White moderates and the persistence of a Jim Crow world

When I read about white moderates (i.e. those who denounced lynching and racism, but did not actively do anything to fight them, and came particularly from the North or West) in the Jim Crow world, I often think about the connections and similarities to the way that some whites talk in today's world. I have an article I'm shopping around about Mabel Byrd's interactions with the New Deal cabinet. Part of my argument is that the way the white New Dealers discussed race was functional and programmatic and discriminatory in a similar way that some white politicians discuss race and black people today. Well, actually the argument is mostly about the New Deal era, but I wave a hand towards the present.

This came home to me again when I opened The Souls of Black Folk to read for the umpteenth time in preparation for class tomorrow. His first paragraph is about talking to white moderates. Think about it in terms not just of the pain in Du Bois' voice, but in the awkwardness of whites in trying to talk to a black person.

Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it. They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil? At these I smile, or am interested, or reduce the boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require. To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word.

I lived with my grandma while finishing up my dissertation and for the first few weeks (months?) of conversations I tried to have about my work, she would answer with one of two stories--the one black family growing up in her small town in Washington state, or the one African family in her southern California church. It was so frustrating precisely because she is a dear heart, definitely not a racist in the sense of speaking ill of or acting badly toward people unlike her, but also because of what Du Bois said--it was boiling down the whole of African Americans experiences into what she knew without wanting to know more. I took her to an African American history exhibit, which was followed by a talk by Tavis Smiley. We ended up in the front row and got videotaped--An elderly white woman beaming at a semi-radical (forthright may be a better term) black intellectual! I always wondered if that picture ended up somewhere on tv.  That helped mix up her conversation about race because it gave her more to talk about and she did indeed share the experience with all of her friends.

This is not an isolated example of what happens when I introduce what I study to white family and friends. I get most of the same responses that Du Bois did a hundred + years ago.

Allan Bloom, or Figment of Saul Bellow’s Imagination?

Reflections on the Neoconservative Persuasion

I finally got around to reading Saul Bellow’s novel Ravelstein, a memoir-style rendering of his friendship with Allan Bloom, the conservative University of Chicago philosopher who specialized in Plato and Rousseau. I’ve been meaning to read it for some time, since Bloom figures large in my research. Bloom, as you all know, was the author of the 1987 mega-hit, The Closing of the American Mind, which signified the culture wars unlike any other book, a surprising event given that the it’s no easy slog. A book with a 70-page chapter titled “From Socrates’ Apology to Heidegger’s Rektoratsrede” is hardly designed to be a bestseller.

One of the recurring themes I’ve come across during my Bloom research is his larger-than-life-ness. Although he was relatively obscure until Closing made him famous, and rich, Bloom’s students were apparently devoted to him with apostle-like fervor. In other words, building off of recent posts from Ben and L.D., he embodied ideas, much like his mentor Leo Strauss. Or, put another way: like pre-mechanically reproduced art, as Walter Benjamin had it, Bloom emitted aura.

But reading Ravelstein compels me to ask: Is the larger-than-life Bloom familiar to us as Bloom? Or as Ravelstein? Where does the real Bloom end and Bellow’s fictional Bloom begin? Of course, given that Bloom was known to be larger than life well before the publication of Bellow’s paean to Bloom’s eclectic form of genius—Ravelstein was published in 2000, 13 years after Closing, and eight years after Bloom died of AIDS—this might seem like a silly question. But Bellow contributed to Bloom’s lore well before he wrote Ravelstein. Bellow wrote the foreword to Closing, where his first sentence told of how “Professor Bloom has his own way of doing things.” Namely, rather than stoop to engage his contemporaries, “Bloom places himself in a larger community, invoking Socrates, Plato, Machiavelli, Rousseau and Kant…”

I’m far from the first person to playfully suggest that the Bloom known to posterity is, in fact, a figment of Saul Bellow’s imagination. As I learned in reading a fantastically scathing review of Ravelstein written by Christopher Hitchens, Robert Paul Wolff, a professor of philosophy at Amherst, reviewed Closing for Academe, where he prophesized the following:

Aficionados of the modern American novel have learned to look to Philip Roth for complex literary constructions that play wittily with narrative voice and frame. One thinks of such Roth works as My Life as a Man and The Counterlife. Now Saul Bellow has demonstrated that among his other well-recognized literary gifts is an unsuspected bent for daring satire. What Bellow has done, quite simply, is to write an entire coruscatingly funny novel in the form of a pettish, bookish, grumpy, reactionary complaint against the last two decades. The ‘author’ of this tirade, one of Bellow’s most fully-realized literary creations, is a mid-fiftyish Professor at the University of Chicago, to whom Bellow gives the evocative name ‘Bloom’. Bellow appears in the book only as the author of an eight-page ‘Foreword’, in which he introduces us to his principal and only character.

Based on this paragraph alone, Wolff merits a lifetime achievement award for witty book reviewing. So, is the success of Closing predicated on its ideas, or on the aura of a larger-than-life, perhaps even fictional Bloom?

Some ideas in Closing were somewhat original, or at least, were expressed in terms new to most of its popular readership. At its most explicit, it was an angry denunciation of relativism in all its forms: philosophic, moral, cultural—relativism realized in the American university, which Bloom argued had been distorted by a “Nietzscheanized-Heideggerianized Left” that arose from the 1960s.

More implicitly, Closing was a defense of elitism. As Hitchens wrote of Closing in his review of Ravelstein:

This book, which was a late product or blooming of the University of Chicago Committee on Social Thought, argued that the American mind was closed because it had become so goddamned open—a nice deployment of paradox and a vivid attack on the relativism that has become so OK on campus these days. Bloom’s polemic swiftly became a primer for the right-wing Zeitgeist; a bookend for the shelf or index sternly marked ‘all downhill since 1967.’

Anti-relativism was an important element of neoconservatism, and nobody demonstrated this better than Bloom. Again, Hitchens:

Chaos, most especially the chaos identified with pissed-off African Americans, was the whole motif of The Closing of the American Mind. Bloom had taught at Cornell during the campus upheaval of 1968, and never recovered from the moment when black students produced guns to amplify their demands.

Neoconservatism is the flip side of the New Left, especially insofar as the New Left combined radical political positions on race, gender and war with the antinomian, relativist spirit of the counterculture. As such, the neoconservative persuasion should also be historically situated in relation to what Corey Robin controversially labels “the reactionary mind.” Robin considers conservatism “a meditation on—and theoretical rendition of—the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back.” George H. Nash, in his seminal The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America, offers a similar definition of conservatism from a different evaluative perspective. He defines it as “resistance to certain forces perceived to be leftist, revolutionary, and profoundly subversive of what conservatives at the time deemed worth cherishing, defending, and perhaps dying for.”

Many Americans viewed the various movements that arose during the 1960s as “profoundly subversive” of the status quo, as threats to entrenched configurations of power. Neoconservatives like Allan Bloom best articulated this post-1960s conservative reaction, especially insofar as they were able to intuit the connections between political movements like Black Power and antinomian countercultural currents. For Bloom, the relativist culture on display in the academy was brutish and coarse, a pale reflection of the Ancient order of his philosophical imagination, which evinced, as Robin puts it, “the excellence of a world where the better man commands the worse.” Whether representative of Bloom or of Bellow’s fictional imagination, Closing is a great primary source of neoconservatism in the way it articulates such a combination of elitism and excellence.

On Describing Today's Historical Ecosphere

We historians conventionally distinguish scholarly historical writing from popular historical writing.  The former is what those of us who write for this blog do professionally; the latter is what tends to appear on bestseller lists.  The very existence of popular historical writing distinguishes our field from many others in the humanities. These days, at least, there's precious little popular literary criticism for example (though popular cultural criticism certainly exists). And though bookstores are brimming with popular philosophy books, they bear virtually no resemblance to the work of academic philosophers.  In contrast, not only are there innumerable works of popular history, most academic historians (or, at least, the Americanists among us) like to think that our work is potentially of interest to a broader, non-academic audience.  Occasionally a handful of scholarly works, usually in the areas of military or political history, find a large (or at least largish) audience outside the Ivory Tower.  I'm thinking, for example, of Jim McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom or Rick Perlstein's Before the Storm. Pulitzer Prizes in History often go to such works.

