Hartman on Geary's Radical Ambition

Review of Daniel Geary’s Radical Ambition: C. Wright Mills, the Left, and American Social Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). ISBN-13: 978-0-520-25836-5. 277 pages.

Review by Andrew Hartman
Illinois State University
March 2010

During my graduate studies, I took a course with Professor Leo Ribuffo on postwar American social thought. In the first part of the semester, we focused our readings on the 1950s consensus or pluralist theorists. The list of characters barely needs introduction: Schlesinger, Hofstadter, Bell, Lipset, Parsons, etc. I was not a fan. Hypersensitive to liberal capitulations to conservatism, especially on Cold War matters, I found their “vital centrism” infuriating. If they represented the mood of the nation, crude stereotypes about the 1950s as a “placid” decade seemed too kind. It was in this context, coming on the heels of my reading of the consensus thinkers, that I first read C. Wright Mills, specifically, his two most famous books, White Collar and The Power Elite. Ribuffo’s pedagogy was madly brilliant: first, lull us to sleep with the drab assurances of consensus, then, shock us out of a slumber with the abrasive anti-conformism of Mills. In this context, I came to love C. Wright Mills. I imagined him a renegade, a lone radical fighting the evil forces of orthodoxy with nothing more than the biting wit of his pen.

Daniel Geary argues against this enduring image of Mills the maverick in his splendid little intellectual biography, Radical Ambition: C. Wright Mills, the Left, and American Social Thought. Geary advises that Mills was a man of his time, not an outlier. ...[Continue here]

Hartman on Geary's Radical Ambition

Review of Daniel Geary’s Radical Ambition: C. Wright Mills, the Left, and American Social Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). ISBN-13: 978-0-520-25836-5. 277 pages.

Review by Andrew Hartman
Illinois State University
March 2010

During my graduate studies, I took a course with Professor Leo Ribuffo on postwar American social thought. In the first part of the semester, we focused our readings on the 1950s consensus or pluralist theorists. The list of characters barely needs introduction: Schlesinger, Hofstadter, Bell, Lipset, Parsons, etc. I was not a fan. Hypersensitive to liberal capitulations to conservatism, especially on Cold War matters, I found their “vital centrism” infuriating. If they represented the mood of the nation, crude stereotypes about the 1950s as a “placid” decade seemed too kind. It was in this context, coming on the heels of my reading of the consensus thinkers, that I first read C. Wright Mills, specifically, his two most famous books, White Collar and The Power Elite. Ribuffo’s pedagogy was madly brilliant: first, lull us to sleep with the drab assurances of consensus, then, shock us out of a slumber with the abrasive anti-conformism of Mills. In this context, I came to love C. Wright Mills. I imagined him a renegade, a lone radical fighting the evil forces of orthodoxy with nothing more than the biting wit of his pen.

Daniel Geary argues against this enduring image of Mills the maverick in his splendid little intellectual biography, Radical Ambition: C. Wright Mills, the Left, and American Social Thought. Geary advises that Mills was a man of his time, not an outlier. ...[Continue here]

Guest Post: Emerson Loves White People

by Matthew Hetrick

It’s always nice to see a historian getting some public love, and on Wednesday March 17th Nell Irvin Painter, professor emerita at Princeton and former President of the OAH, appeared on the Colbert Report. She was there to promote her new book The History of White People, but the highlight of the interview was an arm-wrestling match over whether the Scots-Irish were actually Irish. I first came across the book five days earlier, prominently placed in a Barnes & Noble, and was very excited. My excitement has waned, and I think it’s emblematic of the book’s deep flaws that Painter was unable to explain what the book was about to Colbert. That said, my intention is not to review the book but to raise one issue that I think will be of interest to this blog.

In three central chapters Painter examines the writings and thought of Ralph Waldo Emerson. She traces the creation of whiteness from leading scientific thinkers in Europe, specifically in German Romanticism, to Emerson by way Thomas Carlyle. This is, in itself, a fairly standard explanation of the origins of Transcendentalism, but Painter stresses the racial character of this thought, specifically its emphasis on the German/English or Saxon as the highest point of humanity. Her argument proceeds by something of a syllogism: Emerson believed in a hierarchical racial structure with “whites” or Saxons on top, Emerson was very popular and widely read, therefore Emerson “qualifies as a full contributor to white race theory. His enormous intellectual strength and prodigious output made him the source of a crucial current of thought . . . Towering over his age, he spoke for an increasingly rich and powerful American ruling class. His thinking, as they say, became hegemonic.” (183)

This raises several interesting point:

1. Is she right about Emerson? I am not an Emerson scholar, so I am interested to hear the views of others.

2. If she is right, how important was this strain of thought to Emerson’s thinking? Just because someone was a racial or racist thinker (a distinction that Painter does not make) does not necessarily mean that it was crucial to their thought and writing. Painter acknowledges a “flirtation with the idea of hybridity” in a journal entry from the 1840s where Emerson praises the mix of nations in America, but claims people have over-emphasized Emerson’s broad-mindedness since “there was nothing sustained, no sentence even completed.” (187) Though she discounts his “flirtation” and his abolitionism as unrepresentative, Painter does not explain how prevalent Emerson’s racial views were within his broader thought.

3. Assuming she is right about Emerson, is this how people at the time read Emerson? How influential were his views? Painter, like many historians, ignores the issues of audience and reader reception. She lists how many books were printed and leaves it at that. Painter mentions that Charlotte Forten was a fan of Emerson and supported his views of the English, but fails to connect the widespread Anglophilia with the abolition movement. One could be a fan of the English without being a racist and one could, presumably, read and like Emerson without endorsing all of his views.

