. I figured one or the other would get the 5 minimum nods to be counted.

2. Livingston At HNN: Here's a partial reprise of James Livingston's USIH address, which is also an excerpt from his new book, The World Turned Inside Out: American Thought and Culture at the End of the 20th Century. And here's his new blog address. There he takes on the criticisms of Eric Alterman given during the conference, and reveals---at the end of the post---that he told a (white) lie to Alterman and the rest of us during Q&A.

3. Culture Wars at "The Great Books College of Chicago": As an observer and student of trends in the history of the great books idea, I can't resist bringing to your attention a story out of Chicago. The gist is this: Some faculty and and students at Shimer College are worried that the administration, headed by President Thomas K. Lindsay, is engineering a conservative take over of the institution. A bit of background is necessary. Shimer began as a small liberal arts college in Illinois, originally located in Mount Carroll, that took on a great books curriculum in the 1950s. That curriculum derived from the thinking of Robert Maynard Hutchins, former University of Chicago president, and probably Mortimer J. Adler, Hutchins's friend and intellectual advisor. The college's great books list originally looked a lot like the one comprising Britannica's 1952 Great Books set, but evolved to something more liberal and inclusive as time passed. With regard to its staff, faculty, and students, Shimer became known, especially in the 1970s, for its liberal social and cultural atmosphere. This was evident not just in behavior (which hearsay has probably amplified) during the "Me Decade," but also---and more importantly---in Shimer's radically democratic shared governance scheme, the "Assembly," discussed in the first link above. While some comments to the article express dismay at the culture wars overlay in the piece, saying this is an administrative issue only, there does appear to be a right-ward trend in relation to new Board of Trustees members. This weblog is documenting student, faculty, and staff resistance to the changes. There's a lot to say about this story, but my biggest surprise is that this political-social tug-of-war is only just now hitting Shimer. I'm shocked it didn't happen in the 1980s or 1990s, well before its move to Chicago.

4. The Great Books College of C.S. Lewis: Thanks to John Fea, I have learned that a C.S. Lewis-inspired, ecumenically Christian college is opening in Northfield, MA. The curriculum is, of course, to be based on the great books idea. John didn't say which version of the great books idea they'd be utilizing, but I can imagine a Britannica connection. I'd have to explore their website to learn more. I'll wait on that project, however, until they actually open and host a first class.

5. So you read the Encyclopedia Britannica?: Continuing the great books/Britannica subtheme of today's entries, A.J. Jacobs reflects on the proportion of things-remembered to things-learned after having read the Encyclopedia Britannica near the beginning of this decade. He recorded much of that endeavor in his 2004 book, The Know-It-All. Two parts from the Youtube clip caught my attention. Jacobs emphatically declares that he's forgotten "a huge amount" right off the bat-- about 97-98 percent he thinks. But he also reflects, around the 55 second mark, on the fact that he's gained a deeper, more useful-than-trivia kind of knowledge from that reading. For instance, he cited a justified, affirming optimism about humanity's ability to adapt and grow (my words) that has resulted from his survey of the accomplishments of human civilization.

6. Midsouth Philosophy Conference: I bring this to your attention because of the openness of the call---meaning historians of the Lovejovian variety might be welcome: "The thirty-fourth annual Midsouth Philosophy Conference is scheduled for Friday afternoon and Saturday, March 5-6, at The University of Memphis. Papers in any area are welcome. There will be a $25 registration fee, payable by cash or check at the conference (but not by credit or debit card). Alastair Norcross (University of Colorado at Boulder) will deliver the keynote address."

The Name Game

As the various "Decades Best" lists begin to appear in the old media and around the blogosphere, it has occurred to me that, as we approach the final days of this decade*, we still don't have a name for it. Last decade was the Nineties. The decade before was the Eighties. Next decade will, presumably, be the Teens. But what do we call the first decade of the twenty-first century? Various things were proposed ("The Aughties"), none, as far as I can tell, stuck. Right now we can still refer to it as "this decade." And for ten years we can say "last decade." But what then? This is, of course, a particular problem for us historians.

The first decade of the 20th century doesn't even provide much of a model. I usually refer to that decade as "the nineteen hundreds" (which itself has a certain ambiguity because one can also refer to whole centuries that way....though I prefer not to as it makes the first decade of those centuries hard to name). But you can't say "the twenty hundreds." And "the two thousands" sounds awkward.

So this is an opportunity to show that we are truly the cutting-edge history blog that we think of ourselves as being. Let's solve this problem for our profession and for future generations of educated citizens!

