Jumat, 31 Agustus 2012

The Moment of the Foxes


There's an epistemological and historiographical problem that I am trying to make sense of in relation to the Pragmatists -- and perhaps in relation to our relation to the Pragmatists -- and I am having trouble formulating my thoughts on the matter.  So I have decided to take my question, such as it is, to the blogosophere, and see if  our good readers here can offer some clarity -- or, maybe, some complexity.  Or both.

This weekend I am reading Twentieth-Century Multiplicity by Daniel Borus  and No Place of Grace by T.J. Jackson Lears.  Both are on my reading list, but only Borus is assigned for a class -- the last organized class, by the way, that I will take in my entire academic career.  Ever.  To plunder the Kuhnian castle: I am headed for a major paradigm shift.  First, though, I have to get through this semester.

What I'm wondering about is how to historically situate or understand a particular kind of interpretive move that historians make, though it is certainly not unique to historians.  What I have in mind is our fondness for typological or characterological binarisms -- the binarisms we can employ as shorthand to distinguish between two seemingly different ways that people extract or construct meaning from events. 


I'm thinking, for example, of how one can look at American thinkers at the end of the 19th century and divide them heuristically into "optimists" (John Dewey, William James on most days) and "pessimists" (Henry Adams).  This particular binary seems especially suited -- or, I guess, favored -- when discussing this period. Fragmentation, fracture, multiplicity, contingency, instability -- however we might characterize the cosmology of that era, we seem to find it useful to situate the thinkers of the time in terms of whether or not that they saw in their own time reason for hope or cause for despair. 

In fact, I would suggest that historians of this period themselves might be seen as tending to be either "pessimistic" or "optimistic."  In a footnote to his introduction, Borus writes, "Two diametrically different but superlative efforts to link culture to political economy are T.J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace...and James Livingston, Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution" (15). Borus does not say what makes these inquiries "diametrically different," but I would surmise that much of their difference has to do with each historian's sympathy for a particular strain of thought emerging from the period.  I mean "sympathy" in a kind of Collingwoodian sense:  their effort to understand the thoughts of their subjects by re-thinking them and re-constituting them through their historical inquiry. Lears is recovering and legitimizing an elegiac lament for a lost past; Livingston is recovering and legitimizing an exuberant celebration of an open future.  And so in a way these monographs may come to re-instantiate the very sensibilities they explore.

Perhaps one might expect the historiography of this period to embrace binarism as a mode of inquiry or even divide along binaristic lines because the period itself was so marked.  Think, for example, of James's distinction between the "tough-minded" and the "tender-minded," where epistemology becomes a matter of two basic kinds of temperament.  What's interesting about James's bifurcation of "minds," and other similar distinctions, is the way that a binary can be used to point toward plurality.

A similar binaristic taxonomy of "mind" that paves the way for pluralism is Isaiah Berlin's famous distinction between hedgehogs and foxes.  Of course Berlin is writing after James, and in some senses perhaps in response to him -- I'll let the historians of philosophy weigh in here.  In any case, Berlin uses a binary to accentuate the value of plurality.  Indeed, Borus invokes Berlin's binaristic metaphor in the introduction to Twentieth-Century Multiplicity as a helpful way of distinguishing between two kinds of thinkers or two kinds of thought:  "The early twentieth century," Borus writes, "was the moment of the foxes, even if there were quite a few hedgehogs.  It is salutary to recall that Berlin saw the value of and need for both" (11). 

Borus situates the Berlinian fauna within the period he is studying -- but also, by implication, within his study of the period.  What he says about the thinkers of the time is easily applicable to historians' thinking about it:  "Where foxes remind us of the dangers of overgeneralization, hedgehogs remind us how helpful and at times necessary significant and meaningful generalizations are" (11).  That's not just intellectual history; that's historical method.

So here's the best I can do in framing my question:  to what extent is the epistemology of historical inquiry, especially inquiry about this particular period of epistemic turmoil, indebted to and taking place within the framework of the period itself?  

If we look at American intellectual and cultural history in this time frame and see optimists and pessimists, tough-minded and tender-minded, modernists and anti-modernists, foxes and hedgehogs, are we seeing the object of our inquiry -- the thinking of the time -- or are we seeing everything through it? 

Review: Hmiel on Isaac's *Working Knowledge*


Review of Joel Isaac, Working Knowledge: Making the Human Sciences from Parsons to Kuhn (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012). 
ISBN 9780674065741

Reviewed by Erik Hmiel

Defending Philosophical History 

The standard narrative through which we understand Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions goes something like this: following its publication in 1962, there emerged in its wake a seismic epistemological shift. In the humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences alike, scholars and thinkers of various stripes were all faced with assessing the implications of Kuhn’s ideas of a “paradigm” and “incommensurability,” what these exotic words meant for the status of objectivity, the historically contingent nature of knowledge, and the primacy of the “hard” sciences over those more effete or interpretive disciplines. Kuhn led the charge against positivism, so the story goes, and cleared the path for post-positivism, hermeneutics, and post-structuralism to weaken the hold on the academic mind of a positivist, verificationist epistemology. In the decades following the appearance of Kuhn’s book, the vice grip was loosened further by influential works like Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue, Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self, Michel Foucualt’s The Order of Things, and Richard Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, all of which can be rightly considered philosophical histories that point to the contingency of knowledge and the primacy of Cartesian epistemology in preserving the subject/object divide. Joel Isaac’s remarkable new book Working Knowledge: Making The Human Sciences From Parsons to Kuhn tells a different story.[1] 