But more often, works of history that find their way to the best seller list are considerably less scholarly.  Take, for example, Hardball host Chris Matthews' Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero, currently #33 on the New York Times Hardcover Non-Fiction Best Sellers List and the subject of a take-down by the historian David Greenberg in TNR [h/t Erik Loomis at LGM].  Vanity projects by pundits about presidents past seem to have emerged as a genre unto themselves.  At least as described by Greenberg, Matthews book seems little more than a projection of his own two-dimensional political personality onto JFK.*  

But what I found most interesting about Matthews' book was the list of people who have blurbed it.

As Greenberg notes, Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero is marketed with praise from Douglas Brinkley, Walter Isaacson, Brian Williams, Peggy Noonan, and Doris Kearns Goodwin.  This is an interesting mix of people.  Noonan and Williams are fellow media personalities, who don't have any particular historical credentials. But the other three figures inhabit an intermediate zone between scholarly and popular approaches to history: semi-serious historians whose reputations have been built as mainstream public intellectuals.  The only academic among the three is Brinkley, though I think his reputation as a scholar is even more slight than Isaacson's or Goodwin's (despite the accusations of plagiarism against the latter).  Along with the once ubiquitous Michael Beschloss, Brinkley and Goodwin for years formed a kind of triumvirate of semi-official historical opinion on relatively serious network newscasts.  Each is also more closely tied to the political and financial elite than your average historian (popular or scholarly):  Goodwin was an assistant to LBJ and married Richard Goodwin, a more senior assistant to both JFK and LBJ.  Brinkley is a member of the Century Club and the Council on Foreign Relations.  Beschloss is married to a former treasurer and chief investment officer of the World Bank who runs a Washington, DC-based hedge fund.  Isaacson emerged out of the media, starting his career as a journalist, rising to be CEO of CNN in 2001 and President and CEO of the Aspen Institute in 2003.

What I find fascinating about these figures is the very complicated role they play in today's historical ecosphere. If you had to place their work on one side or the other of the popular / scholarly divide, they'd certainly be considered popular.  Yet their books--especially Goodwin's and Isaacson's--are taken seriously by serious people. They are certainly not in the same category of "historians" as, say, Glenn Beck or Chris Matthews. But they are often called upon to validate the seriousness and even the expertise of people like Matthews (if not Beck).  Indeed, Goodwin's blurb for Matthew's JFK book seems to leave David Greenberg somewhat flummoxed; he notes that she "surely cannot regard this as a meritorious book."

What all of this suggests to me is that the old scholarly / popular divide is too crude to describe the ways in which history is produced and consumed in the U.S. today.  I'm not going to attempt a more precise taxonomy in this blogpost. But I think establishing one would help us make better sense of things like the Tea Party's use of history, which have been recurring themes on this blog.

___________________________

* I needed to add somewhere the cover of Glenn Beck's book on George Washington, since it so nicely captures the actual focus of many of these sorts of projects:

Disembodied Voices in Intellectual History

In his recent post on Embodiment in Intellectual History, Ben raised the question of how intellectual historians might more effectively or fruitfully consider the "embodied aspects of the people about whom we write." He suggested that a consideration of "intellectuals' physical presences may grow more important as disembodied communication technologies become more and more ubiquitous." 
I began to wonder:  when was the last time that our communication technologies weren't in some way disembodied.  We probably have to go back to prehistory for that.  But I forbid my students from beginning their essays at the dawn of time, or writing an introductory paragraph about the course of human history, so I will spare you a similar sweeping gesture.  Besides, we do (mostly) U.S. history around here -- our wayback machine doesn't go very far back (though it might be salutary for us if it did). 

So as I thought about Ben's post, and I thought about how intellectual historians might "do embodiment" well, I was reminded of one of my favorite sections of A Godly Hero, Michael Kazin's brilliant biography of William Jennings Bryan.*

Kazin's extended meditation on the sonority of Bryan's voice provides an excellent example of how intellectual historians can explore what someone's physical presence meant for the articulation and reception of his or her ideas.  In the Great Commoner's case, this particular aspect of Bryan's (self-consciously performative) self-performance seems to have imbued his ideas with a liveliness and appeal that they lacked when presented in mere text, as printed words upon a page.

Kazin writes about the almost magical power of Bryan's speaking voice.

How did he do it? One born too late to hear Bryan on the stump or in a convention hall can only gather up reminiscences and marvel that, in an era satiated with oratory, he could lead so many people, foes as well as allies, to describe him as the most compelling speaker they'd ever heard (48).

Listeners commented on the extraordinary timbre of Bryan's voice:

Nearly every recollection begins by describing the quality of that voice. "Sonorous and melodious," "deep and powerfully musical," "soothing but penetrating," "free, bold, picturesque," "clear as a cathedral bell..." (48)

As Kazin points out, such praise sounds very much like the aesthetic judgment audiences might have pronounced upon a stage actor's talents.

Like them, the Nebraskan could project his voice a remarkable distance. Mary Bryan recalled one day in 1898 when, from inside a hotel room in Corpus Christi, she could hear her husband perfectly "three long blocks" away.  At national conventions, before the introduction of amplified sound in the early 1920s, Bryan's was often the only voice that could reach every seat in the house. And his diction -- clear, precise, and rendered with a slight prairie twang that passed for no accent at all -- ensured that listeners could understand every word (48).

I am intrigued by the gendered aspects of Bryan's appeal.  Apparently, he sounded like a man was supposed to sound.  And I can't help but wonder: what were women supposed to sound like when they spoke in public?  "They weren't," would be the easy laugh line here.  But there were women on the Chautauqua circuit, and I suspect that someone like Carrie Nation could hold a crowd's attention.  But I don't know that her appeal was aesthetic -- or acoustical -- in the way that Bryan's seemed to be.  Instead, part of the draw there (in addition to audience interest in the content of her speech) might have been the sheer spectacle of going to see a woman -- and such a woman! -- speak in public.

In terms of going to hear women, I suppose that famous female vocalists and melodramatic actresses could have drawn great crowds wherever they performed. But except for stage performers and professional entertainers, I wonder if there were many women who would have been able to draw a crowd simply to hear the sound of their speaking voices, as crowds wanted to do in Bryan's case.

In the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, what were the aesthetic expectations for public female -- and/or feminine -- speech?  (I mean besides "Ladies, please don't!")  What acoustical features, what kind of sonority, might have marked a pleasing, public female voice?  If you have some bibliographic suggestions, please add them to the comments below.  This is something I'll need to look at in relation to my work in the early 20th century, and I should probably base my understanding of the matter on something more authoritative than Singin' in the Rain.  ("I caiiiiiint staiiiind him.")

In any case, Bryan's heyday may have been the age of oratory, but it was not yet the age of radio. Kazin writes:

A...GOP partisan named Ira Smith first heard Bryan in 1896. Half a century later, he recalled: "I listened to his speech as if every word and every gesture were a revelation. It is not my nature to be awed by a famous name, but I felt that Bryan was the first politician I had ever heard speak the truth and nothing but the truth." The next day, Smith read the same speech in a newspaper and "disagreed with almost all of it." He was glad, in retrospect, that "the most remarkable orator of the century" had passed his prime before the onset of radio. Otherwise, Smith, who ran the White House mailroom for five decades, believed the Nebraskan would certainly have been elected president (49).

To me, this is perhaps the most striking insight of all -- one of those "for want of a nail" arguments that sets history swinging on the hinge of a single slim contingency.

Heck, maybe old Ira Smith was right.

Or was he making the kind of appeal to technology's magic -- or to charisma's power? -- that often serves as a sop to our most simplistic explanatory urges?  For example, we've probably all heard some version of "Kennedy beat Nixon because of television."  That's a little too easy.  And I think it would be really bad history to say, "If Bryan had been broadcast coast to coast on the radio, he surely would have won the White House."  But Kazin, who doesn't tend to write bad history, doesn't say that.

