"Almost Always Polemical": Common Sense, Mortimer Adler, and Late Twentieth-Century Liberalism (Part I)

In April of this year I wrote a post titled "Great Books Liberalism." In that piece I cited Mortimer J. Adler's 1970 book, The Time of Our Lives: The Ethics of Common Sense, as part of my larger effort to reveal the mid-century vital center-type liberalism that formed the politics of at least one prominent great books supporter. At the time I asked readers to momentarily set aside their doubts about the currency and viability of the phrase 'common sense'---doubts I revealed that I shared. What I want to do now is fully engage those doubts, meaning in relation to philosophy, history, politics, and the great books idea. My hypothesis is that 'common sense' is one of those paradoxical, maddening, inadequate, and, sadly, indispensable tropes of any democratic culture. In other words, if you want to stir thinking and reflection into any pluralistic pot with democratic aspirations, ultimately you will likely have to reckon with either 'common sense' or a similar shorthand.

Why? Or, why do intellectual historians who write about the United States---aside from me---need to concern themselves with the fate, or movements, of 'common sense'? I'm not sure I can answer this question to everyone's satisfaction. But I can, for starters, relay something significant about the phrase from at least one other historian. Daniel Rodgers, in Age of Fracture, offers the following as a form of his book's thesis (bolds mine):

"Most striking of all [from the 1970s to the present] was the range across which the intellectual assumptions that had defined the common sense of public intellectual life since the Second World War were challenged, dismantled, and formulated anew" (p. 2).

I think Rodgers meant, in this passage, the common sensibilities of post-war intellectuals rather than 'common sense' as it is used everyday. But let's explore his usage further. Rodgers goes on to use the term in relation to public thought assumptions and movements in four other passages (bolds mine):

(a) Knowing "the pressures of society on the self was…to speak within the bounds of the prevailing common sense of the matter" (p. 5);
(b) "Certain game-theory set pieces—the free-rider problem, the prisoner's dilemma, the tragedy of the commons—became fixtures of common sense" (p. 10);
(c) "As people tried to think their way through events and experiences using the shifting stock of categories at their disposal, the terrain of common sense shifted" (p. 12); and
(d) "[Reagan] claimed no special knowledge, no expertise, no special qualities of leadership beyond the embodiment of the public's common sense" (p.33).

So Rodgers's usage is mixed (i.e. who controls the meaning and usage of 'common sense'---politicians? intellectuals? the public?). Even so, it's clear that some understanding of 'common sense' is necessary to properly read his history of social, cultural, and intellectual fracture in the late twentieth century.

I listed the passages above according to page appearance, but the last, as a segue, touches on the political problem of 'common sense' most disliked by both the left, currently, and those who mistrust populism. Most late twentieth-century appeals to 'common sense' (May I drop the quotes now? Thanks!) have been by populist leaders, like Reagan, appealing to conservatives. In true Rodgers style, I looked for a way to search presidential speeches collectively for references to common sense and couldn't find one (tried here). But I'd hazard a guess that the phrase appears more often in the public utterances of relatively "popular" two-term presidents like Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

Despite the singular (potential) link to Clinton and Democrats, I think that the party mostly likely to appeal to common sense is the one with demonstrated anti-intellectual rhetorical tendencies---namely, Republicans since the Progressive Era. In other words, those currently on the political left will probably have visceral reactions to common sense appeals. I say this, of course, with no sense of ironic cavil; my hunch is that only left-leaning academic political philosophers would be excessively annoyed with left-leaning populist candidates who utilized appeals to common sense.

Speaking of politics and intellectuals, Ben Alpers indirectly reflected on late twentieth-century political uses of common sense when, in January 2009, he wrote here about "White House Intellectuals" (with a follow-up here). In that first post Ben cited the appearance of Leo Strauss disciple Robert Goldwin as the Ford administration's intellectual-in-residence. Here's the provocative money quote from Goldwin on common sense (bolds mine):

"There is something fishy about the word 'intellectual. …I think of 'intellectuals' as people who have a real distaste, sometimes even contempt, for the common sense approach, which is fundamentally the political approach."

The quote literally drips with what Leon Kass (another Straussian) called the "wisdom of repugnance." That aside, we see in Goldman a Republican administration purposely contrasting the "fishy" intellectual approach with the common sense way solving problems. Goldwin pretty clearly implies that intellectuals prefer top-down, pseudo-fascist bureaucratic means of problem solving, versus populist politicians who appeal to "the people" and seek to understand bottom-up majority opinion, if not the popular consensus. In sum, no Democrat would resort to common sense populism when an effete, eggheaded bureaucrat could get you to the desired end.

Rodgers history, my gloss, and Ben's example, however, obscure the longer political and intellectual history of appeals to common sense. That lacuna is covered, somewhat, by a brand new book I indirectly referenced in my April post: Sophia Rosenfeld's Common Sense: A Political History (Harvard Press, May 2011). Professor Rosenfeld is an historian of early modern Europe and the Atlantic world employed by the University of Virginia. Although I have put out an inter-library loan call for her book, my only access to it at this point is by way of (a) the publisher's blurb and (b) a short write-up by Josh Rothman at the Boston Globe's "Brainiac" blog.

Assuming it is reasonably reflective of the product at hand, the press blurb tells us the following:

Common sense has always been a cornerstone of American politics. In 1776, Tom Paine’s vital pamphlet with that title sparked the American Revolution. And today, common sense—the wisdom of ordinary people, knowledge so self-evident that it is beyond debate—remains a powerful political ideal, utilized alike by George W. Bush’s aw-shucks articulations and Barack Obama’s down-to-earth reasonableness. But far from self-evident is where our faith in common sense comes from and how its populist logic has shaped modern democracy.

I'm struck by these key phrases and words: "always…a cornerstone," "wisdom of ordinary people," "self-evident," "beyond debate," and "faith." Here's the second paragraph from the blurb:

The story begins in the aftermath of England’s Glorious Revolution, when common sense first became a political ideal worth struggling over. Sophia Rosenfeld’s accessible and insightful account then wends its way across two continents and multiple centuries, revealing the remarkable individuals who appropriated the old, seemingly universal idea of common sense and the new strategic uses they made of it. Paine may have boasted that common sense is always on the side of the people and opposed to the rule of kings, but Rosenfeld demonstrates that common sense has been used to foster demagoguery and exclusivity as well as popular sovereignty. She provides a new account of the transatlantic Enlightenment and the Age of Revolutions, and offers a fresh reading on what the eighteenth century bequeathed to the political ferment of our own time. Far from commonsensical, the history of common sense turns out to be rife with paradox and surprise.

More key ideas and points: "a political ideal," used to "foster demagoguery…exclusivity…[and] popular sovereignty."

Here's what Rothman had to say about Rosenfeld's book (bolds mine---aside: notice the similarities and differences with the blurb):

-------------------------------------------------------------
Common sense has a special place in modern politics. Politicians constantly appeal to it in their arguments, and they do so because democracy itself is founded on a faith in common sense. In 1776, for instance, Thomas Paine wrote, in his pamphlet Common Sense, that "simple facts, plain arguments, and common sense" would suffice to place the rights of the people above the rights of the king. The king, and many others, disagreed; and yet today common sense seems, so to speak, self-evident.

The truth is, as usual, more complicated. …Common sense was invented by scientists, philosophers, and politicians. It only seems self-evident now because the idea of common sense presents itself as common-sensical, as though everyone, were he not disabused of the notion by experts, would know that he possessed it. Common sense is…a "slippery" idea -- the kind of idea that covers its own tracks.

Rosenfeld's account of common sense centers on the eighteenth century, when common sense and the scientific method both got their starts. Both ways of thinking about thinking [i.e. epistemology], she writes, began with "a Protestant emphasis on direct, experiential knowledge, simplicity, and the value of 'ordinary life.'" Enlightenment thinkers, who championed reason over tradition and superstition, often cited something not unlike common sense as the quality that authorized them to set aside received ideas and come to their own conclusions. But that alliance was not to last. Science became increasingly specialized, and thinking, especially in print, more rigorous, complicated, and systematized.

Rosenfeld ties her story to a number of large historical developments throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Living in thriving, cosmopolitan cities gave ordinary people the sense that their (actually very local) intuitions might be universally true. Well-educated media types -- think Thomas Paine -- began presenting themselves as representatives of "the people," in an effort to find a middle position in an economically stratified society. And people in authority, overwhelmed by an explosion of books and pamphlets, began using the idea of "common sense" to disqualify ideas they didn't like as absurd or inappropriate. What emerges from this history is that, as Rosenfeld puts it, "common sense is almost never fully consensual;" instead, ideas about what's common-sensical are "almost always polemical."
-------------------------------------------------------------

What are we to take away from Rosenfeld's history---assuming these passages above accurately reflect the contents of her book?