Isaac deflates the radical arc of this narrative by placing Kuhn in a larger context, what he calls the “interstitial academy” of human scientists and philosophers at Harvard University during the first half of the twentieth-century. Instead of a story in which post-positivism and interpretation decisively overcame “traditional” epistemology, only to remain at war with positivists and empiricists, we get a narrative with much greater nuance. And the narrative begins and ends with Isaac’s interstitial academy at Harvard, which includes the social scientists Talcott Parsons and B.F. Skinner, the physicist Percy Williams Bridgman, the biochemist and physiologist Lawrence Joseph Henderson, the philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine, along with Kuhn, all of whom met outside the confines of their various disciplines in various seminars, discussion groups, and societies. In re-constructing this context, Isaac focuses on their attempts to ground the social sciences epistemologically, through an embrace of “scientific philosophy,” a way of thinking that had its roots in the repudiation of Kantian transcendentalism. Scientific philosophy was especially concerned to overcome Kant’s view of knowledge based on the synthesis of the concepts and the “pure forms” of intuition made possible by a transcendental subject. Such attempts at overturning Kantian epistemology had been the object of various thinkers throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, ranging from the Vienna Circle, to the mathematician Gottlieb Frege, and the philosophical scientists Ernst Mach and Henri Poincare.

The social scientists at Harvard during the first half of the twentieth-century inherited this project. And in seeking to combat their marginalization, they sought crucial points of commonality among the human sciences, the most crucial for Isaac being an epistemology grounded in research practices, pedagogy, and communities of inaugurated and qualified inquirers. In reconstructing this moment in the history of the American social sciences, we see how the "practical, 'everyday' aspects of  the theory of knowledge...in the Harvard complex present a salutary contrast to the inflated role often granted to epistemological rubrics like 'positivism and 'interpretivism' in the formation of the human sciences," aspects that cast the “revolutions” of late-twentieth century thought, most notably Kuhn’s Structure, in a new light, and beg further questions about idea of the social sciences itself.

The first half of the book centers on two important ideas that took root among the inchoate human science departments during the first half of the twentieth-century: the sociology outlined in Vilfred Pareto’s 1920 Trattato di Sociologia Generale, and the “Operationism” of Percy Williams Bridgman’s 1927 book, The Logic of Modern Physics. The Pareto Method was informally inaugurated among Harvard’s social scientists in 1932, beginning with a weekly seminar led by Henderson entitled, "Pareto and Methods of Scientific Investigation." For many of the participants, Henderson was an authority on exactly what made science "scientific,” and so the participants looked to the seminar as a way to put the social sciences on more solid, “scientific,” ground. The seminar’s first assignment was to read the French translation of Pareto's Trattato di Sociologia Generale, Pareto having recently turned to sociology from economics after realizing that the rational choice model assigned to the agents of his economic models "fell short of social reality." The participants included notable figures in the future of the social sciences, which included Joseph Schumpter, Talcott Parsons, and Crane Brinton, all of whom deferred to Henderson’s teachings. Moreover, Henderson’s emphasis on the nature of cases as a sound empirical method for understanding human behavior appealed to departments and circles outside the Pareto-seminar including his own course on "Concrete Sociology," the Society of Fellows, and the Graduate School of Business Administration, all of which bore the mark of Hendersonian sociology.

Many of the same discursive patterns were also true of “Operationism,” and its influence of experimental psychology. The chief promulgator of Operationism was the physicist Bridgeman, whose book The Logic of Modern Physicis was highly influential during the inter-war years upon those would soon become Harvard's most influential psychologists, notably, B.F Skinner, Edwin G. Boring, Karl Lashley, and Stanley Smith. Bridgeman's Operationism was heavily indebted to Einstein's theory of relativity, particularly his view of simultanaeity, which held, roughly, that our conception of time was not based on an ideal movement of measureable temporality, but on a concrete set of operations, namely, the coordinating of clocks. It was this view that led Bridgman to the notion that "even the abstract conceptual element in knowledge had to be identified with actual practices of calculation and experimental observation" (104). That is, theories were not tested, but instead made by skilled experts through an experimental process of observation, recording, and revision. "Operationism "was...intended as a characterization of the life-world of the practicing scientist." The epistemology of operationism, Isaac argues, operated in a way directly similar to that of Pareto's in that it was not based on a transcendental, or a priori condition of knowledge, but on a craft-like conception in which knowledge was madeby qualified communities of scientific inquiry.

Isaac notes, as well, the role of Harvard’s philosophy department, and specifically W.V.O Quine, in the interstitial academy. Isaac argues that Harvard’s interstitial academy was uniquely primed to receive Quine’s logical proselytizing for two reasons: "the basic orientation toward empiricism, on the one hand, and the methods of logical-analysis, on the other" (127). Logical analysis already formed the basis the emerging trend in analytic philosophy at Harvard, which would come to dominate philosophy departments by the 1950s; empiricism, or, rather, empirical sciences is the foundation upon which epistemological naturalism, the craft like epistemology at the heart of Isaac’s narrative, is based, for which Quine was indebted to the epistemologist C.I Lewis.

Of course, Quine's enthusiasm for logical empiricism took years to be fully embraced. But Isaac points to our attention that it was in Harvard's interstitial academy where he found, arguably, the warmest reception of his ideas. The Harvard philosopher, Herbert Feigl, who had a significant influence on Quine’s development as a graduate student and encouraged him to travel to Vienna, had come to Harvard after being attracted to the ideas of Bridgman; the Society of Fellows of which Quine was a part became host to a number of interdisciplinary discussions and activities regarding the nature and status of the social sciences and scientific philosophy, and also included many of the émigré members of the Vienna circle. Moreover, Harvard played host to the fifth annual congress of the Unity of Science movement, which attracted the local interstitial academy, the Vienna émigrés, and other scholars devoted to the cause of Scientific philosophy, logical positivists among them.

