Neoliberalism (Slight Return)

This is a too-long delayed reply to Andrew’s long and thoughtful rejoinder to my most recent comments on neoliberalism (us), neoliberalism (e), and neoliberalism (unmodified).*

(I hope that at least some of our readership is thinking "finally Ben is responding to that post." I fear most of you are thinking "oh no...not this discussion again."  If you're in the former group--or are a glutton for punishment in the latter one--follow me below the fold....)


Let me start by agreeing with one thing Andrew wrote:

The neoliberalism (us) that Ben dug up for us—the neoliberalism of 1980s Democrats like Gary Hart—is a relatively important aspect of recent political history, but is not all that important in most larger contexts. 

I think this is correct.  Neoliberalism (us) is a more local phenomenon than neoliberalism (e), and in that sense it is less important.  This is not to say that it is unrelated to similar phenomena in other countries.  Certainly the ascent of the "New Democrats"--very much the successors of the neoliberals (us)--during the late 1980s and 1990s was paralleled by the ascent of New Labour in the UK and similar, roughly rightward movements among many of the social democratic parties of continental Europe.

"A-ha," I can hear Andrew saying, "isn't that your neoliberalism (e)?  I told you neoliberalism (e) = neoliberalism (us)!"

Not so fast.  Let me reiterate my problem with equating neoliberalism (us) (and its European cousins) with neoliberalism (e).  As I outlined in my original post, neoliberalism (us) was designed by its founders to be an alternative both to what they called "paleoliberalism" (really the dominant strain of post-New Politics liberalism of the 1970s) and to the various American conservatism as embodied in the presidency of Ronald Reagan.  But those conservatives, to whom the neoliberals (us) hoped to be the principal alternative, were, in turn, the defining example of neoliberalism (e) to those thinking about neoliberalism in that sense.

So while, in the 1980s, self-described US neoliberals were certainly neoliberals in the European (or global) sense, all US neoliberals in the European (or global) sense were not neoliberals in the US sense.  Indeed, neoliberalism (us) was to a great extent created to engage in a battle within neoliberalism (e), though virtually nobody in this country would have called neoliberalism (e) "neoliberalism" at the time.

Equating neoliberalism (us) with neoliberalism (e) makes a hash out of 1980s American politics, much of which took place within the horizon of neoliberalism (e).  Indeed, for all the explanatory power of neoliberalism (e) in the world today, one of my problems with it as an all-purpose explanation (as it occasionally rather crudely becomes) is that neoliberals often disagree with each other about important things....in part because of the internal contradictions of neoliberalism (e).  In countries like the US and the UK, most mainstream politics for the last three decades has consisted of arguments within neoliberalism (e).  And while it's meaningful and important to point this out, we should avoid the Vulgar Naderism** of declaring that there are no differences whatsoever between the (neoliberal (e)) Republicans and the (neoliberal (e)) Democrats.

So onto Andrew's second apparent disagreement with me, which concerns the relationship between neoliberalism (e) and neoconservatism.***

Again, let me start by noting a substantial area of agreement.  I certainly agree that neoconservatives have something to do with neoliberalism.   Like virtually every other political ideology in the world today, neoconservative thought is marked by its taking place in the context of a national and global economy largely dominated by neoliberalism.  And like most other successful recent US political movements, neoconservatives are neoliberals (e).****

The neoconservative take on neoliberalism (e) is distinctive, in ways that Andrew explores very productively in his post.*****

"Neoliberalism" (us) was coined, in part, as both a parallel and a contrast to "neoconservatism." But "neoconservatism," though it appeared on the scene well after neoliberalism (e) was born, was not coined in relationship to "neoliberalism" at all.  And as a species of neoliberalism (e), neoconservatism does not contrast with it.

All of which brings me back to where this overly long and rambling post (sorry folks!) more or less began: American politics, at least for most of the last half century or so, has often been organized around the words "liberal" and "conservative," and a variety of variations of them. Among these have been "neoconservative" and "neoliberal" (us).  Both US liberalism and US conservatism are protean; each shifts to a great extent in relation to the other. In contrast, the referent of "neoliberalism" in the global sense is much more stable.

Most, though not all, US liberals and US conservatives in recent decades have also been neoliberals (e).  And the neoliberals have been dominant on both the American right and left (two more terms with different meanings elsewhere that are often used interchangeably with "conservative" and "liberal" in US political discourse).

As historians, we want to be able both to see American political thought in a global context and to understand and account for political arguments within the US, even when those arguments are taking place in a fairly narrow political space.  To do the former, we need to be able to think about neoliberalism (e).  To do the latter we need, among many other things, to think a little about neoliberalism (us)...at least when we're thinking about the 1980s.  And we need to understand that neoliberalism (e) and neoliberalism (us) are not the same thing.

One final thought, a bit further afield: does anyone else find it peculiar how infrequently capitalism has been mentioned in these various posts on neoliberalism?

_________________________________________________________________________

* For those who haven't been following this discussion and for some reason feel moved to do so, it more or less starts here and continues here. Then read Andrew's post referenced above and you're up to speed.

** I use this term with (some) apologies to Ralph Nader, who is perhaps more responsible for Vulgar Naderism than Marx is responsible for Vulgar Marxism, but who nevertheless deserves at least somewhat better than to be reduced to it.

*** Believing that he has erased the distinction between neoliberalism (e) and neoliberalism (us), Andrew writes

I think the history of neoliberalism (e-us-g, from hereon just plain old neoliberalism) cannot so easily be separated from the history of neoconservatism. I will use as my example the postwar U.S. intellectual history of education. 

But, in fact, nothing in what follows has anything whatsoever to do with self-described, 1980s US neoliberals (i.e. neoliberalism (us)).

**** Not to beat a dead horse, but this is, yet again, evidence that we cannot simply equate neoliberalism (us) with neoliberalism (e).  The self-described US "neoliberals" of the 1980s defined themselves in part against neoconservatism, which was in a period of enormous growth in influence.


***** On the particularities of the neoconservative brand of neoliberalism (e), see also David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 81-85.

Neoliberalism (Slight Return)

This is a too-long delayed reply to Andrew’s long and thoughtful rejoinder to my most recent comments on neoliberalism (us), neoliberalism (e), and neoliberalism (unmodified).*

(I hope that at least some of our readership is thinking "finally Ben is responding to that post." I fear most of you are thinking "oh no...not this discussion again."  If you're in the former group--or are a glutton for punishment in the latter one--follow me below the fold....)


Let me start by agreeing with one thing Andrew wrote:

The neoliberalism (us) that Ben dug up for us—the neoliberalism of 1980s Democrats like Gary Hart—is a relatively important aspect of recent political history, but is not all that important in most larger contexts. 

I think this is correct.  Neoliberalism (us) is a more local phenomenon than neoliberalism (e), and in that sense it is less important.  This is not to say that it is unrelated to similar phenomena in other countries.  Certainly the ascent of the "New Democrats"--very much the successors of the neoliberals (us)--during the late 1980s and 1990s was paralleled by the ascent of New Labour in the UK and similar, roughly rightward movements among many of the social democratic parties of continental Europe.

"A-ha," I can hear Andrew saying, "isn't that your neoliberalism (e)?  I told you neoliberalism (e) = neoliberalism (us)!"

Not so fast.  Let me reiterate my problem with equating neoliberalism (us) (and its European cousins) with neoliberalism (e).  As I outlined in my original post, neoliberalism (us) was designed by its founders to be an alternative both to what they called "paleoliberalism" (really the dominant strain of post-New Politics liberalism of the 1970s) and to the various American conservatism as embodied in the presidency of Ronald Reagan.  But those conservatives, to whom the neoliberals (us) hoped to be the principal alternative, were, in turn, the defining example of neoliberalism (e) to those thinking about neoliberalism in that sense.

