Peter Gordon on What Is Intellectual History

Recently I found an essay by Peter Gordon titled “What Is Intellectual History? A Frankly Partisan Introduction to a Frequently Misunderstood Field.” Gordon answers this question by comparing intellectual history to other disciplines: history of ideas, philosophy, political theory, cultural history, and various aspects of sociology. His main point seems to be that intellectual history draws on multitude of methodologies and often overlaps with other disciplines (and he sees this as a good thing). Intellectual history is distinct because as its primary goal is takes the study of ideas and intellectual life. Also, intellectual historians find this study intrinsically interesting. For example, evaluating the relationship between cultural and intellectual history, Gordon writes: “Cultural historians pay attention to ideas mainly because they are seeking evidence for larger patterns of culture; intellectual historians pay attention to ideas for their cultural significance but also because they find the ideas themselves of interest.”

I found the essay interesting for two reasons. First, it reminded me of the discussion on this blog about what is U.S. intellectual history. Second, it increased my understanding of the field of intellectual history. Since my training was in the history of science department, I bring different assumptions and different understanding of what is intellectual history than many of this blog's other contributors and readers. Consequently, I often lack the knowledge which is assumed by others. For example, after reading Gordon’s essay, I finally understand something that always puzzled me: the source of intellectual history’s heavy focus on political thought.

I am curious what others think of Gordon’s assessment of intellectual history? Also, Gordon, who studies European history himself, draws on examples from European intellectual history. I wonder if his essay would be different if Americanist perspectives were included.

Peter Gordon on What Is Intellectual History

Recently I found an essay by Peter Gordon titled “What Is Intellectual History? A Frankly Partisan Introduction to a Frequently Misunderstood Field.” Gordon answers this question by comparing intellectual history to other disciplines: history of ideas, philosophy, political theory, cultural history, and various aspects of sociology. His main point seems to be that intellectual history draws on multitude of methodologies and often overlaps with other disciplines (and he sees this as a good thing). Intellectual history is distinct because as its primary goal is takes the study of ideas and intellectual life. Also, intellectual historians find this study intrinsically interesting. For example, evaluating the relationship between cultural and intellectual history, Gordon writes: “Cultural historians pay attention to ideas mainly because they are seeking evidence for larger patterns of culture; intellectual historians pay attention to ideas for their cultural significance but also because they find the ideas themselves of interest.”

I found the essay interesting for two reasons. First, it reminded me of the discussion on this blog about what is U.S. intellectual history. Second, it increased my understanding of the field of intellectual history. Since my training was in the history of science department, I bring different assumptions and different understanding of what is intellectual history than many of this blog's other contributors and readers. Consequently, I often lack the knowledge which is assumed by others. For example, after reading Gordon’s essay, I finally understand something that always puzzled me: the source of intellectual history’s heavy focus on political thought.

I am curious what others think of Gordon’s assessment of intellectual history? Also, Gordon, who studies European history himself, draws on examples from European intellectual history. I wonder if his essay would be different if Americanist perspectives were included.

Renewing Black Intellectual History

We are thrilled to announce that the Third Annual U.S. Intellectual History Conference will include a plenary that will consist of several contributors to an exciting new anthology, Renewing Black Intellectual History: The Ideological and Material Foundations of African American Thought. The following four speakers are confirmed: Adolph Reed, Jr., Kenneth W. Warren, Dean E. Robinson, and Touré F. Reed.

Renewing Black Intellectual History

We are thrilled to announce that the Third Annual U.S. Intellectual History Conference will include a plenary that will consist of several contributors to an exciting new anthology, Renewing Black Intellectual History: The Ideological and Material Foundations of African American Thought. The following four speakers are confirmed: Adolph Reed, Jr., Kenneth W. Warren, Dean E. Robinson, and Touré F. Reed.

Howard Zinn, 1922-2010

I've just read the sad news that Howard Zinn has passed away.

Zinn's career stands as a monument to the proposition that scholarship, teaching, and activism can be successfully melded. As someone who values all three, but manages the relationship between them rather differently, I cannot honestly say that Zinn and his scholarly work have been a model for me. But I greatly admire his career nonetheless.

I never studied with Zinn. But I had the opportunity to meet him briefly, when he was the keynote speaker at the conference on Empire, Resistance, and the War in Iraq that was sponsored by Historians Against the War (on whose steering committee I then sat) in Austin, Texas in February 2006. Zinn gave a rousing and deeply historically informed talk. And he had all the warmth and genuine concern for history, his country, and his fellow citizens that I'd always associated with him.

Truly a life well lived.

Howard Zinn, 1922-2010

I've just read the sad news that Howard Zinn has passed away.

Zinn's career stands as a monument to the proposition that scholarship, teaching, and activism can be successfully melded. As someone who values all three, but manages the relationship between them rather differently, I cannot honestly say that Zinn and his scholarly work have been a model for me. But I greatly admire his career nonetheless.

I never studied with Zinn. But I had the opportunity to meet him briefly, when he was the keynote speaker at the conference on Empire, Resistance, and the War in Iraq that was sponsored by Historians Against the War (on whose steering committee I then sat) in Austin, Texas in February 2006. Zinn gave a rousing and deeply historically informed talk. And he had all the warmth and genuine concern for history, his country, and his fellow citizens that I'd always associated with him.

Truly a life well lived.

Poking at the Obvious: Democracy and Communism

I suddenly realized a few years ago that vocalizing what seems obvious to me can help me bring analysis into my texts (this is something I tell students, though it works better for those with a strong foundation in reading who need a push to figure out how to write the analysis they are already doing in their head, rather than the students who need help analyzing at all). I'm learning this all over again as I edit my dissertation. I'm also realizing that analysis can sometimes begin when one pokes at something that seems obvious or taken for granted.

For example, consider the relationship between democracy and communism. What associations do those two words immediately conjure for you?

In W. E. B. Du Bois: Black Radical Democrat, Manning Marable writes

Even Du Bois’s costly decision to defend the Communist party during the period of McCarthyism was both a political and a moral act. He would affirm his basic faith in democratic principles, even if his government would not.

Anti-communists fought communism because they saw it as a threat to democracy (i.e. overthrowing the American government. The CP listening to dictates from the USSR). Many intellectuals fought for communism because they thought they were protecting democracy (either in an economic way or in the way of free speech). I've always wondered a bit how a Communist Party functions as a political party in a democracy. It seems like a group focused on socialism and gradual change would make more sense than a revolutionary party. But maybe that is because revolution is not in fact as important to Communists as I think it is. Or to some communists, at least.

What do you think? Is there a conflict here? What is the relationship of communism and democracy?

Poking at the Obvious: Democracy and Communism

I suddenly realized a few years ago that vocalizing what seems obvious to me can help me bring analysis into my texts (this is something I tell students, though it works better for those with a strong foundation in reading who need a push to figure out how to write the analysis they are already doing in their head, rather than the students who need help analyzing at all). I'm learning this all over again as I edit my dissertation. I'm also realizing that analysis can sometimes begin when one pokes at something that seems obvious or taken for granted.

For example, consider the relationship between democracy and communism. What associations do those two words immediately conjure for you?

In W. E. B. Du Bois: Black Radical Democrat, Manning Marable writes

Even Du Bois’s costly decision to defend the Communist party during the period of McCarthyism was both a political and a moral act. He would affirm his basic faith in democratic principles, even if his government would not.

Anti-communists fought communism because they saw it as a threat to democracy (i.e. overthrowing the American government. The CP listening to dictates from the USSR). Many intellectuals fought for communism because they thought they were protecting democracy (either in an economic way or in the way of free speech). I've always wondered a bit how a Communist Party functions as a political party in a democracy. It seems like a group focused on socialism and gradual change would make more sense than a revolutionary party. But maybe that is because revolution is not in fact as important to Communists as I think it is. Or to some communists, at least.