Guest Post: Emerson Loves White People

by Matthew Hetrick

It’s always nice to see a historian getting some public love, and on Wednesday March 17th Nell Irvin Painter, professor emerita at Princeton and former President of the OAH, appeared on the Colbert Report. She was there to promote her new book The History of White People, but the highlight of the interview was an arm-wrestling match over whether the Scots-Irish were actually Irish. I first came across the book five days earlier, prominently placed in a Barnes & Noble, and was very excited. My excitement has waned, and I think it’s emblematic of the book’s deep flaws that Painter was unable to explain what the book was about to Colbert. That said, my intention is not to review the book but to raise one issue that I think will be of interest to this blog.

In three central chapters Painter examines the writings and thought of Ralph Waldo Emerson. She traces the creation of whiteness from leading scientific thinkers in Europe, specifically in German Romanticism, to Emerson by way Thomas Carlyle. This is, in itself, a fairly standard explanation of the origins of Transcendentalism, but Painter stresses the racial character of this thought, specifically its emphasis on the German/English or Saxon as the highest point of humanity. Her argument proceeds by something of a syllogism: Emerson believed in a hierarchical racial structure with “whites” or Saxons on top, Emerson was very popular and widely read, therefore Emerson “qualifies as a full contributor to white race theory. His enormous intellectual strength and prodigious output made him the source of a crucial current of thought . . . Towering over his age, he spoke for an increasingly rich and powerful American ruling class. His thinking, as they say, became hegemonic.” (183)

This raises several interesting point:

1. Is she right about Emerson? I am not an Emerson scholar, so I am interested to hear the views of others.

2. If she is right, how important was this strain of thought to Emerson’s thinking? Just because someone was a racial or racist thinker (a distinction that Painter does not make) does not necessarily mean that it was crucial to their thought and writing. Painter acknowledges a “flirtation with the idea of hybridity” in a journal entry from the 1840s where Emerson praises the mix of nations in America, but claims people have over-emphasized Emerson’s broad-mindedness since “there was nothing sustained, no sentence even completed.” (187) Though she discounts his “flirtation” and his abolitionism as unrepresentative, Painter does not explain how prevalent Emerson’s racial views were within his broader thought.

3. Assuming she is right about Emerson, is this how people at the time read Emerson? How influential were his views? Painter, like many historians, ignores the issues of audience and reader reception. She lists how many books were printed and leaves it at that. Painter mentions that Charlotte Forten was a fan of Emerson and supported his views of the English, but fails to connect the widespread Anglophilia with the abolition movement. One could be a fan of the English without being a racist and one could, presumably, read and like Emerson without endorsing all of his views.

A (Non-USIH) Intellectual Historian On The History Of Blogging

In a NYR Blog piece titled "Blogging, Now and Then" and posted today, Robert Darnton explores precedents for the means and content of knowledge passed along in non-standard forms. Here are a few salient passages (bolds mine):

- Blogging brings out the hit-and-run element in communication. Bloggers tend to be punchy. They often hit below the belt; and when they land a blow, they dash off to another target. Pow! The idea is to provoke, to score points, to vent opinions, and frequently to gossip.
- The most gossipy blogs take aim at public figures, combining two basic ingredients, scurrility and celebrity, and they deal in short jabs, usually nothing longer than a paragraph. They often appeal to particular constituencies such as Hollywood buffs (Perez Hilton), political junkies (Wonkette), college kids (Ivy Gate), and lawyers (Underneath Their Robes). Politically they may lean to the right (Michelle Malkin) or to the left (Daily Kos). But all of them conform to a formula derived from old-fashioned tabloid journalism: names make news.
- This subject deserves more study, because for all of their explosiveness, the blog-like elements in earlier eras of communication tend to be ignored by sociologists, political scientists, and historians who concentrate on full-scale texts and formal discourse.
- [Look at a] newspaper from eighteenth-century London. It will have no headlines, no bylines, no clear distinction between news and ads, and no spatial articulation in the dense columns of type, aside from one crucial ingredient: the paragraph. Paragraphs were self-sufficient units of news. They had no connection with one another, because writers and readers had no concept of a news “story” as a narrative that would run for more than a few dozen words. News came in bite-sized bits...
- Two to three hundred years ago, the term anecdote meant nearly the opposite of what it means today. Instead of representing a trivial incident or unreliable hearsay, as in the expression “anecdotal evidence,” it conveyed the notion of “secret history”—episodes concerning the private lives of important personages that had actually taken place but could not be published openly. According to contemporary dictionaries and Diderot’s Encyclopédie, the concept derived from Procopius, the Byzantine historian of the sixth century B.C.E.
- Whether exchanged orally in a café, scribbled on a scrap of paper, or combined as paragraphs in a newssheet, anecdotes operated as the primary unit in a system of communication. Many of them found their way into print. They were picked up by famous writers like Voltaire, but more often they appeared in anonymous tracts known as “libelles.”
- The anecdotes constituted the early-modern equivalent of a blogosphere, one laced with explosives; for on the eve of the Revolution, French readers were consuming as much smut about the private lives of the great as they were reading treatises about the abuse of power. In fact, the anecdotes and the political discourse reinforced each other.

So, is Darnton right in that "names make news" in the blog world? Or is that simply a reflection of the fact that we seek specificity and do not prefer philosophical musing via blogs?

Does Darnton have a real sense of the breadth of knowledge conveyed by blogs today? I mean, there seems to be a lot of narrative in blogs. And many, like USIH, are not based on conveying secret knowledge but rather looking at knowledge from other directions. Blogs "today" seem more about diversity and perspective than any ancient definitions of anecdote or the inability, or lack of desire, to read narrative.