Out of this interdisciplinary institutional culture, in which Quine and the Vienna circle interacted with members of the Pareto Seminar and the Operationist experimental psychologists, there was finally formed in 1946 the “Department of Social Relations.” The department was supported by the new cultural and financial imperatives of militarization that were greatly expanded during the cold-war era, and included an interdiciplinarily oriented group of behavioral scientists who sought a theoretical foundation for the human sciences. The most exemplary figure among the group was Talcott Parsons, who, as Isaac points out, found in Henderson's Pareto a favorable theory for human action, specifically his emphasis on the connection between the conceptual and the empirical. But Parsons put Pareto to his own uses, revising his distinction between logical/non-logical behavior, and positing a continuum on which means-ends relationships for analyzing human behavior should be situated. Parsons, along with Clyde kluckhohn, O.H. Mowrer, and Henry Murray, emerged from the Pareto circle with a desire for unity among the social sciences, and "in consideration of the many levels on which behavioral phenomena required consideration," brought attention to the need for conceptual frames through which the human sciences could be united.

It was this common concern that led these early Pareto acolytes to form the informal group called "The Levellers," deeming themselves as such out of a desire to find common ground among the social sciences. Their desire was first articulated by the Harvard Committee on Concentration in the Area of Social Sciences (of which Parsons had recently been elected president) in its 1941 report entitled "Toward a Common Language for the Area of Social Science." The report articulated the need to find commonality among the disciplines, and it was the complexity involved in forging such commonality, the report argued, that necessitated a complex theoretical structure. Such a structure, however, would not be conceived apart from "facts," but as fundamentally intertwined with them. "Hence abstraction and the creation of theoretical frameworks were hardly to be discouraged; what mattered was finding a conceptual scheme in which the abstractions of the various social sciences could be consolidated and rendered a convenient 'tool' for think about human behavior in the round" (166).

The final chapter of Working Knowledge returns to Kuhn, and the reconstructed context out of which The Structure of Scientific Revolutions emerged. The context in which Kuhn's ideas were incubated begins with Phillip Frank, who sought to "reconstruct the program of the Vienna Circle for the age of nuclear energy and electrical engineering," and exercised a decisive influence on Kuhn. Frank wanted to bridge the gap between science as an internal, technical discipline, and the human "values" that guided its movement throughout history. This was the basis for his forming the Inter-Scientific Discussion Group in 1944. The goal of the group was pedagogical. It sought to inculcate in students of science the scientific philosophy began by Mach, Poincare, James, and Peirce and the tools of Logical empiricism "for analyzing the formal validity of scientific statements." This was to be integrated with the humanizing practice of understanding the values driving competing scientific theories in a historical context.

Kuhn seized on this idea, further supported by his mentor James Bryan Conant, but saw in it an inattention to the way new conceptual schemes were initiated and understood by scientists themselves. So he sought to understand these changes-the construction of empirical knowledge by scientists-on both a psychological and philosophical level by collapsing the “pedagogical distinction between 'demonstration' for non-scientists and intuitive 'experience' for practitioners" (211). After being conducted into the Society of Fellows in 1948, Kuhn further explored the philosophical implications of his emerging ideas by reading heavily in philosophy, lingustics, and logic, and significantly in the works of Jean Piaget's developmental psychology. This led him to a criticism "of the idea that the relationship between theory and experiment, or between a concept and its application, could be accounted for in the terms of logical positivism or operationism" (216). Kuhn had imbibed, but was significantly revising the philosophical and psychological import of Henderson and his mentor Conant.

In what is the most astute and perspicacious section of the book, almost reading like a peroration, Isaac compares Kuhn's shift from this period up until the penultimate draft of Strucutre, in which he discarded the idea of consensus during periods of normal science for the idea of a paradigm, and, Isaac argues, returned to his roots in the epistemology in the interstitial academy. The idea of consensus, Kuhn thought, was not adequate to explain perceptual changes in the limits and problems of normal scientific inquiry. In his first book, The Copernican Revolution, Kuhn had placed emphasis on the intellectual history and the sociology of knowledge to explain conceptual shifts in science. But by the final draft of structure, he had come to abandon this notion, which suggested a new period of consenus, in favor of a more radical change in mental outlook and "way of seeing the world." Isaac suggests that this was a way for Kuhn of returning to his earlier orientation, bred in the context of the interstitial academy, which emphasized "the psychology of learning and the referential properties of words" (225). This was in large part due to the book's hero, Ludwig Wittgentein, but, as Isaac points out, can be equally credited with the Harvard Complex, specifically L.J Henderson and Conant.

So the context in which Kuhn developed his idea of a paradigm, which Isaac argues is significant considering his last minute abandonment of the notion of “consensus” in the penultimate draft of Structure, sheds new light on his affinity for Wittgenstein and his pedagogically informed epistemology. Thus it is that Isaac wants us to historicize Kuhn, and cease conflating his reception with the historical circumstances surrounding his intellectual development. Such conflation, Isaac argues, has led to the view of epistemology qua ideology behind the epic “philosophical histories” of modernity put forward by Taylor, MacIntyre, Foucault, Rorty, and the like; works that make sweeping claims about the historic character of knowledge production, and the production of a modern, representationlist self in the wake of Descartes.

