A Quote for Tuesday

"Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method. . . . Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like. You, ladies and gentleman, may regard this as a whimsical definition of a writer."

Walter Benjamin, "Unpacking My Library," in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1968), 61.

A Quote for Tuesday

"Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method. . . . Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like. You, ladies and gentleman, may regard this as a whimsical definition of a writer."

Walter Benjamin, "Unpacking My Library," in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1968), 61.

Barrett on existentialism and pragmatism

I've been reading some mid-twentieth-century social criticism in preparation for a graduate course next semester and just finished William Barrett's classic account of existentialism, Irrational Man (1958). Throughout I was struck by the lucidity of Barrett's exposition, never more so than in his very brief treatment of William James. I assign James's Pragmatism to my graduate seminar but students often struggle not just with James's argument but with his general philosophical perspective. And, truth be told, try though I do to explain James as a pragmatist, his book on the subject often doesn't seem that pragmatic to me, at least as I understand the philosophical import of the term. James's book seems too weirdly individual and confessional, strangely abstracted from the public concerns that motivated the later Dewey (who, I'll confess, seems to provide my basic understanding of pragmatism). I'm often especially stymied by James's seeming rejection of God in the first part of the book but then his apparent retraction of that atheistic impulse at the end, in effect, bringing him back in because we need him.

Barrett provides a way of understanding James. He explains:

"Of all the non-European philosophers, William James probably best deserves to be labeled an Existentialist. Indeed, at this late date, we may very well wonder whether it would not be more accurate to call James an Existentialist than a Pragmatist. What remains of American Pragmatism today [note: he was writing this in 1958, long before Richard Rorty came to prominence] is forced to think of him as the black sheep of the movement. Pragmatists nowadays acknowledge James's genius but are embarrassed by his extremes: by the unashamedly personal tone of his philosophizing, his willingness to give psychology the final voice over logic where the two seem to conflict, and his belief in the revelatory value of religious experience. There are pages in James that could have been written by Kierkegaard, and the Epilogue to Varieties of Religious Experience puts the case for the primacy of personal experience over abstraction as strongly as any of the Existentialists has ever done. James's vituperation of rationalism is so passionate that latter-day Pragmatists see their own residual rationalism of scientific method put into question. And it is not merely a matter of tone, but of principle: he plumped for a world which contained contingency, discontinuity, and in which the centers of experience were irreducibly plural and personal, as against a 'block' universe that could be enclosed in a single rational system."

I've not read the large literature devoted to James, but this is a new thought for me. Is it one that others have developed? And maybe more importantly, does the argument have merit?

Barrett on existentialism and pragmatism

I've been reading some mid-twentieth-century social criticism in preparation for a graduate course next semester and just finished William Barrett's classic account of existentialism, Irrational Man (1958). Throughout I was struck by the lucidity of Barrett's exposition, never more so than in his very brief treatment of William James. I assign James's Pragmatism to my graduate seminar but students often struggle not just with James's argument but with his general philosophical perspective. And, truth be told, try though I do to explain James as a pragmatist, his book on the subject often doesn't seem that pragmatic to me, at least as I understand the philosophical import of the term. James's book seems too weirdly individual and confessional, strangely abstracted from the public concerns that motivated the later Dewey (who, I'll confess, seems to provide my basic understanding of pragmatism). I'm often especially stymied by James's seeming rejection of God in the first part of the book but then his apparent retraction of that atheistic impulse at the end, in effect, bringing him back in because we need him.

Barrett provides a way of understanding James. He explains:

"Of all the non-European philosophers, William James probably best deserves to be labeled an Existentialist. Indeed, at this late date, we may very well wonder whether it would not be more accurate to call James an Existentialist than a Pragmatist. What remains of American Pragmatism today [note: he was writing this in 1958, long before Richard Rorty came to prominence] is forced to think of him as the black sheep of the movement. Pragmatists nowadays acknowledge James's genius but are embarrassed by his extremes: by the unashamedly personal tone of his philosophizing, his willingness to give psychology the final voice over logic where the two seem to conflict, and his belief in the revelatory value of religious experience. There are pages in James that could have been written by Kierkegaard, and the Epilogue to Varieties of Religious Experience puts the case for the primacy of personal experience over abstraction as strongly as any of the Existentialists has ever done. James's vituperation of rationalism is so passionate that latter-day Pragmatists see their own residual rationalism of scientific method put into question. And it is not merely a matter of tone, but of principle: he plumped for a world which contained contingency, discontinuity, and in which the centers of experience were irreducibly plural and personal, as against a 'block' universe that could be enclosed in a single rational system."

I've not read the large literature devoted to James, but this is a new thought for me. Is it one that others have developed? And maybe more importantly, does the argument have merit?

long live American exceptionalism!

According to the Washington Post, American exceptionalism is making a comeback. In an effort to score political points, Republicans have taken to criticizing President Obama's comments of over a year ago, given in Strasbourg, France.

I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism...[W]e have a core set of values that are enshrined in our Constitution, in our body of law, in our democratic practices, in our belief in free speech and equality, that, though imperfect, are exceptional...I see no contradiction between believing that America has a continued extraordinary role in leading the world towards peace and prosperity and recognizing that leadership is incumbent, depends on, our ability to create partnerships because we can't solve these problems alone.

Mitt Romney writes in his campaign book that "[t]his reorientation away from a celebration of American exceptionalism is misguided and bankrupt," while Mike Huckabee has claimed that "[t]o deny American exceptionalism is in essence to deny the heart and soul of this nation." The article also finds Sarah Palin and Rick Santorum echoing similar ideas.

(I note that some might find Obama's statement to be actually rather celebratory of the United States. On this subject, I believe that conservatives tend to take issue with the first and last sentences quoted above, rather than Obama's overall positions or policies. A quick review of a transcript of the entire event reveals an Obama who, in my view, expresses a great deal of pride in his country, if with perhaps a bit more circumspection and somewhat less swagger than Republicans typically prefer.)

Within the history profession, I think it is fair to say that the mention of American exceptionalism is typically greeted with derision, scorn and mockery. It is odd, therefore, to see professional politicians embrace the phrase, and its attendant ideas, so aggressively. Of course, the people making these attacks are not running for president of the AHA, and the views of academic historians may not track well with those of the electorate at large. According to a poll cited in the article, fully fifty-eight percent of Americans agree with the statement that "God has granted America a special role in human history."

long live American exceptionalism!

According to the Washington Post, American exceptionalism is making a comeback. In an effort to score political points, Republicans have taken to criticizing President Obama's comments of over a year ago, given in Strasbourg, France.

I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism...[W]e have a core set of values that are enshrined in our Constitution, in our body of law, in our democratic practices, in our belief in free speech and equality, that, though imperfect, are exceptional...I see no contradiction between believing that America has a continued extraordinary role in leading the world towards peace and prosperity and recognizing that leadership is incumbent, depends on, our ability to create partnerships because we can't solve these problems alone.

Mitt Romney writes in his campaign book that "[t]his reorientation away from a celebration of American exceptionalism is misguided and bankrupt," while Mike Huckabee has claimed that "[t]o deny American exceptionalism is in essence to deny the heart and soul of this nation." The article also finds Sarah Palin and Rick Santorum echoing similar ideas.

(I note that some might find Obama's statement to be actually rather celebratory of the United States. On this subject, I believe that conservatives tend to take issue with the first and last sentences quoted above, rather than Obama's overall positions or policies. A quick review of a transcript of the entire event reveals an Obama who, in my view, expresses a great deal of pride in his country, if with perhaps a bit more circumspection and somewhat less swagger than Republicans typically prefer.)