Furthermore, as Kazin points out, it was not merely his voice alone that made Bryan so appealing; it was his deep sincerity. "Listeners enjoyed being in his presence and often felt inspired by a guileless orator who seemed an authentic representative of the producing classes. A politics of character thus blended into a politics of celebrity as Bryan's voice became known throughout the land" (49). That part about "being in his presence" suggests a whole performative rhetoric of look and gesture, physicality, sturdy manliness, that went along with that big sonorous voice.  So radio might not have helped Bryan much anyhow.

In their introduction to an audio clip of Bryan's "Cross of Gold" speech, recorded in a studio twenty-five years after it was first delivered, the editors at GMU's History Matters site note that the recording "does not capture the power and drama of the original address."  Perhaps only listeners who had heard Bryan speaking live and also heard that recording could judge whether or not the recording "gets" Bryan.  Listening to his disembodied voice today, we have the challenge of wading through almost one hundred years of technologically mediated cultural history -- or culturally mediated technological history -- that have worked to shape what we think a (man's) voice ought to sound like.

But if audio recordings didn't seem to do justice to Bryan's oratorical gifts, that may have had less to do with the disembodiment of Bryan's voice than with the disembodiment of Bryan's audience.  Maybe it wasn't enough for Bryan to stretch himself out upon a Cross of Gold in a recording studio; maybe he needed a stadium full of people to bring power to his performance.

Along with Ben, I too would be interested to hear (!) our readers' thoughts on the more general question of how attention to embodiment can work in intellectual history.  I would suggest that exploring the (dis)connection between voice and presence, ideas and embodiment, matters not only in history, but for history -- for how we study it, for how we write it, and for how we perform it (and ourselves) here in the silent cacophony of the intellectual history blogosphere.

What say you?

---------
*If my discussion of this book seems vaguely familiar to you, it might be because I swiped a few paragraphs for this post from my old blog.  But I had, like, Seven Faithful Readers.  So I'm guessing it's new to you.

Emerging Historiography of the New Religious Left

Last week I asked about the historiography of the contemporary religious left. The response to my post was another illustration of the promise of blogging--I have a great list of books to read and a list of work from scholars to follow. I have listed suggestions from comments on this site and Religion in American History. Before that, though, I have a couple more questions. Is there a corollary problem in the historiography of the American left over the same period, from 1970 to the present? And if so, what's the connection, if there is one?

One obvious answer is that this was the age of fracture of the left and political consolidation for the right. And so, in the age of Reagan, as Sean Wilentz explains, conservatism offered the most significant organizing principle and political target. Thus the historiography has followed the power, in a sense.

But that is far from the end of the story or stories that are being and will be written. Below is preliminary list of books on the New Religious Left since 1970.

Robert Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion (1988)--the latter chapters

Wuthnow, After Heaven: Spirituality in America Since the 1950s (1998)

Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Crisis, Irony, and Postmoderninty: 1950-2005 (2006)

Dorrien, Soul in Society (1996)

Dean Hodge, Benton Johnson, and Donald Luidens, Vanishing Boundaries: The Religion of Mainline Protestant Baby Boomers (1994)

Amanda Porterfield, The Transformation of American Religion: The Story of a Late Twentieth Century Awakening (2001)

David Swartz's book on the evangelical left from the 1950s to the 1980s due out from the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2012

Brantley Gasaway's book on progressive evangelicalism since the 1960s due out from UNC Press in 2013

For an interview with both Swartz and Gasaway see this site

Pamela Cochran, Evangelical Feminism: A History (2005)

Two projects from Catherine Osborne on Catholics and the moderate-left in the postwar era

Charles Struass is working on American Catholics and US foreign policy toward Central America in the 1970s and 1980s

Dan McKanan, Prophetic Encounters: Religion and the American Radical Tradition (2011)

McKanan, The Catholic Worker after Dorothy: Practicing the Works of Mercy in a New Generation (2008)

Sarah McFarland Taylor, Green Sisters: A Spiritual Ecology (2007)

Amy Koehlinger, The New Nuns: Racial Justice and Religious Reform in the 1960s (2007)

Lillian Calles Barger is at work on a history of Liberation Theology from its origins in early Enlightenment thought to the present.

Shawn David Young, is at work on a book on the Jesus People USA.

Adam Parsons is working on a dissertation on the Christian World Liberation Front

David King is working on the World Vision a Christian NGO

Marcia Pally, The New Evangelicals: Expanding the Vision of the Common Good (2011)

James Bielo, Emerging Evangelicals: Faith, Modernity, and the Desire for Authenticity (2011)

Tim's Light Reading (2-23-2012): Beck-Inspired Flaming, Documentaries, Instrumental Universities, The Market-Democracy Relationship, and New Works of Interest

[Updated: 8:40 am]

1 (of 6). "The Culture Wars are Real": Beck's Minions Attack John Fea

You may or may not know that Glenn Beck has a "news" website called The Blaze. I didn't---until Messiah College professor John Fea, author of Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?, recently relayed a story about being featured on the Beck site.

The Blaze feature, authored by Billy Hallowell, brought attention to Fea for a line in a recent Patheos editorial wherein Fea opined that "Obama may be the most explicitly Christian president in American history." Hallowell's story has garnered 848 comments (as of 3 pm yesterday), and Fea has reported receiving nasty e-mails and voicemails. As an aside, I was somewhat surprised at the attention Fea received because, beyond the title, Hallowell's article isn't particularly incendiary.

I forward this for your consideration because, well, our relatively quiet blog community might garner this kind of attention at some point. It seems logical since we both write about recent political issues (and candidates), and receive some popular attention from moderates and lefty types. Granted, that attention comes from thoughtful corners. But I wouldn't be surprised if a rhetorical bomb-thrower from the right doesn't hit us soon.


2. "We’re Living in a Golden Age of Documentary Filmmaking"

This was the title of a recent Slate article by Eric Hynes. Hynes focuses on the short-shrift this golden age is receiving from the Academy Awards, but I agree fully. I particularly enjoy the work of Errol Morris. His The Fog of War comes up in the article, and I use that documentary religiously in my twentieth-century American survey courses (as well as The Weather Underground, which complements Fog nicely). The point of Hynes's article is that we have lots of screening choices.


3. Perceived Social Rank and Cognitive Ability

Check out this summary of study by a team of Cal Tech researchers. Here are some relevant passages:

Our cognitive abilities and decision-making skills can be dramatically hindered in social settings where we feel that we are being ranked or assigned a status level, such as classrooms and work environments. ...The finding flies in the face of long-held ideas about intelligence and cognition that regard IQ as a stable, predictive measure of mental horsepower.

"This study tells us the idea that IQ is something we can reliably measure in isolation without considering how it interacts with social context is essentially flawed," says Steven Quartz, professor of philosophy at Caltech and one of the authors of the new study. ..."This suggests that the idea of a division between social and cognitive processing in the brain is really pretty artificial. The two deeply interact with each other."

I'm still sorting all of this out, but I'd say this study might have something profound to say to intellectual historians---particularly those whose work covers class-based societies (i.e. all of us). Cue the study summary:

Throughout the 20th century, IQ was used in different arenas as a way of sorting or classifying people into niches. Because people believed it to be a more abstract notion of cognitive ability, it was thought to have strong predictive validity of mental capabilities even from age six. But IQ was always measured in social isolation. "That reflects a long tradition of intellectual history, of considering rationality and cognition to be this isolated process," Quartz says. "But one of the things that we're learning more and more in social neuroscience is the role of our social contexts and the social adaptation of the brain." Understanding the role social context plays and its differential impact on the brain may ultimately help educators and others to design more effective learning environments.

And last but not least:

The present study found some unexpected trends, including the tendency for female subjects to be more affected than males by the implicit signaling of social status during the test.


4. Economically Instrumental Universities

USIH friend and public intellectual(!) Ethan Schrum [right] recently penned an op-ed for the Richmond Times-Dispatch that chastises the Obama administration for a having a narrow view of the role of higher education in recent American history. Here's Schrum's conclusion:

Obama, by contrast, told students they were at Michigan to get skills and training for building their personal finances and the American economy. He gave no indication that a student might be at the university to be formed as a person, as a thinker and communicator — and as a global citizen.