What should we call the first decade of the twenty-first century?

____________________________________________________
* Or at least what everyone will consider the final days of this decade....calendar pedants can file this post away and read it in a year.

The Name Game

As the various "Decades Best" lists begin to appear in the old media and around the blogosphere, it has occurred to me that, as we approach the final days of this decade*, we still don't have a name for it. Last decade was the Nineties. The decade before was the Eighties. Next decade will, presumably, be the Teens. But what do we call the first decade of the twenty-first century? Various things were proposed ("The Aughties"), none, as far as I can tell, stuck. Right now we can still refer to it as "this decade." And for ten years we can say "last decade." But what then? This is, of course, a particular problem for us historians.

The first decade of the 20th century doesn't even provide much of a model. I usually refer to that decade as "the nineteen hundreds" (which itself has a certain ambiguity because one can also refer to whole centuries that way....though I prefer not to as it makes the first decade of those centuries hard to name). But you can't say "the twenty hundreds." And "the two thousands" sounds awkward.

So this is an opportunity to show that we are truly the cutting-edge history blog that we think of ourselves as being. Let's solve this problem for our profession and for future generations of educated citizens!

What should we call the first decade of the twenty-first century?

____________________________________________________
* Or at least what everyone will consider the final days of this decade....calendar pedants can file this post away and read it in a year.

Watching the Detectives

TPMMuckraker, the investigative journalist wing of (Brown History PhD) Josh Marshall's TalkingPointsMemo blog empire, has obtained most of the late John Hope Franklin's FBI file through a FOIA request. The nearly five-hundred pages of material were apparently the result of a series of background checks conducted when Franklin received a number of presidential appointments. Executive summary: colleagues universally praised him; J. Edgar Hoover suspected him of Communist ties for having his book positively reviewed by The Daily Worker, praising a book by Herbert Aptheker, saying nice things about W.E.B. DuBois, and so forth. Excerpts from the file can be found here.

All in all this is interesting news if not a bit surprising. While it's nice to see a (non-academic) blog like TPM putting John Hope Franklin on its frontpage and reminding its readers about the long history of our national surveillance state, TPM draws few conclusions from this story.

While there was once, in the late 1970s, an emerging consensus in Washington that this sort of thing was an affront to democracy, whatever modest progress was made by the Church Committee has been undone in recent years and a much more robust consensus has grown in favor of more internal surveillance. One wonders what our FBI (or DHS) files look like...and whether we or anybody else outside the halls of power will ever get a look at them.

Watching the Detectives

TPMMuckraker, the investigative journalist wing of (Brown History PhD) Josh Marshall's TalkingPointsMemo blog empire, has obtained most of the late John Hope Franklin's FBI file through a FOIA request. The nearly five-hundred pages of material were apparently the result of a series of background checks conducted when Franklin received a number of presidential appointments. Executive summary: colleagues universally praised him; J. Edgar Hoover suspected him of Communist ties for having his book positively reviewed by The Daily Worker, praising a book by Herbert Aptheker, saying nice things about W.E.B. DuBois, and so forth. Excerpts from the file can be found here.

All in all this is interesting news if not a bit surprising. While it's nice to see a (non-academic) blog like TPM putting John Hope Franklin on its frontpage and reminding its readers about the long history of our national surveillance state, TPM draws few conclusions from this story.

While there was once, in the late 1970s, an emerging consensus in Washington that this sort of thing was an affront to democracy, whatever modest progress was made by the Church Committee has been undone in recent years and a much more robust consensus has grown in favor of more internal surveillance. One wonders what our FBI (or DHS) files look like...and whether we or anybody else outside the halls of power will ever get a look at them.

Another Look At Copleston's A History Of Philosophy Series: Volume 1

In August of this year I reported that I had resumed a long dormant reading of Frederick Copleston's A History of Philosophy series. I am happy to relay that I have finally finished Volume I, Greece and Rome: From the Pre-Socratics to Plotinus. Huzzah! Only 8 more to go!---or 10 more depending on whether I can get my hands on the last 2 additions published by Continuum in the United Kingdom. Right now I own the 9 original volumes published by Image/Doubleday/Random House.

Putting future reading aside for the moment, I am here today to re-post a review I wrote for the Facebook application called "Visual Bookshelf." Usually my Visual Bookshelf reviews are too short to be of real use---not to mention that many of the books I've reviewed there having little to do with USIH matters. This one, however, is different. Please pardon the informal style.