Within the history profession, I think it is fair to say that the mention of American exceptionalism is typically greeted with derision, scorn and mockery. It is odd, therefore, to see professional politicians embrace the phrase, and its attendant ideas, so aggressively. Of course, the people making these attacks are not running for president of the AHA, and the views of academic historians may not track well with those of the electorate at large. According to a poll cited in the article, fully fifty-eight percent of Americans agree with the statement that "God has granted America a special role in human history."

Culture Wars in Other Countries (Metaphorical and Real)

A couple weeks ago, this image was making its way around the left of the blogosphere (a larger version can be seen here). Hendrik Hertzberg got the ball rolling when he posted it on his New Yorker blog. Identifying it as a political cartoon by Adalbert Volck that "went viral during the 1862 midterm campaign," Hertzberg compared its attacks on Lincoln to current rightwing attacks on Obama. Matt Yglesias followed up the next day on ThinkProgress with a bit more analysis, noting that the Republicans received "a bit of a shellacking" in those midterm elections and arguing that

the evident similarities between aspects of political rhetoric today and 150 years ago highlights the extent to which the values-and-temperament debate between conservative nationalism and progressive cosmopolitanism is ultimately much more fundamental than the passing controversies over tax rates economic regulation. The basic anxieties provoked by threats to existing status hierarchies haven’t changed, nor have the rhetorical tools of countermobilization.

The following day, Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon echoed Yglesias:

This is the sort of thing that makes claims that Tea Partiers are either some new phenomenon or that they have a specific, policy-based gripe with Obama even more comical. It’s all culture war, all the time.

In fact, Hertzberg, Yglesias, and Marcotte have subtly misidentified this interesting image. It comes not from the election year of 1862, but rather from 1863. Adalbert Volck was a Bavarian-born, Baltimore dentist who, like a lot of his fellow white Marylanders, sympathized with the Confederacy. In 1863, using the pseudonym "V. Blada," he published a portfolio of thirty prints, collectively entitled Confederate War Etchings, of which the image in question, called "Worship of the North," was the first. Twenty-nine of the thirty prints (the last has apparently been lost) are available for viewing online as part of the Library of Congress's American Memory project.*

It's important that this cartoon comes from 1863 and not 1862 because its context was not a political campaign at all, but rather the Civil War itself (though of course, the War was the central political issue in the 1862 and 1864 campaigns). Interestingly, neither Hertzberg, nor Yglesias, nor Marcotte mentions the Civil War. Though American politics may feature "all culture war, all the time," it's certainly not (literally) all civil war, all the time. It is important that the context for this image was something much more wrenching and violent than an election campaign...though noting that arguably makes any similarities we might identify between it and current political rhetoric even more striking. When we see similarities between Volck's attacks on Lincoln and contemporary conservative attacks on Obama, perhaps we shouldn't see something as abstract as Yglesias's "basic anxieties provoked by threats to existing status hierarchies" or even Marcotte's American conservatives as eternal culture warriors, but rather the enduring legacy of the Civil War in American political culture and rhetoric.

But of course, we're not the only country with culture wars. Volck's homeland of Germany, after all, gave us the term "culture war" (Kulturkampf). And Germany is currently having a little culture war of its own.

This past summer, Thilo Sarrazin, an SPD politician and Bundesbank official published a book entitled Deutschland Schafft Sich Ab: Wie wir unser Land aufs Spiel setzen (Germany Does Itself In: How we are putting our country at risk).  Sarrazin's book argues that his country's growing Muslim population constitutes a social and cultural threat, especially in light of the very low birthrate among ethnic Germans.  Sarrazin's argument that Germany's Muslims are both unassimilable and genetically less intelligent than ethnic Germans caused a scandal in Germany.

In many ways, Sarrazin resembles the right-wing populists who can be found throughout Europe these days, from Geert Wilders in the Netherlands to Barbara Rosenkranz in Austria. But while the book's tendentious arguments may be old hat in Europe, they obviously strike a particular nerve in Germany, whose post-war national identity was based on a self-conscious rejection of such arguments.  Unsurprisingly the German political and intellectual establishment has nearly universally condemned the book.  Sarrazin was pressured to resign his Bundesbank post.  And though many Germans initially took comfort in the absence of any political party that might empower Sarrazin's views in Germany, the sheer popularity of the book quickly made clear that, even without such a party, many Germans embraced Sarrazin's views. Although endorsing the book remained taboo, politicians soon began "demanding that the political elite cease ignoring the fact that many in Germany support Sarrazin," according to Der Spiegel.


There are obviously many interesting aspects of the Sarrazin affair, what it reveals about, and how it may change, post-war German politics.  But I'm blogging about it because of an interesting comment by David Goodhart in his recent review of the book for the British journal Prospect (h/t Arts & Letters Daily):

Nowhere in Europe is the gap between public opinion and published opinion as wide as in Germany. And nowhere has public policy been more influenced by a 1960s generation, post-national, society-is-to-blame kind of liberalism. Yet this “official” liberalism has never reflected the way people live and think, even in the German chattering classes. When I lived in the country, 20 years ago, it felt far more socially conservative than the similar circles I had come from in London.

Goodhart's observation is, I think, entirely fair. And the recent experience of the German intellectual and cultural elite with the public reception of Sarrazin's book is further evidence of Goodhart's point.**

This vast divide between elite and popular opinion raises an interesting issue: why hasn't Germany experienced a more pronounced populist backlash against the 60s generation and their intellectual heirs? Especially given the taboos surrounding a political discourse that targets ethnic Others in Germany, the German cultural and intellectual elite, which is quite clearly out-of-step with large bits of the German populace would seem an obvious object of political ire.***  And, as we know, in the United States, the equivalent of those official Sixties liberals, despite never achieving the kind of hegemonic position that they have in Germany, have been a constant political target for almost half a century.

All of this suggests to me that there's a lot of work to be done in comparative culture wars.

__________________________________________________
* More information about Adalbert Volck and his Confederate War Etchings can be found on the websites of Baltimore's Enoch Pratt Free Library and the New-York Historical Society, both of which house Volck materials. A question for any 19th-century historians out there: was Volck a Forty-Eighter? He apparently arrived in this country that year. If so, his support of the Confederacy seems unusual to me. We all know about Forty-Eighters like Carl Shurz who fought on the Union side. Were there many Confederate Forty-Eighters?

** Though Goodhart is, I think, ultimately far too kind to Sarrazin (whom he depicts as hardheaded and sensible...and, as a member of the center-left, a very desirable alternative to the emergence of an actual German version of Geert Wilders).

