Welcome, Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn...and Other Changes!

We are delighted to announce the latest addition to the team here at the U.S. Intellectual History Blog: Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, who will be joining us as our regular Sunday blogger.  Elisabeth is Professor of History at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University, and is the author of, among other works, Race Experts: How Racial Etiquette, Sensitivity Training, and New Age Therapy Hijacked the Civil Rights Revolution and Black Neighbors: Race and the Limits of Reform in the American Settlement House Movement, 1890-1945. She also blogs at Longing for the Real.

Elisabeth is an old friend of S-USIH (to the extent that scholarly societies less than a year old can have old friends).  She participated as a panel commentator at our 2009 Conference.  At the 2010 Conference, she was part of a plenary panel entitled "Intellectual History For What?"  And at last year's S-USIH Conference, she presented a brown-bag talk on the state of intellectual history. It was my honor and pleasure to be at the last two of these presentations and was struck, on both occasions, by Elisabeth's commitment to both intellectual seriousness and intellectual community, challenging us to be better scholars and better friends.  I like to think that these are values that we strive for at this blog. I know that Elisabeth will help us achieve both. 

More USIH Blog announcements after the fold...


Some perceptive readers may have noticed that a disclaimer recently showed up in our right margin:

The Society for U.S. Intellectual History is a nonprofit, nonpartisan educational organization that has applied to the Internal Revenue Service for tax-exempt status. The opinions expressed on the blog are strictly those of the individual writers and do not represent those of the Society or of the writers' employers.

As a new professional association, S-USIH is applying for 501(c)(3) non-profit status. And one of the restrictions placed on 501(c)(3)s is that they are "absolutely prohibited from directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office."  Since this blog is affiliated with S-USIH, we need to be sure to steer clear of violating this regulation.  This disclaimer is part of that effort: it reiterates that none of the bloggers at USIH speak for the Society.  Additionally, each of our regular bloggers have made a commitment to refrain from intervening in favor or against any current candidate for elective public office in their future posts on this blog. 

Our right margin features another new gadget: once again, this blog will be participating in the For the Love of Film film preservation blogathon. This year's blogathon will take place from May 13 to 18 and will focus on Alfred Hitchcock.  Funds raised by donations during the blogathon will benefit the National Film Preservation Foundation's goal of recording a score to Alfred Hitchcock's silent The White Shadow (1923) and streaming the restored film on their website.  This year's blogathon will be co-hosted by Self-Styled Siren, Ferdy on Films, and This Island Rod.

The Baffler Round Table, Entry #1: Eric Brandom

[Editor's Note: This is entry number 1 of 4 total in our round table covering The Baffler, No. 19 (March 2012). Today's piece comes from Eric Brandom, a Ph.D. candidate at Duke University. Tomorrow's will be from Adam Parsons and Wednesday's from Keith Woodhouse. A response to all three will follow from John Summers, The Baffler's new editor-in-chief. - TL]
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“The man in the street is not expected to know the intricacies of the magic of inducing fertility or casting evil spells. What he must know, however, is which magicians to call upon if the need for either of these services arises…The practical difficulties that may arise in certain societies (for instance, when there are competing coteries of experts, or when specialization has become so complicated that the layman gets confused) need not concern us at the moment.” [1]

This is the first part of a roundtable discussion of The Baffler 19. The normal conventions of academic reviewing are difficult to apply to such a publication. I have been selective, knowing that other contributors will have different interests and perspectives. As a guiding hypothesis, useful as a provocation, I want to suggest that The Baffler’s editorial line in this issue is shaped by social constructivism as opposed to a more thoroughgoing materialism. The central problem to be solved is the one raised, and deferred, in the above citation: expertise. This means, I want to suggest, that although the writers here represented--let us called them Bafflers--can explain why certain social arrangements crush creativity and imagination, their critical stance amounts to asserting the autonomy of the various spheres of life, most saliently the economic, political, and artistic. This is problematic because the Bafflers care very much about how these are or might be connected to one another.

The Baffler was founded in the late 1980s as an anti-business “punk literary magazine” in the spirit of Arthur Rimbaud.[2]
It is now considerably older than this precocious young man was when he gave up poetry and took up trading in Africa. What is The Baffler up to these days? John Summers frames Baffler 19 as a broadside against faith in a digitized “creative class” (7). It keeps its distance from academia yet, as Thomas Frank wrote almost 15 years ago, it is conducted with the understanding that, “yes, postmodernism is the cultural logic of late capitalism.”[3] It is surely a somewhat quixotic gesture to so proudly claim the form of the “little magazine” this far into the 21^st century. Does The Baffler help us, as Lionel Trilling wrote commemorating the tenth anniversary of another little magazine, “to organize a new union between our political ideas and our imagination”?[4] How is this best done? The quality of the contributions and the general level of editorial ambition--especially as this issue is a new beginning--suggests that this standard is not too high. But, it seems to me, the constructivist rather than materialist perspective adopted by the magazine as a whole makes it difficult to engage either with the technology under debate in so much of the issue, or the physicality of the human bodies this technology is meant to liberate or at least comfort.

The Baffler 19 certainly paints a discouraging picture of the experts supposed to manage the rolling crisis that is today’s economy. Most alarming is, in Maureen Tkacik’s evocative phrase, a “tendency to level the playing field between reality and fiction” (120-121). According to Thomas Frank, the marketization of everything and the attendant growth of inequality have undermined all the institutions of “organized intelligence” (11). Frank compares the current patterns of economic thought to the transition from the 1930s to the 1940s. “Premature market skeptics” are dismissed today, even as their positions are publically confirmed, just as “premature antifascists” were dismissed after the opening of hostilities against Nazi Germany (a theme echoed by Newell’s fondness for referring to “quislings” in the press or congress (30, 34)). The system as currently rigged, Frank says, means that even the election of a president who believes in expert opinion does not solve the problem. The experts are rewarded not for telling hard truths that eventually turn out to be right, but for reassuringly collective error. James K. Galbraith frames and excerpts from a memo drafted by a group of economists, which he sent to the Obama administration in 2008. It is filed under “We told you so,” and is the moment Cassandra rarely gets. Jim Newell’s “I Was a Teenage Gramlich” is something like a microhistorical account of how one learns to speak the language of economics fluently without, in fact, attaching thoughtful meaning to these words. We are far from 1969, when it could be publically asserted that “we have learned at last to manage a modern economy to assure its continued growth”--what happened?[5]

Rick Perlstein begins the story in the ‘70s--the 1870s. Intransigents like William Lloyd Garrison who “pointed out that the new systems of agricultural labor […] guarded by Ku Klux Klan terror, scarcely differed from slavery,” were dismissed (38). The great strike waves of the era were called anti-American, “transcending strife--achieving consensus--was the meaning of the new nation” (38). Reconstruction was achieved through a nationalist, racist, anti-labor ideology. The same ideology of transcendent national unity, again built out of broken promises to African Americans, Perlstein suggests, brought Ronald Reagan to the White House in the wake of a civil rights struggle that was was somewhere between a revolution and a civil war. Reagan invented--or anyway first made real--a new political language: “Reagan did not get elected to the presidency because he promised to dismantle big government. The Reagan Moment arrived less because of any popular shift in ideology about the role of the state than because of the kind of stories Ronald Reagan told” (46). Through sheer embodied political work--but also very canny timing--Reagan remade American political discourse and therefore the coordinates of the politically possible. Perlstein’s Reagan, we might suggest, is the organic intellectual of the rising creative class that comes in for such abuse throughout this magazine.

Which, it seems to me, begs the question of how American political discourse might be changed in a different direction, one more to the liking of The Baffler. Chris Lehmann’s meditation on The Harbor, a recently re-published novel written in 1915 by Ernest Poole, suggests one set of constraints. It is a bildungsroman for Billy, a writer, torn between the upper reaches of the business elite and the toiling manual laborers at the harbor. Poole knew something about this himself. Indeed, the novel draws heavily on Poole’s own experiences helping to put on the 1913 Paterson Pageant in Madison Square Gardens, to support an IWW-led silk workers’ strike. The Pageant, an “artistic success,” was, according to Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, “disastrous to solidarity during the last days of a losing strike.”[6] The show closed after one performance, the strike lost, and many of the artists involved went off to Europe. As Lehmann emphasizes, this way of thinking about international and cross-class solidarity came to an abrupt end with the arrival of war the next summer. 