But might there be something more to these philosophical histories, missed in Isaac’s dismissal of their significance? It might be suggested that works like Macintyre’s After Virtue, Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, and that of the later Foucualt, were indicative of something like a crisis not only in philosophy, but modern culture and thought more generally, which might explain why the idea of a “science” of human beings may have set off such a polarizing debate in the first place. Whether or not this is true, the convergence on certain existential themes of human understanding in these works raises an important question: is the historicizing of Kuhn really enough to deflate this crisis? Does Isaac’s remarkable and painstakingly researched history of the human sciences at Harvard put our minds at ease given his goal of “deflating” the putatively epic epistemic struggle between positivists and post-positivists? Does it quell the existential stakes raised by these philosophical histories?

What I want to suggest is, in this sense, a limitation of contextualist intellectual history in understanding the philosophical import of Kuhn’s work. For although Isaac’s brilliantly crafted narrative sheds light on certain crucial details about Kuhn’s intellectual development and context (and, of course, the book isn’t all about Kuhn), it seems to me that this light cannot throw into historical relief the philosophical debate over positivism and interpretivism simply by elucidating Kuhn’s epistemic context because it misses the existential implications and philosophical meanings of this debate, implications and meanings that cannot simply be deflated by a more nuanced understanding of context. In fact, it seems that asking this of the reader based on empirical evidence assumes a certain verificationist epistemology that obscures the way we derive meaning from the histories we create, obscuring the dialogical aspect of intellectual history which is more conducive to reflection upon meaning itself. [2]

Take for example the neo-pragmatist Richard Bernstein’s 1981 book, Beyond Objectivity and Relativism. Here, Bernstein pointed to what he perceived to be a persistent “uneasiness that has spread throughout intellectual and cultural life,” an uneasiness that had seemingly set the stakes of intellectual culture in the terms Isaac describes, one between epistemic, Cartesian certainty on the one hand, and a subjectivist relativism on the other. Like Isaac, Bernstein sought to deflate this purportedly either/or choice by canvassing some of the most important thinkers involved in such debates: Hannah Arendt, Hans Georg Gadamer, Richard Rorty, and Thomas Kuhn. In his chapter on Kuhn, which dealt with the reception of his work as well as its philosophical import, Bernstein argued that the terms in which Kuhn had supposedly set the debate were flawed; Kuhn’s work shouldn’t be seen as leading the charge of relativism or unfettered interpertivism. Instead, it should be viewed as rendering science as one among competing discourses, or as Wittgenstein would have it “forms of life,” the terms of which involve learning certain rules, and participating along the given guidelines set by a community of inquirers. Bernstein made a point remarkably similar to Isaac’s, albeit in a philosophical rather than historical register, a point that rightfully helps to deflate the epistemic stakes between a fanatical relativism and a hard and fast objectivity. [3]But is there something more at stake here?

In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Rorty made a similar point, but suggested something Isaac seems to miss in his writing off of “philosophical history.” Rorty noted his indebtedness to Kuhn, and the significance of his work, but along with Kuhn, (as well as Dewey, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger, the heroes of the book) cites Quine and his “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” as helping to overcome the view of privileged representations, helping philosophers to see the “social” and “practice oriented” nature of knowledge. For Rorty, Quine represented what he referred to as “epistemological behaviorism,” a way of "explaining rationality and epistemic authority by reference to what society lets us say, rather than the latter by the former…an attitude common to Dewey and Wittgenstein." [4]The fact that Rorty was attuned to the “craft-like” epistemology Isaac finds in Quine seems somewhat to undermine, on the one hand, his claim that his “philosophical history” in particular should have contributed to such a polarizing debate, given that this was the exact opposite conclusion he wished the reader to draw. It seems that Rorty came to something of a similar conclusion as Isaac: he wanted to deflate the debate between positivism, and empiricism on the one hand, and the more interpretive dimensions of thought.

But in fact, it was this intention that led Rorty to want to abandon the notion of epistemology altogether, suggesting that the idea of having a “theory of knowledge” was more or less fruitless. And it was this conclusion that led Rorty to argue that Kuhn still clung to a view of epistemology that contained within it traces of Kantian idealism. As Rorty put it, "Kuhn was right in saying that 'a philosophical paradigm initiated by Descartes and developed at the same time as Newtonian dynamics' need to be overthrown, but he let his notion of what counted as a 'philosophical paradigm' be set by the Kantian notion that the only substitute for a realistic account of successful mirroring was an idealistic account of the malleability of the mirrored world."[5]

What Rorty pointed to, and arguably dismissed too glibly, was in his mind the need to dispense with epistemology altogether in favor of hermeneutics. Noting his indebtedness to Gadamer’s Truth and Method, he suggested that hermeneutics was significant not as a replacement of epistemology, but as an embrace of the fact of incommensurability pointed to by Kuhn. Such an embrace acknowledges that the distinction between people and things is only that people use language. "If one draws the hermeneutics epistemology distinction…there is no requirement that people should be more difficult to understand than things; it is merely that hermeneutics is only needed in the case of incommensurable discourses, and that people discourse whereas things do not. What makes the difference is not discourse versus silence, but incommensurable versus commensurable discourses" (347). The point, however, is not to attribute to language a metaphysical essence, to attach significance, as did Charles Taylor, to the fact that language facilitates a metaphysical or transcendental means of self-definition and re-definition, but to deal with the fact, or the normativity of language use itself, and to cope with this fact to the best of our ability.

What such coping amounts to, for Rorty, is something at once very similar, but at the same time significantly different than the implications Isaac wants us to draw. Rorty argued that Gadamer separates the "romantic notion of man as self-creative" or self-defining from Cartesian dualism or transcendentalism. "He does this by substituting the notion of Bildung(education, self-formation) for that of 'knowledge' as the goal of thinking." The significance of education, again, seems to belie the claim that such philosophical histories as Rorty’s are the fodder for debates over positivism versus post-positivism. "From the educational, as opposed to the epistemological or the technological, point of view, the way things are said is more important than the possession of truths." [6]But of course, one is left to deal with this way things are said, and the place of the human self from this educational point of view, which is a fundamental part of the second aspect of Bildung suggested by Rorty, via Gadamer: the process of self-formation.