What do you think? Is there a conflict here? What is the relationship of communism and democracy?

Dissent, “Intellectuals and Their America": Long Live the Culture Wars

The Winter 2010 issue of Dissent magazine includes a symposium titled “Intellectuals and Their America.” Although I would like to claim that, in putting this panel together, the Dissent editors were seeking to preempt our efforts—the theme for our third annual U.S. Intellectual History Conference is “Intellectuals and Their Publics”—in fact, the symposium is an attempt to repeat the famous Partisan Review issue from 1952 dedicated to the theme, “Our America and Our Culture.” In some ways the Dissent symposium is similar to its renowned predecessor, although that can hardly be considered praise, since the original is mostly remembered for its conformity to the shibboleths of the Cold War liberal consensus, notwithstanding three renegade voices (C. Wright Mills, Irving Howe, and Norman Mailer).

To be fair, the Dissent symposium is too varied in topics covered—from mass culture, to the academy, to politics, to patriotism—for any one discernable trend to come to the surface. But, if a semi-consensus is to be found, it’s that liberal intellectuals should love their country, minus the blinders often associated with jingoistic patriotism. The Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne describes this as a careful balancing act between attachment and alienation. The only participant who explicitly challenges this milquetoast position is The Nation columnist Katha Pollitt, who, to her credit, argues that, “as Americans, we need to stop living in a Ken Burns documentary…”

Another theme that binds these otherwise disparate essays together, more as an undercurrent than as a consensus, is the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s, the legacy of which inspires hostility to intellectual elitism, disengagement, and obfuscation. Dionne, for example, revisits the lesson he’s been dictating since he wrote Why Americans Hate Politics (1992): “While the political right spent the 1980s and 1990s preaching the gospel of privatization and the virtue of pursuing individual satisfactions, many in the progressive academy engaged in their own form of withdrawal. An aesthetic radicalism replaced political radicalism, and a battle over texts and canons displaced the fight over whose interests would be served by government and whose ideas would define mainstream politics.” Both then and now, Dionne is not alone in trumpeting this call. In The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America is Wracked By Culture Wars (1995), Todd Gitlin famously titled a chapter, “Marching on the English Department While the Right Took the White House,” which Dionne describes as a “devastating metaphor.”

In making the case that the academic left needs to return to more important matters, Dionne seems to be living proof of James Livingston’s recent argument that the culture wars were not between right and left, but between two lefts: the defenders of modernity pitted against the clarions of postmodernity; the older political left versus the newer cultural left. Gitlin, in fact, made the same argument in 1995, as did several others involved in the academic culture wars of the 80s and 90s. This is a very limited view of the culture wars, too specific to the world of academics. It ignores issues that animated conservative activists who outnumbered academic culture warriors several times over. Such issues included, to name just a few, abortion and government funding of controversial artwork, such as Robert Mapplethorpe’s photography and Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ.

This is not to argue that this battle for the soul of the liberal academy is unimportant, or uninteresting. In the historical discipline, such concerns have manifested in compelling fashion. I’m thinking specifically of Michael Kazin’s The Populist Persuasion (1995), which I had the pleasure of re-reading alongside my graduate students earlier this week. Kazin connects an eclectic mix of social movements to a demotic idiom or rhetoric he terms the populist persuasion, from the obvious (The People’s Party and the CIO) to the not-so-obvious (the temperance movement and the New Left) to conservative variants (McCarthyism and George Wallace’s backers). The success of these movements, Kazin argues, ebbed and flowed to the degree that their leaders were able to speak for average Americans, as against a greedy, conspiratorial elite. Other groups failed to coalesce into effective national movements due to their unwillingness or inability to speak to Real Americans, such as the internationalist Wobblies. Although Kazin recognizes that populism as a rhetorical device is elusive and often flawed—for example, rarely have blacks and women been viewed as “the people”—he thinks intellectuals of our time will only succeed in influencing the American public once we learn how to frame our issues along populist lines. This is Kazin’s scholarly answer to the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s, when populist rage was turned against the professors—when intellectuals were commonly denounced as an un-American elite.

Of interest to readers of this blog, Rutgers intellectual historian Jackson Lears also contributed to the Dissent symposium. Sounding like Christopher Lasch or Noam Chomsky, who both wrote about the responsibility of intellectuals relative to the Vietnam War—and explicitly modeling himself after C. Wright Mills, who took Cold War establishment intellectuals such as Walt Rostow and Henry Kissinger to task for their “crackpot realism”—Lears is more pointed in his criticism of today’s intellectuals than are the other Dissent panelists. That said, he also relies upon the tired culture wars paradigm to explain the intellectual history of the 80s and 90s, which he terms “disappointing.” (Lears, in this instance, is similar to Tony Judt, who makes the overstated assessment, in his mostly excellent Postwar, that European intellectual life after the postmodern turn was worse than it had been in centuries.) It’s worth quoting Lears at length on this issue of leftist intellectuals, post-1960s:

“What was left of the left intelligentsia retreated into the academy, where the tragedy of 1960s cultural politics was replayed as farce. Partly this involved the dominance of identity politics. Its sources were compelling and wholly understandable—the desires of women and minorities to vindicate and explore a separate sense of self, independent of the hegemonic standards established by white males. But one unintended quest for alternative identities was that it created a new kind of fragmented, interest-group politics, unmoored from any larger vision of the good society. Cut off from engagement with actual policy debates (the province of ‘wonks’), the left intelligentsia retreated into academic politics—micromanaging curricular reform with ferocious intensity, debating the finer points of ‘cultural theory’ with scholastic precision.”

This argument, although conventional wisdom, has its merits: none of us should be comfortable with the academy, and we should be leery of the effects of academic institutionalization relative to our political positioning as intellectuals. The problem, however, is that there are severe limits to such an evaluation when extrapolated to account for the entire intellectual history of the 80s and 90s. Lears is critical of postmodernism, or more specifically, a variant of Foucauldian theorizing fashionable in the 80s and 90s, conceived as a “Nietzchean individualism [that] celebrated myriad sites of resistance to repressive authority rather than any larger notion of commonweal.” For Lears, this mode of thought “constituted a mirror image of free-market individualism” or even “a kind-of left-wing Reaganism.” Agreed. But this hardly covers the intellectual history of our recent era.

Slashing, philosophical, mostly Marxist critiques of postmodernism appeared almost upon its arrival. Most famously, I’m thinking of Fredric Jameson’s New Left Review article, later expanded as a book, “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” (1984), where in naming postmodernism rather than celebrating it, Jameson critiques its inability to be critical of capitalism. I’m also thinking of David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (1991). Harvey is scathing in his critique of postmodernism for having foregone meta-narratives in favor of fragmentation, ephemerality, instantaneity, and volatility, and attention to surfaces. In this sense, Harvey’s Marxist—and thus structuralist—treatment of postmodernism “is outrageous by postmodernism’s own standards.” More recently, Perry Anderson, in The Origins of Postmodernity (1998), grounds postmodernism squarely in the epochal defeat of the left. And Nancy Fraser has long been critical of what might be considered a postmodern feminism. Very recently, she reiterated a point that she’s been developing for well over a decade: “The cultural changes jump-started by the second wave [feminism], salutary in themselves, have served to legitimate a structural transformation of capitalist society that runs directly counter to feminist visions of a just society.” All of these authors have gravitated to the New Left Review, which is one of the few international venues that has sought to reconcile Marxism to postmodern ways of thinking, if not postmodernism as a whole. This intellectual history is anything but “disappointing.”