Finally, what of Darnton's ominous warning? Are today's libelles pushing political systems to the brink of revolution? If so, I would offer that USIH is not a part of that movement. I would say that we are trying rather to reform knowledge than revolutionize academia. And the diversity of the blogosphere today, apart from USIH, would seem to make historical comparisons to pre-Revolutionary France tentative at best. - TL

A (Non-USIH) Intellectual Historian On The History Of Blogging

In a NYR Blog piece titled "Blogging, Now and Then" and posted today, Robert Darnton explores precedents for the means and content of knowledge passed along in non-standard forms. Here are a few salient passages (bolds mine):

- Blogging brings out the hit-and-run element in communication. Bloggers tend to be punchy. They often hit below the belt; and when they land a blow, they dash off to another target. Pow! The idea is to provoke, to score points, to vent opinions, and frequently to gossip.
- The most gossipy blogs take aim at public figures, combining two basic ingredients, scurrility and celebrity, and they deal in short jabs, usually nothing longer than a paragraph. They often appeal to particular constituencies such as Hollywood buffs (Perez Hilton), political junkies (Wonkette), college kids (Ivy Gate), and lawyers (Underneath Their Robes). Politically they may lean to the right (Michelle Malkin) or to the left (Daily Kos). But all of them conform to a formula derived from old-fashioned tabloid journalism: names make news.
- This subject deserves more study, because for all of their explosiveness, the blog-like elements in earlier eras of communication tend to be ignored by sociologists, political scientists, and historians who concentrate on full-scale texts and formal discourse.
- [Look at a] newspaper from eighteenth-century London. It will have no headlines, no bylines, no clear distinction between news and ads, and no spatial articulation in the dense columns of type, aside from one crucial ingredient: the paragraph. Paragraphs were self-sufficient units of news. They had no connection with one another, because writers and readers had no concept of a news “story” as a narrative that would run for more than a few dozen words. News came in bite-sized bits...
- Two to three hundred years ago, the term anecdote meant nearly the opposite of what it means today. Instead of representing a trivial incident or unreliable hearsay, as in the expression “anecdotal evidence,” it conveyed the notion of “secret history”—episodes concerning the private lives of important personages that had actually taken place but could not be published openly. According to contemporary dictionaries and Diderot’s Encyclopédie, the concept derived from Procopius, the Byzantine historian of the sixth century B.C.E.
- Whether exchanged orally in a café, scribbled on a scrap of paper, or combined as paragraphs in a newssheet, anecdotes operated as the primary unit in a system of communication. Many of them found their way into print. They were picked up by famous writers like Voltaire, but more often they appeared in anonymous tracts known as “libelles.”
- The anecdotes constituted the early-modern equivalent of a blogosphere, one laced with explosives; for on the eve of the Revolution, French readers were consuming as much smut about the private lives of the great as they were reading treatises about the abuse of power. In fact, the anecdotes and the political discourse reinforced each other.

So, is Darnton right in that "names make news" in the blog world? Or is that simply a reflection of the fact that we seek specificity and do not prefer philosophical musing via blogs?

Does Darnton have a real sense of the breadth of knowledge conveyed by blogs today? I mean, there seems to be a lot of narrative in blogs. And many, like USIH, are not based on conveying secret knowledge but rather looking at knowledge from other directions. Blogs "today" seem more about diversity and perspective than any ancient definitions of anecdote or the inability, or lack of desire, to read narrative.

Finally, what of Darnton's ominous warning? Are today's libelles pushing political systems to the brink of revolution? If so, I would offer that USIH is not a part of that movement. I would say that we are trying rather to reform knowledge than revolutionize academia. And the diversity of the blogosphere today, apart from USIH, would seem to make historical comparisons to pre-Revolutionary France tentative at best. - TL

Radical Conservatives? Some Thoughts on Paul Murphy’s THE REBUKE OF HISTORY

I finally had the pleasure to read The Rebuke of History: The Southern Agrarians and American Conservative Thought, written by our USIH colleague Paul Murphy. It was the topic of discussion during my graduate seminar last night. My students found the history of the Agrarians fascinating, in no small part due to Paul’s masterful telling of it, but also because, being from Illinois—the “Land of Lincoln”—it was a shock to their system to learn that serious intellectuals found complex ways to defend the antebellum South.

The thing I found most compelling about The Rebuke of History is Paul’s notion of “radical conservatism.” He considers Southern Agrarianism, as originally formulated in its founding 1930 text, I’ll Take My Stand—written by “Twelve Southerners”—both conservative and radical. Its conservatism is obvious in its idealization of a southern past rooted in the hierarchy of slavery. But the radicalism of southern agrarianism is also evident, in its antipathy to industrial capitalism. Paul sets out to understand how this radicalism dissipated, as the postwar conservative movement sopped up aspects of Agrarianism. In his words:

“The burden of this study has been to document the deradicalization of the Agrarian tradition and to identify the ways in which a cultural criticism originally insistent on the interconnection between culture and the economy came to be replaced by a traditionalist conservatism oriented around the image of the South as a synecdoche for Christian orthodoxy and a patriarchal social order.”

My questions for discussion: What makes a radical conservative? Paul clearly defines a radical conservative as someone who understands that the cultural critique of modernism must, logically, extend to an economic critique of capitalism. In his epilogue, he classifies Eugene Genovese and Wendell Berry as radical conservatives. Paul writes: “Genovese’s [prior] radicalism.. was informed by the same hostility toward bourgeois culture and radical individualism that shapes his current conservatism.” Paul describes Berry in similar fashion: “Berry is at once profoundly conservative in his views on marriage, sexuality, and community and radical in his condemnation of modern agribusiness, the military establishment, and global capitalism.”

In these terms, Christopher Lasch clearly qualifies as a radical conservative, as I have argued elsewhere. Who else? Were radical conservatives more common prior to the postwar conservative movement, which fused the libertarian and traditionalist strains of social thought? More common prior to the polarizing effects of the culture wars?