Obama's narrow, short-sighted rhetoric for American higher education puts our universities in peril. We must wake up to the possibility that universities might be living on borrowed moral capital and begin framing higher education policy in ways consistent with our universities' noble traditions, before it is too late.

Sure, this is a long-running problem that pre-dates Obama's recent speech. But the president deserves a tongue-lashing for using the nation's bully pulpit to promote a one-sided, and frankly erroneous, view of higher education. Although I understand the needs of the campaign trail ("It's the economy, stupid!"), Obama could've been more honest.


5. A Forthcoming Work of Possible Interest

(a) Bernard Hodgson (forthcoming), "Democratic Agency and the Market Machine," Journal of Business Ethics.

[From PhilPapers] "The alliance of pure market economies with democratic polities has traditionally been a problematic one. It is argued that orthodox theoretical conceptualizations of market behaviour and the application of such theory to our communal lives have entrenched an incoherent alliance. In particular, the reductive mechanism characteristic of both neo-classical economic theory and its deployment in our socio-economic order has severely undermined the telic agency required for the autonomy or self-rule definitive of an authentic democratic order. Such reduction is observed to function through the disabling of the cognitive capacity of consumers and by disempowering the agency of workers such that coercion is misconceived as freely agreed contract."


6. From My OAH-RSO Feed: New Books and Articles of Interest

This month's RSO is loaded with intellectual history---more than I've sampled below. Be sure to check out entry (i)!

(a) Barry, John M., Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty (New York: Viking, 2012).

(b) Bromell, Nick, "A `Voice from the Enslaved': The Origins of Frederick Douglass's Political Philosophy of Democracy," American Literary History, 23 (Winter 2011), 697-723.

(c)Fischer, David Hackett, Fairness and Freedom: A History of Two Open Societies, New Zealand and the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

(d) Goodman, Joyce, "The Gendered Politics of Historical Writing in History of Education," History of Education (London), 41 (Jan. 2012), 9-24.

(e) Laats, Adam, "Monkeys, Bibles, and the Little Red Schoolhouse: Atlanta's School Battles in the Scopes Era," Georgia Historical Quarterly, 95 (Fall 2011), 335-55.

(f) Lee, Maurice S., Uncertain Chances: Science, Skepticism, and Belief in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

(g) Lee, Michael J., "American Revelations: Biblical Interpretation and Criticism in America, circa 1700-1860" (PhD Diss, University of Notre Dame, 2009).

(h) Matteson, John, The Lives of Margaret Fuller: A Biography (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2012).

(i) Murphy, Paul V., The New Era: American Thought and Culture in the 1920s (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012).

(j) Powell, Tara, The Intellectual in Twentieth-Century Southern Literature (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012).

(k) Rose, Anne C., "The Invention of Uncertainty in American Psychology: Intellectual Conflict and Rhetorical Resolution, 1890-1930," History of Psychology, 14 (Nov. 2011), 356-82.

(l) Szalay, Michael, "Ralph Ellison's Unfinished Second Skin," American Literary History, 23 (Winter 2011), 795-827.

Marriage Equality

I showed my class the PBS American Experience documentary on Emma Goldman. We talked a bit about how she fought for women's rights, particularly her idea that the institution of marriage should not exist. I read from an interview with her, "What is there in Anarchy for Women?" where she argued that she did not believe in marriage, but rather "I believe that when two people love each other that no judge, minister, or court, or body of people, have anything to do with it. They themselves are the ones to determine the relations which they shall hold with one another. When that relation becomes irksome to either party, or one of the parties, then it can be as quietly terminated as it was formed." This is still a largely minority position, at least for the middle class. but in terms of another quote of Goldman's, I think she was prescient.


She argued that "The alliance should be formed, not as it is now, to give the woman a support and home, but because the love is there, and that state of affairs can only be brought about by an internal revolution, in short, Anarchy." From the Victorian era that Goldman came of age during to today, there has been a revolution in marriage, to the point that it is assumed marriage is only done for the sake of love. Although, even as I write that, it seems like the last few years there is another transformation taking place where marriage can take place for health benefits or tax deductions, but is still a seal on a love-match. As my students pointed out, this revolution took place over a much longer time than Goldman would have wanted, and did not come about because of anarchy. However, it did come about in part because women have gained more rights and the ability economically to support themselves. (Stephanie Coontz has written a book titled Marriage, A History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage. I haven't read it, though I've read other work by her).


I asked the students what they thought of these ideas about marriage, since they are still very relevant with debates over whether or not to let gay people into the institution of marriage (and some gay people would argue they want to over turn the institution like Goldman did). I've been doing a lot of discussion based on present-day concerns. It has pluses and minuses. On the plus side, we've been having great discussions, in which many students participate. I think it is good to start from where students are and move forward. The danger is that we flatten out change over time, although at least once a class it seems like a student will remind us that "that was a different time."

As much as I admire Goldman, anarchy does not make sense to me. I don't understand how people would cooperate without a government (especially because she's not arguing that capitalism take up the slack). Is it just a utopian ideal? Or am I missing something?

Reception History: A New Word for An Old Methodology?*

A few weeks back, while I was reading Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen’s American Nietzsche, I posted here asking readers to list their favorite reception histories. Thanks to you all for helping put together a very comprehensive list. Today, having just read Martin Woessner’s really smart Heidegger in America, I post again about reception history, this time asking more of a meta-question: Are intellectual history and reception history two words for the same thing? Woessner comes close to making this argument, at least insofar as intellectual history is understood to be the history of thought and the history of thinking, not necessarily the social history of intellectuals.

One thing I noticed about both the arguments of Ratner-Rosenhagen and Woessner: The key to understanding the American reception of Nietzsche and Heidegger is understanding America. Such is the logic, at least, of reception history as they seem to understand it. Reception history for them is about how ideas morph when moving from one context to the next, such as from Germany to the United States, or from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries. Their reception history is also interested in how ideas represent culture; how ideas help people cope with culture; how ideas even sometimes remake culture. Ratner-Rosenhagen “argues that confrontations with Nietzsche laid bare a fundamental concern driving modern American thought: namely, the question of the grounds, or foundations, for modern American thought and culture itself.” In other words, she is less interested in Nietzsche, per se, or those intellectuals who fashioned themselves “American Nietzscheans,” and more focused on those “American readers making their way to their views of themselves and their modern America by thinking through, against, and around Nietzsche’s stark challenges.”

Woessner frames his book similarly: “Heidegger’s reception tells us as much—if not more—about the course of American intellectual and cultural history over the past half century as it does about Heidegger himself.” But Woessner takes this a few steps further, in what amounts to an ambitious if not downright grandiose methodological plea. I will quote Woessner extensively to give you a taste of his strong methodological gesture.

“Detailing how Heidegger was (re)made in the U.S.A. will demonstrate how the history of ideas might be reconfigured for a new era.”

“And yet many intellectual historians continue to work as if such messy realities (that texts and contexts go together) do not impinge upon the life of the mind, as if the widest context necessitated by intellectual-historical inquiry is that of an intellectual’s biography. In doing so, they needlessly narrow the scope of the history of ideas when, in truth, intellectual history is relevant to almost all aspects of historical reality.”

“If these assumptions are correct, then it can only be beneficial to view all history of thought in terms of reception history. What the intellectual historian does, fundamentally, is trace networks of reception: he exposes hidden and not-so-hidden influences; he charts legacies of thinkers, books, ideas, discourses, and concepts.”

“All intellectual historians are interested in the fate of ideas as much as their origins, especially since every origin is always already a point of reception itself. Although the dynamics of reception are more noticeable when translation across national or linguistic boundaries occurs, because the distances between the contexts of creation and reception are often greatest in these instances, we should not lose sight of the fact that ideas are always and everywhere caught up in a process of reception.”

“From the moment an idea is expressed, either verbally or in print, it is traveling.”

What do you all make of this? Is it a new way of saying something old? Or is it a stark challenge? I’m genuinely undecided.

--------------
* My title is, of course, a riff on James Kloppenberg's classic article, "Pragmatism: An Old Name for Some New Ways of Thinking?"