The political usage of common sense over time is clearly "rife with paradox" and inconsistencies. This is probably not surprising to most of us. Past and present politicians have a penchant for using words, terms, and phrases for personal gain---irrespective of truth, philosophy, and consistency. Nevertheless, Rothman reports Rosenfeld to argue that "democracy itself is founded on a faith in common sense." This is probably disheartening to a significant number of intellectuals, but I think she's right. I can't decide, however, if this says more about the fragility of democracy or the tentative nature of knowledge. In either case, today's usage of common sense is indeed "almost always political"---if mostly anchored in right-wing politics.

But, if we can set aside the uses and abuses of common sense by politicians, Rosenfeld also tells us that we should take seriously the intellectual foundations of common sense. ...

Let me stop here, however, since this post is getting overly long. Next week I'll try to connect those serious intellectual foundations with Mortimer Adler, the great books, and late twentieth-century liberalism. Stay tuned! - TL

"Almost Always Polemical": Common Sense, Mortimer Adler, and Late Twentieth-Century Liberalism (Part I)

In April of this year I wrote a post titled "Great Books Liberalism." In that piece I cited Mortimer J. Adler's 1970 book, The Time of Our Lives: The Ethics of Common Sense, as part of my larger effort to reveal the mid-century vital center-type liberalism that formed the politics of at least one prominent great books supporter. At the time I asked readers to momentarily set aside their doubts about the currency and viability of the phrase 'common sense'---doubts I revealed that I shared. What I want to do now is fully engage those doubts, meaning in relation to philosophy, history, politics, and the great books idea. My hypothesis is that 'common sense' is one of those paradoxical, maddening, inadequate, and, sadly, indispensable tropes of any democratic culture. In other words, if you want to stir thinking and reflection into any pluralistic pot with democratic aspirations, ultimately you will likely have to reckon with either 'common sense' or a similar shorthand.

Why? Or, why do intellectual historians who write about the United States---aside from me---need to concern themselves with the fate, or movements, of 'common sense'? I'm not sure I can answer this question to everyone's satisfaction. But I can, for starters, relay something significant about the phrase from at least one other historian. Daniel Rodgers, in Age of Fracture, offers the following as a form of his book's thesis (bolds mine):

"Most striking of all [from the 1970s to the present] was the range across which the intellectual assumptions that had defined the common sense of public intellectual life since the Second World War were challenged, dismantled, and formulated anew" (p. 2).

I think Rodgers meant, in this passage, the common sensibilities of post-war intellectuals rather than 'common sense' as it is used everyday. But let's explore his usage further. Rodgers goes on to use the term in relation to public thought assumptions and movements in four other passages (bolds mine):

(a) Knowing "the pressures of society on the self was…to speak within the bounds of the prevailing common sense of the matter" (p. 5);
(b) "Certain game-theory set pieces—the free-rider problem, the prisoner's dilemma, the tragedy of the commons—became fixtures of common sense" (p. 10);
(c) "As people tried to think their way through events and experiences using the shifting stock of categories at their disposal, the terrain of common sense shifted" (p. 12); and
(d) "[Reagan] claimed no special knowledge, no expertise, no special qualities of leadership beyond the embodiment of the public's common sense" (p.33).

So Rodgers's usage is mixed (i.e. who controls the meaning and usage of 'common sense'---politicians? intellectuals? the public?). Even so, it's clear that some understanding of 'common sense' is necessary to properly read his history of social, cultural, and intellectual fracture in the late twentieth century.

I listed the passages above according to page appearance, but the last, as a segue, touches on the political problem of 'common sense' most disliked by both the left, currently, and those who mistrust populism. Most late twentieth-century appeals to 'common sense' (May I drop the quotes now? Thanks!) have been by populist leaders, like Reagan, appealing to conservatives. In true Rodgers style, I looked for a way to search presidential speeches collectively for references to common sense and couldn't find one (tried here). But I'd hazard a guess that the phrase appears more often in the public utterances of relatively "popular" two-term presidents like Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

Despite the singular (potential) link to Clinton and Democrats, I think that the party mostly likely to appeal to common sense is the one with demonstrated anti-intellectual rhetorical tendencies---namely, Republicans since the Progressive Era. In other words, those currently on the political left will probably have visceral reactions to common sense appeals. I say this, of course, with no sense of ironic cavil; my hunch is that only left-leaning academic political philosophers would be excessively annoyed with left-leaning populist candidates who utilized appeals to common sense.

Speaking of politics and intellectuals, Ben Alpers indirectly reflected on late twentieth-century political uses of common sense when, in January 2009, he wrote here about "White House Intellectuals" (with a follow-up here). In that first post Ben cited the appearance of Leo Strauss disciple Robert Goldwin as the Ford administration's intellectual-in-residence. Here's the provocative money quote from Goldwin on common sense (bolds mine):

"There is something fishy about the word 'intellectual. …I think of 'intellectuals' as people who have a real distaste, sometimes even contempt, for the common sense approach, which is fundamentally the political approach."

The quote literally drips with what Leon Kass (another Straussian) called the "wisdom of repugnance." That aside, we see in Goldman a Republican administration purposely contrasting the "fishy" intellectual approach with the common sense way solving problems. Goldwin pretty clearly implies that intellectuals prefer top-down, pseudo-fascist bureaucratic means of problem solving, versus populist politicians who appeal to "the people" and seek to understand bottom-up majority opinion, if not the popular consensus. In sum, no Democrat would resort to common sense populism when an effete, eggheaded bureaucrat could get you to the desired end.

Rodgers history, my gloss, and Ben's example, however, obscure the longer political and intellectual history of appeals to common sense. That lacuna is covered, somewhat, by a brand new book I indirectly referenced in my April post: Sophia Rosenfeld's Common Sense: A Political History (Harvard Press, May 2011). Professor Rosenfeld is an historian of early modern Europe and the Atlantic world employed by the University of Virginia. Although I have put out an inter-library loan call for her book, my only access to it at this point is by way of (a) the publisher's blurb and (b) a short write-up by Josh Rothman at the Boston Globe's "Brainiac" blog.

Assuming it is reasonably reflective of the product at hand, the press blurb tells us the following:

Common sense has always been a cornerstone of American politics. In 1776, Tom Paine’s vital pamphlet with that title sparked the American Revolution. And today, common sense—the wisdom of ordinary people, knowledge so self-evident that it is beyond debate—remains a powerful political ideal, utilized alike by George W. Bush’s aw-shucks articulations and Barack Obama’s down-to-earth reasonableness. But far from self-evident is where our faith in common sense comes from and how its populist logic has shaped modern democracy.

I'm struck by these key phrases and words: "always…a cornerstone," "wisdom of ordinary people," "self-evident," "beyond debate," and "faith." Here's the second paragraph from the blurb:

The story begins in the aftermath of England’s Glorious Revolution, when common sense first became a political ideal worth struggling over. Sophia Rosenfeld’s accessible and insightful account then wends its way across two continents and multiple centuries, revealing the remarkable individuals who appropriated the old, seemingly universal idea of common sense and the new strategic uses they made of it. Paine may have boasted that common sense is always on the side of the people and opposed to the rule of kings, but Rosenfeld demonstrates that common sense has been used to foster demagoguery and exclusivity as well as popular sovereignty. She provides a new account of the transatlantic Enlightenment and the Age of Revolutions, and offers a fresh reading on what the eighteenth century bequeathed to the political ferment of our own time. Far from commonsensical, the history of common sense turns out to be rife with paradox and surprise.

More key ideas and points: "a political ideal," used to "foster demagoguery…exclusivity…[and] popular sovereignty."

Here's what Rothman had to say about Rosenfeld's book (bolds mine---aside: notice the similarities and differences with the blurb):

-------------------------------------------------------------
Common sense has a special place in modern politics. Politicians constantly appeal to it in their arguments, and they do so because democracy itself is founded on a faith in common sense. In 1776, for instance, Thomas Paine wrote, in his pamphlet Common Sense, that "simple facts, plain arguments, and common sense" would suffice to place the rights of the people above the rights of the king. The king, and many others, disagreed; and yet today common sense seems, so to speak, self-evident.

The truth is, as usual, more complicated. …Common sense was invented by scientists, philosophers, and politicians. It only seems self-evident now because the idea of common sense presents itself as common-sensical, as though everyone, were he not disabused of the notion by experts, would know that he possessed it. Common sense is…a "slippery" idea -- the kind of idea that covers its own tracks.