I want to suggest that it is the process of self-formation as an existential issue that is, arguably, the larger message and significance of these philosophical histories, and perhaps exactlywhy they’ve caused the polarized debate that Isaac wants to deflate. That is, we see in Rorty’s book and the other so-called philosophical histories a suggestion that the connection between self-formation and education, participation in our collective “forms of life,” takes on a particularly anxious character in the latter part of the twentieth century, with “science” acting as the dominant paradigm in a globalized, post-industrial, technological society. For there to be a “science” of human beings speaks to an issue larger than epistemology, but rather our condition of Being-in-the-world itself. Isaac argues that the limitation of these philosophical histories is that they are explicitly self-interested, and implicitly accede to the side of interpretivism that keeps the debate between positivists and so-called post-positivists alive, thus preventing the hope of interdisciplinarity intimated by the interstitial academy. “Consequently, the philosophical history of the human sciences has made the postwar fragmentation of the disciplines seem at once inevitable and-given the incommensurable theories of human nature that supposedly underpin differences between practitioners-intractable.” [7]It seems, however, that it is not competing views of human nature that keep the debate alive, but rather how those views are determined, historically, by what it is we take knowledge to be, what it’s good for at a given moment in time in relation to how we view ourselves. Calling this fact to our attention as a philosophical gesture thus seems less self-interested than self-reflexive, a gesture pointing to the fact that we’ll likely always be having this debate, and arguably, for good reasons.

 It is exactly this issue that is addressed by the latter Foucault in the second two volumes of The History of Sexuality, the 1982-83 “Government of the Self and Others Lectures” and his essays “What is Enlightenment” and “On The Geneaology of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress,” where he addresses the significant existential and ontological weight carried in making a claim in the absence of metaphysical certainty and established authority. It is a recognition that in the late twentieth century what might be called for is a an ethics of self, bound up in reflection, ties with others, and a fundamental relation to one’s self-formation that dispenses with “knowledge” as something that might wed us closer to the world, or closer to “progress, and instead seeks an existential and ontological relationship to oneself, in relation to one’s historical circumstance. [8]

For Foucault, the perceived need for such an ethics was a characteristic mark of modernity. But, of course, it was not only Foucault who shared this view. Aside from the volumes of literature on so-called “alienation” in the history of twentieth century intellectual history, those philosophical histories Isaac wants to dismiss address similar features of a perceived existential crisis of modern, post-industrial societies, features that come to bear in various ways on the importance of Bildung. Stanley Cavell, for example, (arguably the most important and underrated American philosopher of the second half of the twentieth century) places enormous emphasis on the role of education (he was a close friend and colleague of Kuhn’s) and its connection to epistemology and self-formation, while holding to the belief that the process of self-formation involves a recognition that “the human creature's basis in the world as a whole, its relation to the world as such, is not that of knowing, anyway not what we think of as knowing.” [9]Perhaps this explains his suggestion that his work “crosses paths at alarmingly many points with what Foucault translates and perceives as the care of the self.” [10]Further, perhaps it opens a window onto the more existential import of Kuhn’s work; not in the sense that he should be seen as having “led the charge” towards interpretivism or post-positivism, as Isaac rightly notes, but in the sense that his book sparked an important conversation about “knowledge” itself, what it is we really take this thing called “knowledge” to mean, and how this consideration might come to bear on issues of selfhood. It seems that this is a large part of the significance of the Catholicism underlying the existential questions addressed by Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self and Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue; they attune us to a lack in the modernity of the twentieth-century that converges most significantly on the existential and ontological dimensions of knowledge, education, and self, a convergence that neither begins nor ends with Kuhn, but should certainly be considered. As Cavell put it in a response to Alan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind, “Kuhn’s book-whatever its shortcomings-(say in providing an epistemology for the concept of a world and of the change of a world), and however much its frame has overshadowed its teaching (so that it is cited as in support of relativism and even irrationality)-did more than any other text to weaken the hold of a positivist/pragmatist verificationist picture of scientific progress on the academic imagination.”[11]Perhaps this is exactly what the academic imagination needed.
                                                                                                                   

[1]Joel Isaac, Working Knowledge: Making the Human Sciences from Parsons to Kuhn (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2012). Specific page citations from Isaac's book will be given in parentheses in the body of this essay.
[2]I’m taking cues here from Dominick LaCapra, who suggests that a more “documentary” approach to history, especially intellectual history, often comes at the expense of a fair and complex interpretation of the meanings of great texts, and obscures what can be a more fruitful, dialogical relationship with the past that understands historiography as a series of self-understanding. See his “Rethinking Intellectual History and Reading Texts,” History and Theory19 No. 3 (1980): 245-276. See also Martin Jay, “Historical Explanation and Event: Reflections on the Limits of Contextualization,” New Literary History 42 No. 4 (2011): 557-71.
[3] Richard Bernstein, Between Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981), 1-20.
[4] Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009,1979), 174.
[5]Ibid., 325.
[6]Ibid., 359.
[7]Isaac, Working Knowledge, 15.
[8]See Michel Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?” in Michel Foucault, The Foucault Reader ed. Paul Rainbow (New York: Vintage Books, 2010); idem. The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the Collège De France, 1982-1983, trans. Graham Burchell , Arnold I. Davidson ed. (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011); idem. Michel Foucault, “On The Geneaology of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress” in The Foucault Reader; idem. Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” Critical Inquiry 8 (1982):
[9]Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 242.
[10]Stanley Cavell, Little Did I Know: Excerpts From Memory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 479.
[11]Stanley Cavell, “Who Disappoints Whom?”, Critical Inquiry 15:3 (1989). 