Radical Conservatives? Some Thoughts on Paul Murphy’s THE REBUKE OF HISTORY

I finally had the pleasure to read The Rebuke of History: The Southern Agrarians and American Conservative Thought, written by our USIH colleague Paul Murphy. It was the topic of discussion during my graduate seminar last night. My students found the history of the Agrarians fascinating, in no small part due to Paul’s masterful telling of it, but also because, being from Illinois—the “Land of Lincoln”—it was a shock to their system to learn that serious intellectuals found complex ways to defend the antebellum South.

The thing I found most compelling about The Rebuke of History is Paul’s notion of “radical conservatism.” He considers Southern Agrarianism, as originally formulated in its founding 1930 text, I’ll Take My Stand—written by “Twelve Southerners”—both conservative and radical. Its conservatism is obvious in its idealization of a southern past rooted in the hierarchy of slavery. But the radicalism of southern agrarianism is also evident, in its antipathy to industrial capitalism. Paul sets out to understand how this radicalism dissipated, as the postwar conservative movement sopped up aspects of Agrarianism. In his words:

“The burden of this study has been to document the deradicalization of the Agrarian tradition and to identify the ways in which a cultural criticism originally insistent on the interconnection between culture and the economy came to be replaced by a traditionalist conservatism oriented around the image of the South as a synecdoche for Christian orthodoxy and a patriarchal social order.”

My questions for discussion: What makes a radical conservative? Paul clearly defines a radical conservative as someone who understands that the cultural critique of modernism must, logically, extend to an economic critique of capitalism. In his epilogue, he classifies Eugene Genovese and Wendell Berry as radical conservatives. Paul writes: “Genovese’s [prior] radicalism.. was informed by the same hostility toward bourgeois culture and radical individualism that shapes his current conservatism.” Paul describes Berry in similar fashion: “Berry is at once profoundly conservative in his views on marriage, sexuality, and community and radical in his condemnation of modern agribusiness, the military establishment, and global capitalism.”

In these terms, Christopher Lasch clearly qualifies as a radical conservative, as I have argued elsewhere. Who else? Were radical conservatives more common prior to the postwar conservative movement, which fused the libertarian and traditionalist strains of social thought? More common prior to the polarizing effects of the culture wars?

Tim's Light Reading (3/11/2010)

1. Thinking About Public Intellectuals: Harvard is hosting a conference on public intellectuals next month with the theme "Speaking Truth to Power." In the late afternoon on the first day is a symposium that looks to be a future-oriented reprise of our USIH Wingspread panel from last November. Otherwise, the program looks excellent.

2. A Useful Derrida? Or should I say a Derrida that might become useful to historians? Andrew Dunstall, a USIH 2.0 participant last fall, wonders about a new, materialist approach--a retranslation, if you will---to reading Derrida's writing and thinking.

3. The Meaning of the Tea Party: About a week ago David Brooks the amateur political-intellectual historian (again) paralleled the Tea Party to the New Left of the 1960s. (Aside: I agree with his observation about both ~not~ being conservative movements.) Brooks' column came on the heels of a Michael Lind article in Salon the week before where Lind called Glenn Beck the new Abbie Hoffman. A few days after Brooks' piece, Todd Gitlin refuted him in a post at Talking Points Memo. I don't have a dog in this fight because I have no stake in protecting either the Tea Party or the reputation of the sixties New Left. Still, it's an interesting intellectual history discussion because it speaks to how we define both ideology (e.g. paranoia), anti-intellectualism (e.g. paranoia again, radical anti-statism), and atavism as a historiographical causal issue (cyclical-ness).

4. A New Lead-Off Hitter for Grad School Historiography Courses? All intellectual historians love reading about historiography (right?). With that in mind, Adam Arenson makes the case, at Making History Podcast: The Blog, that Allan Megill’s Historical Knowledge, Historical Error (U of C Press, 2007) should replace Peter Novick's That Noble Dream. Discuss. ...In the meantime, it looks like I have yet another book to add to my infinitely expanding reading list.

5. Off-Topic: It looks like expectations for "treatment" by the nursing profession in Amsterdam are on the rise. Boy oh boy. - TL

Tim's Light Reading (3/11/2010)

1. Thinking About Public Intellectuals: Harvard is hosting a conference on public intellectuals next month with the theme "Speaking Truth to Power." In the late afternoon on the first day is a symposium that looks to be a future-oriented reprise of our USIH Wingspread panel from last November. Otherwise, the program looks excellent.

2. A Useful Derrida? Or should I say a Derrida that might become useful to historians? Andrew Dunstall, a USIH 2.0 participant last fall, wonders about a new, materialist approach--a retranslation, if you will---to reading Derrida's writing and thinking.

3. The Meaning of the Tea Party: About a week ago David Brooks the amateur political-intellectual historian (again) paralleled the Tea Party to the New Left of the 1960s. (Aside: I agree with his observation about both ~not~ being conservative movements.) Brooks' column came on the heels of a Michael Lind article in Salon the week before where Lind called Glenn Beck the new Abbie Hoffman. A few days after Brooks' piece, Todd Gitlin refuted him in a post at Talking Points Memo. I don't have a dog in this fight because I have no stake in protecting either the Tea Party or the reputation of the sixties New Left. Still, it's an interesting intellectual history discussion because it speaks to how we define both ideology (e.g. paranoia), anti-intellectualism (e.g. paranoia again, radical anti-statism), and atavism as a historiographical causal issue (cyclical-ness).

4. A New Lead-Off Hitter for Grad School Historiography Courses? All intellectual historians love reading about historiography (right?). With that in mind, Adam Arenson makes the case, at Making History Podcast: The Blog, that Allan Megill’s Historical Knowledge, Historical Error (U of C Press, 2007) should replace Peter Novick's That Noble Dream. Discuss. ...In the meantime, it looks like I have yet another book to add to my infinitely expanding reading list.