*** Certainly there has been plenty of German criticism of German "official liberalism."  See, for example, Oliver Hirschbiegel's 2004 film Der Untergang (Downfall)--most famous on the interwebs for spawning the Hitler Meme.  Hirschbiegel saw his film as an attempt to "get beyond guilt," and intended it as a criticism of Sixties generation's views of the past. For their part, 68ers like Wim Wenders lambasted the film for humanizing Hitler.  This was, in many ways, a kind of aftershock of the Historikerstreit of the 1980s, one of whose key players, Joachim Fest, provided much of the material for Downfall.  But the Historikerstreit, as well as Downfall and the reactions to it, were cultural/intellectual debates largely taking place within the German intelligentsia.  Neither of them received any formal expression in electoral politics, as far as I know.  (On the politics of Downfall, see David Bathrick, "Whose Hi/story Is It? The U.S. Reception of Downfall," New German Critique 102, Vol. 34, No. 3, Fall 2007")

Culture Wars in Other Countries (Metaphorical and Real)

A couple weeks ago, this image was making its way around the left of the blogosphere (a larger version can be seen here). Hendrik Hertzberg got the ball rolling when he posted it on his New Yorker blog. Identifying it as a political cartoon by Adalbert Volck that "went viral during the 1862 midterm campaign," Hertzberg compared its attacks on Lincoln to current rightwing attacks on Obama. Matt Yglesias followed up the next day on ThinkProgress with a bit more analysis, noting that the Republicans received "a bit of a shellacking" in those midterm elections and arguing that

the evident similarities between aspects of political rhetoric today and 150 years ago highlights the extent to which the values-and-temperament debate between conservative nationalism and progressive cosmopolitanism is ultimately much more fundamental than the passing controversies over tax rates economic regulation. The basic anxieties provoked by threats to existing status hierarchies haven’t changed, nor have the rhetorical tools of countermobilization.

The following day, Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon echoed Yglesias:

This is the sort of thing that makes claims that Tea Partiers are either some new phenomenon or that they have a specific, policy-based gripe with Obama even more comical. It’s all culture war, all the time.

In fact, Hertzberg, Yglesias, and Marcotte have subtly misidentified this interesting image. It comes not from the election year of 1862, but rather from 1863. Adalbert Volck was a Bavarian-born, Baltimore dentist who, like a lot of his fellow white Marylanders, sympathized with the Confederacy. In 1863, using the pseudonym "V. Blada," he published a portfolio of thirty prints, collectively entitled Confederate War Etchings, of which the image in question, called "Worship of the North," was the first. Twenty-nine of the thirty prints (the last has apparently been lost) are available for viewing online as part of the Library of Congress's American Memory project.*

It's important that this cartoon comes from 1863 and not 1862 because its context was not a political campaign at all, but rather the Civil War itself (though of course, the War was the central political issue in the 1862 and 1864 campaigns). Interestingly, neither Hertzberg, nor Yglesias, nor Marcotte mentions the Civil War. Though American politics may feature "all culture war, all the time," it's certainly not (literally) all civil war, all the time. It is important that the context for this image was something much more wrenching and violent than an election campaign...though noting that arguably makes any similarities we might identify between it and current political rhetoric even more striking. When we see similarities between Volck's attacks on Lincoln and contemporary conservative attacks on Obama, perhaps we shouldn't see something as abstract as Yglesias's "basic anxieties provoked by threats to existing status hierarchies" or even Marcotte's American conservatives as eternal culture warriors, but rather the enduring legacy of the Civil War in American political culture and rhetoric.

But of course, we're not the only country with culture wars. Volck's homeland of Germany, after all, gave us the term "culture war" (Kulturkampf). And Germany is currently having a little culture war of its own.

This past summer, Thilo Sarrazin, an SPD politician and Bundesbank official published a book entitled Deutschland Schafft Sich Ab: Wie wir unser Land aufs Spiel setzen (Germany Does Itself In: How we are putting our country at risk).  Sarrazin's book argues that his country's growing Muslim population constitutes a social and cultural threat, especially in light of the very low birthrate among ethnic Germans.  Sarrazin's argument that Germany's Muslims are both unassimilable and genetically less intelligent than ethnic Germans caused a scandal in Germany.

In many ways, Sarrazin resembles the right-wing populists who can be found throughout Europe these days, from Geert Wilders in the Netherlands to Barbara Rosenkranz in Austria. But while the book's tendentious arguments may be old hat in Europe, they obviously strike a particular nerve in Germany, whose post-war national identity was based on a self-conscious rejection of such arguments.  Unsurprisingly the German political and intellectual establishment has nearly universally condemned the book.  Sarrazin was pressured to resign his Bundesbank post.  And though many Germans initially took comfort in the absence of any political party that might empower Sarrazin's views in Germany, the sheer popularity of the book quickly made clear that, even without such a party, many Germans embraced Sarrazin's views. Although endorsing the book remained taboo, politicians soon began "demanding that the political elite cease ignoring the fact that many in Germany support Sarrazin," according to Der Spiegel.


There are obviously many interesting aspects of the Sarrazin affair, what it reveals about, and how it may change, post-war German politics.  But I'm blogging about it because of an interesting comment by David Goodhart in his recent review of the book for the British journal Prospect (h/t Arts & Letters Daily):

Nowhere in Europe is the gap between public opinion and published opinion as wide as in Germany. And nowhere has public policy been more influenced by a 1960s generation, post-national, society-is-to-blame kind of liberalism. Yet this “official” liberalism has never reflected the way people live and think, even in the German chattering classes. When I lived in the country, 20 years ago, it felt far more socially conservative than the similar circles I had come from in London.

Goodhart's observation is, I think, entirely fair. And the recent experience of the German intellectual and cultural elite with the public reception of Sarrazin's book is further evidence of Goodhart's point.**

This vast divide between elite and popular opinion raises an interesting issue: why hasn't Germany experienced a more pronounced populist backlash against the 60s generation and their intellectual heirs? Especially given the taboos surrounding a political discourse that targets ethnic Others in Germany, the German cultural and intellectual elite, which is quite clearly out-of-step with large bits of the German populace would seem an obvious object of political ire.***  And, as we know, in the United States, the equivalent of those official Sixties liberals, despite never achieving the kind of hegemonic position that they have in Germany, have been a constant political target for almost half a century.

All of this suggests to me that there's a lot of work to be done in comparative culture wars.

__________________________________________________
* More information about Adalbert Volck and his Confederate War Etchings can be found on the websites of Baltimore's Enoch Pratt Free Library and the New-York Historical Society, both of which house Volck materials. A question for any 19th-century historians out there: was Volck a Forty-Eighter? He apparently arrived in this country that year. If so, his support of the Confederacy seems unusual to me. We all know about Forty-Eighters like Carl Shurz who fought on the Union side. Were there many Confederate Forty-Eighters?

** Though Goodhart is, I think, ultimately far too kind to Sarrazin (whom he depicts as hardheaded and sensible...and, as a member of the center-left, a very desirable alternative to the emergence of an actual German version of Geert Wilders).

*** Certainly there has been plenty of German criticism of German "official liberalism."  See, for example, Oliver Hirschbiegel's 2004 film Der Untergang (Downfall)--most famous on the interwebs for spawning the Hitler Meme.  Hirschbiegel saw his film as an attempt to "get beyond guilt," and intended it as a criticism of Sixties generation's views of the past. For their part, 68ers like Wim Wenders lambasted the film for humanizing Hitler.  This was, in many ways, a kind of aftershock of the Historikerstreit of the 1980s, one of whose key players, Joachim Fest, provided much of the material for Downfall.  But the Historikerstreit, as well as Downfall and the reactions to it, were cultural/intellectual debates largely taking place within the German intelligentsia.  Neither of them received any formal expression in electoral politics, as far as I know.  (On the politics of Downfall, see David Bathrick, "Whose Hi/story Is It? The U.S. Reception of Downfall," New German Critique 102, Vol. 34, No. 3, Fall 2007")

mark your calendar

The 2011 USIH conference will be held on November 17-18 at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. (This was the same location as the 2010 conference.) Look for the CFP to be circulated soon!