So while, in the 1980s, self-described US neoliberals were certainly neoliberals in the European (or global) sense, all US neoliberals in the European (or global) sense were not neoliberals in the US sense.  Indeed, neoliberalism (us) was to a great extent created to engage in a battle within neoliberalism (e), though virtually nobody in this country would have called neoliberalism (e) "neoliberalism" at the time.

Equating neoliberalism (us) with neoliberalism (e) makes a hash out of 1980s American politics, much of which took place within the horizon of neoliberalism (e).  Indeed, for all the explanatory power of neoliberalism (e) in the world today, one of my problems with it as an all-purpose explanation (as it occasionally rather crudely becomes) is that neoliberals often disagree with each other about important things....in part because of the internal contradictions of neoliberalism (e).  In countries like the US and the UK, most mainstream politics for the last three decades has consisted of arguments within neoliberalism (e).  And while it's meaningful and important to point this out, we should avoid the Vulgar Naderism** of declaring that there are no differences whatsoever between the (neoliberal (e)) Republicans and the (neoliberal (e)) Democrats.

So onto Andrew's second apparent disagreement with me, which concerns the relationship between neoliberalism (e) and neoconservatism.***

Again, let me start by noting a substantial area of agreement.  I certainly agree that neoconservatives have something to do with neoliberalism.   Like virtually every other political ideology in the world today, neoconservative thought is marked by its taking place in the context of a national and global economy largely dominated by neoliberalism.  And like most other successful recent US political movements, neoconservatives are neoliberals (e).****

The neoconservative take on neoliberalism (e) is distinctive, in ways that Andrew explores very productively in his post.*****

"Neoliberalism" (us) was coined, in part, as both a parallel and a contrast to "neoconservatism." But "neoconservatism," though it appeared on the scene well after neoliberalism (e) was born, was not coined in relationship to "neoliberalism" at all.  And as a species of neoliberalism (e), neoconservatism does not contrast with it.

All of which brings me back to where this overly long and rambling post (sorry folks!) more or less began: American politics, at least for most of the last half century or so, has often been organized around the words "liberal" and "conservative," and a variety of variations of them. Among these have been "neoconservative" and "neoliberal" (us).  Both US liberalism and US conservatism are protean; each shifts to a great extent in relation to the other. In contrast, the referent of "neoliberalism" in the global sense is much more stable.

Most, though not all, US liberals and US conservatives in recent decades have also been neoliberals (e).  And the neoliberals have been dominant on both the American right and left (two more terms with different meanings elsewhere that are often used interchangeably with "conservative" and "liberal" in US political discourse).

As historians, we want to be able both to see American political thought in a global context and to understand and account for political arguments within the US, even when those arguments are taking place in a fairly narrow political space.  To do the former, we need to be able to think about neoliberalism (e).  To do the latter we need, among many other things, to think a little about neoliberalism (us)...at least when we're thinking about the 1980s.  And we need to understand that neoliberalism (e) and neoliberalism (us) are not the same thing.

One final thought, a bit further afield: does anyone else find it peculiar how infrequently capitalism has been mentioned in these various posts on neoliberalism?

_________________________________________________________________________

* For those who haven't been following this discussion and for some reason feel moved to do so, it more or less starts here and continues here. Then read Andrew's post referenced above and you're up to speed.

** I use this term with (some) apologies to Ralph Nader, who is perhaps more responsible for Vulgar Naderism than Marx is responsible for Vulgar Marxism, but who nevertheless deserves at least somewhat better than to be reduced to it.

*** Believing that he has erased the distinction between neoliberalism (e) and neoliberalism (us), Andrew writes

I think the history of neoliberalism (e-us-g, from hereon just plain old neoliberalism) cannot so easily be separated from the history of neoconservatism. I will use as my example the postwar U.S. intellectual history of education. 

But, in fact, nothing in what follows has anything whatsoever to do with self-described, 1980s US neoliberals (i.e. neoliberalism (us)).

**** Not to beat a dead horse, but this is, yet again, evidence that we cannot simply equate neoliberalism (us) with neoliberalism (e).  The self-described US "neoliberals" of the 1980s defined themselves in part against neoconservatism, which was in a period of enormous growth in influence.


***** On the particularities of the neoconservative brand of neoliberalism (e), see also David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 81-85.

The Neocon Take on the "New Class"

My most recent post on Daniel Bell, and how his form of thinking about the so-called "new class," brought comments, especially from Tim, asking for clarification. Here goes (briefly):

Out of their political repositioning in the late 1960s and 1970s, neoconservatives developed a critical theory (co-opted from anti-Stalinist thinking) 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. 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.”

The central reason the neoconservative “new class” theory was so plausible is because the university credential system had become the principal gateway to the professional world, a sorting mechanism for white-collar hierarchy. The numbers tell the story: in 1960, there were about 3.5 million Americans enrolled in universities; by 1970, this number had more than doubled to around 7.5 million, as the size of faculties grew proportionally. Historian James Livingston nicely relates this demographic explosion on the nation’s college campuses to the culture wars, or to what he generally describes as the “debates about the promise of American life.” “By the 1970s,” Livingston contends, “the principal residence of that promise was widely assumed to be the new ‘meritocracy’ enabled by universal access to higher education.” To this extent, class resentment aimed at intellectuals made sense, in a misplaced sort of way, since intellectuals indeed held the levers to any given individual’s future economic stability.*

----------------------
* See James Livingston, The World Turned Inside Out: American Thought and Culture at the End of the 20th Century (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009). (Or my review of that book, and his response.) Eric Hobsbawm also relates the growing importance of a university education to the redirection of class resentment against “toffs of one kind or another—intellectuals, liberal elites, people who are putting it over on us.” Eric Hobsbawm, “Interview: World Distempers,” New Left Review 61 (Jan/Feb 2010), 135.

The Neocon Take on the "New Class"

My most recent post on Daniel Bell, and how his form of thinking about the so-called "new class," brought comments, especially from Tim, asking for clarification. Here goes (briefly):

Out of their political repositioning in the late 1960s and 1970s, neoconservatives developed a critical theory (co-opted from anti-Stalinist thinking) 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. 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.”

The central reason the neoconservative “new class” theory was so plausible is because the university credential system had become the principal gateway to the professional world, a sorting mechanism for white-collar hierarchy. The numbers tell the story: in 1960, there were about 3.5 million Americans enrolled in universities; by 1970, this number had more than doubled to around 7.5 million, as the size of faculties grew proportionally. Historian James Livingston nicely relates this demographic explosion on the nation’s college campuses to the culture wars, or to what he generally describes as the “debates about the promise of American life.” “By the 1970s,” Livingston contends, “the principal residence of that promise was widely assumed to be the new ‘meritocracy’ enabled by universal access to higher education.” To this extent, class resentment aimed at intellectuals made sense, in a misplaced sort of way, since intellectuals indeed held the levers to any given individual’s future economic stability.*

----------------------
* See James Livingston, The World Turned Inside Out: American Thought and Culture at the End of the 20th Century (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009). (Or my review of that book, and his response.) Eric Hobsbawm also relates the growing importance of a university education to the redirection of class resentment against “toffs of one kind or another—intellectuals, liberal elites, people who are putting it over on us.” Eric Hobsbawm, “Interview: World Distempers,” New Left Review 61 (Jan/Feb 2010), 135.