The novel comes from a very different moment in American politics and culture--one in which many of the most prominent writers were socialists. Yet Lehmann detects some echoes with our own time and draws a cautionary conclusion. The Harbor’s “real romantic conflict lies between the narrator and the crowd” (56). It is an exploration of a bourgeois intellectual’s psycho-drama involvement with the proletariat, “his craving for authenticity” (58). “The socialists of the past century were less besotted with working-class internationalism for its own sake than they were smitten with the psychic compensations of the enhanced reality that life among the proletariat had to offer” (59). Indeed one can only agree that “the struggle for justice in the workplace is plenty taxing on its own, without the added burden of producing existential meaning for restless bourgeois spirits” (58). Lehmann, citing Christopher Lasch’s judgment that “one signal failing of the twentieth century’s new radicalism was its misapplication of political means to cultural ends” (59), concludes that whatever the working class is, “one way to ensure that its lot will never improve is to keep it always at voyeuristic arm’s length” (59). It is easy to find contemporary examples of wealthy and privileged audiences finding “authenticity,” “enhanced reality,” and “existential meaning” in representations of what was once called the lower depths. But I wonder if the widely-held assumption that “struggle for justice in the workplace” can no longer generate existential meaning for anyone is not a more serious problem. What’s more, the heirs of Poole and Billy seem unable to provide any kind of answer to Perlstein’s Reagan who, following Lasch, seems to have successfully applied cultural means to political ends. What’s a Baffler to do about this?

One answer might come from a different moment of American leftism. Baffler 19 prints the first third of the story--“Cotton Tenants”--that James Agee and Walker Evans filed with Fortune Magazine in 1936. The story was refused, and has never before been published in this form; Agee expanded and reworked it into Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. It is brilliant writing, a powerful and detailed description of the “existential meaning” of a given time and place. Such a document is not published here out of purely historical interest. What should a writer or artist who wants to be political today learn from the kind of literary reportage of humanity in misery represented by Agee’s text?

The ethical problem that drove the prose of Famous Men was self-torture over the possibility of making something like saleable art out of the suffering of real human beings. It is absent from this earlier version. Consider the first sentence: “Line them up on their front porches, their bodies archaic in their rags as farm bodies are; line them against that grained wood which is their shelter in three rude friezes and see, one by one, who they are: the Tingles, the Fields, the Burroughs” (152). Here is the objectification--archaic bodies in friezes--by insertion into art history that Agee struggled against in order to make Famous Men. The sensitivity of the writing is calibrated to an objectivity so confident in itself that the unknowable is not destabilizing. Lucile Burroughs, ten years old, is a “full-blown enigma […] she uses her eyes to watch into the eyes of other people, quite as calmly as death itself, and as cluelessly, too. [… S]he is advanced in consciousness to that stage at which a child dislikes its name” (157). But Agee is not yet so advanced as to replace this name with a pseudonym--that would come only in the later version of the text.

For Agee’s cotton farmers, labor comes quite directly out of the body, and is inscribed on it. Like George Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier (1937), with which it is almost exactly contemporary, “Cotton Tenants” is therefore obsessed with bodies. A mother’s breast is “shriveled and knottily veined; and her hands, when you notice them, are startling: it is as if they were a couple of sizes too large, drawn over what the keen wrists called for” (156-157). One man’s body “which would otherwise have been very conventionally handsome, is knotted into something else again by the work he has done; and his skin, alarmingly fair beyond the elbows and neck, is cratered and discolored by the food he has eaten and the vermin he has slept with” (156). The same man “is a very poor picker. When he was a child he fell in the fireplace and burnt the flesh off the flat of both hands, so his fingers are stiff and slow and the best he has ever done in a day is 150 pounds. Average for a man is nearer 250” (161-162). It is clear that in a certain immediate sense, if one is to criticize an economic or political regime, one must insist on the damage done to people, the pain inflicted on human bodies. Yet from social criticism, it is easy to slide into a new voyeuristic exploitation. The Baffler 19 contains nothing else like Agee’s prose, and does not seem interested in contemporary journalism that treads the same dangerous ground.  

Fiction, on the other hand, still aspires to map out just how each body is pinned to the reproductive wheel of the capitalist economy. It avoids Agee’s ethical dilemma by subtracting truth-claims. “My Own Little Mission,” a sort of monologue from Dubravka Ugrešić that is broken into pieces and spread at intervals through the issue, is its most effective literary encounter with life under late-late capitalism--the question of its fictionality, perhaps like Reagan’s imaginary bridges, seems beside the point. “Edge Lands” by Chris N. Brown is set in an artists’ colony, a quasi-sovereign state carved out of Mexico. The dystopia running underneath the spectacular, sensual, experiments that the artists perform on themselves and other living bodies is, of course, the corporate world that pays for it all. It is an apologetic, self-pitying story told by the “creative class” to itself. Kim Stanley Robinson’s “2312” rings a change on the witticism (now raised to the level of postmodern metaphysics) that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. The first part of the text is a light and helpful guide to physically making one’s own biosphere out of a hollowed-out asteroid. Its smooth and reassuring voice gives way to chopped-up fragments of exposition describing the Accelerando: a space elevator in Quito; Mondragon accords for an AI-planned economy; and the GINI coefficient on Mars. Insistence on the level of form that it is difficult for us to imagine that “capitalism […] with some rule and attitude changes […] has proven it can be an interesting game, even beautiful, like baseball or volleyball. It is a valid project at the margin, a form of self-actualization, not to be applied to the necessities, but on the margin a nice hobby, even perhaps an art form” (139). Here indeed is a dream for the politicized artist--if only capitalism could be rendered as marginal and easy to ignore as I am--that would have made little sense to Agee.

David Graeber tells us, in “Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit,” that we aren’t likely to get any of this imagination-freeing technology. Graeber has been most in view recently both for his early involvement in Occupy Wall Street and for his timely Debt: The First 5000 Years (2011).[7] His basic claim is that since the middle of the 20^th century, but particularly since 1970, the rate of real technological change has slowed and nearly halted. We are literally going more slowly now--Apollo 10, in 1969, was the fastest a human being has ever travelled (71). Postmodernism, as a broad cultural constellation, is the recognition that in the last 40 years “the only breakthroughs were those that made it easier to create, transfer, and rearrange virtual projections of things.” These have stood in for what we really wanted, “pocket-size nuclear fusion plants or telekinetic mind-reading devices” (68). Nor, in a binary he uses several times, do we have artificial intelligence or robots to do our housework for us. “The Internet”--the obvious answer to the challenge that nothing has changed--“is a remarkable innovation but all we are talking about is a super-fast and globally accessible combination of library, post office, and mail-order catalogue” (77). Adding touch-screens to cell phones is kind of neat, but it does not constitute a fundamental technological breakthrough, and for the past decades we’ve done little better than this.

The central explanation Graeber offers for this failure of expected change is in the title of the piece--the declining rate of profit. “Marx argued that […] value--and therefore profits--can be extracted only from human labor. Competition forces factory owners to mechanize production, to reduce labor costs, but while this is to the short-term advantage of the firm, mechanization’s effect is to drive down the general rate of profit” (73). There is no consensus about the accuracy of these claims, “but if it is true, then the decision by industrialists not to pour research funds into the invention of […] robot factories […] and instead to relocate their factories to labor-intensive, low-tech facilities in China of the Global South makes a great deal of sense” (73). Of course capital prefers not to invest in labor-saving machines, and will take its profits wherever the geopolitical situation allows. Globalization and sheer police power have broken real worker resistance.