------------------------------------------------------------

My 4.5 (out of 5) stars are based on one's interest in this sort of thing. And, as another reviewer noted, this 506-page tome is not for the faint of heart. Given those two factors, I believe you'll find this a rewarding read. The view from the mountaintop---or from around 300-400 AD looking backwards---is worth the climb.

First, a few of the positives. This is a thorough examination of the history of Western philosophy from the Ionian Pre-Socratics through Plotinus and the Neo-Platonism schools. So the book does fulfill the promise of its subtitle. I especially appreciated the entire chapter dedicated to Plato's "Doctrine of the Forms." I was also glad to be corrected of my contemporary, erroneous notion of Epicureanism (i.e. the hedonistic flavor of today's usage versus the real Epicurean goal of pursuing lasting, over transitory, pleasures).

Of course this is not a perfect book. I will confirm what other reviewers have observed about the occasionally lengthy quotes in either Greek or Latin. This can be off-putting. But frankly, you can read over them and generally pick up the sense of the quote from the context. That said, the inclusion of a Greek alphabet in the appendices would help the reader see how singular special terms, also often given in Greek in the text, fit in the picture.

A more bothersome imperfection is the book's limited index of proper names. The almost-criminal omission of ideas and general terms from the index limits one's ability to refer back to key passages with any sort of ease. I took to scribbling key ideas and page numbers in the index as a supplement.

Finally, non-Christians may find the book's last 50 pages or so, particularly the "Concluding Review," somewhat off-putting. But you can't say, as a reader, that you weren't warned. Copleston tells you in the "Preface" that his impetus to write the book was an urge to supplement the lack of detail in Catholic ecclesiastical seminary texts.

Thinking again about the beginning of Copleston's book reminds me of his excellent discussion of the question--- "Why Study the History of Philosophy?"---in the "Introduction." Therein he reminds the reader of ~the~ perennial issue that confronts those embarking on a study of preceding philosophers: "There is continuity and connection, action and reaction, thesis and antithesis [in the history of thought], and no philosophy can really be understood fully unless it is seen in its historical setting and in the light of its connection with other systems" (p. 4-5).

Of course this statement was written with a clear interest in mind (read my books!), and probably smacks of preaching to the choir when one considers the audience of Copleston's series. But I couldn't agree more. - TL

Another Look At Copleston's A History Of Philosophy Series: Volume 1

In August of this year I reported that I had resumed a long dormant reading of Frederick Copleston's A History of Philosophy series. I am happy to relay that I have finally finished Volume I, Greece and Rome: From the Pre-Socratics to Plotinus. Huzzah! Only 8 more to go!---or 10 more depending on whether I can get my hands on the last 2 additions published by Continuum in the United Kingdom. Right now I own the 9 original volumes published by Image/Doubleday/Random House.

Putting future reading aside for the moment, I am here today to re-post a review I wrote for the Facebook application called "Visual Bookshelf." Usually my Visual Bookshelf reviews are too short to be of real use---not to mention that many of the books I've reviewed there having little to do with USIH matters. This one, however, is different. Please pardon the informal style.

------------------------------------------------------------

My 4.5 (out of 5) stars are based on one's interest in this sort of thing. And, as another reviewer noted, this 506-page tome is not for the faint of heart. Given those two factors, I believe you'll find this a rewarding read. The view from the mountaintop---or from around 300-400 AD looking backwards---is worth the climb.

First, a few of the positives. This is a thorough examination of the history of Western philosophy from the Ionian Pre-Socratics through Plotinus and the Neo-Platonism schools. So the book does fulfill the promise of its subtitle. I especially appreciated the entire chapter dedicated to Plato's "Doctrine of the Forms." I was also glad to be corrected of my contemporary, erroneous notion of Epicureanism (i.e. the hedonistic flavor of today's usage versus the real Epicurean goal of pursuing lasting, over transitory, pleasures).

Of course this is not a perfect book. I will confirm what other reviewers have observed about the occasionally lengthy quotes in either Greek or Latin. This can be off-putting. But frankly, you can read over them and generally pick up the sense of the quote from the context. That said, the inclusion of a Greek alphabet in the appendices would help the reader see how singular special terms, also often given in Greek in the text, fit in the picture.

A more bothersome imperfection is the book's limited index of proper names. The almost-criminal omission of ideas and general terms from the index limits one's ability to refer back to key passages with any sort of ease. I took to scribbling key ideas and page numbers in the index as a supplement.