R.I.P. Daniel Bell, Culture Wars Theorist/Protagonist

Daniel Bell’s intellectual obituary writers will rightly focus on his three most important books, The End of Ideology (1960), The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973), and The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976). Scholars from an assortment of disciplines frequently cite these three books not only as intellectual signposts, but also for the theoretical and historical insights that they offer, many of which persist in seeming fresh. But in this post, my small attempt to memorialize Bell, who died at the age of 91 earlier this week, I will focus on a much less famous Wilson Quarterly essay, “The Cultural Wars: American Intellectual Life, 1965-1992” (1992). This essay gives the historian of the culture wars much to ponder. It exemplifies Bell’s qualities as both a theorist and a protagonist of the late twentieth century battles over intellectual position.

The purpose of Bell’s article was to reflect on why the universities were torn by conflict. The year of the essay’s publication, 1992, was the apex of the culture wars in the universities. “Political correctness” was on the tip of everyone’s tongue. Bell argued that this particular battle represented the decaying of the detached, public intellectual. In short, Bell echoed Russell Jacoby’s famous lament, elaborated in his bestseller, The Last Intellectuals (1987), that large institutions (otherwise known as universities) increasingly dominated the life of intellectuals, sapping them of their critical spirit. Setting aside the important critique of this contention, made by David Hollinger and others—that the ideal of the detached intellectual is a romantic reading of the past—Bell was in a good position to comment on this shift in intellectual life, since he occupied both positions, as one of the celebrated New York intellectuals, and also as a longtime professor at Harvard. For Bell, the institutionalization of intellectual life walled intellectuals off from the rest of America.

Arguing that intellectual life had changed was not to argue that intellectuals lacked influence. Quite to the contrary, intellectuals came to “constitute the institutional life of the society, and their wars—over positions in the institutions, especially the universities—and their conflicts over the definitions of what is salient in the culture (such as feminism and multiculturalism), constitute the ‘cultural wars’ that are taking place in American life today.”

In the passage below, Bell combined theoretical and historical insight with an implicitly partisan take on university intellectuals:

I begin with an arbitrary yet perhaps useful distinction between a culture and a society, the culture being the regnant attitudes and traditions that are the wellsprings of belief, the society denoting common attitudes and interests that define a people.

In this light, Bell thought culture and society diverged in contemporary U.S. history:

The United States today is a bourgeois society but not a bourgeois culture. It is a bourgeois society in its emphasis on individualism and materialism. But it is, at the “advanced” level, a modernist culture in its acceptance of experiment, new design, and complex forms. The culture of the United States today is permissive in its ethos (especially on moral and sexual issues) and modernist in its willingness to accept new and innovative and trendy expressions in the arts and literature. It is, to use the phrase of Lionel Trilling, an “adversary culture,” in its opposition to the prevailing societal attitudes. Yet that adversary culture is increasingly entrenched within the institutions of the society, especially the universities, and enjoys a cozy nonconformity in parading its new snobbishness, often on the pretense of still being persecuted. Inevitably, those attitudes have produced a reaction within the culture of what Sidney Blumenthal has called “the counter-intellectuals,” or, in the political arena, of the “neoconservatives,” men and women who have come forward strongly in defense of “bourgeois society” and its values. And uneasily between the two is a current of “political liberalism,” which, in separating the public and the private realms, defends the permissiveness in culture, but is more concerned to rectify the deficits of “bourgeois society,” especially on the issues of equality and redistributive justice. In effect, we have a new set of “cultural wars,” or Kulturkämpfe which are not the romantic visions of the intellectuals against the society, but intense disputes between—and within—enclaves of intellectuals whose arguments only occasionally (as now with the debate about “political correctness”) reach the larger public.

This passage demonstrated Bell’s mastery of “new class” thinking, perfected by the neoconservatives (which I previously wrote about here). “New class” thinking, I argue, was both theoretically astute, and partisan hackery. Bell’s genius was making such a contradictory combination possible.

R.I.P. Daniel Bell, Culture Wars Theorist/Protagonist

Daniel Bell’s intellectual obituary writers will rightly focus on his three most important books, The End of Ideology (1960), The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973), and The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976). Scholars from an assortment of disciplines frequently cite these three books not only as intellectual signposts, but also for the theoretical and historical insights that they offer, many of which persist in seeming fresh. But in this post, my small attempt to memorialize Bell, who died at the age of 91 earlier this week, I will focus on a much less famous Wilson Quarterly essay, “The Cultural Wars: American Intellectual Life, 1965-1992” (1992). This essay gives the historian of the culture wars much to ponder. It exemplifies Bell’s qualities as both a theorist and a protagonist of the late twentieth century battles over intellectual position.

The purpose of Bell’s article was to reflect on why the universities were torn by conflict. The year of the essay’s publication, 1992, was the apex of the culture wars in the universities. “Political correctness” was on the tip of everyone’s tongue. Bell argued that this particular battle represented the decaying of the detached, public intellectual. In short, Bell echoed Russell Jacoby’s famous lament, elaborated in his bestseller, The Last Intellectuals (1987), that large institutions (otherwise known as universities) increasingly dominated the life of intellectuals, sapping them of their critical spirit. Setting aside the important critique of this contention, made by David Hollinger and others—that the ideal of the detached intellectual is a romantic reading of the past—Bell was in a good position to comment on this shift in intellectual life, since he occupied both positions, as one of the celebrated New York intellectuals, and also as a longtime professor at Harvard. For Bell, the institutionalization of intellectual life walled intellectuals off from the rest of America.

Arguing that intellectual life had changed was not to argue that intellectuals lacked influence. Quite to the contrary, intellectuals came to “constitute the institutional life of the society, and their wars—over positions in the institutions, especially the universities—and their conflicts over the definitions of what is salient in the culture (such as feminism and multiculturalism), constitute the ‘cultural wars’ that are taking place in American life today.”

In the passage below, Bell combined theoretical and historical insight with an implicitly partisan take on university intellectuals:

I begin with an arbitrary yet perhaps useful distinction between a culture and a society, the culture being the regnant attitudes and traditions that are the wellsprings of belief, the society denoting common attitudes and interests that define a people.

In this light, Bell thought culture and society diverged in contemporary U.S. history:

The United States today is a bourgeois society but not a bourgeois culture. It is a bourgeois society in its emphasis on individualism and materialism. But it is, at the “advanced” level, a modernist culture in its acceptance of experiment, new design, and complex forms. The culture of the United States today is permissive in its ethos (especially on moral and sexual issues) and modernist in its willingness to accept new and innovative and trendy expressions in the arts and literature. It is, to use the phrase of Lionel Trilling, an “adversary culture,” in its opposition to the prevailing societal attitudes. Yet that adversary culture is increasingly entrenched within the institutions of the society, especially the universities, and enjoys a cozy nonconformity in parading its new snobbishness, often on the pretense of still being persecuted. Inevitably, those attitudes have produced a reaction within the culture of what Sidney Blumenthal has called “the counter-intellectuals,” or, in the political arena, of the “neoconservatives,” men and women who have come forward strongly in defense of “bourgeois society” and its values. And uneasily between the two is a current of “political liberalism,” which, in separating the public and the private realms, defends the permissiveness in culture, but is more concerned to rectify the deficits of “bourgeois society,” especially on the issues of equality and redistributive justice. In effect, we have a new set of “cultural wars,” or Kulturkämpfe which are not the romantic visions of the intellectuals against the society, but intense disputes between—and within—enclaves of intellectuals whose arguments only occasionally (as now with the debate about “political correctness”) reach the larger public.

This passage demonstrated Bell’s mastery of “new class” thinking, perfected by the neoconservatives (which I previously wrote about here). “New class” thinking, I argue, was both theoretically astute, and partisan hackery. Bell’s genius was making such a contradictory combination possible.