Mike O'Connor
Chair, Conference Committee
2011 U.S. Intellectual History conference

mark your calendar

The 2011 USIH conference will be held on November 17-18 at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. (This was the same location as the 2010 conference.) Look for the CFP to be circulated soon!

Mike O'Connor
Chair, Conference Committee
2011 U.S. Intellectual History conference

Is religious history no longer unfashionable?

I’ve been reading a rather unknown yet compelling book, Religious Advocacy in American History, edited by Bruce Kuklick and D. G. Hart. It’s a collection of essays by several religious historians: in addition to chapters by the editors, it includes essays by George Marsden, Mark Noll, Eugene Genovese, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, and Paul Boyer, among others. The book is largely an anthology of a 1994 conference hosted by Wheaton College (“the evangelical Harvard”) entitled the Consultation on Advocacy and Writing American History.

Although the diversity of authors preempts any monolithic message, a couple of themes emerge from Religious Advocacy and American History, as outlined by Leo Ribuffo in the afterward:

Four issues were jumbled together at the Wheaton sessions, and they still have not been sorted out in this book. These are, first, that historians of the United States pay insufficient attention to religion; second, that scholars of religious history are insufficiently respected by their colleagues; third, that these two problems derive primarily from a bias against religious faith by secular faculty; and fourth, that advocacy from a religious perspective—actually, from an evangelical or moderate Catholic perspective—is not only as legitimate as other biases now esteemed in higher education but also provides educational advantages.

The book, thus, has the culture wars written all over it. What several of the contributors seemed to want was what scholars of race and gender had already achieved in the academy: their identity taken seriously. This is a curious position, though, coming from Christians. It’s one thing for a feminist scholar to frame the past using a woman’s perspective, which is necessarily relativist. But doesn’t a true believer in Jesus want to avoid such relativistic understandings of the past?

The book also begs another question: should these religious scholars have been more careful about their wishes? In other words, it seems to me that religious history is no longer unfashionable. But religious advocates are not the ones writing the important new scholarship. I’m thinking here of Bethany Moreton’s To Serve God and Wal-Mart and our own David Sehat’s forthcoming The Myth of Religious Freedom, which I expect to be widely read. Does the mainstreaming of religious history require that it be written by mainstream historians (re: secular scholars)?

Is religious history no longer unfashionable?

I’ve been reading a rather unknown yet compelling book, Religious Advocacy in American History, edited by Bruce Kuklick and D. G. Hart. It’s a collection of essays by several religious historians: in addition to chapters by the editors, it includes essays by George Marsden, Mark Noll, Eugene Genovese, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, and Paul Boyer, among others. The book is largely an anthology of a 1994 conference hosted by Wheaton College (“the evangelical Harvard”) entitled the Consultation on Advocacy and Writing American History.

Although the diversity of authors preempts any monolithic message, a couple of themes emerge from Religious Advocacy and American History, as outlined by Leo Ribuffo in the afterward:

Four issues were jumbled together at the Wheaton sessions, and they still have not been sorted out in this book. These are, first, that historians of the United States pay insufficient attention to religion; second, that scholars of religious history are insufficiently respected by their colleagues; third, that these two problems derive primarily from a bias against religious faith by secular faculty; and fourth, that advocacy from a religious perspective—actually, from an evangelical or moderate Catholic perspective—is not only as legitimate as other biases now esteemed in higher education but also provides educational advantages.

The book, thus, has the culture wars written all over it. What several of the contributors seemed to want was what scholars of race and gender had already achieved in the academy: their identity taken seriously. This is a curious position, though, coming from Christians. It’s one thing for a feminist scholar to frame the past using a woman’s perspective, which is necessarily relativist. But doesn’t a true believer in Jesus want to avoid such relativistic understandings of the past?

The book also begs another question: should these religious scholars have been more careful about their wishes? In other words, it seems to me that religious history is no longer unfashionable. But religious advocates are not the ones writing the important new scholarship. I’m thinking here of Bethany Moreton’s To Serve God and Wal-Mart and our own David Sehat’s forthcoming The Myth of Religious Freedom, which I expect to be widely read. Does the mainstreaming of religious history require that it be written by mainstream historians (re: secular scholars)?

The Long American Revolution

I am teaching a course entitled "The Long American Revolution" in the spring 2011 semester that uses the Revolutionary War and the Civil War as bookends. Yes, not the most radical reworking of history, but we don't have enough faculty in my program to offer separate courses on the Revolution and the Civil War. However, I also think the course has an integrity of its own and can raise some questions and themes that courses with a more limited scope could not necessarily explore.

I draw on the usual suspects for my baseline view of the period: James McPherson, Sean Wilentz, Eric Foner, Ira Berlin, and Mark Noll. I'd like to do two things with this course: first, provide a decent historical arc to the period that completed a radical expansion of political liberties and a profound restructuring of the economy and second, to investigate the myths about this period that continue to echo loudly in the present day, from the role religion played in the founding and in the Civil War to ideas about what constituted a public, a citizen, and a nation.

I have ordered six relatively short (under 250 pages) monographs that cover, basically, changes in religion, slavery, the Revolution, Lincoln, and the economy during the period.

To have some kind of continuity, I am treating the course as intellectual history, so we will look at the keywords (to borrow from Daniel Rodgers still useful book, Contested Truths) that fostered political and cultural debates. For example, we'll look at the term liberty as a way to track change over time.

So, in the midst your turkey stupor, if you have a chance, I would like to hear suggestions for keywords, texts, and (especially) primary documents that you believe would push this course in interesting and unorthodox directions. I think I have the fundamentals covered, but would like to hear what imaginative avenues others might suggest to explore.

The Long American Revolution

I am teaching a course entitled "The Long American Revolution" in the spring 2011 semester that uses the Revolutionary War and the Civil War as bookends. Yes, not the most radical reworking of history, but we don't have enough faculty in my program to offer separate courses on the Revolution and the Civil War. However, I also think the course has an integrity of its own and can raise some questions and themes that courses with a more limited scope could not necessarily explore.

I draw on the usual suspects for my baseline view of the period: James McPherson, Sean Wilentz, Eric Foner, Ira Berlin, and Mark Noll. I'd like to do two things with this course: first, provide a decent historical arc to the period that completed a radical expansion of political liberties and a profound restructuring of the economy and second, to investigate the myths about this period that continue to echo loudly in the present day, from the role religion played in the founding and in the Civil War to ideas about what constituted a public, a citizen, and a nation.

I have ordered six relatively short (under 250 pages) monographs that cover, basically, changes in religion, slavery, the Revolution, Lincoln, and the economy during the period.

To have some kind of continuity, I am treating the course as intellectual history, so we will look at the keywords (to borrow from Daniel Rodgers still useful book, Contested Truths) that fostered political and cultural debates. For example, we'll look at the term liberty as a way to track change over time.

So, in the midst your turkey stupor, if you have a chance, I would like to hear suggestions for keywords, texts, and (especially) primary documents that you believe would push this course in interesting and unorthodox directions. I think I have the fundamentals covered, but would like to hear what imaginative avenues others might suggest to explore.

A Quote for Tuesday

"Beyond, I saw the timber and thatch of the village, and the vanishing wooded contours that, across the valley, corresponded to my vantage point. All these woods, though my footsteps never startled anything larger than a squirrel, still teem with wild boar. As it declined, the sun beat the grey Norman stone into thin edifices of gold; and, when dusk had swallowed them up, the buildings of the monastery were pierced by many gleaming windows--oblong and classical, Norman and rounded, or high tangles of Gothic tracery--as the Abbey prepared itself for the night."

Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time to Keep Silence (1957; repr., New York: New York Review of Books, 2007), 40.

A Quote for Tuesday

"Beyond, I saw the timber and thatch of the village, and the vanishing wooded contours that, across the valley, corresponded to my vantage point. All these woods, though my footsteps never startled anything larger than a squirrel, still teem with wild boar. As it declined, the sun beat the grey Norman stone into thin edifices of gold; and, when dusk had swallowed them up, the buildings of the monastery were pierced by many gleaming windows--oblong and classical, Norman and rounded, or high tangles of Gothic tracery--as the Abbey prepared itself for the night."

Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time to Keep Silence (1957; repr., New York: New York Review of Books, 2007), 40.

The Sixties Counterculture and Intellectual History, or Something is Happening Here, But You Don't Know What It Is

We've been devoting a lot of space around here lately to the Seventies...and rightly so. That decade has recently received an enormous amount of richly deserved historiographical attention and a growing list of excellent works on it is reaching print.

The historiography of the 1960s is a good deal more developed. But there are still major gaps in the literature. And one of them that I find most frustrating involves the counterculture.

I'm currently teaching an undergraduate seminar on the U.S. in the Sixties. This is the second time I've offered this course. And while there's an embarrassment of riches when it comes to secondary works on the New Left, the Great Society, and even conservatism, I've had a terrible time finding the right thing to use to teach the counterculture.

Last year, I used Alice Echols's biography of Janis Joplin, Scars of Sweet Paradise. This is a fine book, but ultimately two weeks on Janis Joplin is really too much.

This year I'm using a combination of primary source readings, music, and film, as well as Natalya Zimmerman's Counterculture Kaleidoscope. Like Echols, Zimmerman focuses on music in San Francisco in the late '60s. Though a less good book than the Echols, in certain ways it is better in the undergraduate classroom: it is shorter, it covers more ground by focusing on a variety of musicians, and it has a stronger argument, albeit one that is a tad simplistic. But it's not very satisfying as an account of the San Francisco scene...let alone the larger counterculture.

Why is there not a stronger, general book on the intellectual and cultural history of the counterculture?*

The counterculture seems to me to have a number of historiographical strikes against it:

First, the counterculture has more enemies than friends...even on the left. Leading figures in the New Left, especially folks associated with the early New Left, often held the counterculture in contempt. And these folks--I'm thinking e.g. of Todd Gitlin--helped frame the historiography of the Sixties. Of course conservatives--and conservative liberals like Joan Didion--have treated the counterculture with an almost apocalyptic sense of horror.

Second, unlike Sixties conservatism (which led to the political successes of the right in later decades) or even the New Left, the counterculture seems to have producd a series of cultural and intellectual dead ends. It was not only quickly commodified. In retrospect it seems to have been always already commodified. Its most obvious cultural legacies--e.g. the rise of seventies New Age thought; jam bands--often make it harder for academics to take it seriously.

Third, the most obviously significant cultural achievements of the counterculture were in the area of music, a subject that most (though by no means all) US historians generally write and think poorly about.

Fourth, chemically altered states of consciousness played an obviously major role in the sixties counterculture and are another area that is difficult to write well about historically.

Of course, I may be missing something here. Perhaps the book I have in mind has, in fact, been written. And if it has, I'm sure it will be revealed (to my eternal embarrassment) in comments.

_____________________________________________________

* There are obviously many fine works of history on particular aspects of the counterculture, from Thomas Frank's Conquest of Cool to Sean Wilentz's Dylan in America.

The Sixties Counterculture and Intellectual History, or Something is Happening Here, But You Don't Know What It Is

We've been devoting a lot of space around here lately to the Seventies...and rightly so. That decade has recently received an enormous amount of richly deserved historiographical attention and a growing list of excellent works on it is reaching print.

The historiography of the 1960s is a good deal more developed. But there are still major gaps in the literature. And one of them that I find most frustrating involves the counterculture.

I'm currently teaching an undergraduate seminar on the U.S. in the Sixties. This is the second time I've offered this course. And while there's an embarrassment of riches when it comes to secondary works on the New Left, the Great Society, and even conservatism, I've had a terrible time finding the right thing to use to teach the counterculture.

Last year, I used Alice Echols's biography of Janis Joplin, Scars of Sweet Paradise. This is a fine book, but ultimately two weeks on Janis Joplin is really too much.

This year I'm using a combination of primary source readings, music, and film, as well as Natalya Zimmerman's Counterculture Kaleidoscope. Like Echols, Zimmerman focuses on music in San Francisco in the late '60s. Though a less good book than the Echols, in certain ways it is better in the undergraduate classroom: it is shorter, it covers more ground by focusing on a variety of musicians, and it has a stronger argument, albeit one that is a tad simplistic. But it's not very satisfying as an account of the San Francisco scene...let alone the larger counterculture.

Why is there not a stronger, general book on the intellectual and cultural history of the counterculture?*

The counterculture seems to me to have a number of historiographical strikes against it:

First, the counterculture has more enemies than friends...even on the left. Leading figures in the New Left, especially folks associated with the early New Left, often held the counterculture in contempt. And these folks--I'm thinking e.g. of Todd Gitlin--helped frame the historiography of the Sixties. Of course conservatives--and conservative liberals like Joan Didion--have treated the counterculture with an almost apocalyptic sense of horror.

Second, unlike Sixties conservatism (which led to the political successes of the right in later decades) or even the New Left, the counterculture seems to have producd a series of cultural and intellectual dead ends. It was not only quickly commodified. In retrospect it seems to have been always already commodified. Its most obvious cultural legacies--e.g. the rise of seventies New Age thought; jam bands--often make it harder for academics to take it seriously.

Third, the most obviously significant cultural achievements of the counterculture were in the area of music, a subject that most (though by no means all) US historians generally write and think poorly about.

Fourth, chemically altered states of consciousness played an obviously major role in the sixties counterculture and are another area that is difficult to write well about historically.

Of course, I may be missing something here. Perhaps the book I have in mind has, in fact, been written. And if it has, I'm sure it will be revealed (to my eternal embarrassment) in comments.

_____________________________________________________

* There are obviously many fine works of history on particular aspects of the counterculture, from Thomas Frank's Conquest of Cool to Sean Wilentz's Dylan in America.

“New Class” Thinking and Historiography

I am curious what our readers make of “new class” thinking. Is it a legitimate way of theorizing about the place of intellectuals in our postmodern, postindustrial society? Or is it anti-intellectual nonsense, an updated version of Julian Benda’s La Trahison des Clercs?

In my research on the culture wars, I credit the popularization of “new class” thinking to the neoconservatives. Out of their political repositioning, they developed a critical theory about a so-called “new class” of intellectuals, broadly defined to include all professionals tasked with manipulating language—although more narrowly applied to humanists and social scientists. Most members of this “new class,” so the theory went, had turned their backs on the society to which they owed their high-ranking status. A private memorandum written by Daniel Patrick Moynihan for his boss President Nixon in 1970 exemplified this withering mode of criticism: “No doubt there is a struggle going on in this country of the kind the Germans used to call a Kulturkampf. The adversary culture which dominates almost all channels of information transfer and opinion formation has never been stronger, and as best I can tell it has come near silencing the representatives of traditional America.”