Finally, non-Christians may find the book's last 50 pages or so, particularly the "Concluding Review," somewhat off-putting. But you can't say, as a reader, that you weren't warned. Copleston tells you in the "Preface" that his impetus to write the book was an urge to supplement the lack of detail in Catholic ecclesiastical seminary texts.

Thinking again about the beginning of Copleston's book reminds me of his excellent discussion of the question--- "Why Study the History of Philosophy?"---in the "Introduction." Therein he reminds the reader of ~the~ perennial issue that confronts those embarking on a study of preceding philosophers: "There is continuity and connection, action and reaction, thesis and antithesis [in the history of thought], and no philosophy can really be understood fully unless it is seen in its historical setting and in the light of its connection with other systems" (p. 4-5).

Of course this statement was written with a clear interest in mind (read my books!), and probably smacks of preaching to the choir when one considers the audience of Copleston's series. But I couldn't agree more. - TL

Zombie Ideas In U.S. Intellectual History: An Etymological And Epistemological Study

I first ran across the phrase "zombie ideas" in Paul Krugman's writings, either here or here---probably the latter. In the first post from November 2007, Krugman refers to this document from the Health Policy Institute, titled "Lies, Damned Lies, and Health Care Zombies: Discredited Ideas That Will Not Die." That study introduces the following phrase in its text: "These false ideas (or “zombies”) carry with them implicit policy recommendations bearing on some aspect of health care financing" (p. 6). The HPI piece was written in 1998.

Although I have found several other instances, beyond HPI and Krugman, where the phrase appears, the year 1998 seems to mark the first public appearance of the phrase "zombie ideas" in thoughtful public discourse. So much for etymology. Perhaps one of our readers---a historian with a penchant for lexicography and a fetish for the undead (hah!)---can add to this story?

But what does the phrase mean? And what is its epistemology? Addressing the former question, Krugman called them "false stories that refuse to die, and just keep coming back." The 1998 HPI study correspondingly says they are ideas with a "tendency to re-emerge." It then indirectly expands the definition of the phrase in several ways:

Yet in the United States the idea that consumer co-payments make good economic (and perhaps moral) sense steadfastly resists permanent burial. Why? The interest in user charges bears the familiar hallmarks of a zombie. First, in spite of its popularity, it is intellectually dead, and second, its overwhelming appeal is a product both of its public resonance, and of the efforts of powerful interest groups to keep it on the agenda (p. 24).

Teasing my concerns from the context of the HPI excerpt, it appears that zombie ideas are (in order of importance):

(1) intellectually dead, or are between death and life currently (hence they arise from the grave);
(2) bad (or evil);
(3) scary (people tremble at the emotional encounter);
(4) kept alive by interest groups (political or otherwise); and
(5) primarily political (or at least zombie ideas recur in this context the most).

I do not mean this list to be exhaustive; consider it a beginning. BTW: In a more humorous vein, it seems the HPI study is THE starting point for understanding zombiology in the realm of ideas.

As for epistemology, what of the science or study of this phenomenon (zombiosis, if you prefer) in the world of ideas? How does this process happen? Perhaps only the specialized historical study of interest groups will reveal changes over time: the peculiar phases, duration, and, most importantly, how zombie ideas are killed once and for all (or are they!)? It seems clear that politicians would benefit from an exhaustive study of these ideas.

I am most curious, speaking somewhat more seriously, of what ideas the historians of U.S. intellectual life feel are zombies? What ideas have recurred the most, or are the most relevant, in the history of the United States? Of course an answer to this question might indict the historians themselves. For the question could be phrased: What ideas have historians resurrected over and over to explain change in U.S. history, particular with regard to its intellectual life? So this could digress into an ad hominem thread that beats up on particular historians. That's not my goal. Besides, a comparable taxonomy has already been constructed once before by David Hackett Fisher.

What say you? What are the most important, most cited, or most over-used ideas in U.S. intellectual history? Or what have I missed in defining the meaning of zombie ideas? - TL

Zombie Ideas In U.S. Intellectual History: An Etymological And Epistemological Study

I first ran across the phrase "zombie ideas" in Paul Krugman's writings, either here or here---probably the latter. In the first post from November 2007, Krugman refers to this document from the Health Policy Institute, titled "Lies, Damned Lies, and Health Care Zombies: Discredited Ideas That Will Not Die." That study introduces the following phrase in its text: "These false ideas (or “zombies”) carry with them implicit policy recommendations bearing on some aspect of health care financing" (p. 6). The HPI piece was written in 1998.