Embodiment and Intellectual History

I recently came across this picture of a Palestinian / American Jewish Roundtable sponsored by the journal Tikkun in the late 1980s. It shows (from left to right) Michael Walzer, Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, Michael Lerner, Edward Said, and Letty Pogrebin.*

What struck me immediately about this image, really the instant I saw it, was how distinctly both Walzer and Said are performing themselves in it.  My ability to say this about Walzer and Said comes from having seen both of them in action:  Said, twice, in graduate school, and Walzer, on a number of occasions over the years, most recently at the latest S-USIH conference last November.  For anyone who experienced Said, or who has experienced Walzer, in person, their gestures in the above photograph are extraordinarily evocative.  (For all I know, the same might be said about Abu-Lughod, Lerner, or Pogrebin, but I have no personal experience of any of them.)

Long before I experienced Walzer or Said in person I had read Just and Unjust Wars and (parts of) Orientalism.**  But seeing each in person altered my relationship to the words on the page...and indeed, expanded my sense of each as a thinker beyond the words on the page.

Historians--perhaps especially intellectual historians--tend to be oriented toward the written word. Over the years some of us have become better at working with media like film, photography, radio, or the plastic arts that are less dependent on the written word.  But one thing I don't think intellectual historians always do as well as we might is deal with the way intellectuals -- and I mean that term broadly -- embody their ideas, the way in which the physical qualities of an intellectual -- the tone of her voice, his self-presentation, her very physical presence -- can have an impact on the transmission, perhaps even the shape, of thought.



If anything, reminding ourselves and our students of the importance of intellectuals' physical presences may grow more important as disembodied communication technologies become more and more ubiquitous.

These questions are a particular issue in my current project on the legacies of Leo Strauss in American public culture.  Leo Strauss by all accounts possessed an extraordinary pedagogical charisma.  Richard G. Stevens has even declared that Strauss was "the greatest classroom teacher in the history of Western Civilization."***  Strauss's students and students's students so esteemed Leo Strauss's classroom performances that, for decades, they privately circulated transcribed recordings of Strauss's classroom lectures.****

But these transcriptions were not generally publicly available. And such a written record would presumably be a pale reflection of the purportedly extraordinary performances that they recorded.

In recent years, however, the Leo Strauss Center at the University of Chicago has begun to put online recordings of classes offered by Leo Strauss at the University of Chicago, Claremont Men's College, and St. John's College from 1958 through 1973.  This effort is the culmination of a slow but steady growth in the openness with which Strauss's students and his students' students have treated the legacy of Strauss. Through the 1970s, many of his students avoided even mentioning Strauss's name in print.  By the late 1990s, the classicist and Strauss student Seth Benardete published Leo Strauss on Plato's Symposium, based on transcribed lectures from a course on Plato's political philosophy that Strauss had given some four decades earlier.*****

There are now recordings of more than thirty courses taught by Strauss available online; twenty more will soon join them.  For those of us interested in Leo Strauss, they're an extraordinary resource that gets us a big step closer to the experience of sitting in the classroom with Strauss himself.

And yet, a voice recording is still not the same thing as watching someone lecture.  I would not have my reaction to the photograph above had I only listened to audio recordings of Walzer and Said.

Having access to such records of the objects of a study is, of course, a luxury reserved for historians of the fairly recent past.  Motion picture records of historical actors are only a little over a century old; audio recordings just a few decades older.

And experiencing these recordings only raises again the question that I've asked above: as intellectual historians, how do we deal with these embodied aspects of the people we study?  

Broader cultural changes certainly affect my reactions to a half-century old recording of Leo Strauss, which might be utterly different from those of a University of Chicago student taking the course at the time the recording was made.  Listening to such a recording while walking my dog as a tenured faculty member in Norman, Oklahoma, is very obviously a different experience from sitting in a no doubt challenging class as an undergraduate in Hyde Park.  

And to the extent that we can translate from our experience of such recordings to that of those present for the original performance (we often have the written remembrances of those who experienced the person in question to help with this process), how should we incorporate this knowledge into the intellectual history we produce?

Most often, I think, these embodied aspects of the people about whom we write get relegated to introductory paragraphs, in which we describe the person we're writing about before turning to the more important matters of the ideas (and texts!) they produced.  But I suspect, at least in certain cases, these embodied aspects of intellectual production are more important than we usually make them out to be.  But I'm not sure what to do with this thought in my own historical practice.

_________________________________
* This picture appeared in Allen Graubard, "From Commentary to Tikkun: The Past and Future of 'Progressive Jewish Intellectuals,'"  Middle East Report, May-June 1989, 17-23 (JSTOR Link).

** In the interest of full disclosure, I may have experienced Said as a dinner guest of my parents during the year they were all at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford (t-shirt slogan: "The Leisure of the Theory Class").  But as I was in fifth grade at the time, I don't think this counts.

*** Richard G. Stevens, "Martin Diamond's Contribution to American Political Thought: Editor's Preface," The Political Science Reviewer v. XXVIII (1999), 3.

**** These transcriptions were also particularly valued for another reason:  Strauss and his students, drawing in part on Plato (as they understand him), have often prized philosophers' oral "teachings" above written ones.  This is, in effect, a special case of the general Straussian assumption that careful speakers and writers tailor their words for their audience. The audience for a written work is necessarily broader and less in the author's control (which is just one of the reasons, Strauss believed, that philosophers write esoterically).  But philosophers can be more frank when talking to their students. For decades, students of Strauss (and their students in turn) privately circulated transcriptions of Leo Strauss's classroom lectures, each bearing the headnote "Recipients are emphatically requested not to seek to increase the circulation of the transcription."

***** This project began while Strauss was still alive, but he was apparently never satisfied with the material so it remained unpublished for decades.

Please Change the Subject

Yesterday I received an unexpected boon in the mail:  a hacked off, hilarious David Hollinger.

Since I will be reviewing Confessing History: Explorations in Christian Faith and the Historian's Vocation (John Fea, Jay Green, and Eric Miller, editors) for this blog some time in the next few months, I ordered the latest volume of Fides et Historia: the journal of the Conference on Faith and History, which features a roundtable on the book. 

I won't be looking at that roundtable for a while.  When I review a book, I never look at other reviews or author comments first.  Chalk it up to the anxiety of influence, or the fear of inadvertent unoriginality of expression.  It just seems best to arrive at my own sense of the book, based on my own reading alone, and write .  But once I'm done writing my review, I like to "check my math" and see where (or whether) my take on the book fits in with other scholars' views.

Instead, when my copy of Fides et Historia 43:2 arrived in the mail yesterday, I turned to David Hollinger's piece (pp. 34-37), part of this volume's featured forum, "Reconciling the Historian's Craft and Religious Belief."

Readers, I encourage you to beg, borrow or steal a copy of this journal and read Hollinger's brief, brilliant scold of an essay.



I do not associate David Hollinger's writing with the overuse of the exclamation point, but there are two in his title:  "The Wrong Question! Please Change the Subject!" And the piece just gets better from there.  Hollinger's exasperation sounds by turns parental and prophetic, as he takes "confessing historians" to task for irresponsibly jeopardizing the fairly recently acquired "mainstream" status of American religious history within the secular academy.

"American academia now has, at long last, a robust, admirably interactive community of scholars working in the field of religious history," Hollinger writes.  "The members of this community can generally take each other's books and articles for the knowledge they offer without getting distracted by what another scholar's religious identity happens to be" (34).  Calls from confessing historians to make space in the secular academy for "confessional" history are like so many snakes in this garden, and Hollinger proceeds to chase them into the sea.

He is responding primarily to Brad Gregory's essay, "Historians' Metaphysical Beliefs and the Writing of Confessional Histories" (9-17).  Hollinger finds fault with Gregory's piece for its (implicit) apologetic for the idea of supernatural causation as a valid explanatory framework for professional historians.  "Religious history," Hollinger scolds, "finally became open to all professional historians largely because we stopped thinking in just this way" (34).

What animates Hollinger's animus toward this Bad Idea is in part the fact that he himself has had to struggle mightily within the discipline to define and defend the legitimacy and importance of American religious history for the secular academy.  He and others have had to work against the notion that "the study of religion is only for those who believe in it." Hollinger has spent a great deal of time and intellectual capital arguing "in forum after forum that historians will not understand the United States in the twentieth century until they confront religion head on" (35).