In this sense, “new class” thinking seems more ideological than analytical, consistent with the anti-intellectual histrionics of Rush Limbaugh and Glen Beck, amusingly portrayed by David Bromwich in his recent New York Review of Books piece, “The Rebel Germ.” Bromwich describes how Limbaugh mockingly portrays Democrats as the party of wimpish intellectuals—updating the egghead label applied to early Cold War era Democrats like Adlai Stevenson and his followers—“composed of superannuated aristocrats [and] pretentious arrivistes...” If this is the sole meaning of the “new class,” then there’s nothing much new about it. But plenty of historians and other intellectuals think the concept analytically useful.

Take Christopher Lasch’s biographer Eric Miller, who buys into Alvin Gouldner’s argument about the “new class,” made in his 1982 book, The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class. In a passage cited by Miller to explain Lasch’s early theories about society, Gouldner writes that a “new class” intellectual “desacralizes authority-claims and facilitates challenges to definitions of social reality made by traditional authorities...” Miller continues, in his own disapproving words:

The unintended effect of this way of seeing was on the one hand to diminish the individual’s sense of agency while on the other to empower the individual to think of herself as subject to no authority beyond the particular, socially constructed, historically contingent institutions of her own circumstance. In the end, social-science-inspired historiography only buttressed a vision of the world in which humans, while shaped by powerful social structures, were morally on their own and finally responsible to no authority higher than their own. The atomizing, antinomian tendencies latent in this individualistic ideology did not bode well for communitarian political hopes—such as those that were fueling Lasch’s nascent historical work and political vision (72-73).


In other words, paradoxically, the early Lasch, and “new class” thinkers like him, laid the groundwork for postmodernism in their dismissal of traditional structures of intellectual authority. I say paradoxically because the later, communitarian Lasch worked so hard to put the pieces of traditional structures of intellectual authority back together. I also say paradoxically because the later Lasch used “new class” thinking in both its political and analytical senses, especially in The True and Only Heaven (1991) and The Revolt of the Elites (1995).

So which is it? (I ask somewhat rhetorically, knowing one does not preclude the other.)

“New Class” Thinking and Historiography

I am curious what our readers make of “new class” thinking. Is it a legitimate way of theorizing about the place of intellectuals in our postmodern, postindustrial society? Or is it anti-intellectual nonsense, an updated version of Julian Benda’s La Trahison des Clercs?

In my research on the culture wars, I credit the popularization of “new class” thinking to the neoconservatives. Out of their political repositioning, they developed a critical theory about a so-called “new class” of intellectuals, broadly defined to include all professionals tasked with manipulating language—although more narrowly applied to humanists and social scientists. Most members of this “new class,” so the theory went, had turned their backs on the society to which they owed their high-ranking status. A private memorandum written by Daniel Patrick Moynihan for his boss President Nixon in 1970 exemplified this withering mode of criticism: “No doubt there is a struggle going on in this country of the kind the Germans used to call a Kulturkampf. The adversary culture which dominates almost all channels of information transfer and opinion formation has never been stronger, and as best I can tell it has come near silencing the representatives of traditional America.”

In this sense, “new class” thinking seems more ideological than analytical, consistent with the anti-intellectual histrionics of Rush Limbaugh and Glen Beck, amusingly portrayed by David Bromwich in his recent New York Review of Books piece, “The Rebel Germ.” Bromwich describes how Limbaugh mockingly portrays Democrats as the party of wimpish intellectuals—updating the egghead label applied to early Cold War era Democrats like Adlai Stevenson and his followers—“composed of superannuated aristocrats [and] pretentious arrivistes...” If this is the sole meaning of the “new class,” then there’s nothing much new about it. But plenty of historians and other intellectuals think the concept analytically useful.

Take Christopher Lasch’s biographer Eric Miller, who buys into Alvin Gouldner’s argument about the “new class,” made in his 1982 book, The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class. In a passage cited by Miller to explain Lasch’s early theories about society, Gouldner writes that a “new class” intellectual “desacralizes authority-claims and facilitates challenges to definitions of social reality made by traditional authorities...” Miller continues, in his own disapproving words:

The unintended effect of this way of seeing was on the one hand to diminish the individual’s sense of agency while on the other to empower the individual to think of herself as subject to no authority beyond the particular, socially constructed, historically contingent institutions of her own circumstance. In the end, social-science-inspired historiography only buttressed a vision of the world in which humans, while shaped by powerful social structures, were morally on their own and finally responsible to no authority higher than their own. The atomizing, antinomian tendencies latent in this individualistic ideology did not bode well for communitarian political hopes—such as those that were fueling Lasch’s nascent historical work and political vision (72-73).


In other words, paradoxically, the early Lasch, and “new class” thinkers like him, laid the groundwork for postmodernism in their dismissal of traditional structures of intellectual authority. I say paradoxically because the later, communitarian Lasch worked so hard to put the pieces of traditional structures of intellectual authority back together. I also say paradoxically because the later Lasch used “new class” thinking in both its political and analytical senses, especially in The True and Only Heaven (1991) and The Revolt of the Elites (1995).

So which is it? (I ask somewhat rhetorically, knowing one does not preclude the other.)

Tim's Light Reading (11/18/2010)

1 (of 7). The Fish Man Cometh: Recent History, Problems, and Hopes in Higher Education

Stanley Fish recently dissected several "woe-is-us books" (his phrase) on the state of higher education today. I suspect that historians of higher education will, in the years ahead, be mining at least a few of the dozen books he covered. Indeed, Menand's The Marketplace of Ideas and Nussbaum's Not For Profit are on my reading list. Hacker and Dreifus's Higher Education? and Nelson's No University is an Island might get on there too. However, in a move to lighten the tone of the subject of his article, Fish says that we should all should pay attention to a start-up liberal arts institution to be located in Georgia, Ralston College. As an aside, if it creates new jobs for intellectual historians, well, that would be a great thing.

On Ralston, I noted this highly idealistic---but worthy---statement from the school's "About Us" page: Ralston College intends to remain without political, ideological, or religious affiliations. I guess Stephen Blackwood is trying to avoid this kind of start-up. Here's what Fish says about Ralston---incorporating statements from the college about itself (bolds mine):

“We believe,” declares the college’s Web brochure, “that the goal of general education is to produce a person who can draw on different fields of knowledge and at the same time grasp the whole of which each field is a part.” This means that “Ralston is fundamentally about reading books, thinking about them, and talking about them.” No on-line instruction, no departmental structure, no professorial ranks, no athletic programs, no teacher evaluations (student-centered education but not on the customer model) and no tenure.

And here is Fish's reaction (bolds mine):

The very fact of Ralston College, if it gets off the ground, might stand as a reminder of what the enterprise has always been about and might serve as a beacon, however dimly perceived, to those who value the liberal arts enterprise for what it is rather than for what it might contribute to the bottom line, to the strengthening of democracy, to the fashioning of citizens, to the advancement of social justice or any other worthy but academically irrelevant aim.

My question for Professor Fish is as follows: Do you really mean to say that those of us concerned with the liberal arts should have no concern with what our institutions "might contribute"---I repeat, ~might~ contribute---to any of those causes? Don't you really mean that our institutions should not be centered on contributing to one or more of those causes? You don't mean to say that those concerns are really just pipe dreams, do you? What a soul-crushing thought, worthy of Theodore "Hickey" Hickman.