Rosenfeld's account of common sense centers on the eighteenth century, when common sense and the scientific method both got their starts. Both ways of thinking about thinking [i.e. epistemology], she writes, began with "a Protestant emphasis on direct, experiential knowledge, simplicity, and the value of 'ordinary life.'" Enlightenment thinkers, who championed reason over tradition and superstition, often cited something not unlike common sense as the quality that authorized them to set aside received ideas and come to their own conclusions. But that alliance was not to last. Science became increasingly specialized, and thinking, especially in print, more rigorous, complicated, and systematized.

Rosenfeld ties her story to a number of large historical developments throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Living in thriving, cosmopolitan cities gave ordinary people the sense that their (actually very local) intuitions might be universally true. Well-educated media types -- think Thomas Paine -- began presenting themselves as representatives of "the people," in an effort to find a middle position in an economically stratified society. And people in authority, overwhelmed by an explosion of books and pamphlets, began using the idea of "common sense" to disqualify ideas they didn't like as absurd or inappropriate. What emerges from this history is that, as Rosenfeld puts it, "common sense is almost never fully consensual;" instead, ideas about what's common-sensical are "almost always polemical."
-------------------------------------------------------------

What are we to take away from Rosenfeld's history---assuming these passages above accurately reflect the contents of her book?

The political usage of common sense over time is clearly "rife with paradox" and inconsistencies. This is probably not surprising to most of us. Past and present politicians have a penchant for using words, terms, and phrases for personal gain---irrespective of truth, philosophy, and consistency. Nevertheless, Rothman reports Rosenfeld to argue that "democracy itself is founded on a faith in common sense." This is probably disheartening to a significant number of intellectuals, but I think she's right. I can't decide, however, if this says more about the fragility of democracy or the tentative nature of knowledge. In either case, today's usage of common sense is indeed "almost always political"---if mostly anchored in right-wing politics.

But, if we can set aside the uses and abuses of common sense by politicians, Rosenfeld also tells us that we should take seriously the intellectual foundations of common sense. ...

Let me stop here, however, since this post is getting overly long. Next week I'll try to connect those serious intellectual foundations with Mortimer Adler, the great books, and late twentieth-century liberalism. Stay tuned! - TL

The S-USIH Publications Committee

I'm honored to have been chosen as the first Publications Chair of the Society for U.S. Intellectual History (S-USIH).  Our Constitution describes my duties as follows:

The Publications Committee Chair shall supervise all official Society publications including but not limited to: the blog, the newsletter, and the book reviews. The Publications Committee Chair shall have the authority to appoint up to two members in good standing to the Publications Committee in order to help in any aspect of performing that committee's responsibilities.

I'm pleased to announce that I've appointed Tim Lacy to serve on the Publications Committee.  Tim is familiar to readers of this site as a founder of the blog, our regular Thursday blogger, and our book review editor.

This leaves one slot open on the Publications Committee.*  We have a clear need for someone with experience in traditional, hardcopy layout.  We have a lot of decisions to make about S-USIH publications and whoever joins the committee will have a seat at the table in making those decisions. But, most immediately, we have been specifically charged with putting together a newsletter. And newsletters require layout, with which neither Tim nor I have much experience.

Rather than asking yet another of the USIH usual suspects to come on board, I thought I'd open things up for new people to get involved.  So if you're reading this, have any experience with layout, and are interested in joining the Society for U.S. Intellectual History's Publications Committee, please send me an e-mail at balpers AT ou.edu (written as a traditional e-mail address, of course).  Please tell me why you're interested and why you think you'd be good for the job.  Please also include a cv.  In order to serve, you will need to be a member in good standing of S-USIH, so if you're interested, please also fill out a membership form and send it in with your dues.

_____________________

* I almost titled this post "I've got this thing and it's f***ing golden. And I'm not giving it up for f***ing nothing," but I didn't want anyone to think I was actually asking for payment to join the Publications Committee, so I thought better of it.

The S-USIH Publications Committee

I'm honored to have been chosen as the first Publications Chair of the Society for U.S. Intellectual History (S-USIH).  Our Constitution describes my duties as follows:

The Publications Committee Chair shall supervise all official Society publications including but not limited to: the blog, the newsletter, and the book reviews. The Publications Committee Chair shall have the authority to appoint up to two members in good standing to the Publications Committee in order to help in any aspect of performing that committee's responsibilities.

I'm pleased to announce that I've appointed Tim Lacy to serve on the Publications Committee.  Tim is familiar to readers of this site as a founder of the blog, our regular Thursday blogger, and our book review editor.

This leaves one slot open on the Publications Committee.*  We have a clear need for someone with experience in traditional, hardcopy layout.  We have a lot of decisions to make about S-USIH publications and whoever joins the committee will have a seat at the table in making those decisions. But, most immediately, we have been specifically charged with putting together a newsletter. And newsletters require layout, with which neither Tim nor I have much experience.

Rather than asking yet another of the USIH usual suspects to come on board, I thought I'd open things up for new people to get involved.  So if you're reading this, have any experience with layout, and are interested in joining the Society for U.S. Intellectual History's Publications Committee, please send me an e-mail at balpers AT ou.edu (written as a traditional e-mail address, of course).  Please tell me why you're interested and why you think you'd be good for the job.  Please also include a cv.  In order to serve, you will need to be a member in good standing of S-USIH, so if you're interested, please also fill out a membership form and send it in with your dues.

_____________________

* I almost titled this post "I've got this thing and it's f***ing golden. And I'm not giving it up for f***ing nothing," but I didn't want anyone to think I was actually asking for payment to join the Publications Committee, so I thought better of it.

Intellectual History in the New York Times Book Review

Just one of my "hey this is cool" posts:

I was listening to the podcast of the New York Times Book Review this morning and was intrigued by the review of "'Mightier Than the Sword,' David S. Reynolds’s informative account of the writing, reception and modern reputation of 'Uncle Tom’s Cabin.'" In particular, I thought it was interesting to discuss the book as a literary work--something that drew praise contemporaneously but within the last fifty years or so has brought derision. Also intriguing is Reynolds' discussion of the international reception of the book. It sounds a bit, though, like Reynolds' is too in abeyance to the book. Henry James may have seen it as a boy, but did it shape his aesthetic imagination, the reviewer Andrew Delbanco asks.

Not mentioned in the review, this topic also intrigues me in the sense of how African Americans have related to the character of "Uncle Tom" over the years. He has not always been derided in the way one would suspect, given the connotations the name has. I remember reading something about this a year or so ago. If I stumble across it, I'll pass along the link.

Intellectual History in the New York Times Book Review

Just one of my "hey this is cool" posts:

I was listening to the podcast of the New York Times Book Review this morning and was intrigued by the review of "'Mightier Than the Sword,' David S. Reynolds’s informative account of the writing, reception and modern reputation of 'Uncle Tom’s Cabin.'" In particular, I thought it was interesting to discuss the book as a literary work--something that drew praise contemporaneously but within the last fifty years or so has brought derision. Also intriguing is Reynolds' discussion of the international reception of the book. It sounds a bit, though, like Reynolds' is too in abeyance to the book. Henry James may have seen it as a boy, but did it shape his aesthetic imagination, the reviewer Andrew Delbanco asks.

Not mentioned in the review, this topic also intrigues me in the sense of how African Americans have related to the character of "Uncle Tom" over the years. He has not always been derided in the way one would suspect, given the connotations the name has. I remember reading something about this a year or so ago. If I stumble across it, I'll pass along the link.

A Means to What? A Rambling Discourse on the Ethics of History

Today we feature a guest post by Varad Mehta, who frequently comments here. Enjoy.
---------------
All historians carry with them into the past a set of ethical assumptions about the nature of their endeavor. These assumptions permeate every facet of their work, from the choice of subject to the way in which they present it. Some historians are motivated almost entirely by such concerns; indeed, some become historians because of them. These concerns can stem from a sense of moral outrage, from the desire to advance a political agenda, or they can have some other origin. Where historians go astray is not in having these impulses but in prioritizing them over their professional obligations. One’s agenda should serve one’s scholarship, not the other way around. That the answer to the question “Can historians approach the past free of moral concerns?” is “No” is nothing to regret. Of course historians have moral concerns. They are human beings, and thus, moral agents. Whatever humans do will have some sort of moral basis. A better question to ask, then, is, What sort of ethical basis can and should history have, if any?

That is the question I will try to answer in this rambling discourse.

Does the past itself impose some sort of moral burden on historians? This is an important question, but I would answer that it is moot, because whether or not the past imposes such a burden, historians act as though it does. And it is the reasons for their actions that we are trying to understand.