That the “tenured radicals” culture wars theme would be so prominent in the Dissent symposium is rendered more curious by the presence of another article in the same issue, by Richard Wolin, that seeks to delineate how the epistemological turmoil of our recent intellectual history played out in the mind of a single individual: Richard Rorty (“Richard Rorty in Retrospect”). Wolin is genuinely curious as to how Rorty struggled to marry his philosophical nihilism to social democratic politics: “He had come to realize that it was impossible to reconcile postmodernism’s glib philosophical anarchism with the social democratic credo he had imbibed as a youth and which, in his sixties, he belatedly sought to reactivate.” Thus, Wolin asks whether Rorty was successful in fusing his belief in social democracy, enunciated in Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in the Twentieth Century (1998), with his most famous work of philosophy, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), which evinced an epistemology “steadfastly averse to strong, context-transcendent, normative claims.” Wolin thinks such a reconciliation was a failure. “Ultimately, Rorty’s aversion to principle jibed ominously with the ‘anti-intellectualism in American life’ so astutely diagnosed by the historian Richard Hofstadter.” But, whether Wolin’s verdict is accurate or not, and in relation to my larger point: Rorty’s torment nicely symbolizes how this recent history resembles the more distant epistemological struggles between pragmatists and rationalists, a history best told by Edward Purcell, Jr., in his brilliant yet often ignored Crisis in Democratic Theory: Scientific Naturalism and the Problem of Value. Surely Lears would not also argue that this older intellectual history is “disappointing”?

I came of intellectual age in the 1990s, and little of my reading could be described as postmodern in the depoliticized, ironic detachment sense. My favorite authors back then were Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Barbara Ehrenreich, Immanuel Wallerstein, Samir Amin, Adolph Reed, Jr., Michael Parenti, the independent socialists who wrote for the Monthly Review, etc. A number of historians in the 80s and 90s worked in this vein, writing about the political and economic matters deemed important to the Dissent panelists. One such panelist, the historian Alice Kessler-Harris, acknowledges as much, writing:

“In the last generation, historians have refocused scholarly debates to suggest the positive as well as the negative value of government for daily life. We have turned our accounts of movements like progressivism or the New Deal to reveal how effective government programs could and did enhance individual liberty rather than constrain it… We have fostered a wide-ranging debate about the economic and social circumstances that have led to military commitments over the centuries…”

So, by this measure, if we take historians to be intellectuals, perhaps we should be less dour in our assessments of recent intellectual history. Of course, good historians don’t always make good pundits. Witness Kessler-Harris, who introduces her essay by describing her disappointment in Obama’s first year, partly because she expected “an end to the war in Afghanistan.” I am at a loss as to why anyone who followed Obama’s campaign would have had such an expectation, other than suspension of disbelief or flat-out naivety.

The Dissent symposium further convinces me that hardly anyone gets the correct coordinates when analyzing recent U.S. intellectual history. James Livingston is wrong to celebrate postmodernism as radical in the same way as pragmatism. (He’s even more wrong in his more recent assessment that the U.S. military is the vanguard of socialism, or a social welfare state of some sort, because its members learn to give up autonomy. But that’s a discussion for another post.) Lears and the Dissent panelists are also wrong, and not only because they ignore those recent left intellectuals who avoided postmodern trends. They are wrong in their volunteerist mode of interpretation. They seem to think the lack of an effective leftist voice in the mainstream national discourse is due to a failure of academic nerve. In other words, as they see it, left-leaning intellectual voices went unheard because they retreated. In reality, left intellectuals were ignored.

The irony here is that Lears explains the rise of right-wing intellectuals by reference to Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony. Lears nicely sums up this theory: “The problem was not that ordinary people were brainwashed into accepting policies against their interests, but that certain ideas and values were simply not admissible into the charmed circle of ‘responsible opinion.’” This sounds sensible. The leftist intellectuals I referenced earlier (those like Noam Chomsky), who made sustained critiques of U.S. political economy and foreign policy, were ignored as anti-American crackpots—and still are. But Lears goes on to apply this theory differently, arguing that right-wing intellectuals understood Gramsci better than left-wing intellectuals, and thus found ways, usually through the creation of well-heeled think tanks, to insert their voices into the realm of “responsible opinion.” He seems to have turned Gramsci upside down in his volunteerist application.

Further irony: those liberals considered “responsible” opinion-makers, including Dionne (not to mention the Dissent editors), typically ignored those like Chomsky—those who flanked them to their left. In this light, their complaints ring hollow. On the bright side, with all of this hand-wringing over the intellectual history of the culture wars, the time is right for a book on the topic.

Dissent, “Intellectuals and Their America": Long Live the Culture Wars

The Winter 2010 issue of Dissent magazine includes a symposium titled “Intellectuals and Their America.” Although I would like to claim that, in putting this panel together, the Dissent editors were seeking to preempt our efforts—the theme for our third annual U.S. Intellectual History Conference is “Intellectuals and Their Publics”—in fact, the symposium is an attempt to repeat the famous Partisan Review issue from 1952 dedicated to the theme, “Our America and Our Culture.” In some ways the Dissent symposium is similar to its renowned predecessor, although that can hardly be considered praise, since the original is mostly remembered for its conformity to the shibboleths of the Cold War liberal consensus, notwithstanding three renegade voices (C. Wright Mills, Irving Howe, and Norman Mailer).

To be fair, the Dissent symposium is too varied in topics covered—from mass culture, to the academy, to politics, to patriotism—for any one discernable trend to come to the surface. But, if a semi-consensus is to be found, it’s that liberal intellectuals should love their country, minus the blinders often associated with jingoistic patriotism. The Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne describes this as a careful balancing act between attachment and alienation. The only participant who explicitly challenges this milquetoast position is The Nation columnist Katha Pollitt, who, to her credit, argues that, “as Americans, we need to stop living in a Ken Burns documentary…”

Another theme that binds these otherwise disparate essays together, more as an undercurrent than as a consensus, is the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s, the legacy of which inspires hostility to intellectual elitism, disengagement, and obfuscation. Dionne, for example, revisits the lesson he’s been dictating since he wrote Why Americans Hate Politics (1992): “While the political right spent the 1980s and 1990s preaching the gospel of privatization and the virtue of pursuing individual satisfactions, many in the progressive academy engaged in their own form of withdrawal. An aesthetic radicalism replaced political radicalism, and a battle over texts and canons displaced the fight over whose interests would be served by government and whose ideas would define mainstream politics.” Both then and now, Dionne is not alone in trumpeting this call. In The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America is Wracked By Culture Wars (1995), Todd Gitlin famously titled a chapter, “Marching on the English Department While the Right Took the White House,” which Dionne describes as a “devastating metaphor.”

In making the case that the academic left needs to return to more important matters, Dionne seems to be living proof of James Livingston’s recent argument that the culture wars were not between right and left, but between two lefts: the defenders of modernity pitted against the clarions of postmodernity; the older political left versus the newer cultural left. Gitlin, in fact, made the same argument in 1995, as did several others involved in the academic culture wars of the 80s and 90s. This is a very limited view of the culture wars, too specific to the world of academics. It ignores issues that animated conservative activists who outnumbered academic culture warriors several times over. Such issues included, to name just a few, abortion and government funding of controversial artwork, such as Robert Mapplethorpe’s photography and Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ.

This is not to argue that this battle for the soul of the liberal academy is unimportant, or uninteresting. In the historical discipline, such concerns have manifested in compelling fashion. I’m thinking specifically of Michael Kazin’s The Populist Persuasion (1995), which I had the pleasure of re-reading alongside my graduate students earlier this week. Kazin connects an eclectic mix of social movements to a demotic idiom or rhetoric he terms the populist persuasion, from the obvious (The People’s Party and the CIO) to the not-so-obvious (the temperance movement and the New Left) to conservative variants (McCarthyism and George Wallace’s backers). The success of these movements, Kazin argues, ebbed and flowed to the degree that their leaders were able to speak for average Americans, as against a greedy, conspiratorial elite. Other groups failed to coalesce into effective national movements due to their unwillingness or inability to speak to Real Americans, such as the internationalist Wobblies. Although Kazin recognizes that populism as a rhetorical device is elusive and often flawed—for example, rarely have blacks and women been viewed as “the people”—he thinks intellectuals of our time will only succeed in influencing the American public once we learn how to frame our issues along populist lines. This is Kazin’s scholarly answer to the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s, when populist rage was turned against the professors—when intellectuals were commonly denounced as an un-American elite.