Tweeting the State of the Union

For those who have not yet seen it, CNN issued a challenge to its readers/viewers to sum up the State of the Union in a tweet. The results can be seen here, but I was struck by how interesting this idea is for the kinds of books that we read and write. If a book cannot be summed up in a tweet, is that a good thing? Or a bad thing?

Tweeting the State of the Union

For those who have not yet seen it, CNN issued a challenge to its readers/viewers to sum up the State of the Union in a tweet. The results can be seen here, but I was struck by how interesting this idea is for the kinds of books that we read and write. If a book cannot be summed up in a tweet, is that a good thing? Or a bad thing?

Daniel Bell (1919-2011)

Daniel Bell passed away yesterday at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the age of 91.  Bell was, of course, a leading sociologist and public intellectual, whose long and fascinating career is, and will likely long be, of great interest to U.S. intellectual historians.  A leading Cold War liberal thinker in the 1950s, Bell later became a founding co-editor of The Public Interest which eventually made him a charter neoconservative, though Bell's version of neoconservatism was always idiosyncratic. Irving Kristol declared that his college friend and co-editor represented the "social democratic wing" of neoconservatism. Bell, for his part, referred to himself as a right-wing social democrat, "a socialist in economics, a liberal in politics, and a conservative in culture."

Daniel Bell (1919-2011)

Daniel Bell passed away yesterday at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the age of 91.  Bell was, of course, a leading sociologist and public intellectual, whose long and fascinating career is, and will likely long be, of great interest to U.S. intellectual historians.  A leading Cold War liberal thinker in the 1950s, Bell later became a founding co-editor of The Public Interest which eventually made him a charter neoconservative, though Bell's version of neoconservatism was always idiosyncratic. Irving Kristol declared that his college friend and co-editor represented the "social democratic wing" of neoconservatism. Bell, for his part, referred to himself as a right-wing social democrat, "a socialist in economics, a liberal in politics, and a conservative in culture."

The President's Tie

In the 2011 State of the Union address, Barack Obama wore bi-partisanship around his neck--his tie was neither red nor blue but some color blend of the two. His veep, Joe Biden, seemed to have on a tie of blue with red stripes, perhaps worn in solidarity with the president. In the aftermath of the tragic shootings in Arizona, people expect at least a nod in the direction of civility, a notion, as intellectual historian James Kloppenberg made clear in his recent book on Obama and in his keynote address to the 2010 USIH conference, that the president has trafficked in for a long time. So in this purplish haze, did Obama offer a way for us to channel our "e pluribus unum"?

Yes, as long as we are on board with the president--preferably riding in a high-speed train between two cities that run on "clean energy." As Kloppenberg makes clear in his analysis of Obama, the president enjoys a good debate, but does not see compromise as the ultimate goal of democratic deliberations. He does not hesitate to state, as he did in the State of the Union, that we should do something because "it is the right thing to do." It was the right thing to do to pass a comprehensive healthcare bill. It was the right thing to do to repeal Don't Ask, Don't Tell. It was the right thing to do to initiate Race to the Top. He also included a list of things that were not so much wrong, but ultimately not right, such as, extending tax cuts for the nation's wealthy; targeting illegal immigrants and their children (especially when they are in college or the military); and, giving in to Tea Party demands to close down half the federal government.

As many commentators note, this Obama speech was heavy on policy ideas and bit lighter on soaring rhetoric. There were still moments, though, that illustrated Obama's command of the rhetorical presidency--he had a "I'm not a socialist" moment near the end of the speech when he declared to a rousing standing ovation that no one in the House chamber would want to be in any country other than the United States. Fair enough, Obama made it clear he has no intention of turning Swedish. But such assurances had little effect on the Michelle Bachmann projects around the country and their constant state of seemingly satisfying paranoia. I say satisfying because never has paranoia been meted out with the kind of smiles worn by the Minnesota representative and Alaska's (least?) favorite daughter.

But what of Obama's plan to re-imagine the American dream as a high-tech, highly-educated future? With references to another imagined landscape, the Kennedy years of Camelot, Obama suggested that Americans realized their potential as dreamers when they looked beyond the end of their noses--toward the moon, or, at least, at some other superpower.

This blog has engaged in some excellent discussion on two issues that seem fundamental to Obama's vision--the power of a free market mentality and the promise of American education. I would like to hear from my fellow bloggers on what they saw in Obama's vision. Did Obama err on the side of the market or did he propose a plan to harness (regulate) the market for the interests of the nation? Is Obama a neo-liberal warlord, or the pragmatist of Kloppenberg's analysis? And finally, did Obama offer a revision of the American dream? Consider two statements to contrast, the first from George W. Bush's last State of the Union in January 2008 and the second from Obama last night.

"In the work ahead, we must be guided by the philosophy that made our Nation great. As Americans, we believe in the power of individuals to determine their destiny and shape the course of history. We believe that the most reliable guide for our country is the collective wisdom of ordinary citizens. And so in all we do, we must trust in the ability of free peoples to make wise decisions and empower them to improve their lives for their futures.

To build a prosperous future, we must trust people with their own money and empower them to grow our economy." George W. Bush, 2008 State of the Union

"We should have no illusions about the work ahead of us. Reforming our schools, changing the way we use energy, reducing our deficit –- none of this will be easy. All of it will take time. And it will be harder because we will argue about everything. The costs. The details. The letter of every law.

Of course, some countries don’t have this problem. If the central government wants a railroad, they build a railroad, no matter how many homes get bulldozed. If they don’t want a bad story in the newspaper, it doesn’t get written.

And yet, as contentious and frustrating and messy as our democracy can sometimes be, I know there isn’t a person here who would trade places with any other nation on Earth.

We may have differences in policy, but we all believe in the rights enshrined in our Constitution. We may have different opinions, but we believe in the same promise that says this is a place where you can make it if you try. We may have different backgrounds, but we believe in the same dream that says this is a country where anything is possible. No matter who you are. No matter where you come from.

That dream is why I can stand here before you tonight. That dream is why a working-class kid from Scranton can sit behind me. That dream is why someone who began by sweeping the floors of his father’s Cincinnati bar can preside as Speaker of the House in the greatest nation on Earth." Barack Obama, 2011 State of the Union

The President's Tie

In the 2011 State of the Union address, Barack Obama wore bi-partisanship around his neck--his tie was neither red nor blue but some color blend of the two. His veep, Joe Biden, seemed to have on a tie of blue with red stripes, perhaps worn in solidarity with the president. In the aftermath of the tragic shootings in Arizona, people expect at least a nod in the direction of civility, a notion, as intellectual historian James Kloppenberg made clear in his recent book on Obama and in his keynote address to the 2010 USIH conference, that the president has trafficked in for a long time. So in this purplish haze, did Obama offer a way for us to channel our "e pluribus unum"?

Yes, as long as we are on board with the president--preferably riding in a high-speed train between two cities that run on "clean energy." As Kloppenberg makes clear in his analysis of Obama, the president enjoys a good debate, but does not see compromise as the ultimate goal of democratic deliberations. He does not hesitate to state, as he did in the State of the Union, that we should do something because "it is the right thing to do." It was the right thing to do to pass a comprehensive healthcare bill. It was the right thing to do to repeal Don't Ask, Don't Tell. It was the right thing to do to initiate Race to the Top. He also included a list of things that were not so much wrong, but ultimately not right, such as, extending tax cuts for the nation's wealthy; targeting illegal immigrants and their children (especially when they are in college or the military); and, giving in to Tea Party demands to close down half the federal government.