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Erik Hmiel is a second-year P.H.D student at Syracuse University. He is a 20th century U.S intellectual historian and his research interests are primarily in the history of American and Continental philosophy and theory.

Kamis, 30 Agustus 2012

CFP: Education Reform: Past, Present, and Future

CALL FOR PAPERS
The Councilor: A Journal of the Social Studies
Special Issue on Education Reform: Past, Present, and Future
Edited by Andrew Hartman (Illinois State University) and Jeff Manuel (Southern Illinois University Edwardsville)

Fundamental questions have roiled the American educational system in recent years. Critics suggest that public education is failing its students and the nation, pinning the blame on teachers' unions, curriculum, and educational bureaucracy, among other culprits. Skeptics, on the other hand, note that critiques of today's educational system are motivated by get-rich-quick privatization schemes or simply find educational reform to be the latest cause de jour. Teachers themselves often feel that their professionalism, their care for children as well as test scores, and their collective bargaining rights vis-a-vis administrators are threatened by possible reforms.

As the journal of record for the Illinois Council for the Social Studies, The Councilor will publish a special issue on the topic of educational reform. We seek academic articles and shorter reflective essays on topics related to educational reform in its current guise, but also its past iterations and possible future trajectories. Possible topics may include:

  • Teachers’ firsthand experiences with new testing and accountability regimes
  • Lessons from previous reform movements that might inform the current situation
  • Discussion of how Illinois teachers and schools have responded to the challenges of education reform

For consideration, please submit an abstract of approximately 200 words to the editors by October 15, 2012. The editors will review all submissions and then invite authors to submit full articles to the journal in early 2013. Abstracts should be emailed to Andrew Hartman (ahartma@ilstu.edu) and Jeff Manuel (jemanue@siue.edu).

The Councilor is the peer-reviewed journal of the Illinois Council for the Social Studies. Since 1939, The Councilor has published articles that incorporate pedagogical innovation and practice into all disciplines of the social studies. The Councilor
also provides a forum for scholars to publish articles that explore the ways in which they integrate research into the classroom.

Rabu, 29 Agustus 2012

Black Internationalism--the Class

James Baldwin in Turkey. Photo found at Northwest African American Museum
I am teaching a "Topics in US History" course next semester and I need to get my course description approved this week. I'm planning to teach the course on "Black Internationalism: African American Engagement with the World." I'm going to use James Campbell's compelling book Middle Passages: African American Journeys to Africa,1787-2005 as the anchor to the course.  It has the advantage of moving forward 20-40 years in each chapter and also draws readers in by discussing big ideas through the lens of a single or at times a handful of individuals. I am going to pair the different chapters with relevant primary sources, such as Martin Delaney's Blake, Alexander Crummel's essays, Du Bois editorials from The Crisis, global Hip Hop songs, etc. (Lisa Lindsay has a lovely syllabus that uses Middle Passages in an honors course about US relations to Africa). There are 9 chapters, so for the other 6 weeks of the course, I'm going to concentrate on other parts of the world. So far the course is Europe and Africa heavy, so I need to think about bringing in Asia and Latin America. I had thought about assigning Kwame Anthony Appiah's Cosmopolitanism, but perhaps I will do something from Nico Slate's Colored Cosmopolitanism instead. Perhaps I will pair the Langston Hughes' chapter in Middle Passages with his autobiography The Big Sea. That will bring in Europe in the 1920s, so then I could use the week I had devoted to that topic to bring in African Americans in Haiti.



I could start thinking about daily topics instead of weekly topics, which would give me more room in the schedule. The problem is that I don't know whether the class will be a MWF or a TH and I find that fairly dramatically changes the way I schedule.

I often like to include something from NPR, the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, or other intelligent but not scholarly sources to show students that there are myriad ways to stay connected to ideas past their graduation. For this course, I'm thinking of assigning the New Yorker's "'Another Country' James Baldwin's flight from America" by Claudia Roth Pierpont.

Here's my course description. Any suggestions?

How does travel change a person’s understanding of themselves? What happens when a person facing discrimination at home feels greater freedom abroad, like most of the African Americans who traveled abroad in the 19th and 20thcenturies? This course will explore different ideas of internationalism, both political and personal, among African Americans. Travels abroad, physically and textually, have been essential to the process of building an African American identity. African Americans approached their journeys with many different philosophies, including Black Nationalism, Pan-Africanism, cosmopolitanism, Christianity, pacifism, and militancy. They developed ideas of missionizing Africa as well as joining with Africans to challenge white supremacy. They criticized inequality in Asia, rejoiced in the Japanese triumph over Russia in 1905, and eventually built a spirit of common cause with other colonized peoples. Ideas about internationalism transformed over the two hundred and fifty years since the United States and Haitian revolutions; this course will interrogate those changes and their influence on global politics and personal identities.

Selasa, 28 Agustus 2012

Kevin Mattson on his own behalf


(Guest post.)
1.
Returning to the debate…

Andrew Hartman’s a smart guy.  He wrote a thoughtful critique of my work (here and here).  But his timing, at least for me, was poor.  He posted just as I was leaving for a two and a half month sojourn into the wilds of Oregon and Washington on the Pacific Crest Trail with my wife, kid, and dog (for those who want a bit more, see these photos).  Now back, I appreciate the opportunity to reengage the debate that Hartman sparked.
 
Though I agree with much of what Andrew said in his pieces, it’s probably no surprise that I also disagree.  I’ll be roundabout in engaging his arguments, starting in one place and circling out to others and then coming back to the debate he most wanted to prompt.