The locus classicus of the attitude that history is a moral enterprise and that the historian has a moral obligation towards the past is the preface of E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963): “I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the ‘obsolete’ hand-loom weaver, the ‘utopian’ artisan, even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity.” Ever since, historians have been trying to rescue one group after another from the callous oblivion of time. Even the new bottles labeled “postcolonial” and “subaltern” (among others) contain more than a dram of Thompson’s old wine.

Thompson’s immortal words advance two distinct but related claims. The first is that these men and women deserve rescue from the enormous condescension of posterity. The second flows from the first: as they are worthy of rescue, one is obligated to rescue them. But we are immediately confronted with new questions: Who decides who deserves rescue? Why are they deserving of rescue? And can they actually be rescued?

Is there any criterion beyond the observer’s own subjective opinion that the object in question is worthy of her attention? If there is not, then someone else would be perfectly justified in maintaining posterity’s condescension inviolate. Thompson himself did not attempt to conceal his ulterior motives. These originated in his political aspirations and his conviction that history’s losers the first go round, need not be its losers the next time. Industrialization in England had produced a certain outcome. A proper understanding of history could forestall its recurrence: “Causes which were lost in England might, in Asia or Africa, yet be won” (13).

Thompson sympathized with the “losers” of industrialization in England because he sympathized with those he imagined to be their contemporary counterparts. Is sympathy a sufficient grounds, though, for assuming a moral obligation? Sympathy was the core of Adam Smith’s ethical theory. He posited an “impartial spectator” via which humans could gauge the morality of their actions. The problem with sympathy for historians is that Smith envisioned it as something that would allow us to measure the rightness of our conduct towards our fellows. But in what sense is a Luddite cropper of the 1820s Thompson’s fellow? Sympathy requires one to place oneself in another’s shoes. We sympathize because we know how we would feel in their circumstances. It is hard enough to gain a modicum of insight into minds to which we have first-hand access. How are we to get into the minds of those long dead? Mind is not an artifact, and whatever understanding we have of our forebears, it is not through sympathy in this Smithian sense. Whatever sympathy operates must be of a passive rather than an active kind.

I don’t mean to imply sympathy has no place in the study of the past. Without it, it is probably impossible to understand it at all. The past at some irreducible level must be intelligible to us, especially the humans who lived their existences in it. We study the past because its matter is humanity. But this can’t be a criterion for determining what part of the past is worthy of our attention, let alone worthy of being rescued from posterity’s condescension, because it applies to any and every aspect of history.

We can’t study the past with regard to victors and losers because the past makes no distinction between them. The present alone decides who won and lost. Those are retrospective categories, not categories innate to historical experience itself. To impose them upon history is to subject it to our whims and desires, the very thing Thompson strove to redress. When Thompson wanted to rescue his historical losers from history, was he doing it for their sake, or his own?

Moreover, we should be extremely chary of making “loserdom” any kind of criterion for establishing a group’s worthiness for historical succor. Some historical losers, and this is but common sense, have earned their oblivion and opprobrium. Some lost causes deserve to remain lost. The great German historian, Hans-Ulrich Wehler, made just this point when he accused the practitioners of Alltagsgeschicthe (“the history of everyday life”) of succumbing to naivety in their infatuation with the masses. So what if the losers lost? Given the basic rottenness of portions of the German past, so much the better. Hence his scathing judgment: “Fortunately the losers, who among so many historians of every day life occupy the centre of the stage, were not the historical victors.”

“Causes which were lost in England might, in Asia or Africa, yet be won.” How? If they are won in Asia or Africa, that will not do anything to change what happened in England; defeat remains defeat, loss remains loss. Remembering them now will do nothing for them then. They will not even know that they have been rescued, for they were unaware they needed rescuing. To believe they did is to take the past on our terms, not its own. And this is all before we pose the even more loaded question of why history’s losers should be accorded as much respect as its victors, or even more.

“History to the defeated / May say alas, but cannot help or pardon.” Every historian must bear in mind Auden’s words from his poem, “Spain, 1937,” for they express in poignant terms the existential limits of the historian’s reach. It redounds to our credit as moral beings that we not only can, but do desire to help and pardon. But we can do neither. Alas is the best we can do because it is all we can do. The impulse is ineradicable as it is understandable. The historian’s duty is not to deny it but to understand its sources and recognize its influence.

The past cannot impose a moral obligation upon the historian (or any human being) because there is no one to whom she can discharge this obligation. What debt is to be paid by someone living today to someone dead three centuries? How is that debt even incurred? Now we must ask an even more elementary question: Is it even possible for history to have a moral basis?

It is hard to will a universal moral law or legislate for a kingdom of ends when studying the past, but even then it is surely possible to treat others not merely as means but also as ends. But how is it possible? At first blush the answer seems obvious. After all, what is history about if it isn’t about humans? (Recall my earlier remark about the intelligibility of history.) If the subject of history is humanity, then historians only have to treat the humans of the past as ends the same way they would treat humans of the present. But this view, too, breaks down on closer scrutiny.

I write about Rousseau. He remains a seminal figure in the history of political thought and early modern intellectual history, two fields in which I do a good deal of grazing. His writings, his thought, his life, his ideas – these are what make it possible for me to write about the past because he addressed issues I’m interested in. Rousseau allows me to do what I do. Clearly, he is my means. Is there any way he can also be my end? I suppose one could say that I treat him as an end by according him the respect he deserves, by taking his ideas seriously, by attempting to understand his concerns from the perspective through which he perceived them, and so forth. That is all well and good, but once that much is conceded we immediately stumble over the same obstacle which ensnared Thompson.

It was never clear with Thompson whether he could rescue his subjects from posterity’s condescension for their own sake or only his own. The same is true here. When I say I shall take Rousseau’s ideas seriously, it is not to treat him as an end; it is only to facilitate my treating him as a means. I have to do that, because if I don’t I’ll only be making my job harder. I can use my means poorly or well, but using it well is not the same as treating it as an end. The end is always on me; it has nothing to do with Rousseau. My end is my book or my article or my better understanding of Rousseau. But my better understanding has no impact whatever on Rousseau. The relationship flows only one way, so cannot be considered mutual. Historians aren’t guilty of violating the Second Formulation because Kant says we must not treat only as a means that which may also be treated as an end. The past can never be an end, only a means.

A means to what, though? Certainly towards no end it can propose or dispose. Ineluctably I’ve been heading towards the conclusion that the past can make no moral claim on us. So to state that one shall study the past for its own sake is to utter a non sequitur. As though the past has a sake! The past suffers no harm by our not studying it, nor enjoys any benefit if we do. That’s why it’s the past. But this is not an impasse. I said at the beginning that it doesn’t matter whether or not the past actually imposes any moral claims upon historians because they act as though it does. That is the key. The past makes no claim on us, but we make all sorts of claims on the past. But these are really claims on ourselves. The past is a means – to what? Suddenly, the baby has reappeared in the basinet.

Historians are moral agents, and moral agents act in the present. It stands to reason, then, that moral agents’ obligations and duties and rights would arise and be discharged in the present. This is where the idea that the past has some moral claim on us originates. The past has a distinct ontological status; it exists. But as we study it here and now it exists in and is part of the present. To rescue anything from posterity, is really to rescue it from ourselves, for we are its posterity. If we study the past for anyone’s sake, it is our own.

It cannot be otherwise. Study the past for our own sake we must. It is innate in our nature as human beings. The German philosopher of history Reinhart Koselleck put it this way: “The compulsion to coordinate past and future so as to be able to live at all is inherent in any human being.” If we are obliged by dint of our humanity to contemplate our place in time, then history cannot be the special province of historians. It belongs to all human beings.

If there be any kind of ethical or moral obligation in our study of the past, this then must be its source, the imperative we have as humans to be the historians of our own lives as we daily live them. It is an obligation we incur not as historians, but as humans. No one expounded this idea with greater intellectual or moral force than the great English philosopher R. G. Collingwood. For Collingwood, man’s pursuit of the past was a characteristic of being human because it was an activity that originates within man’s mind. He defined the philosophy of history as “the exposition of the transcendental concept of history, the study of history as a universal and necessary form of mental activity.” As he saw it, the philosophy of history is what allows us to comprehend history as “a necessary form of human experience” (432), something which is “the common property of all minds” (422).

This mental activity takes place in the present. The past itself is to a certain extent the product of the mind’s activity. This is the inevitable result of Collingwood’s philosophical commitments, for he regarded the past as entirely ideal, that is, as having no ontological validity. For him, only the present existed. Whether one agrees with the Collingwood’s metaphysics, he is surely right that this presentism shapes history and historical practice in fundamental ways, the chief of which is that history can only exist in the present because that is where the mental activity which creates it takes place. All history must be in the present, and is in some ineffable, insuperable way about the present, for the simple reason that we are in the present.