This Marxian explanation is accompanied by what strikes me as a profoundly constructivist reinterpretation of capitalism and creativity. If, for Marx, intra-capitalist competition inevitably drove innovation, Graeber gives social form--bureaucracy, abstracted from any non-human technological basis--the power to trump change. For Graeber, American capitalism is basically corporate, which means bureaucratic (80). It is in contrast with British capitalism, which had a more diverse social structure and was therefore more open to change. Not profit as such, but corporate-bureaucratic standardization has halted scientific progress--especially in academia. Far from freeing us from standardization, bureaucratic technologies like the internet and “computers have played a crucial role in […] narrowing our social imagination” (81). Toward what sort of politics does this point?

The goal of politics would be--as in Robinson’s story--to put rationality at the service of poetry, and not the other way around. Graeber describes replacing bureaucratic technologies with “poetic technologies” (81), so that “free of the dead hand of the hedge fund managers and the CEOs […] our imaginations  [can] once again become a material force in human history” (84). This is a call to the post-scarcity society that the 1960s believed it was about to achieve, and is a directly voluntarist challenge to the contemporary class structure. Graeber suggests that if sufficient resistance to capital can be mounted, or simply in the fullness of time, technological progress will pick back up, and we indeed will be able to dispense with capitalism without giving up the benefits of modernity. 

Here, it seems to me, we see again the broad difficulty into which The Baffler falls. Graeber effectively wants the economy to be made autonomous, so that it can be ignored. Elsewhere, Graeber has described his anarchist politics as “prefigurative.” In short, a hierarchical and authoritarian revolutionary party will not produce an egalitarian and free society. The Occupy movement was consensus-based and participatory, prefiguring the desired social order. There is an element of political formalism here--when politics is imagined as an autonomous sphere with its own logic, that logic is the essential thing.

One triumphal narrative in recent years has been that new communications technologies are prefigurative of a coming society. The Baffler 19 exhausts itself in destroying this narrative, but cannot make an alternative one out of the pieces left by the demolition. As Robert Eshelman insists, Twitter didn’t make the Egyptian revolution. But Graeber himself notes that new ways of organizing people, not steam power or anything so obviously ‘technological,’ built the pyramids (82). Is it really unimaginable that these new means of (what Graeber would perhaps call non-) production do not carry some potential for resistance? If so, surely it can be revealed only by the kind of attention that Agee sought to pay to the life-world of the cotton tenant farmer. That is, only by taking seriously--not dismissing as failure or distraction--the realities created by the new means of communication, by the “creative class” and its daily life, will it be possible to rise, as The Baffler wants to do, from distemper to dissent.

The Baffler’s rejection of the contemporary situation seems so complete that I cannot resist, by way of supplement to Trilling’s goal of uniting imagination and political ideas, citing from a text written at the same moment as “Cotton Tenants” and mentioned by Maureen Tkacik: “if you want knowledge, you must take part in the practice of changing reality.”[8]

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[1] Berger, Peter L., and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. (London: Penguin Books, 1966), 95-96.

[2] The Baffler, “About,” http://thebaffler.com/faq (accessed April 26, 2012)

[3]  Commodify Your Dissent: Salvos from The Baffler, eds Thomas Frank and Matt Weiland (New York: Norton, 1997), 15.

[4] Trilling, Lionel. The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society. (New York: Doubleday, 1950), 103.

[5] Richard Nixon:"Inaugural Address," January 20, 1969. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=1941. (accessed April 26, 2012)

[6] Cited in McNamara, Brooks, “Paterson Strike Pageant,” The Drama Review: TDR 15, no. 3 (1971): 61.

[7] An anthropologist by training, his first book drew on his own fieldwork in Madagascar as well as other ethnographic resources to present a process-oriented theory of value by synthesizing Karl Marx and Marcel Mauss. See Graeber, David. Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams, (New York: Palgrave, 2001).

[8] Mao Tse-Tung “On Practice.” http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/mswv1_16.htm (accessed April 26, 2012).

Amos Vogel: The Soul of Postwar NYC Movie Culture

On Tuesday April 24, 2012 Amos Vogel died at his home in Greenwich Village in lower Manhattan.  When writing my dissertation on the way movies challenged the idea of art in twentieth century America, which subsequently became my first book, the only person I wanted to interview (really wanted to interview) was Amos Vogel.  He and his wife Marcia let visit with them for an extended afternoon in 1999 in their spacious apartment in which they lived, by that point, for probably 40 or 50.  I interviewed both of them because they had jointly founded and operated the single most influential and significant alternative cinema in postwar NYC--Cinema 16.  Cinema 16 was technically a club--people had to pay dues and become members--and so skirted around the draconian censorship laws that blanketed big city movie cultures, perhaps most acutely in New York.  There is an amazing collection of documents and essays on Cinema 16 published by the very good film historian Scott MacDonald.  The Vogels worked tirelessly to bring the best experimental, European, and independent films to their members--who numbered in the few thousands at the club's peak.  Many filmmakers, from Stan Brakhage to Alfred Hitchcock, spoke to audiences at screenings.  The success of this enterprise could not be measured by ticket sales or palatial settings, but by the people in film who moved through Cinema 16 at one time or another: from critics such as Andrew Sarris and John Simon to filmmakers such as the Mekas brothers and Roman Polanski.

The influence of Cinema 16 enabled Amos to make a pitch to the president and board of the new Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts to be the film programmer for a cinema festival there.  Along with British film critic Richard Roud, Vogel directed the first film festival there in 1963.  The NYTimes has a solid obituary about Vogel and the arc of his career.  

I could not let Vogel's passing go without acknowledging how significant his influence was over New York City movie culture and my understanding of it.  I have written about Vogel for this blog before and will continue to teach about the critical and theoretical stands Amos Vogel took in the most vibrant period of American movie culture.

Susan Pearson's Book Wins Merle Curti Award

The blogging staff of the USIH blog and the members of the S-USIH would like to extend our warmest congratulations to Susan J. Pearson, whose outstanding book The Rights of the Defenseless: Protecting Animals and Children in Gilded Age America (U. of Chicago, 2011) won the 2012 Merle Curti Award in Intellectual History.

The publisher's website offers a brief summary of this brilliantly-conceived text, and includes a few of the many well-deserved accolades the book garnered from early reviewers.  Here, for example, is Dan Wickberg's early assessment of  Pearson's important work:

The Rights of the Defenseless is much more than an examination of the development of specific policies by humane societies, more than a case study of the emergence of Progressive era reform as it applied to the protection of children and animals.  Rather, Susan Pearson uses the very specific concern with these two forms of dependency to explore the definition of rights in liberal discourse; the boundary between person and animal in modern thought and practice; the symbolic configuration of self and society in nineteenth-century political culture; the emergence of a modern mode of linking feeling to reason to action. I do not think it is too much to say that this book will redefine the understanding of the humanitarian sensibility and its place in modern American culture. This is history as an act of the moral imagination in the very best sense.

Pearson's history is pathbreaking indeed, and we are all pleased that the 2012 Merle Curti Award Committee recognized her truly outstanding achievement. 

Susan was not able to accept this honor in person at the 2012 OAH meeting in Milwaukee. She was busy with another outstanding achievement:  she was having a baby.  So double congratulations to Susan and her lovely family, including especially her husband, Michael Kramer, a frequent, smart, savvy commenter on this blog.  I believe they have set the bar for the Best Week Ever for intellectual historians.

After the Death of Post-Liberalism

Recently, I spent a weekend teaching about the Progressive Era and the New Deal as part of a Teaching American History grant administered through the University of Virginia.  I pitched-hit for Sidney Milkis who knows infinitely more about this period and the liberalism developed through it than me.  Nonetheless, after reading a couple dozen essays in two volumes Milkis edited on Progressivism and the New Deal, I came up with a somewhat pithy way to describe the evolution of liberalism in America.  Using the ambiguous notion of liberalism reflected in Jefferson's phrase, "the Pursuit of Happiness," I suggested that from the founding to the late-19th century American liberalism addressed the pursuing of happiness--the freedom to pursue made people happy; from the Progressive Era to today, Americans have contested the happiness that they all believe they have a God-given right to pursue.  While probably not very original, my construction struck the teachers in the program as inordinately generous to liberalism.  While as a group they all agreed that liberalism had some relation to "freedom" to pursue interests of different sorts, their reading of essays on Croly, Dewey, TR and FDR, made them rethink their assumptions about liberalism.  Most assumed that social security and welfare stand as ends in themselves.  In short, liberals have no moral imagination. 