The biggest obstacle Hollinger has encountered in his project of encouraging the secular academy to take the history of religion seriously "is the perception that religious believers have fatally skewed the field with their apologetics" (35).  Calls to "bring God into history" (37), however subtly articulated, do not help overcome that perception.

This is a fierce, funny essay, but the stakes are quite serious.  History is hampered as a discipline if historians feel like they have to take the long way around to avoid talking about the place of religion in Americans' lives. That's a long detour, and there's a lot of crucial insights that you're going to miss if you don't have a way of approaching the subject that is faithful to the canons of professional, secular history.

Now that historians seem to be headed down a more promising path, the last thing we need is to come face to face with an angel waving the flaming sword of providential appeals, blocking the way to the garden.

The New Hieroglyphics

As regular readers of this blog  -- and former readers of my (now mothballed) personal blog -- are probably aware, I am profoundly ambivalent about the digital humanities.  This ambivalence derives in part from unfamiliarity. When it comes to the digital humanities, I am not yet clear on exactly what they are (or can be), exactly what they do, and exactly what they mean or can mean for both the scholarly enterprise and the wider cultural work of people collectively making sense of the world.

I'm working on remedying my admitted ignorance of DH as an academic discipline, but I still have some homework to do.  In the meantime, my colleagues who are digital humanists have been wonderfully patient about educating me.  Indeed, I expect to learn a thing or two from comments on this post.* 

As I understand them, most apologists for and practitioners of the digital humanities envision their discipline in a both/and kind of way.  In other words, the digital humanities are not a replacement for pen-and-ink scholarship, but a vast expansion and extension of the possibilities of all kinds of scholarship, including scholarship based upon and ultimately aimed at producing good old-fashioned printed texts.  I see nothing that is troubling and much that is promising about this approach.

Nevertheless, I have occasionally come across some apologists for the digital humanities who predict that print and print culture -- in a word, the book -- will eventually become obsolete, and who seem to think that this development is A Good Thing.  Indeed, some of them would like to speed the process along.

This hoped-for obsolescence of the book strikes me as a Very Bad Idea.

Now, I'm a historian, so by definition and inclination I am decidedly not in the business of predicting the future.  ("Not my table!")  But there's something unsettling for me about some people's hope for the demise of the codex.  I call this unsettling something the "hieratic potential" embedded in digital texts:  the possibility that written knowledge will once again become the exclusive property of (something like a postmodern secular version of) a priesthood.  I'm not really thinking of the pre-Reformation priesthood; I'm thinking more along the lines of the ancient Egyptian priesthood.


As Carlo Ginzburg so deftly demonstrates in The Cheese and the Worms, during the Reformation, common people gained access to texts which had once been the purview of the privileged and the priests. People with no special training beyond the ability to read and write could (mis)read those texts in ways that expanded their mental, moral and material universes, making them a menace to the hierarchy.  

Menocchio's ability to acquire a book, read it, and pass it on to someone else serves as a stunning synecdoche summing up a profoundly transformative historical moment.  The printing press -- a proto-industrial technology -- rendered written texts relatively cheap and suddenly, simply, widely accessible.  Beyond literacy (no small thing), Menocchio and the readers of his time required no special tools to access the words on those newly available pages except sunlight, candle-light, or firelight.  And sharing that knowledge was something they could accomplish with no technological mediation.  It was a matter of placing a text into a new reader's hands.

To this day, the technology for producing or reading a written text remains simple, robust, and nearly universally accessible.  It's nice if you own your own printing press -- it sure came in handy for William Lloyd Garrison.  But, at their simplest level, the tools for the production and dissemination of text-based knowledge are easily obtained and easily used. Paper, ink, a light source -- that's pretty much all you need to write with, or to read by.

This doesn't mean that all readers or potential readers have universal access to knowledge.   Economic advantage, advanced education, critical disciplinary training which has only been possible because we do not usually have to worry about where our next meal is coming from -- these inequalities allow some of us access to the text -- to its power -- in ways that are not open to others. And many are the gatekeepers who want to keep things as they are.

One of the most admirable goals of activists in the digital humanities is the goal of open access: moving "the text" out from behind the iron gates and ivied walls and paywalls, detaching it from some of the protective structures which make it unavailable and therefore unassailable -- the special collections room, the closed-stack library, the archive, the restricted-access database -- and opening it up to the scrutiny of anyone who has the basic ability to read it on a screen.

On a screen.

That screen adds a subtle but significant layer of mediation between the reader and the text, something altogether different from and deeper than the distance between the reader and the hand-written or press-printed page. 

Getting the texts from the library shelves to the ereader screen requires encoding them. They are translated into an inscrutable language -- a type of writing decipherable only by computer scientists and software engineers who, thankfully, design these reading tools to also decode for us what has been encoded.

What I see happening here, though, is the development of an elite system of writing, a new kind of hieroglyphics. Knowledge is being preserved in a language which is illegible without access to highly specialized training and expensive equipment. We are embedding texts in a coded language inscribed on microchips, and encasing those microchips in a proprietary system which controls how and what we may read.   Furthermore, the ability to get those texts from the servers on which they reside to our own screens -- Kindle, Nook, laptop -- depends upon how and under what conditions and by whose permission we can use the internet. 

So what happens if we lose (or are denied) the ability to download and read the coded texts?  What happens when someone decides that something you have downloaded onto your Kindle -- say, 1984 or Animal Farm -- is just not suitable reading material any more?  Yes, Amazon.com zapped those downloads due to an apparent copyright infringement -- a presumably legitimate reason for an astonishingly Orwellian demonstration of how easily digital knowledge can be "disappeared."

After over five hundred years of widely accessible "open source" coding -- Gutenberg's cosmologically transformative gift, a fast and reliable process for producing and distributing words on a page -- we are heading down a path that makes not just the production and distribution of texts, but their very reception, proprietary. We are de-democratizing knowledge, even as we talk about and advocate for increased access, because we are making that access dependent on the use of a proprietary coded language encased in manufactured products whose control remains in the hands of those who sold them, not those who bought them. And even if those manufactured products or distribution networks become so cheap as to be nearly ubiquitous -- free internet for everyone, free ereaders for all -- they will always be an inescapable mediating technology between the reader and the text, a technology that the reader cannot circumvent.

When there are no more printing presses -- when the books are gone, when all old knowledge has been digitized, and all new knowledge is digitally distributed -- then there will be only one way to access powerful and empowering knowledge, a way that is mediated (and monitored and limited) by corporations and governments who develop and control the proprietary delivery systems of all things digital. Who controls that technology? Who designs those tools?  For whom will they be made available, and under what conditions?  Who will guarantee texts a place on the grid, and who will guarantee us access to the grid as readers?  And who will assure us that even if the grid goes dark, and stays dark for far too long, we can still access the knowledge embedded in those unreadable digital files? 

Or will digital texts become the new hieroglyphics, faint scratchings on the pedestal of a vast colossal wreck of a culture that unwisely abandoned a well-worn instrument of liberation:  printed words on a page, "portable property," books simply -- but not always safely -- passed from one hand to another.



------------
*Readers of my old blog might recognize some sections of this post, which is a substantial revision of remarks I had made there last year.

Where is the historiography of the New Religious Left?

In light of the comments on my post on John Courtney Murray and John Ford, and Tim's post on Rick Santorum's Catholicism, I thought of all the various books I have read and read about and skimmed through having to do with the rise of the Christian Right. Having just completed a book that deals with debates over war among religious intellectuals, I realized how lopsided the scholarship seems to be on recent American religious history. And so, I have a query for our community: what books, essays, lectures capture this history of the religious LEFT since the 1970s?

Let me provide some context for my question. I have referred in the past to a comment that Martin Marty made on Krista Tippet's APM show (now called 'Being') in which he suggested that rarely had a religious group given up so much power with so little resistance as the liberal Protestant establishment had in the post-WWII period. Marty illustrated his point by explaining that when he began to write for the Christian Century in the late 1950s he was told to avoid saying much that was positive about Catholics, yet by the early 1960s, that editorial policy had been reversed as the U.S. slid into an ecumenical awakening. As Robert Wuthnow documented in his useful history, The Restructuring of American Religion, by the early 1970s, the liberal religious establishment no longer had coherence and in its wake a conservative surge had taken its place.