Of interest to readers of this blog, Rutgers intellectual historian Jackson Lears also contributed to the Dissent symposium. Sounding like Christopher Lasch or Noam Chomsky, who both wrote about the responsibility of intellectuals relative to the Vietnam War—and explicitly modeling himself after C. Wright Mills, who took Cold War establishment intellectuals such as Walt Rostow and Henry Kissinger to task for their “crackpot realism”—Lears is more pointed in his criticism of today’s intellectuals than are the other Dissent panelists. That said, he also relies upon the tired culture wars paradigm to explain the intellectual history of the 80s and 90s, which he terms “disappointing.” (Lears, in this instance, is similar to Tony Judt, who makes the overstated assessment, in his mostly excellent Postwar, that European intellectual life after the postmodern turn was worse than it had been in centuries.) It’s worth quoting Lears at length on this issue of leftist intellectuals, post-1960s:

“What was left of the left intelligentsia retreated into the academy, where the tragedy of 1960s cultural politics was replayed as farce. Partly this involved the dominance of identity politics. Its sources were compelling and wholly understandable—the desires of women and minorities to vindicate and explore a separate sense of self, independent of the hegemonic standards established by white males. But one unintended quest for alternative identities was that it created a new kind of fragmented, interest-group politics, unmoored from any larger vision of the good society. Cut off from engagement with actual policy debates (the province of ‘wonks’), the left intelligentsia retreated into academic politics—micromanaging curricular reform with ferocious intensity, debating the finer points of ‘cultural theory’ with scholastic precision.”

This argument, although conventional wisdom, has its merits: none of us should be comfortable with the academy, and we should be leery of the effects of academic institutionalization relative to our political positioning as intellectuals. The problem, however, is that there are severe limits to such an evaluation when extrapolated to account for the entire intellectual history of the 80s and 90s. Lears is critical of postmodernism, or more specifically, a variant of Foucauldian theorizing fashionable in the 80s and 90s, conceived as a “Nietzchean individualism [that] celebrated myriad sites of resistance to repressive authority rather than any larger notion of commonweal.” For Lears, this mode of thought “constituted a mirror image of free-market individualism” or even “a kind-of left-wing Reaganism.” Agreed. But this hardly covers the intellectual history of our recent era.

Slashing, philosophical, mostly Marxist critiques of postmodernism appeared almost upon its arrival. Most famously, I’m thinking of Fredric Jameson’s New Left Review article, later expanded as a book, “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” (1984), where in naming postmodernism rather than celebrating it, Jameson critiques its inability to be critical of capitalism. I’m also thinking of David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (1991). Harvey is scathing in his critique of postmodernism for having foregone meta-narratives in favor of fragmentation, ephemerality, instantaneity, and volatility, and attention to surfaces. In this sense, Harvey’s Marxist—and thus structuralist—treatment of postmodernism “is outrageous by postmodernism’s own standards.” More recently, Perry Anderson, in The Origins of Postmodernity (1998), grounds postmodernism squarely in the epochal defeat of the left. And Nancy Fraser has long been critical of what might be considered a postmodern feminism. Very recently, she reiterated a point that she’s been developing for well over a decade: “The cultural changes jump-started by the second wave [feminism], salutary in themselves, have served to legitimate a structural transformation of capitalist society that runs directly counter to feminist visions of a just society.” All of these authors have gravitated to the New Left Review, which is one of the few international venues that has sought to reconcile Marxism to postmodern ways of thinking, if not postmodernism as a whole. This intellectual history is anything but “disappointing.”

That the “tenured radicals” culture wars theme would be so prominent in the Dissent symposium is rendered more curious by the presence of another article in the same issue, by Richard Wolin, that seeks to delineate how the epistemological turmoil of our recent intellectual history played out in the mind of a single individual: Richard Rorty (“Richard Rorty in Retrospect”). Wolin is genuinely curious as to how Rorty struggled to marry his philosophical nihilism to social democratic politics: “He had come to realize that it was impossible to reconcile postmodernism’s glib philosophical anarchism with the social democratic credo he had imbibed as a youth and which, in his sixties, he belatedly sought to reactivate.” Thus, Wolin asks whether Rorty was successful in fusing his belief in social democracy, enunciated in Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in the Twentieth Century (1998), with his most famous work of philosophy, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), which evinced an epistemology “steadfastly averse to strong, context-transcendent, normative claims.” Wolin thinks such a reconciliation was a failure. “Ultimately, Rorty’s aversion to principle jibed ominously with the ‘anti-intellectualism in American life’ so astutely diagnosed by the historian Richard Hofstadter.” But, whether Wolin’s verdict is accurate or not, and in relation to my larger point: Rorty’s torment nicely symbolizes how this recent history resembles the more distant epistemological struggles between pragmatists and rationalists, a history best told by Edward Purcell, Jr., in his brilliant yet often ignored Crisis in Democratic Theory: Scientific Naturalism and the Problem of Value. Surely Lears would not also argue that this older intellectual history is “disappointing”?

I came of intellectual age in the 1990s, and little of my reading could be described as postmodern in the depoliticized, ironic detachment sense. My favorite authors back then were Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Barbara Ehrenreich, Immanuel Wallerstein, Samir Amin, Adolph Reed, Jr., Michael Parenti, the independent socialists who wrote for the Monthly Review, etc. A number of historians in the 80s and 90s worked in this vein, writing about the political and economic matters deemed important to the Dissent panelists. One such panelist, the historian Alice Kessler-Harris, acknowledges as much, writing:

“In the last generation, historians have refocused scholarly debates to suggest the positive as well as the negative value of government for daily life. We have turned our accounts of movements like progressivism or the New Deal to reveal how effective government programs could and did enhance individual liberty rather than constrain it… We have fostered a wide-ranging debate about the economic and social circumstances that have led to military commitments over the centuries…”

So, by this measure, if we take historians to be intellectuals, perhaps we should be less dour in our assessments of recent intellectual history. Of course, good historians don’t always make good pundits. Witness Kessler-Harris, who introduces her essay by describing her disappointment in Obama’s first year, partly because she expected “an end to the war in Afghanistan.” I am at a loss as to why anyone who followed Obama’s campaign would have had such an expectation, other than suspension of disbelief or flat-out naivety.

The Dissent symposium further convinces me that hardly anyone gets the correct coordinates when analyzing recent U.S. intellectual history. James Livingston is wrong to celebrate postmodernism as radical in the same way as pragmatism. (He’s even more wrong in his more recent assessment that the U.S. military is the vanguard of socialism, or a social welfare state of some sort, because its members learn to give up autonomy. But that’s a discussion for another post.) Lears and the Dissent panelists are also wrong, and not only because they ignore those recent left intellectuals who avoided postmodern trends. They are wrong in their volunteerist mode of interpretation. They seem to think the lack of an effective leftist voice in the mainstream national discourse is due to a failure of academic nerve. In other words, as they see it, left-leaning intellectual voices went unheard because they retreated. In reality, left intellectuals were ignored.