The teachers can't be faulted for their vision of liberalism.  In the latest issue of First Things, Bill McClay has the lead essay from a conference sponsored by the journal called "After Liberalism."  McClay's piece, entitled "Liberalism After Liberalism," nicely sums up the sense my group had of liberalism: arguing against Justice Anthony Kennedy's notorious explanation of liberalism as "the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life," McClay declares that "the alternative private-sector inequality generally is not the vaunted achievement of 'democracy' but the gray reign of public bureaucracies, whose 'equality' is administered and enforced by unaccountable officials, with exemptions paid out to the politically connected and the ideologically favored."  So much for the legacy of the CCC, WPA, or the Social Security Administration (for that matter).  

McClay mentions only two books on liberalism written after 1945, Alasdair MacIntyre's demolition of liberalism, After Virtue, and Paul Starr's paean to liberalism Freedom's Power.  The forum in First Things demonstrates that there is little need to address works by Kloppenberg, Rodgers, Westbrook, or Milkis (among the scores of others) that address liberalism in its various complexity.  So I have come to an impasse in my understanding of this particular historiography.  Have reached the moment that requires a list of books that addresses whatever it is that comes or has come or will come after the death of post-liberalism?

My colleague Andrew Hartman suggested there are three broad avenues regarding the intellectual history of conservatism that need investigation.  I ask a comparable question in regard to the what follows our era of post-liberalism. Who is out there writing on this topic (I want to recognized Chris Shannon's remarkable essay is this general area)?  Where are we headed?

Tim's Light Reading (4/26/2012): A New Blog, "Secular Humanism," LGBT History, Chuck Colson, And The Problems Of Peer Review

1. A New Blog Of Interest

Two names familiar to USIH readers---Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn and Michael Fisher, both of whom attended last year's USIH conference---now share space on a three-person blog originating in the Syracuse-Rochester corridor. The blog's title is Longing For The Real, and it has been in existence since January 2012. Thus far the content ranges far and wide, but I expect USIH topics to appear.


2. What Is "Secular Humanism," And How Is It Used And Abused?

Rick Perlstein tackles these questions in his latest Rolling Stone installment that serves as a shot across the bow, for Democrats, in relation to the upcoming election season. Some of us have had a lively discussion on Andrew Hartman's Facebook page about Perlstein's article. We've been trying to think through the Culture Wars to figure out which part of the Christian right benefits the most by trumping up fears about "Secular Humanism." By the end of the article one is left wondering about the difference between "deeply held beliefs" and the "invention[s] of hucksters with right-wing agendas."


3. USIH, Chicago's LGBT Community, And Public History

This article explores recent leadership problems with Chicago's famous Gerber/Hart Library. Before reading this piece (today), I would have recommended the Gerber/Hart Library to any intellectual historian with ambitions of understanding the recent history of Chicago's non-hetero community. Now I wonder whether that recommendation can be made, due to disarray in the organization and in relation to potentially supporting a renegade leader who appears to be thwarting the LGBT community's wishes in relation to holdings. It sounds like a public history nightmare. And it's complicated by the fact the public history (in a different sense of the phrase) of this community is new---still evolving. My heart goes out to those involved because, as a former resident of the area who lived steps away from the Library, I was proud on behalf of the LGBT community that they had created a public space for holdings and gatherings. In addition, one of my good friends spent YEARS volunteering at Gerber/Hart, helping them organize their collections. I fear for my friend's hard work.


4. Chuck Colson: Delivered Or Disguised?

Our own LD Burnett wrote on Colson's passing last weekend. She noted that "Colson's conversion to charity -- and by 'charity' I mean both 'philanthropy' and 'Christian love' -- did not seem to dull his political instincts." This theme was echoed and expanded upon in polemical-historical pieces by Francis Schaeffer, Jr. and S-USIH member David Greenberg. Schaeffer's entry is more autobiographical, but his message is clear: Colson used his redemption for nefarious ends. Greenberg seconds that point, and argues further (not precisely in these words) that (a) Colson's conversion seems to be at least partially a sham, (b) Colson should've removed himself from politics, and (c) Colson simply continued his pre-Watergate/pre-Nixon political initiatives, particularly with regard to faith-based org-gov't partnerships, but with a post-prison Christian conversion stamp of approval. Colson used his deliverance to disguise a latent thuggishness, so says Greenberg, and continued his ongoing concerns. So who is the real Chuck Colson?

5. What Are The Goods Of Peer Review?

The deceased historian, Princeton graduate (under Dan Rodgers, I believe), and former Chicago Reader contributor Cliff Doerksen asked this question in a September 2010 Reader piece. Here are some salient passages:

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In the eyes of its critics, anonymous peer review sucks because it's slow, undemocratic, and hostile to new and potentially game-changing ideas and arguments. Advocates of the new approach [open review] discussed in the Times propose "using the Internet to expose scholarly thinking to the swift collective judgment of a much broader interested audience." It's an interesting and attractive idea, and one rife with potential for unintended consequences. There's no question that the existing review process is slow: an article can take years to reach publication. But it's not clear, at least not to me, that it really disfavors innovation by empowering unaccountable gatekeepers who select against new and threatening ideas. That's because academics are fundamentally creatures of consensus. ...  

It's hard to pick a fight around an academic conference table because every step of the industry's socialization process after admission to graduate school stresses playing well with others. When newly minted PhDs totter off to their first job interviews, they'll be lucky if a single person in the department to which they are applying has read so much as the title page of their dissertations. "On-campus" interviews, during which the candidate is typically entertained by his prospective employers for 48 hours, are simply protracted exercises in mutual butt-sniffing, designed to determine whether the prospective hire will fit harmoniously into the polyamorous marriage that is an academic department. 

The field of academic book reviewing is likewise a pillow fight. Few reviewers care to freely speak their minds when they know that an uncensored takedown might do real injury to the reviewed author's prospects for tenure or other advancement—and might piss off the author's friends and allies in the bargain. (Fun facts: Amid the thousands of academic book reviews accessible through Project Muse, a gargantuan database of 393 peer-reviewed journals, only nine books were deemed "poorly researched" by their reviewers. On the other hand, 374 were found to be "magisterial"—pretty much the warmest plaudit in the humanistic vocabulary.) 

On the odd occasion when scholars do get out their flick knives, it tends to happen outside of class and out by the bike racks....

Getting back to the issue of double-blind peer review: Theoretically the anonymity of the process creates conditions in which an academic referee can vote his or her conscience. In practice I question whether double-blinding really makes much difference, any more than the acquisition of tenure reliably turns your average prudent career academic into a fearless speaker of truth to power after years of careful self-censorship. ...By and large I have to agree with Professor Drummond Rennie, deputy editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, when he asserts that "there seems to be no study too fragmented, no hypothesis too trivial, no literature too biased or too egotistical, no design too warped, no methodology too bungled, no presentation of results too inaccurate, too obscure, and too contradictory, no analysis too self-serving, no argument too circular, no conclusions too trifling or too unjustified, and no grammar and syntax too offensive for a paper to end up in print." And keep in mind Dr. Rennie is referring here to the scientific precincts of scholarship, where especially robust standards of proof and argumentation supposedly prevail. 