“All history is an attempt to understand the present by reconstructing its determining conditions” (420). We sense intuitively that the past made the present. After all, we have lived through the past which made the present of our own lives. Looked at from another angle, the present is but the continual accumulation of past upon past upon past. But all these pasts exist only in the present. “To speak, therefore, of traces of the past in the present is to speak of the present and nothing but the present” (483). If I gaze upon the Pyramids, I do so now; if I read Plato, I do so now; if I consult a medieval town charter, I do so now; if I try to reconstruct the movements of the combatants in a battle, I do so now. “In this sense history is the study of the present and not of the past at all” (485).

Some might surrender to despair at this point, so futile seems the possibility that we can gain knowledge of the past. But that is to misunderstand Collingwood’s meaning. History is about the present not because that is its subject but because that is when it is realized. History exists in the present because we do. And we want to know the past because doing so allows us to live: “The purpose of history is to enable us to know (and therefore act relatively to) the present” (406). There is no prospect of acting towards the past. To think with Thompson that one can and therefore has sanction to pass moral judgments upon the past, sorting out the wicked from the just, is to succumb to the fallacy that the past is real in the sense that it is a proper arena for our intervention. As though we can walk into it and stop a massacre, or slavery, or what have you.

When we say with Tacitus that we shall apprehend the past sine ira et studio, we do so not for its sake but our own, because it is to ourselves that we owe the fullest understanding of the past we can attain. Our moral obligation is to ourselves, because it is only to each other that we can discharge it. Whatever moral basis upon which we hope to establish history, it must adhere to this one rule, that it emanate from ourselves. For it is only to and for ourselves that we may be responsible; we can be responsible neither to nor for the past.

History, it turns out, does not sanction a moral philosophy; it is a moral philosophy. “Know thyself” commanded the Delphic oracle. Without history, those words would form not an aspiration but a nullity. Man seeks to know himself and his world so that he may live. As long as the past is part of that world and he is part of the past, he will seek to understand history. Of all possible moral foundations for history, surely this is the strongest and soundest. For it accords both with history’s nature, as well as our own.

A Means to What? A Rambling Discourse on the Ethics of History

Today we feature a guest post by Varad Mehta, who frequently comments here. Enjoy.
---------------
All historians carry with them into the past a set of ethical assumptions about the nature of their endeavor. These assumptions permeate every facet of their work, from the choice of subject to the way in which they present it. Some historians are motivated almost entirely by such concerns; indeed, some become historians because of them. These concerns can stem from a sense of moral outrage, from the desire to advance a political agenda, or they can have some other origin. Where historians go astray is not in having these impulses but in prioritizing them over their professional obligations. One’s agenda should serve one’s scholarship, not the other way around. That the answer to the question “Can historians approach the past free of moral concerns?” is “No” is nothing to regret. Of course historians have moral concerns. They are human beings, and thus, moral agents. Whatever humans do will have some sort of moral basis. A better question to ask, then, is, What sort of ethical basis can and should history have, if any?

That is the question I will try to answer in this rambling discourse.

Does the past itself impose some sort of moral burden on historians? This is an important question, but I would answer that it is moot, because whether or not the past imposes such a burden, historians act as though it does. And it is the reasons for their actions that we are trying to understand.

The locus classicus of the attitude that history is a moral enterprise and that the historian has a moral obligation towards the past is the preface of E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963): “I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the ‘obsolete’ hand-loom weaver, the ‘utopian’ artisan, even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity.” Ever since, historians have been trying to rescue one group after another from the callous oblivion of time. Even the new bottles labeled “postcolonial” and “subaltern” (among others) contain more than a dram of Thompson’s old wine.

Thompson’s immortal words advance two distinct but related claims. The first is that these men and women deserve rescue from the enormous condescension of posterity. The second flows from the first: as they are worthy of rescue, one is obligated to rescue them. But we are immediately confronted with new questions: Who decides who deserves rescue? Why are they deserving of rescue? And can they actually be rescued?

Is there any criterion beyond the observer’s own subjective opinion that the object in question is worthy of her attention? If there is not, then someone else would be perfectly justified in maintaining posterity’s condescension inviolate. Thompson himself did not attempt to conceal his ulterior motives. These originated in his political aspirations and his conviction that history’s losers the first go round, need not be its losers the next time. Industrialization in England had produced a certain outcome. A proper understanding of history could forestall its recurrence: “Causes which were lost in England might, in Asia or Africa, yet be won” (13).

Thompson sympathized with the “losers” of industrialization in England because he sympathized with those he imagined to be their contemporary counterparts. Is sympathy a sufficient grounds, though, for assuming a moral obligation? Sympathy was the core of Adam Smith’s ethical theory. He posited an “impartial spectator” via which humans could gauge the morality of their actions. The problem with sympathy for historians is that Smith envisioned it as something that would allow us to measure the rightness of our conduct towards our fellows. But in what sense is a Luddite cropper of the 1820s Thompson’s fellow? Sympathy requires one to place oneself in another’s shoes. We sympathize because we know how we would feel in their circumstances. It is hard enough to gain a modicum of insight into minds to which we have first-hand access. How are we to get into the minds of those long dead? Mind is not an artifact, and whatever understanding we have of our forebears, it is not through sympathy in this Smithian sense. Whatever sympathy operates must be of a passive rather than an active kind.

I don’t mean to imply sympathy has no place in the study of the past. Without it, it is probably impossible to understand it at all. The past at some irreducible level must be intelligible to us, especially the humans who lived their existences in it. We study the past because its matter is humanity. But this can’t be a criterion for determining what part of the past is worthy of our attention, let alone worthy of being rescued from posterity’s condescension, because it applies to any and every aspect of history.

We can’t study the past with regard to victors and losers because the past makes no distinction between them. The present alone decides who won and lost. Those are retrospective categories, not categories innate to historical experience itself. To impose them upon history is to subject it to our whims and desires, the very thing Thompson strove to redress. When Thompson wanted to rescue his historical losers from history, was he doing it for their sake, or his own?

Moreover, we should be extremely chary of making “loserdom” any kind of criterion for establishing a group’s worthiness for historical succor. Some historical losers, and this is but common sense, have earned their oblivion and opprobrium. Some lost causes deserve to remain lost. The great German historian, Hans-Ulrich Wehler, made just this point when he accused the practitioners of Alltagsgeschicthe (“the history of everyday life”) of succumbing to naivety in their infatuation with the masses. So what if the losers lost? Given the basic rottenness of portions of the German past, so much the better. Hence his scathing judgment: “Fortunately the losers, who among so many historians of every day life occupy the centre of the stage, were not the historical victors.”

“Causes which were lost in England might, in Asia or Africa, yet be won.” How? If they are won in Asia or Africa, that will not do anything to change what happened in England; defeat remains defeat, loss remains loss. Remembering them now will do nothing for them then. They will not even know that they have been rescued, for they were unaware they needed rescuing. To believe they did is to take the past on our terms, not its own. And this is all before we pose the even more loaded question of why history’s losers should be accorded as much respect as its victors, or even more.

“History to the defeated / May say alas, but cannot help or pardon.” Every historian must bear in mind Auden’s words from his poem, “Spain, 1937,” for they express in poignant terms the existential limits of the historian’s reach. It redounds to our credit as moral beings that we not only can, but do desire to help and pardon. But we can do neither. Alas is the best we can do because it is all we can do. The impulse is ineradicable as it is understandable. The historian’s duty is not to deny it but to understand its sources and recognize its influence.

The past cannot impose a moral obligation upon the historian (or any human being) because there is no one to whom she can discharge this obligation. What debt is to be paid by someone living today to someone dead three centuries? How is that debt even incurred? Now we must ask an even more elementary question: Is it even possible for history to have a moral basis?

It is hard to will a universal moral law or legislate for a kingdom of ends when studying the past, but even then it is surely possible to treat others not merely as means but also as ends. But how is it possible? At first blush the answer seems obvious. After all, what is history about if it isn’t about humans? (Recall my earlier remark about the intelligibility of history.) If the subject of history is humanity, then historians only have to treat the humans of the past as ends the same way they would treat humans of the present. But this view, too, breaks down on closer scrutiny.

I write about Rousseau. He remains a seminal figure in the history of political thought and early modern intellectual history, two fields in which I do a good deal of grazing. His writings, his thought, his life, his ideas – these are what make it possible for me to write about the past because he addressed issues I’m interested in. Rousseau allows me to do what I do. Clearly, he is my means. Is there any way he can also be my end? I suppose one could say that I treat him as an end by according him the respect he deserves, by taking his ideas seriously, by attempting to understand his concerns from the perspective through which he perceived them, and so forth. That is all well and good, but once that much is conceded we immediately stumble over the same obstacle which ensnared Thompson.