5. Off-Topic: It looks like expectations for "treatment" by the nursing profession in Amsterdam are on the rise. Boy oh boy. - TL

Drunk History

As this blog frequently demonstrates, the internet provides historians with a powerful new medium with which to explore the past and reach a broader audience. We in the profession, however, are not the only folks doing history online.

Among the more unusual of these new online explorations of the past is Drunk History.*

The methodology set up is pretty simple: comedians Derek Waters and Jeremy Konner get a fellow comedian friend of theirs rip-roaring drunk and ask him or her to recall a favorite event in American history. They then film surprisingly well-known performers in period costume acting out the drunkenly-narrated story.

One could note that the series plays in interesting ways with conventions in "reel history" and suggests much about Americans' relationship to our past. But I'll let others explore these things in comments if they insist.

Without further ado, here's Drunk History, Vol. 3: The Story of Oney Judge (as told by a drunk Jen Kirkman):



_____________________________
* Yeah, I know....the series is actually a couple years old. But it's new to me (h/t The Sound of Young America)

Drunk History

As this blog frequently demonstrates, the internet provides historians with a powerful new medium with which to explore the past and reach a broader audience. We in the profession, however, are not the only folks doing history online.

Among the more unusual of these new online explorations of the past is Drunk History.*

The methodology set up is pretty simple: comedians Derek Waters and Jeremy Konner get a fellow comedian friend of theirs rip-roaring drunk and ask him or her to recall a favorite event in American history. They then film surprisingly well-known performers in period costume acting out the drunkenly-narrated story.

One could note that the series plays in interesting ways with conventions in "reel history" and suggests much about Americans' relationship to our past. But I'll let others explore these things in comments if they insist.

Without further ado, here's Drunk History, Vol. 3: The Story of Oney Judge (as told by a drunk Jen Kirkman):



_____________________________
* Yeah, I know....the series is actually a couple years old. But it's new to me (h/t The Sound of Young America)

Intellectual Conversions In U.S. History

Diane Ravitch has finally gone public---in a big way---with her turn against No Child Left Behind. I say "finally" because her dissatisfaction with the law has been percolating well over a year; the evidence has mounted in various posts at the weblog, Bridging Differences, that she shares with Deberah Meier.

I bring this to the attention of USIH readers because I believe this signals something bigger---something more philosophical. Here's the passage from the NPR story that interested me as an intellectual historian:

Part of the reason schools were so intent on achieving high tests scores was because they were competing with other schools for resources, which were often doled out on that basis alone. Ravitch is critical of the impact this had on schools. "There should not be an education marketplace, there should not be competition," Ravitch says. "Schools operate fundamentally — or should operate — like families. The fundamental principle by which education proceeds is collaboration. Teachers are supposed to share what works; schools are supposed to get together and talk about what's [been successful] for them. They're not supposed to hide their trade secrets and have a survival of the fittest competition with the school down the block."

Ravitch has apparently rejected the political-economic philosophy of the Friedman school, or perhaps neoliberalism (looked at another way), as applied to education. As for NCLB particulars, Ravitch's two main gripes are about school choice (people don't want to leave their neighborhood schools) and testing (too much measuring and punishing, as well as cheating and gaming the system). Here's more from Ravitch herself on the book's publication, as well as a NYT piece.

The NYT article contains this (juicy) nugget on the intellectual discontinuity of her conversion:

“She has done more than any one I can think of in America to drive home the message of accountability and charters and testing,” said Arthur E. Levine, a former president of Teachers College, where Dr. Ravitch got her doctorate and began her teaching career in the 1970s. “Now for her to suddenly conclude that she’s been all wrong is extraordinary — and not very helpful.”

Extraordinary? Sure. But "not very helpful"? What does that mean? Politics? Perhaps. But it makes an intriguing problem for a future intellectual historian/biographer. Going forward, how will Ravitch reconcile her conversion with her past statements? How does anyone reconcile their past with their future, intellectually, after a conversion experience?

One prominent historian, mentioned in the NYT, is already taking a stab at it:

“First she angered the Marxist historians, and later the fans of progressive education and the multiculturalists,” said Jeffrey E. Mirel, a professor of education and history at the University of Michigan. “But she’s always defended public schools and a robust traditional curriculum, because she believes they’ve been a ladder of social mobility.”

Ravitch's move led me to think about other high-profile intellectual and/or philosophical conversions of public intellectuals in U.S. history---particularly the twentieth century. Although Ravitch's does not seem follow this pattern, 'philosophical' and 'intellectual' in these contexts often also contains political and religious overtones.

For starters, I suppose Irving Kristol comes to mind in relation to a swing from mid-century liberalism to neoconservatism. Another is John Neuhaus, who swung in the seventies (not what you think--hah!) from being a social-cultural liberal activist to a neoconservative (in addition to converting from Lutheranism to Catholicism).

Mortimer J. Adler moved from being a neoThomist in the 1940s to an Aristotelian more broadly in the 1950s. In light of that conversion, he also ironically moved from irreligion/agnosticism to Christianity later---an Episcopalian first in the early eighties and then a Catholic in 1999. Unlike Neuhaus, however, Adler remained a FDR-type mid-century liberal at least through the late eighties (in contrast to his association with Buckley via many Firing Line appearances).

More examples? More issues to consider? - TL

Intellectual Conversions In U.S. History

Diane Ravitch has finally gone public---in a big way---with her turn against No Child Left Behind. I say "finally" because her dissatisfaction with the law has been percolating well over a year; the evidence has mounted in various posts at the weblog, Bridging Differences, that she shares with Deberah Meier.