So what then might we anticipate from a brave new protocol of scholarly review premised on the idea that anyone with access to the Web is entitled to an opinion? Probably something pretty interesting, and at least as dysfunctional as the mess we have now.
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 Comments, praise, and disparagement are welcome! - TL

Black women in 1920s newspapers and journals

Image found here

Part of what I am doing in my first chapter is describing the different components of the Harlem women's community--the physical space, the YWCA, the women's auxiliaries of the NAACP and Urban League, the artistic salons, and two NACWs--the National Association of Colored Women (which helped plan the 1927 Pan-African Congress) and the National Association of College Women. In addition, I locate African American women in the vibrant print culture of Harlem. This has proven to be somewhat of a challenge because I am asking different questions than I did while writing my dissertation, but I no longer have access to the digitized black newspapers (or the newspapers on microfilm, except through interlibrary loan, which I haven't gotten to yet). Because it is not a central component of my argument, I would be happy to depend on someone else's legwork. But as Kim Gallon* argues, there has yet to be extensive work on the place of black women in black newspaper historiography--in the sense of deep analysis of women's pages, articles, and editorials. There has obviously been work on individual authors and a few anthologies of essays by women during the Harlem Renaissance. What I am wondering is--did the 4 black women my book is about see themselves in black periodicals, or did they see a distorted image?


I am continuing to read Prove It On Me: New Negroes, Sex, and Popular Culture, which I blogged about last week (hurry, hurry, the interlibrary loan is ending today!). Chapman argues that the black periodical Opportunity obscures black women's independence in favor of advocating a notion of race motherhood. Her analysis is incredibly helpful to my section on black periodicals. At the same time, I am pondering whether the impact that the idea of "race mothering" had on New Negro women, which Chapman charts, is true of the women I study. I think that the international travel my women engaged in gave them a unique kind of independence that transported them out of the "race mothering" ideology of the New Negro that Chapman articulates. But I'm still pondering.

I'm deeply grateful to Chapman for giving me so many things to think about. She takes a much more pessimistic view of how black women were presented in the media and it is providing a much needed corrective to my (perhaps overly) optimistic tone, at least in that first chapter.

Now, a few quotes to illustrate what I mean by the above and then I need to keep reading so I can stop adding to my library fees.

All New Negro women "lived within and understood themselves through the prevailing sexual and racial discourses of their time, which operated according to a particular, interwar mix of racism and sexism and New Negro efforts to advance the race." (55)

"These New Negro progressives, including professional racial advocates, sociologists, psychologists, ministers, teachers, and a rising army of social workers, developed an approach that placed a premium on women's maternal roles in ideally patriarchal black families and communities and obfuscated the need for the redress of black women's particular oppression." (55)

"New Negro progressivism participated in the development and dissemination of an intra-racial discourse overwhelmingly binding black women's identities to motherhood. Whether they were mothers rearing their own children or childless women supporting themselves, black women were expected to devote the whole of their energies and talents to the betterment of the race's opportunities through the successful reproduction and training of the next generation. They were, essentially, to mother the race." (57)

Opportunity; "With such editorials, [Charles S.] Johnson provided a large proportion o the magazine's coverage of black women's experiences. ... Johnson did not consider women inherently inferior to men. ... Rather than a sexist belief in women's inherent inferiority, Johnson evinced a masculinist understanding of the African American racial situation that relegated black women to the home and children's care." "In editorials on women workers, infant mortality and mothers' mortality over the course of the 1920s, Johnson identified working women as a curse on the black family." (69)

"Women's racial advocacy and respectability, their loyalty to the race's interests, even their very identities, were measured, prescribed, and evaluated in terms of race motherhood." (70) [hmmmmmmm, even their very identities--yes, there is a deep sense of what I call "responsibility to the race" (rather than race motherhood, which is a term I need to adopt) and yet I think international travel provided these women with an alternative kind of identity, adding to, rather than losing, the sense of responsibility. hmmmmm]

"Under Johnson's editorship, Opportunity promoted race motherhood throughout its discussions of black women's employment circumstances and prospects. This discourse worked against black women's participation in the 'opportunity' the magazine touted as the hallmark of the era. Black women were not to seek to determine their destinies independently of the greater racial good nor take advantage of theri increased employment opportunities to create lives that excluded or decentralized their mothering potential. Furthermore, they were to promote New Negro patriarchy by serving in subordinate, helpmate capacities to professional black men in business and medicine and by accepting less payment than their male counterparts." (72)

"The proliferation of this gender discourse worked against black women's realizations of the opportunities for independence and self-determination that migration, urbanization, the Nineteenth Amendment, industrialization, and city life should have made possible. Ultimately, it muted black women's voices and circumscribed their opportunities. It did little to eliminate the particular oppression that continued to assault them, and it failed to provide them a full measure of fulfillment."  (77)

 That last quote is almost the anti-thesis** of what I've been articulating in Chapter 1. Much to ponder.

*Kim Gallon, “Silences Kept: The Absence of Gender and Sexuality in Black Press Historiography,” History Compass 10, no. 2 (February 1, 2012): 207–218.
**(hahaha the antithesis)

David Sehat's Book Wins Turner Award

Our hearty congratulations go to David Sehat, whose book The Myth of American Religious Freedom has been honored with the 2012 Frederick Jackson Turner Award.

Last spring the USIH blog hosted a roundtable about David's book, with contributions from Daniel K. Williams, Andrew Hartman, Raymond J. Haberski, and Christopher Hickman.

A former blogger for USIH, David currently serves as the Chairman of the S-USIH 2012 Conference Committee.  Please come to New York this November and offer him your congratulations in person.

We are delighted that David's work has been honored with this prestigious award.

What's next in the intellectual history of conservatives?

My OAH experience this year was short but sweet. My panel, "Advise and Dissent: Intellectuals, Values, and Postwar Conservative Trajectories," which took place on Thursday, was a huge success by my account. Chaired by J. David Hoeveler (University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee), it included excellent papers by Gregory Schneider (Emporia State University), who talked about Stephen Tonsor, and Lisa Szefel (Pacific University, the next S-USIH treasurer), who presented on Peter Viereck. I gave a paper on Gertrude Himmelfarb. The highlight of the session was provided by George H. Nash, author of the groundbreaking The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America since 1945 (which we debated last year at length here).

Nash opened with a fascinating autobiographical discussion about his peculiar career trajectory--which is of historiographic significance given that his seminal book on conservative intellectuals was written way, way before the topic became trendy. He then spoke some about the incredible surge of historiography on conservatism since Alan Brinkley offered the topic his imprimatur. After that, Nash concluded with some suggestions about what still needs to be done on the history of conservatism. Here they are:

Nash contends that we need biographies of the following three conservative intellectuals:

1) Irving Kristol. (It's amazing nobody has written this yet.)

2) Richard John Neuhaus. (I think our own Ray Haberski is the perfect candidate to write this book.)

3) Peter Viereck. (As Nash noted, luckily Lisa Szefel is on the case.)

Nash also argued that we need more historical exploration of the following three spheres of conservative intellectual history:

1) Neoconservatism. (I couldn't agree more.)

2) The changing place of Europe in the conservative imagination. (This is intriguing--I wanted to ask Nash more about this but forgot to.)

3) Conservative religious ecumenicalism and interfaith alliances. (Speaking as someone writing on the culture wars, for which the breakdown of religious barriers in favor of new political alliances was a major cause and consequence, I second this notion.)

What do you all think? How about an open thread on what still needs to be done on the history of conservatism, conservative intellectuals, or even intellectual history more broadly.

USIH PSAs

Dear Readers: A few public service announcements that might be of interest to U.S. intellectual historians.

1) American Political Thought. A new journal from the University of Chicago Press. Thanks to Mike O'Connor for notifying me of this development. As Mike wrote to me: "The inaugural issue includes a roundtable on American Exceptionalism, featuring, among others, Rogers Smith. This issue also features reviews of books by Pauline Maier and John Patrick Diggins, and an article on Benjamin Franklin. It's indexed on JSTOR, where they've put up a bit of free content (see the link above)."

2) Jacobin. As regular readers here know by now, I'm a tireless advocate of this upstart leftist journal of ideas. The latest issue is now out, and several of the articles can be read for free online. The issue is excellent. I am particularly impressed by articles by my Illinois State University colleague Curtis White, "The Philanthropic Complex," and by the next great educational writer, Megan Erickson, "The Case for Cinderblocks." Also be sure to read the excellent review of Jim Livingston's Against Thrift by Tim Barker.