The irony here is that Lears explains the rise of right-wing intellectuals by reference to Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony. Lears nicely sums up this theory: “The problem was not that ordinary people were brainwashed into accepting policies against their interests, but that certain ideas and values were simply not admissible into the charmed circle of ‘responsible opinion.’” This sounds sensible. The leftist intellectuals I referenced earlier (those like Noam Chomsky), who made sustained critiques of U.S. political economy and foreign policy, were ignored as anti-American crackpots—and still are. But Lears goes on to apply this theory differently, arguing that right-wing intellectuals understood Gramsci better than left-wing intellectuals, and thus found ways, usually through the creation of well-heeled think tanks, to insert their voices into the realm of “responsible opinion.” He seems to have turned Gramsci upside down in his volunteerist application.

Further irony: those liberals considered “responsible” opinion-makers, including Dionne (not to mention the Dissent editors), typically ignored those like Chomsky—those who flanked them to their left. In this light, their complaints ring hollow. On the bright side, with all of this hand-wringing over the intellectual history of the culture wars, the time is right for a book on the topic.

Grouchy Crouch: Black Intellectuals

I was just reading Stanley Crouch's introduction to a 2005 edition of The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual and it is a very strange document. It professes the importance of Cruses' work while tearing apart all the ideas presented in it as either wrong or rather silly. For example:

The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual seemed to assume that there was a substantial intellectual tradition among American Negroes. That was neither true forty years ago nor is it true now. Very little arrived that would challenge the depth of thought found in the works of men like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edmund Wilson, T.S. Eliot, Gilbert Seldes, Lincoln Kirstein, Malcolm Cowley, Alfred Kazin, and so on. There has never been a substantial body of thought on any Afro-American subject that was formed of deep studies, original theories, probing cultural examination, complex religious assessment, and schools of philosophical concern that raised questions about essences as opposed to superstitions, hearsay, and propaganda. There have been attempts here and there, usually caught up in Negro politics or Negro art movements based more in exotica than the kinds of challenges to convention that jazz brought to the table of Western music. No serious gathering of ideas, as full of yea as of nay, has appeared that was so well conceived and so eloquently expressed that it would add something of value to either American thinking or the larger and more formidable fact of life we call Western thought.

In the Salon, Amy Alexander explains that this is typical Crouch.

Armed with an elephant's memory and a passionate knowledge of and engagement with art (blues and jazz especially, though not exclusively) and history (American, though not exclusively), Crouch delights in slaying the dragons of convention -- particularly those that guard the sometimes-insular world of black intellectuals.

But also argues that there is more to him than his contrariness:

Underneath the mask of Crouch the Grouch is a down-to-earth individual who would rather engage you in debate than cut you dead with pretensions of writerly superiority. He is one of the rare top-echelon literary figures who not only welcomes conversation with unknown young writers (he gives out his home office phone number and usually picks up when it rings), but is also wont to commandeer them for marathon swirls through his downtown universe of smoldering jazz clubs, big-portion restaurants and Runyonesque watering holes.
...
Although routinely and incorrectly described as a black conservative, Crouch calls himself a "radical pragmatist." To the uninitiated, his philosophy might best be described as rigidly humanist. It centers on an unsentimental vision wherein we must fight the siren temptation to obsess about our (mostly superficial) differences, lest we miss the chance to embrace our (very real and very numerous) commonalities.

Of all the things that could be said of Crouch, one cannot deny that he is a very intelligent man and an excellent jazz critic. Why, then, would he claim that there was no black intellectual tradition? Why would a publisher, New York Reviews Books Classic, put him at the beginning of the reprint of Cruse, generally acknowledged as a major contribution to black intellectual history? What can we take seriously in Crouch's critique and what can we dismiss as his famous "grouchiness?"

I think this might be more interesting as a discussion than simply me offering an opinion, though I will point out that Du Bois' interpretation of the Reconstruction, published in the 1930s, is now the staple interpretation (minus some of Du Bois' Marxism).

Grouchy Crouch: Black Intellectuals

I was just reading Stanley Crouch's introduction to a 2005 edition of The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual and it is a very strange document. It professes the importance of Cruses' work while tearing apart all the ideas presented in it as either wrong or rather silly. For example:

The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual seemed to assume that there was a substantial intellectual tradition among American Negroes. That was neither true forty years ago nor is it true now. Very little arrived that would challenge the depth of thought found in the works of men like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edmund Wilson, T.S. Eliot, Gilbert Seldes, Lincoln Kirstein, Malcolm Cowley, Alfred Kazin, and so on. There has never been a substantial body of thought on any Afro-American subject that was formed of deep studies, original theories, probing cultural examination, complex religious assessment, and schools of philosophical concern that raised questions about essences as opposed to superstitions, hearsay, and propaganda. There have been attempts here and there, usually caught up in Negro politics or Negro art movements based more in exotica than the kinds of challenges to convention that jazz brought to the table of Western music. No serious gathering of ideas, as full of yea as of nay, has appeared that was so well conceived and so eloquently expressed that it would add something of value to either American thinking or the larger and more formidable fact of life we call Western thought.

In the Salon, Amy Alexander explains that this is typical Crouch.

Armed with an elephant's memory and a passionate knowledge of and engagement with art (blues and jazz especially, though not exclusively) and history (American, though not exclusively), Crouch delights in slaying the dragons of convention -- particularly those that guard the sometimes-insular world of black intellectuals.

But also argues that there is more to him than his contrariness:

Underneath the mask of Crouch the Grouch is a down-to-earth individual who would rather engage you in debate than cut you dead with pretensions of writerly superiority. He is one of the rare top-echelon literary figures who not only welcomes conversation with unknown young writers (he gives out his home office phone number and usually picks up when it rings), but is also wont to commandeer them for marathon swirls through his downtown universe of smoldering jazz clubs, big-portion restaurants and Runyonesque watering holes.
...
Although routinely and incorrectly described as a black conservative, Crouch calls himself a "radical pragmatist." To the uninitiated, his philosophy might best be described as rigidly humanist. It centers on an unsentimental vision wherein we must fight the siren temptation to obsess about our (mostly superficial) differences, lest we miss the chance to embrace our (very real and very numerous) commonalities.

Of all the things that could be said of Crouch, one cannot deny that he is a very intelligent man and an excellent jazz critic. Why, then, would he claim that there was no black intellectual tradition? Why would a publisher, New York Reviews Books Classic, put him at the beginning of the reprint of Cruse, generally acknowledged as a major contribution to black intellectual history? What can we take seriously in Crouch's critique and what can we dismiss as his famous "grouchiness?"

I think this might be more interesting as a discussion than simply me offering an opinion, though I will point out that Du Bois' interpretation of the Reconstruction, published in the 1930s, is now the staple interpretation (minus some of Du Bois' Marxism).

Tim's Light Reading (1/20/2010)

1. The Marketplace of Ideas: Louis Menand's new book---subtitled Reform and Resistance in American Universities---is getting a fair amount of attention. Here's a solid review in Slate.com, but I've seen other excellent reflections here (WSJ, Wilfred McClay) and here (Bookforum, Jessica Loudis).

2. Dissent's "Intellectuals and Their America": I'm very interested in this forum but have not yet had the time to explore it fully. Have you? Feel free to color my reading.

3. Graduate-level Liberal Arts---In Business Schools: So the NYT has unintentionally(?) documented the sorry state of liberal arts education in America by showing how a liberal arts mindset has to be remedially taught in graduate professional school. Maybe this foreshadows a burgeoning market for un/under-employed humanities PhDs?!

4. An Addition to the Annals of African-American Intellectual History: My online colleague Sharon Williams, editor of The Chicago History Journal (a weblog), has relayed some of the biography of the literary critic, Chicagoan, and former Duke University professor Kenny J. Williams (1927-2003).

5. An Upcoming Conference on Neoliberalism: My home institution, UIC, is planning a conference on neoliberalism courtesy of Walter Benn Michaels. I'm planning to attend, so let me know if you'll be there too.