2. Addams the Intellectual

Much like Louis Knight does in Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy, this Slate article by Ruth Graham approaches Jane Addams as something more than a mere social reformer, hero of liberalism, or "American saint". Graham calls us to see Addams as "an independent thinker and doer who was neither universally adored nor chained to liberal orthodoxy." The occasion for Graham reminding us of Addams's intellectual contributions is that this month is the 100th anniversary of the publication of Twenty Years at Hull House. In the context of Addams's pacificism and contemporary reactions to her position, Graham forwards the following (bolds mine):

Meanwhile, Addams' pacifist period must be squared with her past as something of moderate. "My temperament and habit had always kept me in rather the middle of the road," Addams wrote, looking back in 1922. "In politics and social reform I had been for the 'best possible.' " It's that pragmatist attitude that has contributed to her recent rediscovery as a philosopher on par with her friends John Dewey and William James. Her moderation also means there's plenty about her that merits respect from contemporary conservatives.

In contrast with that last sentence, however, Graham relays this: Despite this, after her death, Addams' name would be sullied by conservative critics like World magazine editor Marvin Olasky, whose influential 1992 book The Tragedy of American Compassion fingered Hull House as a model for the supposedly bloated New Deal and Great Society programs that superseded it in the 1930s and 1960s. In fact, Addams didn't agitate for the overthrow of capitalism. She asked for the meaningful deployment of state resources.

No matter the views of conservatives, I think that Graham, Knight, and Jean Bethke-Elshtain have it right: intellectual historians ~must~ reckon with Addams in accounts of the Progressive Era.


3. Have you ever wondered what Emerson, Longfellow, and Thoreau read while at Harvard?

If so, this database/website hosted by the Harvard University Library will tell you. Here is an excerpt from the site's introductory page:

Reading: Harvard Views of Readers, Readership, and Reading History is an online exploration of the intellectual, cultural, and political history of reading as reflected in the historical holdings of the Harvard Libraries. For Internet users worldwide, Reading provides unparalleled digital access to a significant selection of unique source materials:

* personally annotated books owned by John Keats, Herman Melville, Hester Lynch Piozzi, and others
* William Wordsworth's private library catalog
* commonplace books used by Joseph Conrad, Washington Irving, Victor Hugo, and more
* records of the Harvard College Library that reveal the reading activities of Emerson, Longfellow, and Thoreau ...


4. Lilla on the Tea Party

Columbia University professor and intellectual historian Mark Lilla identifies an issue where Obama could have found common ground with Tea Partiers: fairness. Had Obama played the role of an economic populist, Lilla believes that Obama could have defused a significant portion of Tea Party rhetoric and brought some (small) portion of them, and independents, into the Democrat's fold. But is Lilla underestimating Tea Party anti-intellectualism and racism, the issue unemployment, the effective obstinacy of a determined political minority, the importance of states' rights/subsidiarity, and the support given by one major media outlet for Tea Party issues? Perhaps.


5. Clinton Rossiter's (Now Dated) Shout-out to American Intellectual History

I feel like an idiot for not having encountered, prior to this long piece by Bill Moyers, Clinton Rossiter's pithy assessment of the intellectual corruption of the Gilded Age. The quote, which serves as a subheading for chapter five of his 1982 book, Conservatism in America, is introduced as follows: "American Conservatism, 1865-1945: Or, The Great Train Robbery of American Intellectual History."

Rossiter argues that Gilded Age Robber Barons hijacked the language of progress, individualism, opportunity, and the whole Jeffersonian liberal tradition in general, to funnel wealth toward the "deserving." Clinton Lawrence Rossiter, III, was a historian and political scientist at Cornell University from 1946-1970, when Rossiter committed suicide. The Wikipedia article on Rossiter is the best I can do for background at this point.


6. Diagramming Western Philosophy

Assistant Professor Kevin Sharp, an analytic philosopher at The Ohio State University, likes to draw diagrams---or flow charts---of philosophical thought. Here are two covering the Western philosophical tradition from 600 BCE to 600 CE, and another from 700 to about 1960. Others are available. This kind of effort correlates well with those outlined by Patricia Cohen in a NYT article from this past Tuesday titled, "Digital Keys for Unlocking the Humanities’ Riches." Good stuff.


7. Fer or Agin?

Continuing somewhat the discussion of the Tea Party that David Sehat started on Tuesday, some journalists have asserted that Marco Rubio is a---perhaps THE--- darling of Tea Partiers. But is this story an argument for or against religion mattering to Tea Partiers? I can't tell.

Finally, I offer the following on the Tea Party from Noam Chomsky (bolds mine):

Ridiculing Tea Party shenanigans is a serious error, however. It is far more appropriate to understand what lies behind the movement’s popular appeal, and to ask ourselves why justly angry people are being mobilized by the extreme right and not by the kind of constructive activism that rose during the Depression, like the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations).

Words to ponder. - TL

Tim's Light Reading (11/18/2010)

1 (of 7). The Fish Man Cometh: Recent History, Problems, and Hopes in Higher Education

Stanley Fish recently dissected several "woe-is-us books" (his phrase) on the state of higher education today. I suspect that historians of higher education will, in the years ahead, be mining at least a few of the dozen books he covered. Indeed, Menand's The Marketplace of Ideas and Nussbaum's Not For Profit are on my reading list. Hacker and Dreifus's Higher Education? and Nelson's No University is an Island might get on there too. However, in a move to lighten the tone of the subject of his article, Fish says that we should all should pay attention to a start-up liberal arts institution to be located in Georgia, Ralston College. As an aside, if it creates new jobs for intellectual historians, well, that would be a great thing.

On Ralston, I noted this highly idealistic---but worthy---statement from the school's "About Us" page: Ralston College intends to remain without political, ideological, or religious affiliations. I guess Stephen Blackwood is trying to avoid this kind of start-up. Here's what Fish says about Ralston---incorporating statements from the college about itself (bolds mine):

“We believe,” declares the college’s Web brochure, “that the goal of general education is to produce a person who can draw on different fields of knowledge and at the same time grasp the whole of which each field is a part.” This means that “Ralston is fundamentally about reading books, thinking about them, and talking about them.” No on-line instruction, no departmental structure, no professorial ranks, no athletic programs, no teacher evaluations (student-centered education but not on the customer model) and no tenure.

And here is Fish's reaction (bolds mine):

The very fact of Ralston College, if it gets off the ground, might stand as a reminder of what the enterprise has always been about and might serve as a beacon, however dimly perceived, to those who value the liberal arts enterprise for what it is rather than for what it might contribute to the bottom line, to the strengthening of democracy, to the fashioning of citizens, to the advancement of social justice or any other worthy but academically irrelevant aim.

My question for Professor Fish is as follows: Do you really mean to say that those of us concerned with the liberal arts should have no concern with what our institutions "might contribute"---I repeat, ~might~ contribute---to any of those causes? Don't you really mean that our institutions should not be centered on contributing to one or more of those causes? You don't mean to say that those concerns are really just pipe dreams, do you? What a soul-crushing thought, worthy of Theodore "Hickey" Hickman.


2. Addams the Intellectual

Much like Louis Knight does in Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy, this Slate article by Ruth Graham approaches Jane Addams as something more than a mere social reformer, hero of liberalism, or "American saint". Graham calls us to see Addams as "an independent thinker and doer who was neither universally adored nor chained to liberal orthodoxy." The occasion for Graham reminding us of Addams's intellectual contributions is that this month is the 100th anniversary of the publication of Twenty Years at Hull House. In the context of Addams's pacificism and contemporary reactions to her position, Graham forwards the following (bolds mine):

Meanwhile, Addams' pacifist period must be squared with her past as something of moderate. "My temperament and habit had always kept me in rather the middle of the road," Addams wrote, looking back in 1922. "In politics and social reform I had been for the 'best possible.' " It's that pragmatist attitude that has contributed to her recent rediscovery as a philosopher on par with her friends John Dewey and William James. Her moderation also means there's plenty about her that merits respect from contemporary conservatives.