3) Routledge Handbook of Cosmopolitan Studies. (Shameless self promotion alert.) This large anthology is now published--it's expensive, so you might recommend it to your institutional libraries. It includes my chapter, "Americans and Others: Historical Identity Formation in the United States."

 4) Ideas in History. This Nordic journal of intellectual history is issuing a CFP for a special theme issue on the history of economic ideas. Check it out: Since the 1980s, the economic landscape of the world has changed dramatically: globalisation, finanzialisation and deindustrialisation, rapid growth of global and national economic inequality, and repeated financial crises. Although the world has changed, intellectual historians have yet to seize the opportunity of offering historical in-depth understandings of the changes of global capitalism, then and now. This, we argue, should indeed be possible, and this special issue of Ideas in History calls for an economic turn’ of the discipline of intellectual history. We are interested in work that investigates the moral and cultural histories of economic rationalities and practice; work that traces the ways in which modern economic rationality became natural, and the ways in which it had to struggle (or collaborate) with religious and scientific authorities in order to gain legitimacy. Studies might concern various economic topics and practices, such as finance, poverty, markets, the state, regulation debates, statistics, money, insurance, etc., but it should investigate these from a perspective and/or methodology that can clearly be identified as affiliated with the discipline of intellectual history. Indeed, economic practices and rationalities offer great opportunities for being studied as representation, discourse, rhetoric, ideology, signs, symbols, etc., instead of merely being cold-hearted facts, graphs, figures, laws or objective truths that are not mediated through culture. Periodically, we are interested in the early modern period (with the rise of e.g. double-entry bookkeeping and of merchant capitalism in e.g. Venice), in the modern enlightenment period, and in the contemporary world. We are particularly interested in studies that investigate the moral and political controversies surrounding economic practices, and the role that religion and science, especially natural science, have played in these. Readings of work that deal with greater cultural and intellectual changes in the context of economic practices will be preferred over ‘great text’ readings. Reflections on whether the language of economics and economic values has today become a ‘master discourse’, stronger than both truth (science) and faith (religion) are highly welcome, as well as reflections on whether economic discourses are still haunted/supported by religious and/or scientific beliefs. Deadline for article submission is October 1st 2012.

 Ideas in History is a double-blind peer reviewed journal. Pieces should generally be 8-12,000 words long. Pieces will be received by the journal editors. Upon approval by the editorial board, pieces will then be sent for blind peer review. Ideas in History uses the Chicago Manual of Style, 16th ed., author-date system for references. Ideas in History subscribes to the principle of global English; manuscripts may be submitted in any self-consistent national form of English as concerns spelling, grammar and syntax. For placement of quotation marks, spellings of dates, capitalization conventions, placement of references, page numbering conventions and the compilation of the reference list, authors are referred to the Chicago Manual. The reference list should be labeled "References". Manuscripts should be submitted in Times New Roman 12. Footnotes, when necessary, should be used instead of endnotes and be formatted in Times New Roman 10. Manuscripts should be line spaced at either 1.5 or 2.0. Articles should be sent to Mikkel Thorup (idemt@hum.au.dk) or Christian Olaf Christiansen (idecoc@hum.au.dk).

On Listening to Leo Strauss

The perfect book or speech obeys in every respect the pure and merciless laws of what has been called logographic necessity.  The perfect speech contains nothing slipshod; it in there are no loose threads; it contains no word that has been picked at random; it is not marred by errors due to faulty memory or to any other kind of carelessness; strong passions and a powerful and fertile imagination are guided with ease by a reason which knows how to use the unexpected gift, which knows how to persuade and which knows how to forbid; it allows of no adornment which is not imposed by the gravity and aloofness of the subject matter; the perfect writer rejects with disdain and with some impatience the demand of vulgar rhetoric that expressions must be varied since change is pleasant. 

-- Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli (1958), p. 121

Let me say only this: Don't pay too great attention to that [unintelligible] of mine. What I said about this prehistory of Hegel--Kant and Spinoza--was a deliberately provisional statement to lead up to this new kind of thinking. If you have any difficulty, forget about it. . . .  

Just forget about it. Don't worry too much.  I just tried...And you are not a...you probably have no teaching experience. As a teacher one has to lead up from all parts of the horizon to something. And, uh, one is not always successful at that. That has to be...I mean, teaching can never become a scientifically conductible affair. 

--Leo Strauss, Seminar on Hegel's The Philosophy of History, University of Chicago,

 Winter Quarter 1965, Session 1, January 5, 1965

In my post several weeks ago on Embodiment and Intellectual History, I mentioned the audio recordings of courses taught by Leo Strauss that are now available at the website of the Leo Strauss Center at the University of Chicago.  Here are a few preliminary thoughts about them...



I

Those of us who study the last century-and-a-quarter or so of history have at least the possibility of hearing the voices of the people about whom we write. Some historical voices are familiar to almost all of us who study the past.  My guess is that the voices of every President going back to FDR are familiar to those who read this blog.  So are the voices of other major political figures of the recent past, such as Martin Luther King, Jr.

Other voices may be less familiar but are readily available...especially in the age of the internet. The voices of poets, for example, have been of interest since the beginning of sound recording. At the click of a mouse, you can hear Walt Whitman, William Butler Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell,   Sylvia Plath, Theodore Roethke, Allen Ginsberg, Adrienne Rich, or virtually any other well-known poet of the recent past.

But away from politics and literature, the ability to hear voices from the past is a bit more hit-and-miss. While some of the people about whom I wrote in my first book have voices that are familiar to me--Orson Welles, Franklin Roosevelt, even Frank Capra and Hannah Arendt--I know others only through their literary voices.  My guess is that there are plenty of sound recordings of Erich Fromm, Bruno Bettelheim, Dwight Macdonald, and Clement Greenberg, but if I've heard them, I forget the qualities of their voices.  I don't know if there are any readily available recordings of many of the other, more obscure, figures about whom I wrote, like Calvin B. Hoover, the Duke University economist who was one of the first to use "totalitarian" as a term to link Stalinism and Nazism, and my guess is, if such recordings exist, they'd be harder to come by.

Encountering for the first time the (actual) voice of someone whose literary voice is familiar is always an odd experience, one which we often have with the living as well as the dead. Sometimes the voice is exactly what one expects. Or, at least, it matches one's literary experience. I remember, for example, the first time I heard J.G.A. Pocock give a lecture and being struck by both the oddness of his voice and how perfectly it fit the voice on the page.

More often, at least for me, the voices I hear of those whose words are familiar to me are somewhat different from what I expected. Mind you, I don't usually formulate a precise expectation of someone's voice by reading her prose. But like literary characters whom we meet in novels, we fill in the blanks about real people whom we encounter on the page. And the initial experience of hearing their voices is often like encountering a familiar literary character in a film or stage adaptation.  What we hear is often not what we imagined.

But there is of course a big difference. Especially if we are careful readers, the image of a literary character that we develop from the page has at least as great a claim to authenticity as the adapted versions we see on the screen. To the extent that those screen versions begin to displace the versions we imagined for ourselves, something real is lost.  But the voice we hear in a recording of an historical person is that person's voice...or at least a good deal closer to it than any imagined reconstruction we come up with when reading their prose.

I'm not sure how I imagined that Leo Strauss would sound, but I was surprised when I first encountered his voice, which reminded me in many ways of my Russian grandfather, who was just a few years younger than Strauss and who learned English well after becoming fluent in German and earning a PhD at a German university (at least that's my best explanation of whatever similarity I hear).  But now that I've heard it, Strauss's voice is inseparable in my mind from Leo Strauss, who has become more concretely embodied for me than he was before.

II

As I wrote in my post on embodiment, Strauss's recorded seminars are of particular interest because of the esteem in which his students held him as a teacher.  Richard G. Stevens's claim that Strauss was "the greatest classroom teacher in the history of Western civilization" is only the most extravagant of countless celebrations of his pedagogical charisma.

As the Strauss Center's webpage notes, for years, transcripts of these recordings were passed around among a select group of Strauss's students and his students' students, always with the admonition "Recipients are emphatically requested not to seek to increase the circulation of the transcription."