As many commentators note, this Obama speech was heavy on policy ideas and bit lighter on soaring rhetoric. There were still moments, though, that illustrated Obama's command of the rhetorical presidency--he had a "I'm not a socialist" moment near the end of the speech when he declared to a rousing standing ovation that no one in the House chamber would want to be in any country other than the United States. Fair enough, Obama made it clear he has no intention of turning Swedish. But such assurances had little effect on the Michelle Bachmann projects around the country and their constant state of seemingly satisfying paranoia. I say satisfying because never has paranoia been meted out with the kind of smiles worn by the Minnesota representative and Alaska's (least?) favorite daughter.

But what of Obama's plan to re-imagine the American dream as a high-tech, highly-educated future? With references to another imagined landscape, the Kennedy years of Camelot, Obama suggested that Americans realized their potential as dreamers when they looked beyond the end of their noses--toward the moon, or, at least, at some other superpower.

This blog has engaged in some excellent discussion on two issues that seem fundamental to Obama's vision--the power of a free market mentality and the promise of American education. I would like to hear from my fellow bloggers on what they saw in Obama's vision. Did Obama err on the side of the market or did he propose a plan to harness (regulate) the market for the interests of the nation? Is Obama a neo-liberal warlord, or the pragmatist of Kloppenberg's analysis? And finally, did Obama offer a revision of the American dream? Consider two statements to contrast, the first from George W. Bush's last State of the Union in January 2008 and the second from Obama last night.

"In the work ahead, we must be guided by the philosophy that made our Nation great. As Americans, we believe in the power of individuals to determine their destiny and shape the course of history. We believe that the most reliable guide for our country is the collective wisdom of ordinary citizens. And so in all we do, we must trust in the ability of free peoples to make wise decisions and empower them to improve their lives for their futures.

To build a prosperous future, we must trust people with their own money and empower them to grow our economy." George W. Bush, 2008 State of the Union

"We should have no illusions about the work ahead of us. Reforming our schools, changing the way we use energy, reducing our deficit –- none of this will be easy. All of it will take time. And it will be harder because we will argue about everything. The costs. The details. The letter of every law.

Of course, some countries don’t have this problem. If the central government wants a railroad, they build a railroad, no matter how many homes get bulldozed. If they don’t want a bad story in the newspaper, it doesn’t get written.

And yet, as contentious and frustrating and messy as our democracy can sometimes be, I know there isn’t a person here who would trade places with any other nation on Earth.

We may have differences in policy, but we all believe in the rights enshrined in our Constitution. We may have different opinions, but we believe in the same promise that says this is a place where you can make it if you try. We may have different backgrounds, but we believe in the same dream that says this is a country where anything is possible. No matter who you are. No matter where you come from.

That dream is why I can stand here before you tonight. That dream is why a working-class kid from Scranton can sit behind me. That dream is why someone who began by sweeping the floors of his father’s Cincinnati bar can preside as Speaker of the House in the greatest nation on Earth." Barack Obama, 2011 State of the Union

Two Quotes for Tuesday

On existential authenticity:

"It is commonly assumed that no art or skill is required in order to be subjective. To be sure, every human being is a bit of a subject, in a sense. But now to strive to become what one already is: who would take the pains to waste his time on such a task, involving the greatest imaginable degree of resignation? Quite so. But for this reason alone it is a very difficult task, the most difficult of all tasks in fact, precisely because every human being has a strong natural bent and passion to become something more and different. . . . Why can we not remember to be human beings?"

Soren Kierkegaard writing as Johannes Climacus in Concluding Unscientific Postscript to "Philosophical Fragments" in A Kierkegaard Anthology, Robert Bretall ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1946), 208, 199.


"At this point the real answer to the question, how one becomes what one is, can no longer be avoided. And thus I touch on the masterpiece of the art of self-preservation--of selfishness. . . . I cannot remember that I ever tried hard--no trace of struggle can be demonstrated in my life; I am the opposite of a heroic nature. 'Willing' something, 'striving' for something, envisaging a 'purpose,' a 'wish'--I know none of this from experience. At this very moment I still look upon my future--an ample future!--as upon calm seas: there is no ripple of desire. I do not want in the least that anything should become different than it is; I myself do not want to become different. . . . My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it--all idealism is mendaciousness in the face of what is necessary--but love it. . . . in all seriousness: nobody before me knew the right way, the way up; it is only beginning with me that there are hopes again, tasks, ways that can be prescribed for culture--I am he that brings these glad tidings.--And thus I am also a destiny."

Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann (1908; New York: Vintage, 1967), 253, 255, 258, 315.

Two Quotes for Tuesday

On existential authenticity:

"It is commonly assumed that no art or skill is required in order to be subjective. To be sure, every human being is a bit of a subject, in a sense. But now to strive to become what one already is: who would take the pains to waste his time on such a task, involving the greatest imaginable degree of resignation? Quite so. But for this reason alone it is a very difficult task, the most difficult of all tasks in fact, precisely because every human being has a strong natural bent and passion to become something more and different. . . . Why can we not remember to be human beings?"

Soren Kierkegaard writing as Johannes Climacus in Concluding Unscientific Postscript to "Philosophical Fragments" in A Kierkegaard Anthology, Robert Bretall ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1946), 208, 199.


"At this point the real answer to the question, how one becomes what one is, can no longer be avoided. And thus I touch on the masterpiece of the art of self-preservation--of selfishness. . . . I cannot remember that I ever tried hard--no trace of struggle can be demonstrated in my life; I am the opposite of a heroic nature. 'Willing' something, 'striving' for something, envisaging a 'purpose,' a 'wish'--I know none of this from experience. At this very moment I still look upon my future--an ample future!--as upon calm seas: there is no ripple of desire. I do not want in the least that anything should become different than it is; I myself do not want to become different. . . . My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it--all idealism is mendaciousness in the face of what is necessary--but love it. . . . in all seriousness: nobody before me knew the right way, the way up; it is only beginning with me that there are hopes again, tasks, ways that can be prescribed for culture--I am he that brings these glad tidings.--And thus I am also a destiny."

Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann (1908; New York: Vintage, 1967), 253, 255, 258, 315.

The U.S. History Canon

It's been a while since we talked bibliographic canon, so I thought we might give it another whack. A couple of years ago I posted a list for the long nineteenth century. The list below covers all of modern American history excluding the Revolution and the Federalist period. My colleague Michelle Brattain and I drafted it for doctoral students in our department, and it has benefited from suggestions by several others on our faculty. But the list is still too slanted toward our own interests.

Here's the goal: Come up with a list of truly canonical books that everyone who has gone to graduate school in U.S. history should have read. This is not just a list of intellectual and cultural history--it is supposed to include all the major works in modern U.S. history in all the different sub-specialties. In certain cases where an article was substantially the same as an important book, we added the article instead. We also left out many good books and books that would help to fill out a coherent narrative, trying instead to arrive at a truly canonical list. That is, of course, an impossible task, given the fragmentation and specialization of the historiography of the United States. But we thought it worth the effort in any case.

So now the question is: where have we gone wrong? The list is capped at 100 works, so all suggestions for additions need to be accompanied by an equal number of works to cut. That is the only way to arrive at a canonical list. But we also could have gone wrong in our periodization or in any number of ways, so critique away. I look forward to the conversation.

Without further ado, here's the list.

Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Book List

Disciplinary

Peter Novick, That Noble Dream (1988)

Antebellum

Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought (2007).

Charles Grier Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846 (1991).

Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy (2005)

Harry L. Watson, Liberty and Power, Rev. Ed. (2006)

Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic (1984)

Eugene D Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1974)

Eugene D Genovese, The Political Economy of Slavery (1967).

Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household (1988)

Drew Faust, John Henry Hammond and the Old South (1982)

William Hutchison, Religious Pluralism in America (2003)

Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith (1990).