In contrast with that last sentence, however, Graham relays this: Despite this, after her death, Addams' name would be sullied by conservative critics like World magazine editor Marvin Olasky, whose influential 1992 book The Tragedy of American Compassion fingered Hull House as a model for the supposedly bloated New Deal and Great Society programs that superseded it in the 1930s and 1960s. In fact, Addams didn't agitate for the overthrow of capitalism. She asked for the meaningful deployment of state resources.

No matter the views of conservatives, I think that Graham, Knight, and Jean Bethke-Elshtain have it right: intellectual historians ~must~ reckon with Addams in accounts of the Progressive Era.


3. Have you ever wondered what Emerson, Longfellow, and Thoreau read while at Harvard?

If so, this database/website hosted by the Harvard University Library will tell you. Here is an excerpt from the site's introductory page:

Reading: Harvard Views of Readers, Readership, and Reading History is an online exploration of the intellectual, cultural, and political history of reading as reflected in the historical holdings of the Harvard Libraries. For Internet users worldwide, Reading provides unparalleled digital access to a significant selection of unique source materials:

* personally annotated books owned by John Keats, Herman Melville, Hester Lynch Piozzi, and others
* William Wordsworth's private library catalog
* commonplace books used by Joseph Conrad, Washington Irving, Victor Hugo, and more
* records of the Harvard College Library that reveal the reading activities of Emerson, Longfellow, and Thoreau ...


4. Lilla on the Tea Party

Columbia University professor and intellectual historian Mark Lilla identifies an issue where Obama could have found common ground with Tea Partiers: fairness. Had Obama played the role of an economic populist, Lilla believes that Obama could have defused a significant portion of Tea Party rhetoric and brought some (small) portion of them, and independents, into the Democrat's fold. But is Lilla underestimating Tea Party anti-intellectualism and racism, the issue unemployment, the effective obstinacy of a determined political minority, the importance of states' rights/subsidiarity, and the support given by one major media outlet for Tea Party issues? Perhaps.


5. Clinton Rossiter's (Now Dated) Shout-out to American Intellectual History

I feel like an idiot for not having encountered, prior to this long piece by Bill Moyers, Clinton Rossiter's pithy assessment of the intellectual corruption of the Gilded Age. The quote, which serves as a subheading for chapter five of his 1982 book, Conservatism in America, is introduced as follows: "American Conservatism, 1865-1945: Or, The Great Train Robbery of American Intellectual History."

Rossiter argues that Gilded Age Robber Barons hijacked the language of progress, individualism, opportunity, and the whole Jeffersonian liberal tradition in general, to funnel wealth toward the "deserving." Clinton Lawrence Rossiter, III, was a historian and political scientist at Cornell University from 1946-1970, when Rossiter committed suicide. The Wikipedia article on Rossiter is the best I can do for background at this point.


6. Diagramming Western Philosophy

Assistant Professor Kevin Sharp, an analytic philosopher at The Ohio State University, likes to draw diagrams---or flow charts---of philosophical thought. Here are two covering the Western philosophical tradition from 600 BCE to 600 CE, and another from 700 to about 1960. Others are available. This kind of effort correlates well with those outlined by Patricia Cohen in a NYT article from this past Tuesday titled, "Digital Keys for Unlocking the Humanities’ Riches." Good stuff.


7. Fer or Agin?

Continuing somewhat the discussion of the Tea Party that David Sehat started on Tuesday, some journalists have asserted that Marco Rubio is a---perhaps THE--- darling of Tea Partiers. But is this story an argument for or against religion mattering to Tea Partiers? I can't tell.

Finally, I offer the following on the Tea Party from Noam Chomsky (bolds mine):

Ridiculing Tea Party shenanigans is a serious error, however. It is far more appropriate to understand what lies behind the movement’s popular appeal, and to ask ourselves why justly angry people are being mobilized by the extreme right and not by the kind of constructive activism that rose during the Depression, like the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations).

Words to ponder. - TL

The patriot and the priest

As is probably clear from our recent blog posts, many of us find the culture wars endlessly fascinating. Yet one of the most difficult questions I get from students when we discuss the culture wars is how do we identify what is at stake in these debates? Two very recent news stories provide cases in point. The first comes from a blog post about the recent Medal of Honor recipient; the second about the election of the Catholic Bishop who will direct the United States Conference of Bishops.

Yesterday, President Obama awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor to Staff Sgt. Salvatore A. Giunta for actions in Korangal Valley, Afghanistan. According to the citation for valor, Giunta placed himself in the line of fire to try to save his fellow squadmates and comfort a wounded American soldier. There have been four recipients of this award for the Afghanistan war; Giunta is the only living recipient.

News of the ceremony sparked an interesting and apparently short-lived debate at the New York Times blog, The Caucus: http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/16/medal-of-honor-for-bravery-in-afghanistan/. I find the comments section of any blog to be quite revealing (of course), and this post did not disappointment. Within the first few comments, “Charles B. Tiffany” from Kissimmee, Florida fired a zinger, choosing to denigrate those of a certain persuasion—readers of the New Republic, graduates of the Ivy League, fans of Rachel Maddow. The upshot of this post was that if Giunta partook in any of these pursuits (thus making him liberal) he would not have been in Afghanistan to rescue his comrades; in fact he would not have been in the military at all. Somewhat incredibly, the Times removed this comment. You can pick up the gist of the original comment from others who refer to it. Many people wrote in to decry the idea that liberals are not patriots or that members of certain educated class do not serve. Perhaps most interesting in terms of the culture wars was that many who contributed to this debate believed that the topic of a contemporary war was not an appropriate venue for brawling over our politics. Real wars trump culture wars.

This morning, we learned that Timothy M. Dolan, the archbishop who runs the New York Archdiocese, had been elected president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. Reportedly, Dolan was somewhat of a surprise choice because he was selected over Bishop Gerald Kincanas of Arizona who had served as vice president of the Conference and was seen as the natural successor to Cardinal Francis George of Chicago. The key factor in this election, according to Laurie Goodstein of the New York Times, was that Dolan is a moderate conservative who represents a wing of the American Catholic Church that has come out in opposition to the new healthcare act and takes strong public positions on same-sex unions. Kincanas represents another wing of the church that focuses on issues of social justice such as immigration, workers’ rights, poverty, and peace. Rev. Thomas J. Reese, a senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown observed that the election of Dolan was “a signal that the conference wants to be a leader in the culture wars.” Indeed, the article included remarks from Robert P. George of Princeton and a leading figure in the contemporary culture wars who pointed out that Dolan had been the host of meetings that produced the “Manhattan Declaration,” a flagship contribution to the culture wars from religious conservatives.

So, on the one hand we have a defense of liberals as patriots sparked by honoring a soldier for his valor in an utterly tragic situation and war; and on the other hand, we have the election of an American Catholic Bishop based on his ability to coordinate attacks against the healthcare act and same-sex unions. I know that we have debated whether liberals have won or are winning the culture wars, but what is one to make of situations in which Americans try to defend a liberal position as nothing less than patriotic and when the largest single religious denomination chooses to highlight opposition to healthcare and same-sex unions rather than peace, immigration, and poverty ?