The preciousness, care, and even secrecy with which these transcripts were treated reflect Strauss's peculiar notions about the relationship of oral philosophical teaching to written philosophical works. The former can be much more frank than the latter, as they are addressed to a select audience and are not available to the vulgar.*

One of the things most immediately striking about the recordings of Strauss's seminars is how different they are from his writings. Not so much in content--I have yet to encounter any "secret teachings" in my listening--as in tone.  The two passages I quote above--the first in writing about writing, the second on tape about oral teaching--capture at least part of the theoretical aspect of this difference.  The second comes from Strauss's answer to a student's question about Strauss's very condensed discussion of Kant, Spinoza, and Jacobi with which Strauss had begun his introductory meeting of his seminar on Hegel's Philosophy of History.  In this quotation, Strauss puts forward a vision of classroom teaching that is utterly different from his notion of philosophical writing, which is, in turn, nicely captured in the quotation above it from his Thoughts on Machiavelli.  Strauss's method of reading philosophy entails assuming that serious philosophers are simply incapable of making errors...so any apparent error in a philosophical text (or at least in a pre-modern philosophical text) is an indication of some sort of esoteric teaching.  But clearly Strauss understands the task of oral instruction differently.  I suspect I am not alone, among those who find Straussian (written) hermeneutics hard to swallow, in finding Strauss's humility about the provisional nature of teaching refreshing.

And indeed the feeling of Strauss's seminar lectures (and these are very much lectures) is utterly different from the feelings of his writings.  Strauss's written work is dense, allusive, and often elusive.  Although followers of Strauss deeply value these written for, among other things, their style, many non-Straussians find them exquisitely dull.  "It is a general observation," Strauss writes in his essay "How to Study Spinoza's Theologico-Political Treatise" from Persecution and the Art of Writing, "that people write as they read."**  And Leo Strauss certainly treated the writings of other philosophers as esoteric puzzle palaces.

His lectures, on the other hand, seem different.  They are much more typical of good lectures in their approach than his books are typical of good books. Strauss emphasizes and reemphasizes important points. He incorporates examples from current events to illustrate his points. He interacts with his students in a way that indicates both that he takes them seriously, but that he knows exactly where he wants to lead them (his pedagogical persona is, unsurprisingly, old-fashioned in this regard).  While they certainly do not move me to agree that he was the greatest teacher since Plato, Strauss's pedagogical charisma is clear in them.

III

Now broadly available, the lectures provide an excellent new (to the rest of us) way to get a sense of Leo Strauss's approach to political philosophy. Take, for example, the Introduction to Political Philosophy that Strauss offered at the U of C during the Winter Quarter of 1965.  Like most of the courses for which recordings are available, this one is incomplete; only nine of the sixteen sessions are preserved on tape. As far as I can tell, the recordings represent nine of the first ten class meetings, with the last five meetings missing (the recordings are numbered one to nine, but there appears to be a lecture skipped in the midst of them).

For those unversed in Strauss, the arrangement of material might seem odd. Strauss begins his opening lecture by noting that political philosophy, in the classical sense, seems utterly impossible today.  He then spends the next six, hour-and-a-half-long sessions elaborating the reasons for this sense of impossibility. All of the first two lectures and the beginning of the third concern Auguste Comte and positivism.  The rest of Lecture Three, all of Lecture Four, and the beginning of Lecture Five concern the notion of value-free social science...and its inadequacy in Strauss's view.  The remainder of Lecture Five and all of Lecture Six concern historicism.

Strauss thus spends more than the first third of his class meticulously describing three of his major bêtes noires: positivism, the fact-value distinction, and historicism. All of this, again, is by way of explaining why political philosophy seems impossible in 1965.

Finally, in Lecture Seven, Strauss begins to tackle the history of political philosophy, which, Strauss argues, unlike political philosophy itself, is still seen as necessary.  He begins discussing the history of political philosophy by way of another great Straussian trope, the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns. This then leads to a discussion of Hobbes and Rousseau, who represent what Strauss sees as the first and second waves of modernity.*** 

Lecture Eight continues to describe the ways in which modern political philosophy departs from classical political philosophy, which Strauss has still not discussed at any length. At various times, Kant, Descartes, Hegel, and Nietzsche, the last the representative figure from Strauss's third wave of modernity, come into the discussion.  The lecture concludes with the thought that, unlike modern political thought, which locates itself outside the realm of everyday politics, classical political philosophy "has its stand within the political sphere."

In Lecture Nine, Strauss finally works his way to classical political philosophy and a discussion of Aristotle's Politics.

Strauss's extraordinarily long journey to the subject at hand in these lectures seems to instantiate his notion  (in his written works) of modernity's constituting a second cave from which we must crawl merely to find ourselves in the "natural" cave described by Plato.  The lectures also provide a concrete answer to what is sometimes seen as a core paradox of Strauss's work: the fact that this implacable foe of historicism appears to have devoted his career to explicating the history of political philosophy.  As Strauss explains in exhaustive detail in the early lectures, given that political philosophy seems impossible today, while the history of political philosophy seems not only possible but necessary, that history must be our path back to political philosophy itself.

I'm not sure that I would have gotten all of this out of these lectures had I not first read much Strauss, and much about Strauss. And from the point of view of intellectual history, the status of these seminars is complicated: they are both public and private documents, depending on how one looks at them. But they are a fascinating resource.
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* For more on this issue, see Strauss's Persecution and the Art of Writing (1952), esp. Chapter 2.  This is also not to say that Strauss is being entirely frank in his seminars. But he is certainly addressing a more select audience.

** Persecution and the Art of Writing, 144.

*** Strauss does not talk of the three waves in this lecture, but the idea structures his discussion of modern political philosophy here in many ways.

Born Again Politics

Today's New York Times reports the passing of Charles W. Colson. 

I don't usually think about Charles Colson, but I was just thinking of him yesterday.

Among the primary sources I was considering for my U.S. intellectual history reading list was Mary McCarthy's shrewd shredding of the smaller-than-life players in the Watergate scandal, The Mask of State: Watergate Portraits (1974).  However, McCarthy's sharp, smart text ended up on the cutting-room floor.  I crossed it off just yesterday morning; I need that spot for something else. 

I don't plan on replacing McCarthy's slim volume with Colson's bloated Born Again.  Nevertheless, I think it is worthwhile to consider the significant impact that Colson's conversion narrative -- not just the book, but the entire post-prison trajectory of his life story -- seems to have had on the fractious, fractured, transformed and transforming political alliances and alignments growing out of the 1970s.

I say that Colson "seems to have had" a significant impact simply because I don't want to appear to be putting forward some kind of "great man theory" to explain the rise of the Religious Right and its growing identification with the Republican party.  How would I explain this moment in American cultural history?  I must defer to the expertise of my fellow bloggers -- along with a few frequent commenters here -- who have the shifting political, social and cultural landscapes of the 1970s in much sharper focus.  

But Colson might serve as a fitting symbol for all that coalesced in the political rise of the Religious Right.  And I suppose that Colson must have recognized this fact at the time.  Just as Saint Augustine's conversion to chastity did not seem to diminish his polemical skills, so Charles Colson's conversion to charity -- and by "charity" I mean both "philanthropy" and "Christian love" -- did not seem to dull his political instincts.

I am not questioning the sincerity or thoroughness of either conversion; I simply note that savvy sinners, once converted, can make for very savvy saints.  And Charles Colson was a savvy spokesman for what seemed to be a new kind of politics.  He was someone with a compelling story of personal conversion who became one of the standard bearers leading a swell-tide of religious conservatives, mostly Evangelical, seeking to convert their sense of moral solidarity into political clout.  Colson was apparently committed to using at least some of that clout to (re?) privatize and (re?) Christianize the task of alleviating social ills, and he sought to redirect public funds to that purpose.