Christine Heyrman, South Cross (1997)

Paul Johnson, Shopkeeper’s Millenium, Rev. Ed. (2004)

Nathan Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (1989)

Dave Roedeger, The Wages of Whiteness, Rev. Ed. (2007)

Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone (1998)

Nancy Cott, Bonds of Womanhood (1977)

Christine Stansell, City of Women (1986)

Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men (1995)

Civil War/Reconstruction

Eric Foner, Reconstruction (1989).

Orville Vernon Burton, The Age of Lincoln, (2007).

James MacPherson, Battlecry of Freedom (1988)

Drew Faust, The Creation of Confederate Nationalism (1988)

Broad 19th Century

Rogers M Smith, Civic Ideals (1997).

John F Kasson, Rudeness & Civility (1990).

Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet (2003).

Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color (1999)

Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden (1964)

Lawrence Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness (1977)

Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow (1988)

Karen Haltunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women (1982)

Ellen Carol DuBois, Woman Suffrage and Women’s Rights (1998)

Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness (1998)

Gilded Age and Progressive Era

William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis (1991).

Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America (1982).

William A. Link, The Paradox of Southern Progressivism (1992)

Robert H Wiebe, The Search for Order (1968).

C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow 3rd ed. (1974)

Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization (1996)

Rosalind Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres (1982)

Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings (1998)

T.J. Jackson Lears, No Place for Grace (1981)

Fox and Lears, eds., Culture of Consumption (1983)

Alan Dawley, Struggles for Justice (1991)

Christine Stansell, American Moderns (2000)

David Kennedy, Over Here (1980)

Herbert Gutman, Work, Society, and Culture in Industrializing America (1976)

Roy Rozenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will (1983)

Edward Ayers, Promise of the New South (1992)

Glend Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow (1996)

Michael Kazin, Populist Persuasion (1995)

George Chauncey, Gay New York (1994)

John Higham, Strangers in the Land, 2nd ed. (1992)

1920s

Edward L. Larson, Summer for the Gods (2006

Henry F. May, End of American Innocence, Columbia University Press Morningside edition (1992).

Nancy Cott, Grounding of Modern Feminism (1987)

Nancy MacLean, “The Leo Frank Case Reconsidered: Gender and Sexual Politics in the Making of ReactionaryPopulism,” Journal of American History, 78 (Dec. 1991).

William Leuchtenberg, Perils of Prosperity, 2nd ed. (1993)

New Deal

Patricia Sullivan, Days of Hope (1996).

Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest (1983)

Lizbeth Cohen, Making a New Deal (1990)

William E. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal (1963).

Harvard Sitkoff, ed., Fifty Years Later: New Deal Evaluated (1985)

Paul Conkin, The New Deal, 3rd ed (1992)

Stephen Fraser and Gary Gerstle, ed., The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order (1990)

WWII

John Dower, War without Mercy (1986)

Cold War/Postwar Politics

Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic (2004)

David Oshinsky, A Conspiracy So Immense (2005)

Melvin Leffler, The Specter of Communism (1994)

Fredrik Logevall, Choosing War (1999).

Marilyn Young, The Vietnam Wars (1991)

Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War (2005)

Friedman, Andrea, “The Smearing of Joe McCarthy: The Lavender Scare, Gossip, and Cold War Politics,” American Quarterly 57 (2005): 1105-1129.

Brattain, “Race, Racism and Anti-Racism,” American Historical Review (December 2007).

George C Herring, America’s Longest War, 4th ed. (2002).

Matthew Lassiter, The Silent Majority (2006)

Dan Carter, From Wallace to Gingrich (1996)

Michael Schaller, Reckoning with Reagan (1992)

Cold War/Postwar Social Movements

Harvard Sitkoff, The Struggle for Black Equality, rev. ed. (1993)

Robin Kelley, “We Are Not What We Seem: Rethinking Black Working-class Opposition in the Jim Crow South,: Journal of American History 80 (June 1993): 75-112.

John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities 2nd ed (1998)

Timothy Tyson, “Robert F. Williams, ‘Black Power,’and the Roots of the Black Freedom Struggle,” Journal of American History 85 (Sept. 1998): 540-570.

Braunstein and Doyle, eds. Imagine Nation (2002)

John Dittmer, Local People (1994).

Jeremy Varon, Bringing the War Home (2004).

Terry Anderson, The Movement and the Sixties (1996)

Thomas Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty (2008)

David Chappell, Stone of Hope (2004)

Cold War/Postwar Culture

Stephen J. Whitfield, Culture of the Cold War (1991)

Cuordileone, K. A. “‘Politics in an Age of Anxiety’: Cold War Political Culture and the Crisis In American Masculinity, 1949-1960” Journal of American History 87 (2000): 515-545.

Costigliola, Frank, “‘Unceasing Pressure For Penetration’: Gender, Pathology, and Emotion in George Kennan's Formation of the Cold War” Journal of American History 83 (1997): 1309-1339.

Cold War/Postwar Society

Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound, Rev. ed. (2008)

Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis (1996).

Rebecca E. Klatch, A Generation Divided (1999).

Bruce Schulman, The Seventies (2001)

Andreas Killen, 1973 Nervous Breakdown (2006)

Joseph Crespino, In Search of Another Country (2007)

Kevin Michael Kruse, White Flight (2005).

Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors (2001).

Melani McAlister, Epic Encounters, updated ed. (2005)

Gary Gerstle, American Crucible (2001)

The U.S. History Canon

It's been a while since we talked bibliographic canon, so I thought we might give it another whack. A couple of years ago I posted a list for the long nineteenth century. The list below covers all of modern American history excluding the Revolution and the Federalist period. My colleague Michelle Brattain and I drafted it for doctoral students in our department, and it has benefited from suggestions by several others on our faculty. But the list is still too slanted toward our own interests.

Here's the goal: Come up with a list of truly canonical books that everyone who has gone to graduate school in U.S. history should have read. This is not just a list of intellectual and cultural history--it is supposed to include all the major works in modern U.S. history in all the different sub-specialties. In certain cases where an article was substantially the same as an important book, we added the article instead. We also left out many good books and books that would help to fill out a coherent narrative, trying instead to arrive at a truly canonical list. That is, of course, an impossible task, given the fragmentation and specialization of the historiography of the United States. But we thought it worth the effort in any case.

So now the question is: where have we gone wrong? The list is capped at 100 works, so all suggestions for additions need to be accompanied by an equal number of works to cut. That is the only way to arrive at a canonical list. But we also could have gone wrong in our periodization or in any number of ways, so critique away. I look forward to the conversation.

Without further ado, here's the list.

Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Book List

Disciplinary

Peter Novick, That Noble Dream (1988)

Antebellum

Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought (2007).

Charles Grier Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846 (1991).

Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy (2005)

Harry L. Watson, Liberty and Power, Rev. Ed. (2006)

Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic (1984)

Eugene D Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1974)

Eugene D Genovese, The Political Economy of Slavery (1967).

Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household (1988)

Drew Faust, John Henry Hammond and the Old South (1982)

William Hutchison, Religious Pluralism in America (2003)

Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith (1990).

Christine Heyrman, South Cross (1997)

Paul Johnson, Shopkeeper’s Millenium, Rev. Ed. (2004)

Nathan Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (1989)

Dave Roedeger, The Wages of Whiteness, Rev. Ed. (2007)

Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone (1998)

Nancy Cott, Bonds of Womanhood (1977)

Christine Stansell, City of Women (1986)

Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men (1995)

Civil War/Reconstruction

Eric Foner, Reconstruction (1989).

Orville Vernon Burton, The Age of Lincoln, (2007).

James MacPherson, Battlecry of Freedom (1988)

Drew Faust, The Creation of Confederate Nationalism (1988)

Broad 19th Century

Rogers M Smith, Civic Ideals (1997).