I bring this to the attention of USIH readers because I believe this signals something bigger---something more philosophical. Here's the passage from the NPR story that interested me as an intellectual historian:

Part of the reason schools were so intent on achieving high tests scores was because they were competing with other schools for resources, which were often doled out on that basis alone. Ravitch is critical of the impact this had on schools. "There should not be an education marketplace, there should not be competition," Ravitch says. "Schools operate fundamentally — or should operate — like families. The fundamental principle by which education proceeds is collaboration. Teachers are supposed to share what works; schools are supposed to get together and talk about what's [been successful] for them. They're not supposed to hide their trade secrets and have a survival of the fittest competition with the school down the block."

Ravitch has apparently rejected the political-economic philosophy of the Friedman school, or perhaps neoliberalism (looked at another way), as applied to education. As for NCLB particulars, Ravitch's two main gripes are about school choice (people don't want to leave their neighborhood schools) and testing (too much measuring and punishing, as well as cheating and gaming the system). Here's more from Ravitch herself on the book's publication, as well as a NYT piece.

The NYT article contains this (juicy) nugget on the intellectual discontinuity of her conversion:

“She has done more than any one I can think of in America to drive home the message of accountability and charters and testing,” said Arthur E. Levine, a former president of Teachers College, where Dr. Ravitch got her doctorate and began her teaching career in the 1970s. “Now for her to suddenly conclude that she’s been all wrong is extraordinary — and not very helpful.”

Extraordinary? Sure. But "not very helpful"? What does that mean? Politics? Perhaps. But it makes an intriguing problem for a future intellectual historian/biographer. Going forward, how will Ravitch reconcile her conversion with her past statements? How does anyone reconcile their past with their future, intellectually, after a conversion experience?

One prominent historian, mentioned in the NYT, is already taking a stab at it:

“First she angered the Marxist historians, and later the fans of progressive education and the multiculturalists,” said Jeffrey E. Mirel, a professor of education and history at the University of Michigan. “But she’s always defended public schools and a robust traditional curriculum, because she believes they’ve been a ladder of social mobility.”

Ravitch's move led me to think about other high-profile intellectual and/or philosophical conversions of public intellectuals in U.S. history---particularly the twentieth century. Although Ravitch's does not seem follow this pattern, 'philosophical' and 'intellectual' in these contexts often also contains political and religious overtones.

For starters, I suppose Irving Kristol comes to mind in relation to a swing from mid-century liberalism to neoconservatism. Another is John Neuhaus, who swung in the seventies (not what you think--hah!) from being a social-cultural liberal activist to a neoconservative (in addition to converting from Lutheranism to Catholicism).

Mortimer J. Adler moved from being a neoThomist in the 1940s to an Aristotelian more broadly in the 1950s. In light of that conversion, he also ironically moved from irreligion/agnosticism to Christianity later---an Episcopalian first in the early eighties and then a Catholic in 1999. Unlike Neuhaus, however, Adler remained a FDR-type mid-century liberal at least through the late eighties (in contrast to his association with Buckley via many Firing Line appearances).

More examples? More issues to consider? - TL

An Intellectual History of Culture as Becoming

The term “culture” denotes several meanings. As opposed to the more commonly held notions of culture—i.e., as reference to how a specific group lives, or as tastes, high or otherwise—I am interested in the concept of culture as a state of becoming. More specifically, I am curious about the intellectual history of culture as becoming.

My curiosity is piqued thanks to Allan Bloom. I am currently re-reading his bestseller, The Closing of the American Mind, as I prepare for a paper I am giving at the upcoming OAH. (Aside: The paper is part of a session of potential interest to USIH readers. It is titled “Relativism and Its Discontents in Modern American Thought.” Casey Nelson Blake, who is on the plenary slate at our next USIH conference, is chair. Bruce Kuklick is commenting. I am joined on the panel by fellow USIH blogger Ben Alpers, and USIH conference regular Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen.)

In seeking to understand why all of his students were relativists, Bloom analyzed the distorted importation of Nietzsche into American thought. Bloom held that one of the key Nietzschean premises that gained traction in the United States is the belief that there is no text, only interpretation. “This observation is the foundation of the currently popular view,” Bloom wrote, “that there is no is but only perspectives on becoming, that the perception is as much reality as there is, that things are what they are perceived to be. This view, of course, allied with the notion that man is a value-creating, not a good-discovering, being” (CAM, 159-160). For Bloom, the idea that humans create their own values and that, as such, values are not natural, was how he defined culture. Conceptualized in such a way, culture ran opposite to nature. Furthermore, cultural theory, as such, ran opposite to Bloom’s epistemology, rooted in natural rights doctrine.

Bloom believed that Enlightenment thinkers such as Hobbes and Locke discovered that the surest path to social equilibrium was to harmonize nature’s laws with those of humankind—to ensure people the right to pursue happiness, or self-interest, by securing property. Such "rights are ours,” Bloom argued. “They are our common sense.” For Hobbes and Locke (read through Bloom), society functioned best when humans were reconciled to the truth that nature made them self-serving. This was a universal truth. “The spring that makes the social machinery tick is this recognition, which generates the calculation that, if he agrees to respect the life, liberty and property of others (for which he has no natural respect), they can be induced to reciprocate. This is the foundation of rights, a new kind of morality solidly grounded in self-interest” (CAM, 166). (To the degree that Bloom posited humans as naturally self-serving, he surely agreed with his University of Chicago colleagues across campus in the economics department.)

Americans, according to Bloom, internalized the rights doctrine like no other people, which explains the degree to which Americans of all classes seemed to lack a servile temperament, and which also explains why the importation of the Nietzschean concept of culture as becoming is experienced by Bloom as cognitive dissonance. It seemed out of place for Americans to believe that everything could be remade, nature be damned, and yet still hold onto their natural (some might say “God given”—not Bloom, he was an atheist) right to the pursuit of happiness.