It was never clear with Thompson whether he could rescue his subjects from posterity’s condescension for their own sake or only his own. The same is true here. When I say I shall take Rousseau’s ideas seriously, it is not to treat him as an end; it is only to facilitate my treating him as a means. I have to do that, because if I don’t I’ll only be making my job harder. I can use my means poorly or well, but using it well is not the same as treating it as an end. The end is always on me; it has nothing to do with Rousseau. My end is my book or my article or my better understanding of Rousseau. But my better understanding has no impact whatever on Rousseau. The relationship flows only one way, so cannot be considered mutual. Historians aren’t guilty of violating the Second Formulation because Kant says we must not treat only as a means that which may also be treated as an end. The past can never be an end, only a means.

A means to what, though? Certainly towards no end it can propose or dispose. Ineluctably I’ve been heading towards the conclusion that the past can make no moral claim on us. So to state that one shall study the past for its own sake is to utter a non sequitur. As though the past has a sake! The past suffers no harm by our not studying it, nor enjoys any benefit if we do. That’s why it’s the past. But this is not an impasse. I said at the beginning that it doesn’t matter whether or not the past actually imposes any moral claims upon historians because they act as though it does. That is the key. The past makes no claim on us, but we make all sorts of claims on the past. But these are really claims on ourselves. The past is a means – to what? Suddenly, the baby has reappeared in the basinet.

Historians are moral agents, and moral agents act in the present. It stands to reason, then, that moral agents’ obligations and duties and rights would arise and be discharged in the present. This is where the idea that the past has some moral claim on us originates. The past has a distinct ontological status; it exists. But as we study it here and now it exists in and is part of the present. To rescue anything from posterity, is really to rescue it from ourselves, for we are its posterity. If we study the past for anyone’s sake, it is our own.

It cannot be otherwise. Study the past for our own sake we must. It is innate in our nature as human beings. The German philosopher of history Reinhart Koselleck put it this way: “The compulsion to coordinate past and future so as to be able to live at all is inherent in any human being.” If we are obliged by dint of our humanity to contemplate our place in time, then history cannot be the special province of historians. It belongs to all human beings.

If there be any kind of ethical or moral obligation in our study of the past, this then must be its source, the imperative we have as humans to be the historians of our own lives as we daily live them. It is an obligation we incur not as historians, but as humans. No one expounded this idea with greater intellectual or moral force than the great English philosopher R. G. Collingwood. For Collingwood, man’s pursuit of the past was a characteristic of being human because it was an activity that originates within man’s mind. He defined the philosophy of history as “the exposition of the transcendental concept of history, the study of history as a universal and necessary form of mental activity.” As he saw it, the philosophy of history is what allows us to comprehend history as “a necessary form of human experience” (432), something which is “the common property of all minds” (422).

This mental activity takes place in the present. The past itself is to a certain extent the product of the mind’s activity. This is the inevitable result of Collingwood’s philosophical commitments, for he regarded the past as entirely ideal, that is, as having no ontological validity. For him, only the present existed. Whether one agrees with the Collingwood’s metaphysics, he is surely right that this presentism shapes history and historical practice in fundamental ways, the chief of which is that history can only exist in the present because that is where the mental activity which creates it takes place. All history must be in the present, and is in some ineffable, insuperable way about the present, for the simple reason that we are in the present.

“All history is an attempt to understand the present by reconstructing its determining conditions” (420). We sense intuitively that the past made the present. After all, we have lived through the past which made the present of our own lives. Looked at from another angle, the present is but the continual accumulation of past upon past upon past. But all these pasts exist only in the present. “To speak, therefore, of traces of the past in the present is to speak of the present and nothing but the present” (483). If I gaze upon the Pyramids, I do so now; if I read Plato, I do so now; if I consult a medieval town charter, I do so now; if I try to reconstruct the movements of the combatants in a battle, I do so now. “In this sense history is the study of the present and not of the past at all” (485).

Some might surrender to despair at this point, so futile seems the possibility that we can gain knowledge of the past. But that is to misunderstand Collingwood’s meaning. History is about the present not because that is its subject but because that is when it is realized. History exists in the present because we do. And we want to know the past because doing so allows us to live: “The purpose of history is to enable us to know (and therefore act relatively to) the present” (406). There is no prospect of acting towards the past. To think with Thompson that one can and therefore has sanction to pass moral judgments upon the past, sorting out the wicked from the just, is to succumb to the fallacy that the past is real in the sense that it is a proper arena for our intervention. As though we can walk into it and stop a massacre, or slavery, or what have you.

When we say with Tacitus that we shall apprehend the past sine ira et studio, we do so not for its sake but our own, because it is to ourselves that we owe the fullest understanding of the past we can attain. Our moral obligation is to ourselves, because it is only to each other that we can discharge it. Whatever moral basis upon which we hope to establish history, it must adhere to this one rule, that it emanate from ourselves. For it is only to and for ourselves that we may be responsible; we can be responsible neither to nor for the past.

History, it turns out, does not sanction a moral philosophy; it is a moral philosophy. “Know thyself” commanded the Delphic oracle. Without history, those words would form not an aspiration but a nullity. Man seeks to know himself and his world so that he may live. As long as the past is part of that world and he is part of the past, he will seek to understand history. Of all possible moral foundations for history, surely this is the strongest and soundest. For it accords both with history’s nature, as well as our own.

Society for U.S. Intellectual History

Dear Fellow U.S. Intellectual History Enthusiasts:

It is my great pleasure to announce the birth of the Society for U.S. Intellectual History!

We began as a group blog in 2007. We hosted our first conference in Grand Rapids, Michigan in 2008. We will host our fourth annual conference on November 17 and 18, 2011, at the CUNY Graduate Center. And now, thanks to the hard work of about 10 of my colleagues, we are an academic society.

We welcome new members. You'll find our membership form here. (Please download it in order to activate the information fields) In order for S-USIH to thrive, we will need many of you to join and get involved. Other than helping to shape the future of U.S. intellectual history, the benefits of membership include conference attendance and a subscription to our newsletter, the first issue of which we hope to roll out in time for this year's conference.

You'll also find our S-USIH Constitution and By-Laws here. As a small sample, I'll post the first page, which includes the founding principles:

SOCIETY FOR UNITED STATES INTELLECTUAL HISTORY CONSTITUTION

The Society for U.S. Intellectual History advances the historical study of American thought among academic and non-academic scholars and provides a forum for its exploration, aiming also to broaden and diversify the communities engaged in this study and the approaches applied to it.

Founding Principles

The Society for United States Intellectual History is committed to the following principles:

*Scholarship: Upholding a primary commitment to serious, academic scholarship.

*Interdisciplinarity: Understanding American thought in its broadest terms and encouraging interdisciplinary approaches to intellectual history.

*Inclusiveness: Encouraging the participation of anyone with an interest in the intellectual history of the United States, not only professional historians and scholars who work in other fields but also teachers, public historians, journalists, policy analysts, artists, and free-lance critics.

*Outreach: Actively welcoming members who embody the wide range of experiences and cultures that define and enrich our society.

*Media: Using all forms of media to reach broad audiences and engender vital debate and exchange of ideas.

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

I am proud to announce the first Executive Committee of S-USIH:

Secretary: Ray Haberski
Treasurer: Mike O'Connor
Conference Committee Chair (2012): David Sehat
Publications Committee Chair: Ben Alpers

Our terms are only one year long. Anybody who is a member in good standing is eligible to run for a position on the executive committee next summer.

I look forward to being involved in S-USIH for decades to come! Cheers.

Andrew Hartman
President, S-USIH

Society for U.S. Intellectual History

Dear Fellow U.S. Intellectual History Enthusiasts:

It is my great pleasure to announce the birth of the Society for U.S. Intellectual History!

We began as a group blog in 2007. We hosted our first conference in Grand Rapids, Michigan in 2008. We will host our fourth annual conference on November 17 and 18, 2011, at the CUNY Graduate Center. And now, thanks to the hard work of about 10 of my colleagues, we are an academic society.

We welcome new members. You'll find our membership form here. (Please download it in order to activate the information fields) In order for S-USIH to thrive, we will need many of you to join and get involved. Other than helping to shape the future of U.S. intellectual history, the benefits of membership include conference attendance and a subscription to our newsletter, the first issue of which we hope to roll out in time for this year's conference.

You'll also find our S-USIH Constitution and By-Laws here. As a small sample, I'll post the first page, which includes the founding principles:

SOCIETY FOR UNITED STATES INTELLECTUAL HISTORY CONSTITUTION

The Society for U.S. Intellectual History advances the historical study of American thought among academic and non-academic scholars and provides a forum for its exploration, aiming also to broaden and diversify the communities engaged in this study and the approaches applied to it.