John F Kasson, Rudeness & Civility (1990).

Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet (2003).

Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color (1999)

Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden (1964)

Lawrence Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness (1977)

Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow (1988)

Karen Haltunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women (1982)

Ellen Carol DuBois, Woman Suffrage and Women’s Rights (1998)

Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness (1998)

Gilded Age and Progressive Era

William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis (1991).

Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America (1982).

William A. Link, The Paradox of Southern Progressivism (1992)

Robert H Wiebe, The Search for Order (1968).

C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow 3rd ed. (1974)

Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization (1996)

Rosalind Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres (1982)

Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings (1998)

T.J. Jackson Lears, No Place for Grace (1981)

Fox and Lears, eds., Culture of Consumption (1983)

Alan Dawley, Struggles for Justice (1991)

Christine Stansell, American Moderns (2000)

David Kennedy, Over Here (1980)

Herbert Gutman, Work, Society, and Culture in Industrializing America (1976)

Roy Rozenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will (1983)

Edward Ayers, Promise of the New South (1992)

Glend Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow (1996)

Michael Kazin, Populist Persuasion (1995)

George Chauncey, Gay New York (1994)

John Higham, Strangers in the Land, 2nd ed. (1992)

1920s

Edward L. Larson, Summer for the Gods (2006

Henry F. May, End of American Innocence, Columbia University Press Morningside edition (1992).

Nancy Cott, Grounding of Modern Feminism (1987)

Nancy MacLean, “The Leo Frank Case Reconsidered: Gender and Sexual Politics in the Making of ReactionaryPopulism,” Journal of American History, 78 (Dec. 1991).

William Leuchtenberg, Perils of Prosperity, 2nd ed. (1993)

New Deal

Patricia Sullivan, Days of Hope (1996).

Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest (1983)

Lizbeth Cohen, Making a New Deal (1990)

William E. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal (1963).

Harvard Sitkoff, ed., Fifty Years Later: New Deal Evaluated (1985)

Paul Conkin, The New Deal, 3rd ed (1992)

Stephen Fraser and Gary Gerstle, ed., The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order (1990)

WWII

John Dower, War without Mercy (1986)

Cold War/Postwar Politics

Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic (2004)

David Oshinsky, A Conspiracy So Immense (2005)

Melvin Leffler, The Specter of Communism (1994)

Fredrik Logevall, Choosing War (1999).

Marilyn Young, The Vietnam Wars (1991)

Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War (2005)

Friedman, Andrea, “The Smearing of Joe McCarthy: The Lavender Scare, Gossip, and Cold War Politics,” American Quarterly 57 (2005): 1105-1129.

Brattain, “Race, Racism and Anti-Racism,” American Historical Review (December 2007).

George C Herring, America’s Longest War, 4th ed. (2002).

Matthew Lassiter, The Silent Majority (2006)

Dan Carter, From Wallace to Gingrich (1996)

Michael Schaller, Reckoning with Reagan (1992)

Cold War/Postwar Social Movements

Harvard Sitkoff, The Struggle for Black Equality, rev. ed. (1993)

Robin Kelley, “We Are Not What We Seem: Rethinking Black Working-class Opposition in the Jim Crow South,: Journal of American History 80 (June 1993): 75-112.

John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities 2nd ed (1998)

Timothy Tyson, “Robert F. Williams, ‘Black Power,’and the Roots of the Black Freedom Struggle,” Journal of American History 85 (Sept. 1998): 540-570.

Braunstein and Doyle, eds. Imagine Nation (2002)

John Dittmer, Local People (1994).

Jeremy Varon, Bringing the War Home (2004).

Terry Anderson, The Movement and the Sixties (1996)

Thomas Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty (2008)

David Chappell, Stone of Hope (2004)

Cold War/Postwar Culture

Stephen J. Whitfield, Culture of the Cold War (1991)

Cuordileone, K. A. “‘Politics in an Age of Anxiety’: Cold War Political Culture and the Crisis In American Masculinity, 1949-1960” Journal of American History 87 (2000): 515-545.

Costigliola, Frank, “‘Unceasing Pressure For Penetration’: Gender, Pathology, and Emotion in George Kennan's Formation of the Cold War” Journal of American History 83 (1997): 1309-1339.

Cold War/Postwar Society

Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound, Rev. ed. (2008)

Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis (1996).

Rebecca E. Klatch, A Generation Divided (1999).

Bruce Schulman, The Seventies (2001)

Andreas Killen, 1973 Nervous Breakdown (2006)

Joseph Crespino, In Search of Another Country (2007)

Kevin Michael Kruse, White Flight (2005).

Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors (2001).

Melani McAlister, Epic Encounters, updated ed. (2005)

Gary Gerstle, American Crucible (2001)

Happy 4th Birthday!

Four years ago, on January 25, 2007, I posted this welcome message on behalf of my USIH colleagues. Since then the USIH odyssey has included three---soon to be four---conferences, 565 posts on any and all intellectual history topics, numerous book reviews (with more to be added), and recent, much-appreciated recognition from our peers.

...Cupcakes are still in, right? - TL

Happy 4th Birthday!

Four years ago, on January 25, 2007, I posted this welcome message on behalf of my USIH colleagues. Since then the USIH odyssey has included three---soon to be four---conferences, 565 posts on any and all intellectual history topics, numerous book reviews (with more to be added), and recent, much-appreciated recognition from our peers.

...Cupcakes are still in, right? - TL

Pardon Our Progress

Readers of this blog may notice that it looks a little different from the last time you visited it. And it may look a little different the next time you visit it, too.

We* are going through one of our very occasional bouts of playing with USIH's design.

Do not adjust your set.

We hope you'll like the eventual results!

________________________

* As is usually the case with design issues around here, Lauren deserves the lion's share of the credit...though since the entire crew approves the changes she makes, we collectively deserve any blame!

Pardon Our Progress

Readers of this blog may notice that it looks a little different from the last time you visited it. And it may look a little different the next time you visit it, too.

We* are going through one of our very occasional bouts of playing with USIH's design.

Do not adjust your set.

We hope you'll like the eventual results!

________________________

* As is usually the case with design issues around here, Lauren deserves the lion's share of the credit...though since the entire crew approves the changes she makes, we collectively deserve any blame!

New Blog Design

I'd like to request feedback from any tablet users or anyone who reads this blog on a small-screen format. I widened the reading pane. Can you still read it easily? Post your reactions below.

New Blog Design

I'd like to request feedback from any tablet users or anyone who reads this blog on a small-screen format. I widened the reading pane. Can you still read it easily? Post your reactions below.

Neo-Liberal-Conservative America (some recent educational history)

“Every time I try to get out, they keep pulling me back in.”

Just when I thought I could let the discussion of neoliberalism rest for now, the comment thread at Ben’s most recent post on the subject sparked my wish to seek more clarity.

Ben writes:

And it’s fascinating to compare [an essay on the origins of U.S. neoliberalism] to more recent essays like Wendy Brown's “American Nightmare: Neoliberalism, Neoconservatism, and De-Democratization” (Political Theory, Vol. 34, No. 6 (Dec., 2006), pp. 690-714; http://www.jstor.org/stable/20452506), which is equally innocent of neoliberalism (us). Instead, Brown discusses “neoconservatism” and “neoliberalism” (e) as somehow parallel constructs, though the first is more exclusively American:
“The problematic of this essay is well-suited to the analytics of dreamwork. This is the problematic of thinking together American neoconservatism—a fierce moral-political rationality—and neoliberalism—a market-political rationality that exceeds its peculiarly American instantiation and that does not align exclusively with any political persuasion.”
Here's the problem (or at least a problem) with all this: although neoliberalism (us) may be an instance of neoliberalism (e), they are not the same thing...and, in fact, neoliberalism (e) pretty much encompasses all “mainstream” US political positions of (at least) the last thirty years or so (it’s called the “Washington consensus” ‘cause it's a consensus, after all).
So while “neoliberalism” (us) was, indeed, constructed as a parallel contrastive term to “neoconservatism,” “neoliberalism” (e) really doesn’t work as contrastive with “neoconservatism,” despite its linguistic similarity.