Bloom believed culture—as becoming—rationalized human behavior in the wake of nature’s death. God is Dead, Culture is Your New Maker. Bloom posited that in a post-Robespierrean world, “changing human nature seems a brutal, nasty, tyrannical thing to do. So, instead, it began to be denied that there is such a thing as human nature. Rather, man grows and grows into culture; cultures are, as is obvious from the word, growths. Man is a culture being, not a natural being” (CAM, 190).

So my question to you, gentle reader: Is the intellectual history of culture as becoming worth thinking about? What are its parameters? Although Bloom dated this history as far back as the French Revolution—actually, further back, since he saw the nature/culture tension as internal to Western thought going all the way back to the Greeks—in an American context, surely pragmatism, which Bloom hardly mentions, is more formative to such cultural theorizing than the continental nihilism of Nietzsche. And according to John Dewey, the best method for understanding how humans behaved was to understand how they were conditioned or acculturated. What Dewey termed the social habitude—culture—was more important in forming the individual than was a hypothetically static “human nature.” “The meaning of native activity is not native, it is acquired,” Dewey wrote in Human Nature and Conduct. “It depends upon interaction with a matured social medium.” Culture was something we became for the pragmatists.

Whether or not you agree with Bloom that we should lament that culture conquered nature, or even that this victory was total—I don’t—it is worth pondering the degree to which the notion of culture as becoming shapes American scholarship, if not broader social sensibilities.

In the graduate seminar that I’m currently teaching—the topic, “Left and Right in U.S. History Since the 1930s”—I’m learning anew that many contemporary historians of the American left describe the legacy of the leftist movements they research as decidedly mixed. They all understand these movements, from the Popular Front, to the New Left, to Black Power, to have largely failed at the political level. How could one examine the current political terrain with eyes wide open and think otherwise? But they all, also, think these leftist movements attained cultural success, or left an indelible cultural mark. Americans became different, better, they argue.

For example, in his influential tome, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture, Michael Denning argues that the sprawling culture of the 1930s Popular Front, from the radical folk music of Woody Guthrie to the modernist-realist literature of John Dos Passos to the “ghetto pastorals” of Richard Wright and other plebian artists, inexorably reshaped American culture. From then on, American culture took on a working-class or “laboring” accent. Americans became something different.

Similarly, William Van Deburg, in his provocative New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965-1975, concedes political defeat. The hollowed-out landscape of the urban black ghetto is proof of such defeat. At the biographical level, the fact that some of the most militant Black Power leaders became shills for “whitey” (Black Panthers Bobby Seale and Eldridge Cleaver became, respectively, a barbeque sauce vendor and an anti-Communist Christian evangelical!) serves as similar such evidence of defeat. But at the cultural level, Van DeBurg maintains that Black Power achieved success, as seen in the irreversible attitudinal shifts of blacks. Counter-historically, rap music is made to seem impossible minus Black Power. For Van Deburg, such cultural promise was written into Black Power from its inception, resting as it did on the cultural power of becoming. “It was their hope and expectation that the revolutionary psychological process of becoming black would initiate a social revolution of great magnitude” (NDB, 55).

As culture increasingly came to be about becoming, its political significance was ratcheted up. This might help explain the culture wars. Bloom loathed this historical development, even though, somewhat ironically, The Closing of the American Mind is considered one of the primary culture war texts. Bloom wished to return to a time when politics was proper, when it was bracketed off from culture and other seemingly non-political realms. “The disappearance of politics is one of the most salient aspects of modern thought and has much to do with our political practice. Politics tends to disappear either into the subpolitical (economics) or what claims to be higher than politics (culture)—both of which escape the architectonic art, the statesman’s prudence” (188-189). A prudent statesman, presumably, would understand the lasting brilliance of the social contract and the universal truths upon which it rested. Prudence, in other words, was not becoming.

An Intellectual History of Culture as Becoming

The term “culture” denotes several meanings. As opposed to the more commonly held notions of culture—i.e., as reference to how a specific group lives, or as tastes, high or otherwise—I am interested in the concept of culture as a state of becoming. More specifically, I am curious about the intellectual history of culture as becoming.

My curiosity is piqued thanks to Allan Bloom. I am currently re-reading his bestseller, The Closing of the American Mind, as I prepare for a paper I am giving at the upcoming OAH. (Aside: The paper is part of a session of potential interest to USIH readers. It is titled “Relativism and Its Discontents in Modern American Thought.” Casey Nelson Blake, who is on the plenary slate at our next USIH conference, is chair. Bruce Kuklick is commenting. I am joined on the panel by fellow USIH blogger Ben Alpers, and USIH conference regular Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen.)

In seeking to understand why all of his students were relativists, Bloom analyzed the distorted importation of Nietzsche into American thought. Bloom held that one of the key Nietzschean premises that gained traction in the United States is the belief that there is no text, only interpretation. “This observation is the foundation of the currently popular view,” Bloom wrote, “that there is no is but only perspectives on becoming, that the perception is as much reality as there is, that things are what they are perceived to be. This view, of course, allied with the notion that man is a value-creating, not a good-discovering, being” (CAM, 159-160). For Bloom, the idea that humans create their own values and that, as such, values are not natural, was how he defined culture. Conceptualized in such a way, culture ran opposite to nature. Furthermore, cultural theory, as such, ran opposite to Bloom’s epistemology, rooted in natural rights doctrine.

Bloom believed that Enlightenment thinkers such as Hobbes and Locke discovered that the surest path to social equilibrium was to harmonize nature’s laws with those of humankind—to ensure people the right to pursue happiness, or self-interest, by securing property. Such "rights are ours,” Bloom argued. “They are our common sense.” For Hobbes and Locke (read through Bloom), society functioned best when humans were reconciled to the truth that nature made them self-serving. This was a universal truth. “The spring that makes the social machinery tick is this recognition, which generates the calculation that, if he agrees to respect the life, liberty and property of others (for which he has no natural respect), they can be induced to reciprocate. This is the foundation of rights, a new kind of morality solidly grounded in self-interest” (CAM, 166). (To the degree that Bloom posited humans as naturally self-serving, he surely agreed with his University of Chicago colleagues across campus in the economics department.)