Hartman fails to mention something crucial in the Old Right constellation (let’s say the early 1950s to demarcate the time-frame here) when he contrasts it to the neoconservatism of the 1960s: The centrality of McCarthyism and the heated rhetoric used against Adlai Stevenson and liberalism during the 1952 election.  I deal with this in greater detail in my book, Just Plain Dick: Richard Nixon’s Checkers Speech and the “Rocking, Socking” Election of 1952, and so allow me to elaborate to begin our debate.



The conservative mind has always been hell-bent on tracking down a betrayal among elites (that’s why a “populist turn” was not that difficult to make early-on).  During the 1950s, the target became “eggheads” – Harvard-centered liberals (think Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. or John Kenneth Galbraith) giving advice to the king egghead of them all, Adlai Stevenson.  Nixon accused Stevenson of holding a “Ph.D. from Dean Acheson’s Cowardly College of Communist Containment,” an alliteration that pummeled Stevenson as a traitor to his country.  America needed to elect a “real man,” another term Nixon used.  Adlai Stevenson, Nixon said numerous times, lacked “backbone.”  Joseph McCarthy (the gruff ally of Richard Nixon in 1952 and a man who had campaigned for him earlier during his 1950 Senate-run) talked about physically assaulting the “debonair” Democrat (no “ic” added there) candidate for President.  McCarthy, like Nixon, loved a good fight – a tough fight.  Liberals had silver spoons in their mouths and were sissies.  They were indecisive and wimpy.  Both Nixon and McCarthy conflated a real communist sympathizer, Alger Hiss, with an anti-communist and fairly conservative-leaning liberal, Adlai Stevenson.  That was a part of their intellectual-political toolkit and worldview. And it became a central feature of so much conservative political thought during the postwar years.

Enough about political campaigns.  Consider, in light of where we’re having this debate, two intellectuals.  First and foremost Whittaker Chambers, whose book Witnesscame out in 1952 (Nixon did what he could to promote his ally’s book).  Witnessderided “the most articulate section of mankind” (codeword: educated) for betraying the country by ceasing to “believe in God” and giving into communist dreams of remaking the world.  Alger Hiss was the icon here.  The book set the tone of so much conservative work from that point onwards – apocalyptic, melodramatic, and grandiose.  Central in it was something Chambers overheard from a friend of Henry Luce’s: “In the United States, the working class are Democrats.  The middle class are Republicans.  The upper class are Communists.”  

The second intellectual, and this starts getting us to the point that Andrew wanted to engage the most, is Irving Kristol.  Writing about “liberals” in 1952 (seemingly he still was one – though it depended on what the term meant), Kristol contrasted them to Joseph McCarthy.  In one of the most quoted lines from the essay (used in the documentary, Arguing the World, and Neil Jumonville’s The New York Intellectuals Reader), Kristol worried: “There is one thing that the American people know about Senator McCarthy: he, like them, is unequivocally anti-Communist.  About the spokesmen for American liberalism, they feel they know no such thing.  And with some justification.”  The person he cites to make his case is Henry Steele Commager, professor of history at Columbia University and one of many eggheads who would later go on to protest Eisenhower’s run for the presidency.

Kristol’s point, I think, was that the style mattered – that it was McCarthy’s gruffness that attracted many to his side.  Liberals lacked the spirit of the fight, because they also worried about something called “civil liberties.”  McCarthy’s assured style mattered in the common perception of him as a fighter against liberal pansies who had too many self-tormented doubts.  Kristol wasn’t endorsing McCarthy here, but he was putting an idea on the table that neoconservatives would come back to later after the sixties: That liberal elites (the term “new class” wasn’t used at this point – the huge explosion in higher education was still emerging as a major social factor) betrayed their country and lacked legitimacy in the eyes of the American public.

2.
Style versus substance and good versus bad presentism…

Andrew suggests I pick up on style too much rather than substance.  I realize I’m not in great standing if I defend style over substance.  Nonetheless, my undergraduate students have taught me that style and substance are inseparable every time they complain that I’ve graded their essays on writing (usually my “awkward prose” comments litter their margins) rather than their ideas or arguments.  Over and over, I have to explain that how you communicate your ideas – your tone, clarity, verve or lackthereof – is wedded to substance.  “If you can’t state your case, you don’t have a case,” I have said to many a perturbed younger writer.  There’s of course a fancy tradition of linguistic philosophy I could cite here, but why bother?  What I suggested in Rebels All! is that the style of contemporary conservatives – apocalyptic, fabulist in orientation, insular, aggressive – tells us a great deal about the substance of their ideas.  Hard right writers create hard right prose and communicate the nature of their ideas in doing so.  Andrew wants to separate out these two areas too quickly (and I should point out that one of the commenters on Andrew’s piece pointed this out better than I can).

This style argument is also tied to my defense of the liberal tradition in American ideas.  I must take aim at Hartman’s conflation of my interpretation of postwar liberalism with that of Peter Beinart (author of The Good Fight).  Indeed, I reviewed Beinart’s book in the Boston Review.  I spent a great deal of time showing that Beinart’s book was sloppy and full of historical analogies that didn’t work.  I am by all means a presentist, but I also see the inherent dangers of writing presentist history.  It’s rather easy to conflate the 9/11 period with the early years of the Cold War and to do so in a bad, sloppy, and rushed way.  Personally, I was shocked by Peter Beinart’s shock in the opening pages of The Good Fight where he confessed that he overvalued America’s legitimacy abroad and underestimated George W. Bush’s incompetence.  This coming from someone who had read Reinhold Niebuhr?!  Good presentism would have raised more doubts about our prospects of exporting democracy.  It would make us appreciate an insight of postwar liberalism: That irony and humility are necessary guards against self-assured expansion of American power.  That style, the way you hold your ideas and worldview, often guide the way you do things in the world.