Founding Principles

The Society for United States Intellectual History is committed to the following principles:

*Scholarship: Upholding a primary commitment to serious, academic scholarship.

*Interdisciplinarity: Understanding American thought in its broadest terms and encouraging interdisciplinary approaches to intellectual history.

*Inclusiveness: Encouraging the participation of anyone with an interest in the intellectual history of the United States, not only professional historians and scholars who work in other fields but also teachers, public historians, journalists, policy analysts, artists, and free-lance critics.

*Outreach: Actively welcoming members who embody the wide range of experiences and cultures that define and enrich our society.

*Media: Using all forms of media to reach broad audiences and engender vital debate and exchange of ideas.

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

I am proud to announce the first Executive Committee of S-USIH:

Secretary: Ray Haberski
Treasurer: Mike O'Connor
Conference Committee Chair (2012): David Sehat
Publications Committee Chair: Ben Alpers

Our terms are only one year long. Anybody who is a member in good standing is eligible to run for a position on the executive committee next summer.

I look forward to being involved in S-USIH for decades to come! Cheers.

Andrew Hartman
President, S-USIH

At the archives

Spent the week at the Howard University Moorland-Spingarn Research Center. Some of the things I thought while sorting through the boxes, after the jump:



These diaries are rich with detail, yet not the exact detail I’m looking for. Why doesn’t she talk about what I want her to talk about? And yet they are so much better than what I’ve found before.

These diaries are taking forever. What if I don’t get through them and don’t get to the correspondence? Maybe I should skip a little bit to get to the correspondence.

These diaries are amazing. I don’t have time to transcribe them. Maybe I should copy them all. Will I get in trouble if I ask for them all to be copied? Maybe I’ll look through them and pick and choose what to copy.

Ok, I have to skip something so I can get to the correspondence. If the diaries are this good, the correspondence is going to be amazing.

Why must all this correspondence take place in the 1960s and 1970s, instead of the 1920s and 30s? Where are the letters from all the people she talked about in the diary?

Careful, careful, Precious documents here.

Hurry, hurry, not moving fast enough. I might not be able to see everything.

Why aren’t the people I want to be in the correspondence in the correspondence?

Maybe I should ask for the diaries back. But I want to see that other collection too.

Please, collection that wasn’t available during my dissertation writing phase, don’t have anything that overhauls my analysis completely.

Please, collection that wasn’t available during my dissertation writing phase, have something amazing that completely transforms how I was thinking about this subject.

Aaaaaargh, all of this correspondence is also from three decades past what I’m interested in!

Oooooh, love letters. Scrawly, handwritten love letters. Someone else should work on those later. I’ll make a note for future students.

No, wait, there’s some from the 40s. Now, how do I treat the 40s? The war makes such a nice break, but if there isn’t correspondence from the 20s-30s, maybe I should look at the 40s. It’s interesting how we decide what to look at. The other researchers in the room with me are each studying a single person, so they are trying to work through the whole collection of that one person. I study a generation of black intellectuals, particularly shared ideas and a shared social network. That has required searching through numerous collections, and not just for the people I already know, because I am trying to understand the network that surrounded each individual. So I limit the massive quantity of correspondence by date—1939 or earlier. Sometimes I peek at the 1940 and 1941 letters. Unfortunately, these three collections are weighed heavily toward the more established part of the individuals’ careers.

Ummmmm, let’s go back to those love letters and see if there is any information about the social network. Yep. These are the best letters in the collection for my part. And they satisfy that historian as gossip urge.

I know for a fact that Person A visited Persons B and C in London, so why aren’t there any letters from Person A to B or C? How frustrating. Oh, maybe they were such good friends that they landed in the partial name folder?

Nope.

Nope.

Nope, not that topic either.

So, for four days, I have diaries and I have love letters and a few scattered semi-helpful correspondence. Maybe today in the National Archives will be better. I have a very specific, tiny little needle I want to find in that massive haystack. Luckily, I got the ILL book with the most helpful citation yet the day before I left to come here.

And in four days, I have two new colleagues (a forced lunch is not good for the overachiever, but it is a nice way to meet your fellow researchers), many beautiful urban steps added to my shoes, and a flat tire.

At the archives

Spent the week at the Howard University Moorland-Spingarn Research Center. Some of the things I thought while sorting through the boxes, after the jump:



These diaries are rich with detail, yet not the exact detail I’m looking for. Why doesn’t she talk about what I want her to talk about? And yet they are so much better than what I’ve found before.

These diaries are taking forever. What if I don’t get through them and don’t get to the correspondence? Maybe I should skip a little bit to get to the correspondence.

These diaries are amazing. I don’t have time to transcribe them. Maybe I should copy them all. Will I get in trouble if I ask for them all to be copied? Maybe I’ll look through them and pick and choose what to copy.

Ok, I have to skip something so I can get to the correspondence. If the diaries are this good, the correspondence is going to be amazing.

Why must all this correspondence take place in the 1960s and 1970s, instead of the 1920s and 30s? Where are the letters from all the people she talked about in the diary?

Careful, careful, Precious documents here.

Hurry, hurry, not moving fast enough. I might not be able to see everything.

Why aren’t the people I want to be in the correspondence in the correspondence?

Maybe I should ask for the diaries back. But I want to see that other collection too.

Please, collection that wasn’t available during my dissertation writing phase, don’t have anything that overhauls my analysis completely.

Please, collection that wasn’t available during my dissertation writing phase, have something amazing that completely transforms how I was thinking about this subject.

Aaaaaargh, all of this correspondence is also from three decades past what I’m interested in!

Oooooh, love letters. Scrawly, handwritten love letters. Someone else should work on those later. I’ll make a note for future students.

No, wait, there’s some from the 40s. Now, how do I treat the 40s? The war makes such a nice break, but if there isn’t correspondence from the 20s-30s, maybe I should look at the 40s. It’s interesting how we decide what to look at. The other researchers in the room with me are each studying a single person, so they are trying to work through the whole collection of that one person. I study a generation of black intellectuals, particularly shared ideas and a shared social network. That has required searching through numerous collections, and not just for the people I already know, because I am trying to understand the network that surrounded each individual. So I limit the massive quantity of correspondence by date—1939 or earlier. Sometimes I peek at the 1940 and 1941 letters. Unfortunately, these three collections are weighed heavily toward the more established part of the individuals’ careers.

Ummmmm, let’s go back to those love letters and see if there is any information about the social network. Yep. These are the best letters in the collection for my part. And they satisfy that historian as gossip urge.

I know for a fact that Person A visited Persons B and C in London, so why aren’t there any letters from Person A to B or C? How frustrating. Oh, maybe they were such good friends that they landed in the partial name folder?

Nope.

Nope.

Nope, not that topic either.

So, for four days, I have diaries and I have love letters and a few scattered semi-helpful correspondence. Maybe today in the National Archives will be better. I have a very specific, tiny little needle I want to find in that massive haystack. Luckily, I got the ILL book with the most helpful citation yet the day before I left to come here.

And in four days, I have two new colleagues (a forced lunch is not good for the overachiever, but it is a nice way to meet your fellow researchers), many beautiful urban steps added to my shoes, and a flat tire.

Robert Nozick and the Libertarian Mind

If you had learned your U.S. intellectual history solely from this site over the past four years, you would have seen Robert Nozick's name explicitly mentioned only once in a post---as a secondary reference. His name has appeared indirectly, in a few books reviewed or mentioned here, such as Daniel Rodgers' Age of Fracture. That aside, Nozick has essentially been absent from USIH discussions until today. Why? I'm not sure. So let's begin at the beginning:

Who is Robert Nozick?

Born in New York City, he lived from 1938 to 2002. Nozick was a professor at Harvard University, where his fields of study were moral and political philosophy---in the analytic vein. His most famous work is Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974). The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (IEP) contains a nice summary of it.[1] Some have called Anarchy, State, and Utopia the libertarian response to John Rawls' A Theory of Justice. After his most famous work, here is what the IEP article says about Nozick's professional trajectory:

Nozick neglected political philosophy for the rest of his philosophical career. He moved on to address other philosophical questions and made significant contributions to other areas of philosophical inquiry. In epistemology, Nozick developed an externalist analysis of knowledge in terms of counterfactual conditions that provides a response to radical skepticism. In metaphysics, he proposed a “closest continuer” theory of personal identity.