I want to politely disagree with my colleague Ben on two fronts.

First, Ben’s careful spadework in separating out neoliberalism (us) from neoliberalism (e), though an interesting distinction, will, I suspect, in the longue durée mean very little. Neoliberalism (e) is now neoliberalism (g) (global). And neoliberalism (g), in the eyes of most people, is neoliberalism (e and us). In a fascinating interview about his most recent book on Marxism, Eric Hobsbawm, simply the best at historical periodization, speaks matter-of-factly about neoliberalism as our latest historical epoch (here, in the context of discussing why Marx and Marxism is relevant again):

With the fall of the Soviet Union, the capitalists stopped being afraid and to that extent both they and we could actually look at the problem in a much more balanced way, less distorted by passion than before. But it was more the instability of this neoliberal globalised economy that I think began to become so noticeable at the end of the century. You see, in a sense, the globalised economy was effectively run by what one might call the global north-west [western Europe and North America] and they pushed forward this ultra-extreme market fundamentalism. Initially, it seemed to work quite well – at least in the old north-west – even though from the start, you could see that at the periphery of the global economy it created earthquakes, big earthquakes. In Latin America, there was a huge financial crisis in the early 1980s. In the early 1990s, in Russia, there was an economic catastrophe. And then towards the end of the century, there was this enormous, almost global, breakdown ranging from Russia to [South] Korea, Indonesia and Argentina. This began to make people think, I feel, that there was a basic instability in the system that they had previously dismissed.

Hobsbawm is obviously using the term neoliberalism in the sense of Ben’s neoliberalism (e). But he thinks neoliberalism (e) is in fact neoliberalism (us-e) and that neoliberalism (us-e) became neoliberalism (g). This seems right to me and this seems like the best use of the term in most contexts. The neoliberalism (us) that Ben dug up for us—the neoliberalism of 1980s Democrats like Gary Hart—is a relatively important aspect of recent political history, but is not all that important in most larger contexts.

This leads me to my second disagreement with Ben: I think the history of neoliberalism (e-us-g, from hereon just plain old neoliberalism) cannot so easily be separated from the history of neoconservatism. I will use as my example the postwar U.S. intellectual history of education.

Milton Friedman, one of the original neoliberal thinkers, actually wrote quite a bit about education during the 1950s (I cover this to some degree in chapter 5 of my book Education and the Cold War). He grounded his educational theory in both economic and political principles. On the one hand, as a laissez-faire economist, Friedman was an early proponent of educational privatization, believing that education would function more efficiently if subjected to the market. He believed that imposing the costs of education on parents would “equalize the social and private costs of having children and so promote a better distribution of families by size.” In other words, relieving taxpayers of the burden of paying for the educations of other people’s children would be a non-intrusive way of regulating those inclined to multiply beyond their financial means. On the other hand, as a libertarian political theorist, Friedman lamented the “nationalization” of education that had given rise to an “education industry” disinclined to constrain its own power and reach. As a solution, he proposed a voucher system that would empower parents as educational buyers, presenting them with a range of educational options. According to Friedman, vouchers would have the doubly beneficial effect of forcing schools to be more cost effective and of breaking the “education industry” monopoly. (See: Milton Friedman, “The Role of Government in Education,” in Robert A. Solo, ed., Economics and the Public Interest [New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1955].)

In short, Friedman innovated neoliberal solutions to education in the sense that neoliberalism is all about introducing market principles to solve otherwise intractable social problems that government supposedly cannot solve. However, other than business elites, the majority of Americans in the 1950s were not yet amenable to thinking of their children’s education as they might consider a commodity such as a kitchen appliance. I would argue—and here is where I disagree with Ben—that neoconservatives were crucial in popularizing such neoliberal thinking.

One of the central achievements of Irving Kristol’s Public Interest and Norman Podhoretz’s Commentary is in convincing so many intellectuals and policymakers that the government often makes social problems worse. In the realm of education, the Coleman Report (1966) became legendary in neoconservative policy circles for supposedly proving that educational equity was unattainable via policy measures. In other words, the Coleman Report became the holy grail of those who contended that spending more money on the education of poor children was a waste of resources. It became the touchstone for those who argued instead that educational “excellence”—in other words, high standards measures by a testing regime—was the only means of ensuring educational improvement.

I just completed reading Chester Finn’s memoir, Troublemaker: A Personal History of School Reform since Sputnik. Finn is the longtime neoconservative educational policy thinker who started his career in the 1970s working for Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and who also worked in Reagan’s department of education under the guidance of William Bennett. He’s written widely on educational “excellence” and in support of school choice, or Friedman’s “vouchers.” In Troublemaker, Finn repeatedly refers to a “post-Coleman consciousness.” In other words, this report, which had neoliberal policy implications but was trumpeted most widely by neconservatives, forever changed the game for Finn and for the neoconservative educationists who would eventually win the national debate. Bush’s No Child Left Behind and Obama’s Race to the Top are national policies rooted in “post-Coleman consciousness.”

One interesting note, based on Wendy Brown’s definition of neoconservatism as “a fierce moral-political rationality”: neocons like Finn are distinguishable from neoliberals like John Chubb and Terry Moe, who wrote the bible of school choice—Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools (1990)—in that he, in addition to supporting market solutions, believed in a strong, patriotic, anti-relativist curriculum. As such, Finn joined the fierce neoconservative critique, led by Lynne Cheney, of the 1994 National History Standards. In Troublemaker, Finn lumps his critique of the history standards together with his treatment of the national English standards, created around the same time:

the quest for standards was… weakened by the credulous expectation that self-interested experts, mostly free from the discipline of consumers, parents, practicing teachers, and policymakers—and sometimes free from leading university scholars in their own fields—could successfully distill from their own cherished subjects the essential skills and knowledge that kids should learn in school, and could do so while (a) avoiding political correctness, (b) sparing schools from the savage internecine disputes within the field, and (c) producing a manageable document of essential curricular guidance rather than a kitchen-sink tome with the heft of the Los Angeles phone directory… The dismaying results ranged from incoherent blather (English) to left-leaning political correctness (history)… The U.S. Senate voted 99-1 to condemn the history standards, and an early draft of the English standards was so vapid that Clinton’s Education Department cut off further funding (173).

Finn’s longtime collaborator Diane Ravitch had a similar take on the National History Standards in her magnum opus Left Back (2000): “The abortive attempt to create national standards revealed… the wide gap between avant-garde thinkers in the academic world and the general public” (174). Together, Finn and Ravitch founded the Educational Excellence Network in 1981 to push for neoliberal-neoconservative reforms. In 1988 they co-authored What Do Our 17-Year-Olds Know? (not much).

As most of USIH readers are probably aware, Ravitch, unlike Finn, has recently made an intellectual U-Turn (Tim blogged about this back in May). Ravitch the neocon, it seems, is not happy with the destructive consequences of neoliberal educational policy. Ravitch has even become the biggest critic of Bill Gates the educational philanthropist. (Check out this great Ravitch interview on the topic of Gates.) I admire Ravitch’s flip-flop, since, as Joanne Barkan demonstrates in a devastating critique of educational philanthropists like Gates, neoliberalism has been just as destructive to education as it has been to the economy. Thanks neocons!