So, yes, I’m a presentist less concerned with historiography and academic debates than I am in understanding the world I occupy.  On that, Andrew is certainly right.  I have just assigned George Orwell’s essays on writing for an upcoming graduate student course.  I am reminded in rereading Orwell that his motivation in writing – political and engaged – was always mine.  I cut my teeth and came into a great deal of my knowledge not from academe but from activism.  I learned to write for political publications and punk rock fanzines.  I also am suspicious that “new” ideas in historiography are as important as they often appear.  When I entered graduate school, there was still a great deal of interest in the prospect of labor and social history saving the historical profession as well as growing interest in Western Marxist theory to orient historical explorations (I was at the hotbed for that project during graduate school – the University of Rochester).  Remember how feminist historians touted the virtues of deconstruction as a method for rewriting history – a la Joan Scott (for more on this point, I point readers here)?  What happened to all of that, I’m left wondering today.  Historiography is largely a dustbin of trendy ideas that get put on for a number of years and then discarded.  The only thing we have left today, as far as I can tell, is a bricolage of ideas and orientations, none of which promise to orient our intellectual work with assuredness.  Perhaps such a statement consigns me to being on no graduate reading lists, as Andrew suggests.

3.
Politics

A simpler and cleaner point.  I sense Andrew and I disagree on politics.  He appears much more of a leftist; I’m a liberal.  Some of his criticisms seem less about the substance of my own argument and getting things wrong and more with my own political conclusions.  As I recall, he didn’t care for my critique of Howard Zinn and other far lefties that I made a number of years ago.  It’s not about the popularization but about the conclusions you draw and where they point you politically.  Andrew goes much further in a left direction than I do.  This is not the place for me to elaborate on all of the ins and outs of the differences between liberals and leftists.

4.

The debate about neocons that Andrew wanted to have…

Finally, the chief point that Andrew wanted most to debate, and this brings me back to my opening.  Andrew doesn’t like that I conflate the neoconservative critique (1960s onwards) with the Old Right intellectual hatred of liberal elites (1950s).  There are rarely direct lines in history (unlike Corey Robin, I don’t see straight lines, for instance, from Burke to Palin), but I’m pretty sure about thisdirect line.  I admit to a suspicion when anyone claims they are a “new” or “neo” anything.  I think that’s probably a historian’s natural inclination.  No doubt, the neoconservatives Andrew has in mind claimed the altar of uniqueness.  They felt uncomfortable being associated with WASP or Catholic curmudgeons, like Whittaker Chambers or William F. Buckley.  They were Jews educated in an urban milieu.  They believed in “social science” rather than purely moralistic arguments.  They had been mugged by the sixties.  They had “new” ideas to add to the debate.

True, true, true.  The “new class” conception had its own roots.  An entire book could be written about the idea (hell, an entire edited book was published about the idea).  Indeed, the conception of a new class had much deeper roots than the sixties.  Andrew knows that many of its roots went farther back to Thorstein Veblen’s idea of “engineers” clashing with capitalist owners, to the Trostkyist critique of Stalin’s supposed “betrayal” of the Soviet revolution, to Lionel Trilling’s conception of modernism’s “adversary” tendencies.  Daniel Bell – the sociologist who helped neoconservative arguments along the way until he balked at Kristol’s ideological hardening and recognized his own liberal beliefs – knew about all of these different roots and called the concept of a “new class” a “muddled” concept.  He was right.

My point is that the “new class” idea mimicked and helped reproduce, much more than the neoconservatives might have thought, that older idea of educated elites selling out the country to communism.  Who was Alger Hiss and who was Dean Acheson and who was Adlai Stevenson?  Well, they were all men who attended good schools because their families could afford them and yet who betrayed the ballast of western civilization.  The terms “egghead” and “new class” share more than we might at first think if we think about how the terms operate in political debate.  Most important of all, hardening a critique of a “new class” helped someone like a Kristol create a more populist tone to his work – a tone that he had once rejected during the mid-1960s and early 1970s (for more on this, see my essay about Kristol here).  Neoconservatives might have thought of themselves as social scientists in the pages of the Public Interest, but that would never have satisfied Kristol.  He wanted a movement, based around certain moral and political ideas, to take back the country from the liberal new class.  And who could blame him, if such ideas were always supposed to be about more than just academic ponderings?  Social scientific arguments weren’t enough.  He returned to the language of the Old Conservative right – one that was charged and moralistic – in order to fuel a political agenda.  I would suggest that the idea of a new class helped him get to this point.

So too Norman Podhoretz in the realm of foreign policy.  He would return to the spirit of Joseph McCarthy by the late 1970s, suggesting that a liberal elite (effeminate, perhaps even homosexual, and certainly cautious) had lost the Vietnam War.  That echoed the war at home that worried Irving Kristol once the Cold War had ended. In 1993, Kristol wrote, "My cold war has increased in intensity, as sector after sector of American life has been ruthlessly corrupted by the liberal ethos. It is an ethos that aims simultaneously at political and social collectivism on the one hand, and moral anarchy on the other."  The language of war was the language of politics, of course.  Social science wouldn’t win a war.  But a class warfare argument just might.  And so the neoconservatives were right back to the language of Nixon (the 1952 Nixon, I would argue, as much as the 1972 Nixon who Kristol supported) and McCarthy as they vocalized a politics they thought could win the nation back from the perils of liberalism.  The 1960s and the culture wars mattered here for sure.  But my point is that the lineage was there to build upon already.