6. Common Education Standards for Schools: E.D. Hirsch reflects on the weaknesses of the Common Core Standards Initiative sponsored by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers. This initiative applies to college/university professor types because it deals with college readiness. And Hirsch believes a major weakness to be the lack of content standards---much of which deals directly with history, or at least historical topics.

7. Butler's Critical Americans: The October 2009 issue of the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (Vol. 8, no. 4) contains a review of Leslie Butler's Critical Americans: Victorian Intellectuals and Transatlantic Liberal Reform. The reviewer is Christopher McKnight Nichols.

8. Anti-intellectualism and Ignorance Today: This conspiracy-theory video on Obama, Catholicism, and domestic politics shows why we need to study intellectual history in America. I've never seen so much ignorance packed into a 3:36 minute clip. Wow.

9. For Fun: What type---meaning font---are you? The password is "character." I came up Expanded Antique; here's a sample.

Tim's Light Reading (1/20/2010)

1. The Marketplace of Ideas: Louis Menand's new book---subtitled Reform and Resistance in American Universities---is getting a fair amount of attention. Here's a solid review in Slate.com, but I've seen other excellent reflections here (WSJ, Wilfred McClay) and here (Bookforum, Jessica Loudis).

2. Dissent's "Intellectuals and Their America": I'm very interested in this forum but have not yet had the time to explore it fully. Have you? Feel free to color my reading.

3. Graduate-level Liberal Arts---In Business Schools: So the NYT has unintentionally(?) documented the sorry state of liberal arts education in America by showing how a liberal arts mindset has to be remedially taught in graduate professional school. Maybe this foreshadows a burgeoning market for un/under-employed humanities PhDs?!

4. An Addition to the Annals of African-American Intellectual History: My online colleague Sharon Williams, editor of The Chicago History Journal (a weblog), has relayed some of the biography of the literary critic, Chicagoan, and former Duke University professor Kenny J. Williams (1927-2003).

5. An Upcoming Conference on Neoliberalism: My home institution, UIC, is planning a conference on neoliberalism courtesy of Walter Benn Michaels. I'm planning to attend, so let me know if you'll be there too.

6. Common Education Standards for Schools: E.D. Hirsch reflects on the weaknesses of the Common Core Standards Initiative sponsored by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers. This initiative applies to college/university professor types because it deals with college readiness. And Hirsch believes a major weakness to be the lack of content standards---much of which deals directly with history, or at least historical topics.

7. Butler's Critical Americans: The October 2009 issue of the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (Vol. 8, no. 4) contains a review of Leslie Butler's Critical Americans: Victorian Intellectuals and Transatlantic Liberal Reform. The reviewer is Christopher McKnight Nichols.

8. Anti-intellectualism and Ignorance Today: This conspiracy-theory video on Obama, Catholicism, and domestic politics shows why we need to study intellectual history in America. I've never seen so much ignorance packed into a 3:36 minute clip. Wow.

9. For Fun: What type---meaning font---are you? The password is "character." I came up Expanded Antique; here's a sample.

To Young Idealists in the Mold of Paul Goodman

To aforesaid idealists, a chance to win a prize and publish in Dissent by answering this question: "What is one of the pressing social and political issues of our time, and how would you address it?" The contest is being run in conjunction with a forthcoming documentary on the twentieth-century radical social critic Paul Goodman ("Paul Goodman Changed My Life"), which promises to be interesting. From what I can tell, you need to be under the age of 30 -- a key demographic for this site, I presume.

To Young Idealists in the Mold of Paul Goodman

To aforesaid idealists, a chance to win a prize and publish in Dissent by answering this question: "What is one of the pressing social and political issues of our time, and how would you address it?" The contest is being run in conjunction with a forthcoming documentary on the twentieth-century radical social critic Paul Goodman ("Paul Goodman Changed My Life"), which promises to be interesting. From what I can tell, you need to be under the age of 30 -- a key demographic for this site, I presume.

Teed on Ruffin's A Paradise of Reason

Review of J. Rixey Ruffin’s A Paradise of Reason: William Bentley and Enlightenment Christianity in the Early Republic (Oxford University Press, 2009). ISBN: 978-0-19-532651-2 (hardcover). 280 pp. 9.2 x 6.4 x 1.

Guest Review by Paul E. Teed
Saginaw Valley State University

William Bentley has too long been neglected by students of American religious and intellectual history. Even among historians of American Unitarianism, a religious movement which Bentley helped to nurture during the Early Republic, his role has been overshadowed by better known religious liberals like William Ellery Channing. Although most scholars of the period have heard of Bentley, he is best known for his detailed diary which has been mined for references to the better known figures with whom he mixed, and for its insights into the social and political life of Salem, Massachusetts where he spent nearly four decades as a minister. In contrast, J. Rixey Ruffin’s new book places Bentley at the forefront of the intellectual and religious changes that swept New England and the new United States in the wake of the American Revolution. In the process, he makes a persuasive case that Bentley met the Enlightenment’s challenges to New England’s inherited religious and political values in ways that few, if any of his clerical contemporaries were prepared to accept. Bentley emerges from the book as a maverick, even a gadfly, whose commitment to freedom of thought led him to embrace not only the radical Enlightenment but also the party of Thomas Jefferson.

Bentley has remained under the scholarly radar in part because he published very little of his writing. A list of “major published works” by Bentley yields...[Continue here]

Teed on Ruffin's A Paradise of Reason

Review of J. Rixey Ruffin’s A Paradise of Reason: William Bentley and Enlightenment Christianity in the Early Republic (Oxford University Press, 2009). ISBN: 978-0-19-532651-2 (hardcover). 280 pp. 9.2 x 6.4 x 1.

Guest Review by Paul E. Teed
Saginaw Valley State University

William Bentley has too long been neglected by students of American religious and intellectual history. Even among historians of American Unitarianism, a religious movement which Bentley helped to nurture during the Early Republic, his role has been overshadowed by better known religious liberals like William Ellery Channing. Although most scholars of the period have heard of Bentley, he is best known for his detailed diary which has been mined for references to the better known figures with whom he mixed, and for its insights into the social and political life of Salem, Massachusetts where he spent nearly four decades as a minister. In contrast, J. Rixey Ruffin’s new book places Bentley at the forefront of the intellectual and religious changes that swept New England and the new United States in the wake of the American Revolution. In the process, he makes a persuasive case that Bentley met the Enlightenment’s challenges to New England’s inherited religious and political values in ways that few, if any of his clerical contemporaries were prepared to accept. Bentley emerges from the book as a maverick, even a gadfly, whose commitment to freedom of thought led him to embrace not only the radical Enlightenment but also the party of Thomas Jefferson.

Bentley has remained under the scholarly radar in part because he published very little of his writing. A list of “major published works” by Bentley yields...[Continue here]

What document bears the signatures of Washington, Adams, Jefferson and Madison?

It's Friday, time for some light trivia with which to impress your friends over the weekend.



The manuscript pictured (from the archives of the American Philosophical Society) here is the only document known to contain the signatures of the first four presidents of the U.S. It is a subscription list for an expedition by André Michaux to explore "the interior of North America from the Mississippi along the Missouri, and Westwardly to the Pacific ocean." Michaux, whose globetrotting life was full of excitements and disappointments, was a French botanist who came to United States to examine the North America flora. Today he is well remembered (at least in some circles) and his best know work is the Histoire des chenes de l'Amerique septentrionale (1801) illustrated by the famed Pierre-Joseph Redouté. Of course, Michaux scientific exploration was motivated and supported by more practical reasons than increasing the store of philosophical knowledge. He collected and shipped plants with commercial uses and which could be acclimated to grow in France or its possession. He also supplied beautiful exotic species, such as magnolias, to the empress Josephine's garden at Malmaison.