We have had many fine examples of scholarship on the rise of the New Christian Right, among such works are those by Dan Williams (a participant at the S-USIH conference), Bethany Moreton, Darren Dochuk, Lisa McGirr, Kim Phillips-Fein, Patrick Allitt, Michael Lienesch, and even Gary Wills, to name just a few. There are books by leaders of the Christian left--Stanley Hauerwas, Jim Wallis (pictured above being arrested), William Cavanaugh, Cornel West--that serve as examples of their critique of the right, of the nation-state, of war, but were are the historical assessments of their work? James Davison Hunter has recently produced a book, To Change the World, which I have not yet read and it seems to survey and critique Hauerwas's position on issues of church and state interaction, but I consider Hunter as much a participant of the era he surveys as anything else.

Again, where are books about the religious left that are comparable to those on the religious right?

Genealogies of Neoliberalism

Longtime readers of this blog should be well aware of the ongoing discussion/debate we've had for the past few years about the genealogy of neoliberalism. New readers should go back and read some of the back-and-forth that occupied so much of the blog's time and space--Neoliberalism at USIH. With that in mind, it looks like we should all read the latest edition of Radical History Review, edited by Mark Soderstrom and Jason Stahl, dedicated to "Genealogies of Neoliberalism." Articles in the issue that seem to speak specifically to USIH:

Brian Tochterman, "Theorizing Neoliberal Urban Development: A Genealogy from Richard Florida to Jane Jacobs"

Ryan Patrick Murphy, "United Airlines is For Lovers?: Flight Attendant Activism and the Family Values Economy in the 1990s"

Stephen Dillon, "Possessed by Death: The Neoliberal-Carceral State, Black Feminism, and the Afterlife of Slavery"

Jon D. Rossini and Patricia Ybarra, "Neoliberalism, Historiography, Identity Politics: Toward a New Historiography of Latino Theater"

Sergio A. Cabrera, "To Serve God and Housewives?: Gender, Christianity, and the Political Economy of Shopping"

The Catholic Mind Of Rick Santorum

While I've been engrossed in other minor matters over the past few days, I've been fascinated with the sudden rise of Rick Santorum's Republican presidential bid over the past few weeks. As a Catholic I'm supposed to be treating Santorum's campaign with respect because of his pro-life credentials, his general family values, and his espousal of subsidiarity. Although I attend to these issues and more when I evaluate my candidates, as an intellectual historian I also look at their long arc of development---the things that seem to occupy their minds and hearts as well as their public political personae. With that, today I want to meditate on the Catholic mind of Rick Santorum, as well as what one might call the "Romanization of the American culture wars." As our new contributor LD perceptively quipped at our Facebook page yesterday, "Come for the current events; stay for the history." Indeed.

One could do worse in analyzing Santorum's thinking than starting with a primary source: an essay penned by the candidate himself and published on January 20, 2012 (hat-tip to Ethan Schrum for pointing me to this). These two pieces have a lot of meat in them (both containing deeper issues on which to ruminate), but I'm going to stick to Santorum himself today. What follows is an interlinear, but non-exhaustive, breakdown of the ten-paragraph piece (links, bolds, and underlines mine):

In 1977, Peter Berger and the late Richard John Neuhaus published a now-famous essay, “To Empower People,” which argued that “mediating structures” such as family, church, charities, and neighborhood associations are essential for a healthy civil society.* I entirely agree, and as those who have followed my career will know, I attempted to develop these ideas throughout my time in the United States Senate and in my own 2005 book, It Takes a Family. I believe passionately that the family is the basic building block of society, and that in contrast to President Obama’s immense sums of borrowed money being spent on entitlement programs and his undermining of charities and religious liberty, we can and must do far better—here in South Carolina and throughout the country.

Neuhaus is of course famous for many things, not the least for being a confidant of, or at least an inspiration to, President George W. Bush. Here Santorum is trying to go a little deeper---trying to capture something of the spirit Tocqueville observed about American society. The first sentence of this piece, however, has been cribbed from the publisher's blurb for a collection of essays edited by Michael Novak titled To Empower People: From State to Civil Society (not coincidentally promoted at the American Enterprise Institute's website). As a post-World War II emigrant intellectual from Austria, Berger is someone who ought to get more attention here at USIH, especially since James Davison Hunter was apparently one of Berger's students.

My problem with this paragraph is its maxim that "the family is the basic building block of society." It's true---as far is it goes---and Catholics return to this principal over and over again, but many treat it as if it's the end of the story. Even conservatives, especially politicians, who espouse "mediating structures" often de-emphasize those structures in favor of talking about "family values" in the context of the Culture Wars. I agree with Andrew Hartman that this talk is sincere and not merely a Republican political canard. The language captures something fundamental---that it is related to an identity crisis, instigated by own ongoing lack of adjustment to modernity, that underlays so much of the late twentieth-century's incarnation of the Culture Wars. Even so, the Catholic overlay given by Santorum, as well as by Cathoolic intellectuals, is that we can solve the question of the meaning of America by simply communicating better with our fathers (heavenly and earthly), mothers (ditto), sisters, and brothers. The rhetorical focus is on blood family and our Church-going compatriots rather than our self-made tribes, ethnic groups, and, strangely enough, larger forms of identity that bind together America as a nation. Indeed, if we followed Santorum's, Neuhaus's, and Berger's advice to an extreme, American culture would be more Balkanized and local than it already is---perhaps more than it ever was in the nineteenth century. It's this anti-globalism that differentiates Santorum from Romney as much as anything. ...Returning to the essay...

I am running for President because I believe in practical, constitutional, and limited government that respects the rights of ordinary citizens and makes room for local communities to thrive because real people who know one another support one another. In my tradition we call this the principle of subsidiarity: the idea that whenever possible, reform should happen locally because people closest to the need have the most invested in the solution. From its first day in office my presidency will restrain the overreach of Washington by giving space for civil society institutions like congregations, families, businesses, charities and community organizations to flourish—acknowledging that the kind of solidarity that exists in local communities is far stronger and more effective than taxpayer-funded subsidies from Washington bureaucrats.

Two historians, Michael Kazin and Thomas Sugrue, have tackled the issue of subsidiarity in recent pieces about Newt Gingrich, Saul Alinsky, and President Obama. Just last week I referenced those pieces (point #4) at USIH. Gingrich accidentally and indirectly denigrated subsidiarity by trashing Saul Alinsky. Apparently Gingrich was unaware of the Alinsky's links to one of the great Catholic cosmopolitan thinkers of the twentieth century, Jacques Maritain. Maritain found a way to support both subsidiarity and international human rights, while also respecting personhood and the political process. I don't foresee Santorum referencing Maritain anytime soon in campaign speeches (despite the former's enthusiasm for natural law, which as Molly Worthen reminded us does connect with Thomas Aquinas). But at least Santorum has not rhetorically ruled out the connection, the possibility, for liberal Catholics who lean right and may be unhappy with Obama.

Wikipedia offers two entries for subsidiarity---one with a kind of secular bent, and oriented toward European politics, and the other focused on the Catholic teaching of subsidiarity. I linked to the secular one in the excerpt above, but the Catholic one applies as well. Here are the first few lines from the Catholic-oriented entry:

"The principle of subsidiarity was developed by German theologian Oswald von Nell-Breuning.[2] His work influenced the social teaching of Pope Pius XI in Quadragesimo Anno and holds that government should undertake only those initiatives which exceed the capacity of individuals or private groups acting independently. Functions of government, business, and other secular activities should be as local as possible. If a complex function is carried out at a local level just as effectively as on the national level, the local level should be the one to carry out the specified function. The principle is based upon the autonomy and dignity of the human individual, and holds that all other forms of society, from the family to the state and the international order, should be in the service of the human person."

The best discussion I've seen of Catholic subsidiarity in intellectual history is Jay Corrin's excellent transnational study, Catholic Intellectuals and the Challenge of Democracy (Notre Dame Press, 2002). I first wrote about Corrin's book here (about two-thirds down the page), and have long had plans for an extended retrospective review. In the post you get a taste---Corrin's book receives just a summation in a single paragraph. [Two asides: (a) If someone from Notre Dame Press is reading this, get that book out in paperback! (b) On my long-planned review, I have twenty-some note cards filled, front and back, with thoughts on the book.]