Nozick also delved into public philosophy, as you will see in the titles of a few of the following books by him:

- Philosophical Explanations (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1981)
- The Examined Life: Philosophical Meditations (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989)
- The Nature of Rationality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993)
- Socratic Puzzles (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997)
- Invariances: The Structure of the Objective World (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2001)

Before diving too deeply into the contents of any one book, or Nozick's most significant ideas, let's look ahead a bit. What is Nozick's significance to later thinkers and scholars? A consideration of subsequent works about him may tell us something. With that, I've put together select list of significant books, theses, and dissertations that look at Nozick and his thought (located below, in order of oldest to most recent, gathered from here). A quick perusal of the list reveals that Nozick has received more attention over the last ten years.

On Nozick's significant ideas and influence, estimates like these are hazardous, but a quick study of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (online) reveals 106 references to, and citations of, his work. About 75-80 percent of those are related to Anarchy, State, and Utopia.

Qualitatively speaking, Stephen Metcalf recently wrote the following, for Slate.com, about Nozick's historical significance (bolds mine):

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

As a moral philosopher, Nozick was free to stretch liberty further than even an Austrian economist. That is, he was able to separate out a normative claim (that liberty is the fundamental value of values, and should be maximized) from an empirical claim (that the most efficient method for allocating goods and services is a market economy). Free to pursue liberty as a matter of pure principle, Nozick let nothing stand in his way. Should we tax the rich to feed the poor? Absolutely not, as "taxation of earnings is on par with forced labor." (Or more precisely: "Taking the earnings of n hours of labor is like taking n hours from the person.") Well, isn't at least some redistribution necessary on the basis of need? "Need a gardener allocate his services to those lawns which need him most?"

To the entire left, Nozick, in effect, said: Your social justice comes at an unacceptable cost, namely, to my personal liberty. Most distressingly, to this end Nozick enlisted the humanist's most cherished belief: the inviolability of each human being as an end unto himself—what Nozick, drawing on Immanuel Kant, calls "the separateness of persons." For Nozick, the principle of the separateness of persons is close to sacred. It affirms, as he writes, "the underlying Kantian principle that individuals are ends and not merely means; they may not be sacrificed or used for the achieving of other ends without their consent. Individuals are inviolable."

I like to think that when Nozick published Anarchy, the levee broke, the polite Fabian [read: cautious and gradualist] consensus collapsed, and hence, in rapid succession: Hayek won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1974, followed by Milton Friedman in '75, the same year Thatcher became Leader of the Opposition, followed by the California and Massachusetts tax revolts, culminating in the election of Reagan, and … well, where it stops, nobody knows.

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

It should be noted that the point of Metcalf's polemical piece is to discuss why Nozick gave up libertarianism. The title reveals the article's thesis: "The Liberty Scam: Why even Robert Nozick, the philosophical father of libertarianism, gave up on the movement he inspired." [Aside: This article, by the way, is the best short take-down of extreme libertarianism I've ever read.]

That aside, the lines I excerpted from Metcalf's article seem to demand the following conclusion: Nozick is a major marker figure in the intellectual development of the New Right.

Before leaving Nozick for reader discussion, let me provide a final plug from historians on why Nozick matters. I don't have Daniel Rodgers' excellent book on hand (Age of Fracture), so I can't relay his passages on Nozick. But I do happen to have J. David Hoeveler, Jr.'s The Postmodernist Turn at my desk.[2] Hoeveler ends his book---in the last passages just before his Afterword---with a four-page reflection on Nozick. Here are few passages (bolds mine):

In the 1960s and early 1970s, libertarianism found outspoken defenders in Ayn Rand, science fiction novelist Robert Heinlein, and Murray Rothbard. ...When Rothbard happened to have a conversation with young Harvard professor, Robert Nozick, the professor decided to write a book.

Nozick took a circuitous route to libertarianism. In high school in the 1950s he had joined the youth branch of the Norman Thomas's Socialist Party, and as an undergraduate at Columbia he founded another Socialist group. But Nozick gradually yielded to the persuasive forces of individualism and of moral and economic systems that gave highest priority to the free individual. ...

Nozick's book [Anarchy] is not an easy matter. It flourishes with the philosopher's love of dense logic-chopping and finely-tuned disputation. The reader will find many pages full of mathematical symbols. In its analytical depth it resembles the work of Nozick's rival Rawls. ...One reviewer called [it] "a major event in political philosophy."...[noting] that recent political theory generally assumed the necessary distributive role of the state. However correct, he added, after Anarchy...these axioms could no longer be taken for granted. (pp. 168-69)

From here Hoeveler spends a great deal of time summarizing the book, discussing Nozick terms and axioms like "the entitlement theory," "end-result" or "end-state" principles, and Nozick's long (50-page) direct critique of Rawls. Here is Hoeveler's final statement on Nozick---which happens to also be the last page of the text (again, bolds mine):

Anarchy, State, and Utopia offered a theoretical, philosophical defense of libertarianism. ...It often gave illustrations, but too often came up short of details. Nonetheless, reviewers took Nozick's book to be, ultimately, a polemic against all the apparatus of the modern liberal state---welfare operations, public health care, compulsory social security, state-sponsored education, progressive taxation, and legislated equality of any kind. Some conservatives therefore welcomed Nozick's ideas. But Nozick wanted to be consistent. His libertarianism, however welcomed by conservative businessmen...aspired to give them no privileges. Nozick insisted that he opposed any government favoritism, as, for example, no subsidies to businesses (the airlines) or in protective tariffs. ...True and consistent libertarianism, like Nozick's, always confounds the liberal-conservative dichotomies. (p. 172).

With that, I ask the reader: How important does Nozick seem to be in the spectrum of conservative political (and social) philosophy? How significant was he to neoconservatives, or the New Right generally? If a "libertarian mind" exists (I don't necessarily believe ~one~ does), how has Nozick helped in its formation? How have you seen Nozick cited in USIH-type works beyond Rodgers and Hoeveler? - TL

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

[1] The IEP article is probably the most comprehensive of those I found online. It was written by Edward Feser of Pasadena City College. For what it's worth, Feser is a self-proclaimed political conservative and "traditional Roman Catholic" in matters of religion.

[2] The Postmodernist Turn: American Thought and Culture in the 1970s (New York: Twayne Publishers/Simon & Schuster Macillan, 1996).

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

Select, Significant Books, Dissertations, and Theses About Nozick

(Listed from oldest to most recent)


- Golash, Deirdre. "Entitlement and Equality: A Response to Robert Nozick." Thesis--University of Maryland, College Park, 1976.
- Goldsworthy, Jefferey Denys. "Robert Nozick and the Justifaction of Coercive Government." Thesis (LL. M.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1983, 1983.
- Luper, Steven. The Possibility of Knowledge: Nozick and His Critics. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1987.
- Paul, Jeffrey, ed. Reading Nozick: Essays on Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1991.
- Wolff, Jonathan. Robert Nozick: Property, Justice, and the Minimal State. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1991.
- Roberts, P. M. "Historical Entitlement Theory: Robert Nozick and Hillet Steiner." Thesis (M.A.)--University of Wales Swansea, 1994, 1994.
- Jovic, Dejan. Robert Nozick: between Anarchy and State. Manchester: University of Manchester, 1995.
- Hailwood, Simon. Exploring Nozick: Beyond Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Sydney: Avebury, 1996.
- Lacey, A. R. Robert Nozick. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001.
- Casey, David T. "Negative Rights and Social Indifference: Trying to Resuscitate Robert Nozick's Libertarianism." Norton, MA: Wheaton College, 2001.
- Schmidtz, David, ed. Robert Nozick. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002. [right]
- Feser, Edward. On Nozick. Australia: Thomson/Wadsworth, 2004.
- Payne-Johnson, Jesse Paul. "Anarchy, State, Utopia & the Social Contract: The Contractarian Foundations of Nozick's Libertarianism." Thesis (A.B., Honors in Government)--Harvard University, 2006, 2006.
- Bakaya, Santosh. The Political Theory of Robert Nozick. Delhi: Kalpaz, 2006.
- Schwab, Alexander B. "Rectifying Justice in Rectification: Dealing with Historical Injustice in Nozick's Minimal State." Thesis (A.B., Honors in Philosophy)--Harvard University, 2006, 2006.
- Murray, Dale F. Nozick, Autonomy, and Compensation. London: Continuum, 2007.
- Boaheng, Paul Biredu. "Nozick's Non-Libertarianism: A Philosophical Reconstruction." Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Alberta, 2007, 2007.
- Bader, Ralf M. Robert Nozick. New York: Continuum, 2010.
- Papaioannou, Theo. Robert Nozick's Moral and Political Theory: A Philosophical Critique of Libertarianism. Lewiston, NY [u.a.]: Mellen Press, 2010.
- Bader, Ralf M., and John Meadowcroft. The Cambridge Companion to Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. [right]