Michaux expedition to the interior America never took place. However, ten years later Jefferson sent out another expedition (headed by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark) to obtain the geological and botanical knowledge he desired. This information provided Jefferson as much knowledge about the political situation and economic potential of the land west as much as it did about scientific matters.

It seems symbolic that the only document to bear the signatures of George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison (and others) represents scientific, political, economic and imperial ambitions of the new country. It reminds us that since its founding, the United States, its political, economic, intellectual and scientific histories were intertwined.

What document bears the signatures of Washington, Adams, Jefferson and Madison?

It's Friday, time for some light trivia with which to impress your friends over the weekend.



The manuscript pictured (from the archives of the American Philosophical Society) here is the only document known to contain the signatures of the first four presidents of the U.S. It is a subscription list for an expedition by André Michaux to explore "the interior of North America from the Mississippi along the Missouri, and Westwardly to the Pacific ocean." Michaux, whose globetrotting life was full of excitements and disappointments, was a French botanist who came to United States to examine the North America flora. Today he is well remembered (at least in some circles) and his best know work is the Histoire des chenes de l'Amerique septentrionale (1801) illustrated by the famed Pierre-Joseph Redouté. Of course, Michaux scientific exploration was motivated and supported by more practical reasons than increasing the store of philosophical knowledge. He collected and shipped plants with commercial uses and which could be acclimated to grow in France or its possession. He also supplied beautiful exotic species, such as magnolias, to the empress Josephine's garden at Malmaison.

Michaux expedition to the interior America never took place. However, ten years later Jefferson sent out another expedition (headed by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark) to obtain the geological and botanical knowledge he desired. This information provided Jefferson as much knowledge about the political situation and economic potential of the land west as much as it did about scientific matters.

It seems symbolic that the only document to bear the signatures of George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison (and others) represents scientific, political, economic and imperial ambitions of the new country. It reminds us that since its founding, the United States, its political, economic, intellectual and scientific histories were intertwined.

Exciting New Pedagogy Based in the History of Ideas

A decade ago, several professors at Barnard College created a pedagogy based in the History of Ideas called "Reacting to the Past." I attended a session at the AHA discussing this pedagogy (the History News Network discusses the session here).

Their website explains:

Reacting to the Past” (RTTP) consists of elaborate games, set in the past, in which students are assigned roles informed by classic texts in the history of ideas. Class sessions are run entirely by students; instructors advise and guide students and grade their oral and written work. It seeks to draw students into the past, promote engagement with big ideas, and improve intellectual and academic skills. Pioneered by Barnard College in 1996, the project is supported by a consortium of colleges and universities.

Some of the games I heard discussed were based on Plato's Republic, Confucius's Proverbs, the division of India, Anne Hutchinson, and King Henry VIII. The games immerse the students in the ideas expressed. Students are divided into different factions and given certain goals they are trying to achieve. Some students are indeterminants that need to be persuaded to join one or another faction and often have the swing vote in classes. The games take up different amounts of time.

All the professors at the AHA session familiar with this pedagogy said that it transformed students. They arrived early and stayed late for class. The factions would chase down indeterminants in the hallways and unions trying to persuade them. Shy students felt nervous at first, but blossomed by the end. Freshman made lasting friendships.

The series started out as something more for a Freshman Year Experience course or a general education course, but historians are starting to adopt them. We have to be willing to give up a lot of content coverage in a lecture class, or they can be used in a seminar type class. There are several games already published, and more being worked on at the moment.

I was especially excited because I had plans for constructing something very much like this around the 1964 Democratic Convention. Delegates at that convention split into many different factions that expressed competing opinions among blacks and whites, northerners and southerners, politicians and activists. An EMU history prof at the AHA session, Mark Higbee, said he's developing a game for the Montgomery Bus Boycott. One black student told him that she had never understood the Civil Rights Movement until she had to take on the role of a white segregationist and argue for further discrimination and segregation. She then realized what Civil Rights Activists had been challenging.

The pedagogy has been used at small liberal arts colleges and major research one institutions. Barnard College holds a training session every summer and there are other regional conferences around the country.

What do you think? Do you have any controversies or texts in American Intellectual History that you think would work for this?

Exciting New Pedagogy Based in the History of Ideas

A decade ago, several professors at Barnard College created a pedagogy based in the History of Ideas called "Reacting to the Past." I attended a session at the AHA discussing this pedagogy (the History News Network discusses the session here).

Their website explains:

Reacting to the Past” (RTTP) consists of elaborate games, set in the past, in which students are assigned roles informed by classic texts in the history of ideas. Class sessions are run entirely by students; instructors advise and guide students and grade their oral and written work. It seeks to draw students into the past, promote engagement with big ideas, and improve intellectual and academic skills. Pioneered by Barnard College in 1996, the project is supported by a consortium of colleges and universities.

Some of the games I heard discussed were based on Plato's Republic, Confucius's Proverbs, the division of India, Anne Hutchinson, and King Henry VIII. The games immerse the students in the ideas expressed. Students are divided into different factions and given certain goals they are trying to achieve. Some students are indeterminants that need to be persuaded to join one or another faction and often have the swing vote in classes. The games take up different amounts of time.

All the professors at the AHA session familiar with this pedagogy said that it transformed students. They arrived early and stayed late for class. The factions would chase down indeterminants in the hallways and unions trying to persuade them. Shy students felt nervous at first, but blossomed by the end. Freshman made lasting friendships.

The series started out as something more for a Freshman Year Experience course or a general education course, but historians are starting to adopt them. We have to be willing to give up a lot of content coverage in a lecture class, or they can be used in a seminar type class. There are several games already published, and more being worked on at the moment.

I was especially excited because I had plans for constructing something very much like this around the 1964 Democratic Convention. Delegates at that convention split into many different factions that expressed competing opinions among blacks and whites, northerners and southerners, politicians and activists. An EMU history prof at the AHA session, Mark Higbee, said he's developing a game for the Montgomery Bus Boycott. One black student told him that she had never understood the Civil Rights Movement until she had to take on the role of a white segregationist and argue for further discrimination and segregation. She then realized what Civil Rights Activists had been challenging.

The pedagogy has been used at small liberal arts colleges and major research one institutions. Barnard College holds a training session every summer and there are other regional conferences around the country.

What do you think? Do you have any controversies or texts in American Intellectual History that you think would work for this?

Tony Judt on American and European liberalism

Tony Judt was one of the first intellectual historians I read and enjoyed. I spent a semester during courses thinking about the choices about communism made by western leftists after Stalin. Then when his masterful Postwar Europe came out during my comps, I was first in awe and then cursed its timing.

I was saddened today to learn that he has an advanced form of ALS and is now a quadrapalegic. An article in the Chronicle shows that his mind and sense of humor are still sharp.

A taste:

He began by joking, referring to himself as "a quadriplegic wearing facial Tupperware" and promising not to use overdramatic hand gestures. The tension abated, and Judt moved into the substance of his talk, "What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy?" [...]

Americans and, to a lesser extent, Europeans have forgotten how to think politically and morally about economic choices, Judt warned, his fragile, British-accented voice growing louder. To abandon the gains made by social democrats—the New Deal, the Great Society, the European welfare state—"is to betray those who came before us as well as generations yet to come. [...]

I ask how he felt after the lecture. "Elated," Judt replies simply. Some friends and colleagues had encouraged him to scrap his planned remarks and speak instead about ALS. "I thought about it," Judt says, "but I have nothing new to say about ALS. I do have something new to say about social democracy, and by saying it in my condition I can maybe have some influence on people's understanding of sickness." He takes a deep breath. "There is something to be said for simply doing the thing you would do anyway, doing it as well as you can under the circumstances, and getting past the sympathy vote as soon as possible."