Returning to Santorum...

In the last three years, the current President has added more to America’s deficit than the collective total of all prior presidents—and this comes at tremendous cost to our children and grandchildren, and it is not working. Unemployment continues to exceed the promised “8 percent” he told us his whopping $787 billion stimulus package would guarantee. But even more problematically, Mr. Obama’s policies have made far too many of us less resilient, less responsible and less free. Food stamps usage has increased by 41 percent since the President took office. More than 1 in 7 U.S. adults—and an astonishing 1 in every 4 children—today receive food stamps. The Temporary Assistance to Needy Families program received billions in additional annual spending. Subsidized housing, the Women, Infants and Children program (WIC) and the numbers of children born out of wedlock—are all up. As a father this breaks my heart. This should not be.

This is, to say the least, a very one-sided definition of freedom. First, it is not the assistance that makes people "less resilient, less responsible and less free." Indeed, this assertion is inconsistent with existential Christian theology and philosophy which would assert that freedom begins with a state of consciousness about one's own responsibility for her/his relationship with God. Not that Catholicism has ever been exceedingly friendly to Christian existentialism. Is there, by the way, a historical theological-philosophical study out there of Catholic existentialism, or of Soren Kierkegaard's influence on Catholic thought? My point here is that there is nothing in Catholic theology, including the principal of subsidiarity, that necessitates an inverse relationship between government assistance and less resilience, responsibility, or freedom. Only Catholic ideologues like Father Coughlin assert this absolutely.

Returning to Santorum's essay (though the intellectual returns are diminishing)...

I will address this issue of father-absence and family-strengthening head-on, because doing so makes sense both culturally and economically. Today, more than 25 million American children, at least 64% of African Americans and 36% of Hispanics, live in father-absent homes. Research tells us that low-income children without a father at home are five times more likely to remain poor. Children growing up without a dad are 2-3 times as likely to become teen parents and engage in criminal behavior: for these young people, economic realities follow cultural-relational realities, not the other way around. We need courageous fathers; that’s what moms want and America’s children need.

I'm not qualified to speak about this point in relation to social science and American intellectual history. I wonder if Santorum is working from research within the conservative tribe, by Charles Murray no less, on the so-called breakdown of the working-class male work ethic over the past 30-40 years? Anyway, it's clear that Santorum prioritizes culture over economic drivers. It's a very Catholic way of seeing the world. Santorum sees a conservative-liberal dichotomy: liberals believe that work availability engenders a work ethic, conservatives believe people are the way they are (e.g. working-class whites are now lazy and overprivileged, won't accept retraining, and jobs hence should be outsourced). But Catholic conservatives like Santorum believe that if we can change the culture, the economy will grow again. Hence conservative Catholics believe that the Culture Wars will literally pay in the long run for America. ...Returning to the essay.

As president I will support state and local funding options that strengthen marriage and support for low-income families so that dads are incentivized to support their children and be involved in their lives. I will not attempt to “transform” faith-based and community organizations into bureaucratic arms of the federal government, but will instead look to devolve resources to states, much as I did in 1996 in reforming welfare. And put wind behind the back of great charities like the Salvation Army and Catholic Charities which have been discriminated against by liberal courts, regulators, and now the Obama Administration.

So, Santorum doesn't want to make "faith-based and community organizations into bureaucratic arms of the federal government," but he'd be happy to make them arms of the state government to recreate America's Christian "moral establishment" at a more local level? He needs to read David Sehat's study of what happened when that was the case. Check out the four reviews in our round table on David's book (here, here, here, and here), as well has his response. ...Back to Santorum's essay.

The Obama Administration only makes it harder for generous Americans to help those in need, even though Obamanomics has resulted in 1 in 6 Americans being in poverty. Obama has proposed limiting deductions for charitable giving, for those Americans who are large givers which United Way estimates could cost charities between more than $4 billion a year, larger than the operating budgets of of the American Cancer Society, World Vision, St. Jude's Children's Hospital, Habitat for Humanity, and the American Heart Association combined. President Obama has also worked to define “religious employers” in ObamaCare so narrowly that it’s doubtful that Jesus Christ’s ministry would even qualify.

It's hard to take seriously a paragraph anchored by the incendiary political rhetoric of "Obamanomics" and "Obamacare," but I'll give it my own Catholic analysis. Whether one agrees the his reasoning or not, Santorum's political point about the religious employers-contraception debate must have had political legitimacy because the Obama administration modified their policy. I don't think it's wrong to measure that kind of legitimacy in relation to actual actions. There were many religious leaders who feared the long-term implications of religious institutions being forced to deliver health care that conflicted (potentially or really) with moral teachings. The administration therefore gave way (though some Catholic bishops, and probably Santorum, felt the administration's move is still inadequate).

Beyond that I'll make only one observation: Isn't it interesting how Santorum has made our economic and cultural situation dependent on long-range cultural and political problems (i.e. family breakdown and federal overreach), but also largely blamed those same problems on policies enacted over only three years by a Christian president who supports responsible fatherhood (and with one full year, and counting, of those policies refracted by a Republican House and gridlocked Senate)? ...Back to the essay.

Moreover, his Administration stopped Catholic Charities from their long-standing partnership with government to help women who are victims of sex trafficking because they do not support abortion, just vulnerable women being abused. Is that caring for the least of these, respecting the free exercise of religion, or is that playing to the extreme left to the detriment of women? Many on the left care more about being politically correct and imposing their agenda than caring for those with HIV or kids that need adopted. They didn’t stop there. They told a positive marriage program to help teenage girls that they could talk about marriage just not abstinence. So marriage is OK just not fidelity.

I'm not qualified to speak on either the Catholic Charities-sex trafficking or teen abstinence program issues. But I can say anecdotally that I've not seen any poll numbers that support the notion of raped and abused women being forced to keep the resultant babies. On this point abolitionist pro-lifers, Catholic and otherwise, are strongly at odds with American culture.

I was the best advocate for private sector charitable activity and giving incentives in Congress for many years, taking on those who wanted to restrict freedom and civil society, and successfully passing several provisions into law that enabled the donation of food to the hungry, good equipment to volunteer firefighter companies, and large IRA contributions to faith-based groups, education, and other charitable groups. I will continue to be an advocate for the little platoons of faithful servants who help their neighbors all around our country.

Now for the big finish...

It is time to stop rewarding bad behavior via government handouts that have unintended consequences, and to instead respect hard work, family, and local civil society institutions (like the hundreds of congregations, private hospitals, and grassroots community organizations throughout South Carolina) that make our country truly great. When the French thinker Alexis de Tocqueville visited our land 200 years ago, he said that our political associations “form only a detail in the immense picture that the sum of associations presents here”—and that those associations are “essential for defending liberty from State tyranny.”

Saturday's primary election is an opportunity to send a clear message to the current president that freedom is back. We do not want a European-style welfare state; we want freedom to be neighbors to our neighbors. We want the federal government to focus on keeping us free and standing for our values and interests around the world. With your help, I will defend our country, restrain federal spending, restore the honor of marriage and family, while respecting civil society which forges local solutions to the challenges we face in America.

Line one from the first paragraph above is a standard talking point of the post-1960s New Right. It is also one of the three points from Albert O. Hirschman's 1991 book, The Rhetoric of Reaction: the perversity thesis. In a nutshell, the helpful hand of the mid-century welfare state only results in a decrease in the real welfare of the recipient via spiritual degradation. I don't get the pivot here to Tocqueville beyond the association already made above to subsidiarity. It is an anachronistic association in that Tocqueville was unaware of how voluntary associations would work in a post-industrial, globalized industrial-financial state.

I don't mean to say that references to Tocqueville in 2012 are useless, but rather that they have to be done carefully. And that care must also be used in relation to romantic medieval visions of village subsidiarity that dominated the thinking of late nineteenth-century thinkers like Chesterton, Belloc, and others who influenced early twentieth-century American Catholicism. - TL