Americans, according to Bloom, internalized the rights doctrine like no other people, which explains the degree to which Americans of all classes seemed to lack a servile temperament, and which also explains why the importation of the Nietzschean concept of culture as becoming is experienced by Bloom as cognitive dissonance. It seemed out of place for Americans to believe that everything could be remade, nature be damned, and yet still hold onto their natural (some might say “God given”—not Bloom, he was an atheist) right to the pursuit of happiness.

Bloom believed culture—as becoming—rationalized human behavior in the wake of nature’s death. God is Dead, Culture is Your New Maker. Bloom posited that in a post-Robespierrean world, “changing human nature seems a brutal, nasty, tyrannical thing to do. So, instead, it began to be denied that there is such a thing as human nature. Rather, man grows and grows into culture; cultures are, as is obvious from the word, growths. Man is a culture being, not a natural being” (CAM, 190).

So my question to you, gentle reader: Is the intellectual history of culture as becoming worth thinking about? What are its parameters? Although Bloom dated this history as far back as the French Revolution—actually, further back, since he saw the nature/culture tension as internal to Western thought going all the way back to the Greeks—in an American context, surely pragmatism, which Bloom hardly mentions, is more formative to such cultural theorizing than the continental nihilism of Nietzsche. And according to John Dewey, the best method for understanding how humans behaved was to understand how they were conditioned or acculturated. What Dewey termed the social habitude—culture—was more important in forming the individual than was a hypothetically static “human nature.” “The meaning of native activity is not native, it is acquired,” Dewey wrote in Human Nature and Conduct. “It depends upon interaction with a matured social medium.” Culture was something we became for the pragmatists.

Whether or not you agree with Bloom that we should lament that culture conquered nature, or even that this victory was total—I don’t—it is worth pondering the degree to which the notion of culture as becoming shapes American scholarship, if not broader social sensibilities.

In the graduate seminar that I’m currently teaching—the topic, “Left and Right in U.S. History Since the 1930s”—I’m learning anew that many contemporary historians of the American left describe the legacy of the leftist movements they research as decidedly mixed. They all understand these movements, from the Popular Front, to the New Left, to Black Power, to have largely failed at the political level. How could one examine the current political terrain with eyes wide open and think otherwise? But they all, also, think these leftist movements attained cultural success, or left an indelible cultural mark. Americans became different, better, they argue.

For example, in his influential tome, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture, Michael Denning argues that the sprawling culture of the 1930s Popular Front, from the radical folk music of Woody Guthrie to the modernist-realist literature of John Dos Passos to the “ghetto pastorals” of Richard Wright and other plebian artists, inexorably reshaped American culture. From then on, American culture took on a working-class or “laboring” accent. Americans became something different.

Similarly, William Van Deburg, in his provocative New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965-1975, concedes political defeat. The hollowed-out landscape of the urban black ghetto is proof of such defeat. At the biographical level, the fact that some of the most militant Black Power leaders became shills for “whitey” (Black Panthers Bobby Seale and Eldridge Cleaver became, respectively, a barbeque sauce vendor and an anti-Communist Christian evangelical!) serves as similar such evidence of defeat. But at the cultural level, Van DeBurg maintains that Black Power achieved success, as seen in the irreversible attitudinal shifts of blacks. Counter-historically, rap music is made to seem impossible minus Black Power. For Van Deburg, such cultural promise was written into Black Power from its inception, resting as it did on the cultural power of becoming. “It was their hope and expectation that the revolutionary psychological process of becoming black would initiate a social revolution of great magnitude” (NDB, 55).

As culture increasingly came to be about becoming, its political significance was ratcheted up. This might help explain the culture wars. Bloom loathed this historical development, even though, somewhat ironically, The Closing of the American Mind is considered one of the primary culture war texts. Bloom wished to return to a time when politics was proper, when it was bracketed off from culture and other seemingly non-political realms. “The disappearance of politics is one of the most salient aspects of modern thought and has much to do with our political practice. Politics tends to disappear either into the subpolitical (economics) or what claims to be higher than politics (culture)—both of which escape the architectonic art, the statesman’s prudence” (188-189). A prudent statesman, presumably, would understand the lasting brilliance of the social contract and the universal truths upon which it rested. Prudence, in other words, was not becoming.

Announcement

Friends and Colleagues,

To prevent my edging into non-USIH topics here I've constructed a Turnerian safety valve weblog as a "catch all" for other intellectual frontiers. By no means is this a move away from USIH. Rather, it is more that I've found myself wanting to reflect in long form on matters that either haven't easily fit into my old weblog, History and Education, or are too cumbersome for Facebook (Twitter be damned). Of course my new effort may need some tweaking; I just bought my all-purpose exploration suit and it will probably need alteration. As for USIH, I plan to continue my "Light Reading" series---albeit with better focus---and get back to posting longer, more narrow posts on historiography and topical analysis.

- Tim

Announcement

Friends and Colleagues,

To prevent my edging into non-USIH topics here I've constructed a Turnerian safety valve weblog as a "catch all" for other intellectual frontiers. By no means is this a move away from USIH. Rather, it is more that I've found myself wanting to reflect in long form on matters that either haven't easily fit into my old weblog, History and Education, or are too cumbersome for Facebook (Twitter be damned). Of course my new effort may need some tweaking; I just bought my all-purpose exploration suit and it will probably need alteration. As for USIH, I plan to continue my "Light Reading" series---albeit with better focus---and get back to posting longer, more narrow posts on historiography and topical analysis.

- Tim