"Every man's death diminishes me," wrote John Donne, the converted libertine.  And that is my sentiment as well.  I hope no one imagines that my reflections about the nature or significance of the political movement which Colson symbolized and in some ways helped to shape arise from some kind of ill will -- or, on the other hand, allegiance -- towards the man or the people who mourn him.  I simply want to understand how his life and life-work fit into a larger cultural narrative.

Did Colson and his fellow standard-bearers usher in something new in the American political landscape?  Or was this an older politics born again? Was this Progressivism chasing its own tail?  Or was this a hollowed-out Populism, hard-bitten, left behind, and biting back?

Conference on Public Intellectuals

Today's post is by guest blogger Jonathan Wilson, a PhD candidate in history at Syracuse University, who tweets at @jnthnwwlsn

Last weekend, I had the privilege of participating in a sort of USIH cousin, the Conference on Public Intellectuals, which met for the fourth year at Harvard University. It provided a glimpse into a different approach to American intellectual history -- a set of procedures and questions that complement the ones foregrounded at the New York meetings, but which imply different anxieties about the discipline. I left the conference pleased that this alternative model exists, pondering how it might inform the practices of S-USIH.

The first conference, four years ago, was a one-time event held in honor of Lawrence J. Friedman. Since then, the Conference on Public Intellectuals has become an annual affair. (Damon Freeman and Larry Friedman did the organizing this year.) Despite its name, the conference is really more of a two-day workshop. The twenty-one presenters were encouraged to speak informally, even speculatively, and all the presentations took place in the same conference room in the Harvard Science Center. In his opening remarks, Friedman urged the attendees to be "nice" to each other and take part in every discussion. Fifteen to twenty minutes of Q&A followed each paper rather than each panel. And most importantly, the conference had a question instead of a theme: What is a "public intellectual," and is that term useful to scholars in the first place? At various points during the conference, discussions of particular presentations evolved into general discussions of that question.

For example, the first session, on Friday, covered "Cold War Liberalism and Public Intellectuals" in the United States. USIH's own Lisa Szefel led off with a presentation on Peter Viereck, arguing that conservative thought shared crucial cultural concerns with liberal thought and deserves a place in the history of the mid-20th-century "vital center." Alan Petigny followed with a critique of Reinhold Niebuhr and the "decline of the absolute" in Fifties liberal thought, arguing that the public rhetoric of American liberal intellectuals lost the moral firmness it required to take on militarism and racial oppression in the postwar age. Ellen Rafshoon then outlined the biography of Hans Morgenthau, suggesting that the same moral concerns that led him, as a Jewish German exile, to embrace realism in international relations also eventually led him (pace his defenders) to implicitly reject it when he became a critic of American policy in Vietnam. Finally, Ronald Doel displayed a series of images taken by documentary photographers working for the federal government under Roy Stryker during the New Deal and World War II. After the war, as Doel showed, Stryker went to work making similar images for Standard Oil, depicting positively the impressive machinery and (we might say) devastating environmental effects of oil extraction. Doel argued that these photographers may deserve to be considered as public intellectuals, articulating ideas about nature and society in a public medium allowing for subtle expression. If all four of these presentations shared an argument, it may have been that the mid-20th-century American public intellectual inhabited a vexed media environment that makes it difficult to characterize the intellectual simply as an outsider or critic of the modern state.

The discussion of the intellectual's relationship with mass culture continued in the following session on "European Legacies and Public Intellectuals." Nicolaas Barr Clingan, discussing the late Dutch philosopher Lolle Nauta, Benjamin Wurgaft, discussing Levinas and Sartre, Pilar Damião de Medeiros, discussing contemporary social movements, and Odile Heynders, proposing that contemporary European public intellectuals be seen as "bidimensional beings" who navigate the border between literary truth and political action, all addressed the problem of political engagement or withdrawal for modern European intellectuals.

The next session on Friday, which took up "Public Intellectuals and the Problem of Race and Nationalism," narrowed the question of political engagement, turning it into a question of publicity. James Clark discussed psychiatrist Robert Coles's work with children as a way of interpreting racism, and Shane Gunderson discussed the work of outside intellectuals (most notably Noam Chomsky) in publicizing the East Timor independence movement in the 1990s, proposing this as a case study in the work of the public intellectual as a protestor. Helen Fordham also highlighted the work of the intellectual as publicist by discussing the case of Australian prisoner David Hicks, in which various kinds of Australian "knowledge workers" interpreted Hicks's cause for the public as a matter of human rights. Finally, my paper on David Walker's Appeal and the Freedom's Journal, the first African-American newspaper, also depicted various writers adopting new media to turn the ordinary lives of oppressed people into national issues.

These discussions on Friday led into a general debate over the term "public intellectual" itself, loosely moderated by Larry Friedman in the spare time available. Daniel Geary argued that Russell Jacoby's term may be essentially redundant, since the intellectual is necessarily a figure engaged in public rather than esoteric concerns. Alan Petigny disagreed, arguing that the adjective public serves a useful purpose in distinguishing the politically or socially active thinker from other kinds of scholars. Ben Wurgaft, on the other hand, suggested that it might be helpful not to think of the public intellectual as a figure so much as an event -- a certain kind of emergent public transformation.

The final event on Friday, held at night, was for me the highlight of the conference. Three members of the early-60s Committee of Correspondence -- Norman Birnbaum, Michael Maccoby, and Everett Mendelsohn -- met to recall their work as nuclear disarmament activists. Their wide-ranging conversation touched on familiar questions about the New Left and Neoconservatism, with Maccoby in particular holding up David Riesman as a leader with particularly nuanced political views. In the frightening era of the early Cold War, Maccoby said, Riesman's firmest conviction was that human civilization is a "thin veneer," a fragile restraint on violent impulses. Thus it was that Riesman worried about mass political movements of all kinds and was at times highly unsympathetic to the student movement and even the civil rights movement. Maccoby defended (or at least empathized with) Riesman's as a consistent and principled intellectual position.

Saturday's panels continued to discuss these themes. In the morning, Bertram Wyatt-Brown argued that George Orwell's own experiences of humiliation animated his writing about surveillance and torture in 1984, Claudia Franziska Brühwiler discussed Ayn Rand's self-creation as an intellectual "icon" (drawing on Dominik Bartmanski's "How to Become an Iconic Social Thinker"), and Mark West explained that Nuremberg prosecutor Telford Taylor was intimately involved in shaping public perceptions of the postwar tribunals through his involvement with the scripts for Judgment at Nuremberg. In the next session, classicist John Lenz began by discussing Socrates' suspicion of politics as a way of understanding Bertrand Russell's anarchist tendencies (or vice versa). Then Anna Dubenko argued in a fascinating paper that the idea of a public intellectual helps explain some of the tensions in James Baldwin's work as a writer addressing distinct publics, and John Morra detailed the public rivalry of Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin, whose conflicting scientific views and personal pride shaped American public health policy.

In the last session, on Saturday afternoon, three presenters tackled questions of pressing importance in the 21st century. Elisabeth Chaves considered the question of whether print journals represent a retreat from public significance or are the intellectual's natural habitat. Alhelí Alvarado-Díaz discussed Herbert Marcuse as a "prophet of economic apocalypse," focusing on the critique in One-Dimensional Man. Jason Roberts, finally, traced the course of the "Decent Left" debates during the early-to-mid-2000s, focusing on Todd Gitlin's attempt to reclaim patriotism for the Left in The Intellectuals and the Flag. These presentations led into a second informal discussion of the public intellectual as a contemporary figure.

The conference did not, of course, come to any particular conclusion about the term "public intellectual." But by posing a question -- even a seemingly simple and familiar one -- toward which everyone present could contribute, the Conference on Public Intellectuals stirred up all sorts of unusually interesting side questions. I, for one, was unsettled by the fact that only two presenters discussed topics earlier than the 20th century. This seems revealing, though I can't say for sure what it reveals. On the other hand, I was also impressed by the ease with which conversation flowed between Europeanists and Americanists, and between historians and scholars from other disciplines. By setting up a complex conversation but keeping it all within one room, the Conference on Public Intellectuals created a fertile environment for reflection on both the practice and the subject matter of intellectual history.