Tony Judt on American and European liberalism

Tony Judt was one of the first intellectual historians I read and enjoyed. I spent a semester during courses thinking about the choices about communism made by western leftists after Stalin. Then when his masterful Postwar Europe came out during my comps, I was first in awe and then cursed its timing.

I was saddened today to learn that he has an advanced form of ALS and is now a quadrapalegic. An article in the Chronicle shows that his mind and sense of humor are still sharp.

A taste:

He began by joking, referring to himself as "a quadriplegic wearing facial Tupperware" and promising not to use overdramatic hand gestures. The tension abated, and Judt moved into the substance of his talk, "What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy?" [...]

Americans and, to a lesser extent, Europeans have forgotten how to think politically and morally about economic choices, Judt warned, his fragile, British-accented voice growing louder. To abandon the gains made by social democrats—the New Deal, the Great Society, the European welfare state—"is to betray those who came before us as well as generations yet to come. [...]

I ask how he felt after the lecture. "Elated," Judt replies simply. Some friends and colleagues had encouraged him to scrap his planned remarks and speak instead about ALS. "I thought about it," Judt says, "but I have nothing new to say about ALS. I do have something new to say about social democracy, and by saying it in my condition I can maybe have some influence on people's understanding of sickness." He takes a deep breath. "There is something to be said for simply doing the thing you would do anyway, doing it as well as you can under the circumstances, and getting past the sympathy vote as soon as possible."

Career Opportunities

I've been following with interest the discussion on this blog and elsewhere about the state of the academic job market in history. I put a few thoughts in a comment on Tim's post below, but I thought I'd expand on them in a post.

Let me start with some caveats: I have not studied this problem systematically. Like most of the other folks commenting on this issue, I rely on the professional organizations for my data and my own experience of the profession for further evidence (while recognizing that the plural of anecdote is not data). I haven't read Marc Bousquet's How the University Works though it's been on my seemingly endless to-read list for some time. My understanding of his views is based on reading shorter pieces by him, such as his recent blog entries in this conversation, as well as reviews of the book. I apologize if I have, therefore, misconstrued any of his positions and welcome clarifications from those more familiar with his book.

I share Bousquet's concerns about the casualization of academic labor. And I agree that there is no substitute for addressing the demand side of the academic job market, organizing, and fighting back against the dominant trends in the structure of academic employment. Though I fear that this is easier said than done (about which I'll have more to say in another post), I am extremely grateful that people like Bousquet's are leading the good fight. Incidentally, if you're an academic and you're not a member of the AAUP (on whose council Bousquet serves), stop reading this post and join now. I'll wait for you here...

Welcome back!

While I'm happy to join Bousquet on the ramparts of the demand side, I remain puzzled by his position on concerns about the supply side of the academic job market. It seems to me that one can think one of three things about the number of PhDs currently being produced in a field (let's talk about history, since this is a history blog): 1) we're producing too many history PhDs; 2) we're producing too few history PhDs; 3) we're producing roughly the right number of history PhDs. Which of these three positions one takes will naturally depend upon how one defines the right number of history PhDs. And I agree with Marc Bousquet that we should absolutely resist the temptation to assume that the number of tenure-track jobs (or even the number of jobs period) that are currently available is the same as the ideal number of PhDs seeking employment. Indeed, I take his central concern about supply-side talk to be that it tends to take the demand side as a given. With this, too, I agree. Worrying about the supply side can be no substitute for attending to the demand side structures. And, indeed, supply-side worries can help naturalize demand-side changes that we ought to be actively resisting.

The problem is that I don't see any alternative conception on Bousquet's part of what the right number of PhDs is. Instead one gets the sense that he objects to any concern at all about how many PhDs are being produced. This is, I take it, the point of associating such concern with Reaganomics (e.g. "This is the sort of thing that used to get said all the time by disciplinary-association staffers -- as what I call part of a 'second wave' of thinking about academic labor, emerging out of discredited supply-side thought dating back to the Reagan administration.") But Reagan-era supply-side economics was a theory of macroeconomics that argued not for limiting the supply-side, but doing the opposite, i.e. lowering perceived barriers to the production of good and services. The microeconomics of the academic job market don't have much to do with this, but to the extent that we want to draw a metaphorical connection, the idea of limiting the production of PhDs, whatever its merits, seems to me to have very little to do with the "discredited supply-side thought dating back to the Reagan era." This sounds to me like argument by pejorative.

In fact, I think that there are very good reasons to limit the production of history PhDs, especially in the short run. First, the size of PhD programs tends to be determined by a series of factors that has next to nothing to do with either the actual or the potential demand for people with PhDs. Having a PhD program tends to add to a department's prestige. At most institutions, the larger the program, the better it is for the department within the institution. Graduate students also provide a supply of cheap labor that helps limit the size of of faculty teaching loads (or that substitutes for less qualified people, e.g., undergraduates, teaching instead).* Mentoring graduate students can, of course, be very personally fulfilling to historians. Factors that limit the number of PhDs produced by a department tend to include student demand and the availability of funding and/or assistantships.

None of this has much of anything to do with employment demand for the PhDs being produced by the department. At this point I should pause and note that while I have taught for three history departments with PhD programs, I have never had a tenure-track appointment in one (my current, tenured appointment is in an undergraduate-only unit). So there are perhaps conversations taking place in meetings in which I have not been involved that took the question of job opportunities for my various departments' future PhDs into consideration when thinking about how large the PhD program ought to be. But I certainly never heard any such conversations. And I know for a fact that, at least back in the 1990s, when I taught at one of these three departments--a flagship midwestern state university with a fine history department--it did not even track the record of its PhDs on the job market.

And while I take Bousquet's point that a restructured demand side might need a substantially larger number of PhDs than the current casualizing market does, in the context of the current market, we are producing a vast reserve army of the unemployed that helps to ease the process of casualization, as there are always unemployed and underemployed PhDs willing and available to take the ever worsening deals offered to them by universities and colleges in the hope that they will eventually get something better. Far from denying the need to organize, I think that reducing the pool of history PhDs would substantially improve our bargaining position.

All that being said, the devil is in the details....and here I must say that I don't have a strong sense of how one should go about equitably limiting the number of new history PhDs. Jonathan Rees endorses Ralph Luker's view that some marginal PhD programs should be simply shut down and replaced with MA programs. This seems like a sensible idea in principle, though the incentives for particular PhD programs to go out of business are pretty weak. And I'm not sure who could be empowered (or who we'd be comfortable with empowering) to tell them they have to go. Moreover, there's no particular reason to assume that an overproduction problem is best solved by eliminating entire programs rather than shrinking but retaining programs. There's a good case to be made that a greater number of programs (with a greater number of faculty supervising PhDs) increases the diversity of the discipline in any number of ways. All of which is to say that, while I tend to think that we ought to be reducing the number of newly minted history PhDs, I don't know the best way to do so.

Sometime later this week I'll return with a few thoughts about the challenges of addressing the demand side.
________________________________
* Bousquet uses this fact as an argument against limiting the number of PhDs:

[J]ust imagine the shrinkage of grad programs.

Who would do the work that grad students were doing? On what terms? Would they be more qualified or less? At some institutions administrations will want to replace grad student discussion leaders with undergrads. What would be a proper replacement for the grad student discussion leader? A teaching-intensive faculty member? In that context are teaching-intensive faculty “historians” to the AHA? Ditto small colleges and community colleges?

In the end, any actual shrinkage of doctoral programs leads you right back to the tough questions that “job market theory” initially bypasses–because those doctoral programs are that size for a reason: the students are working!

Here, as elsewhere, Bousquet seems to assume that the only reason to discuss the supply side is to avoid discussing the demand side. I agree with him 100% that shrinking graduate programs would necessarily entail a restructuring of academic employment, i.e. addressing the demand side. I just don't see this as much of an argument against shrinking the size of PhD programs.