Although I have found several other instances, beyond HPI and Krugman, where the phrase appears, the year 1998 seems to mark the first public appearance of the phrase "zombie ideas" in thoughtful public discourse. So much for etymology. Perhaps one of our readers---a historian with a penchant for lexicography and a fetish for the undead (hah!)---can add to this story?

But what does the phrase mean? And what is its epistemology? Addressing the former question, Krugman called them "false stories that refuse to die, and just keep coming back." The 1998 HPI study correspondingly says they are ideas with a "tendency to re-emerge." It then indirectly expands the definition of the phrase in several ways:

Yet in the United States the idea that consumer co-payments make good economic (and perhaps moral) sense steadfastly resists permanent burial. Why? The interest in user charges bears the familiar hallmarks of a zombie. First, in spite of its popularity, it is intellectually dead, and second, its overwhelming appeal is a product both of its public resonance, and of the efforts of powerful interest groups to keep it on the agenda (p. 24).

Teasing my concerns from the context of the HPI excerpt, it appears that zombie ideas are (in order of importance):

(1) intellectually dead, or are between death and life currently (hence they arise from the grave);
(2) bad (or evil);
(3) scary (people tremble at the emotional encounter);
(4) kept alive by interest groups (political or otherwise); and
(5) primarily political (or at least zombie ideas recur in this context the most).

I do not mean this list to be exhaustive; consider it a beginning. BTW: In a more humorous vein, it seems the HPI study is THE starting point for understanding zombiology in the realm of ideas.

As for epistemology, what of the science or study of this phenomenon (zombiosis, if you prefer) in the world of ideas? How does this process happen? Perhaps only the specialized historical study of interest groups will reveal changes over time: the peculiar phases, duration, and, most importantly, how zombie ideas are killed once and for all (or are they!)? It seems clear that politicians would benefit from an exhaustive study of these ideas.

I am most curious, speaking somewhat more seriously, of what ideas the historians of U.S. intellectual life feel are zombies? What ideas have recurred the most, or are the most relevant, in the history of the United States? Of course an answer to this question might indict the historians themselves. For the question could be phrased: What ideas have historians resurrected over and over to explain change in U.S. history, particular with regard to its intellectual life? So this could digress into an ad hominem thread that beats up on particular historians. That's not my goal. Besides, a comparable taxonomy has already been constructed once before by David Hackett Fisher.

What say you? What are the most important, most cited, or most over-used ideas in U.S. intellectual history? Or what have I missed in defining the meaning of zombie ideas? - TL

Neil's Occasional Quote

I came across this choice nugget in the Introduction to Richard Rorty's Philosophy and Social Hope, and have been chewing on it for the past day.

"The purpose of inquiry is to achieve agreement among human beings about what to do, to bring about consensus on the ends to be achieved and the means used to achieve those ends. Inquiry that does not achieve coordination of behavior is not inquiry but simply wordplay." (Philosophy and Social Hope, p. xxv)

Provocative and unsettling, I think, with a bit of a scientistic undercurrent. Is what intellectual historians do inquiry? If so, is "agreement... about what to do," or "consensus on the ends to be achieved," ever presupposed as the outcome of historical scholarship? Rorty often used Darwinian theory to describe philosophy as a social tool, but he appears to go further here and apply an instrumental calculus to all forms of inquiry. As he puts it, "for pragmatists there is no sharp break between natural science and social science, nor between social science and politics, nor between politics, philosophy and literature. All areas of culture are parts of the same endeavor to make life better."

Neil's Occasional Quote

I came across this choice nugget in the Introduction to Richard Rorty's Philosophy and Social Hope, and have been chewing on it for the past day.

"The purpose of inquiry is to achieve agreement among human beings about what to do, to bring about consensus on the ends to be achieved and the means used to achieve those ends. Inquiry that does not achieve coordination of behavior is not inquiry but simply wordplay." (Philosophy and Social Hope, p. xxv)

Provocative and unsettling, I think, with a bit of a scientistic undercurrent. Is what intellectual historians do inquiry? If so, is "agreement... about what to do," or "consensus on the ends to be achieved," ever presupposed as the outcome of historical scholarship? Rorty often used Darwinian theory to describe philosophy as a social tool, but he appears to go further here and apply an instrumental calculus to all forms of inquiry. As he puts it, "for pragmatists there is no sharp break between natural science and social science, nor between social science and politics, nor between politics, philosophy and literature. All areas of culture are parts of the same endeavor to make life better."