1. What Today's Philosophers Think: Although I understand some of the questions given here by The PhilPapers Surveys, another subset are beyond me---at least as of today. The authors of the quiz concede that they framed many of the questions within the analytic tradition, and my strengths (the few I possess) do not lie in the history of that era, or in its terminology, so my ignorance should not have surprised me. Still, I'm intrigued by what I do know of the issues. The demographics portion of the survey included a question (at the bottom) about the non-living philosophers with which today's group identified. Notice Foucault garnered only 11 votes, and Adorno only 6. I was shocked to see Hume at the top, as well as Aristotle---one of my favorites---still holding at #2. My other favorite is Aquinas, who came in at #24 with 69 votes. Dewey, Sellars, and Peirce came in at 29, 30, and 31 with 31, 30, and 28 votes, respectively. James entered at 34 with 22 votes. Based on my more recent, less historical observations of Catholic thought and the analytical framework of the questions, I'm somewhat surprised to see neither this guy nor this movement on the lists. I figured one or the other would get the 5 minimum nods to be counted.
2. Livingston At HNN: Here's a partial reprise of James Livingston's USIH address, which is also an excerpt from his new book, The World Turned Inside Out: American Thought and Culture at the End of the 20th Century. And here's his new blog address. There he takes on the criticisms of Eric Alterman given during the conference, and reveals---at the end of the post---that he told a (white) lie to Alterman and the rest of us during Q&A.
3. Culture Wars at "The Great Books College of Chicago": As an observer and student of trends in the history of the great books idea, I can't resist bringing to your attention a story out of Chicago. The gist is this: Some faculty and and students at Shimer College are worried that the administration, headed by President Thomas K. Lindsay, is engineering a conservative take over of the institution. A bit of background is necessary. Shimer began as a small liberal arts college in Illinois, originally located in Mount Carroll, that took on a great books curriculum in the 1950s. That curriculum derived from the thinking of Robert Maynard Hutchins, former University of Chicago president, and probably Mortimer J. Adler, Hutchins's friend and intellectual advisor. The college's great books list originally looked a lot like the one comprising Britannica's 1952 Great Books set, but evolved to something more liberal and inclusive as time passed. With regard to its staff, faculty, and students, Shimer became known, especially in the 1970s, for its liberal social and cultural atmosphere. This was evident not just in behavior (which hearsay has probably amplified) during the "Me Decade," but also---and more importantly---in Shimer's radically democratic shared governance scheme, the "Assembly," discussed in the first link above. While some comments to the article express dismay at the culture wars overlay in the piece, saying this is an administrative issue only, there does appear to be a right-ward trend in relation to new Board of Trustees members. This weblog is documenting student, faculty, and staff resistance to the changes. There's a lot to say about this story, but my biggest surprise is that this political-social tug-of-war is only just now hitting Shimer. I'm shocked it didn't happen in the 1980s or 1990s, well before its move to Chicago.
4. The Great Books College of C.S. Lewis: Thanks to John Fea, I have learned that a C.S. Lewis-inspired, ecumenically Christian college is opening in Northfield, MA. The curriculum is, of course, to be based on the great books idea. John didn't say which version of the great books idea they'd be utilizing, but I can imagine a Britannica connection. I'd have to explore their website to learn more. I'll wait on that project, however, until they actually open and host a first class.
5. So you read the Encyclopedia Britannica?: Continuing the great books/Britannica subtheme of today's entries, A.J. Jacobs reflects on the proportion of things-remembered to things-learned after having read the Encyclopedia Britannica near the beginning of this decade. He recorded much of that endeavor in his 2004 book, The Know-It-All. Two parts from the Youtube clip caught my attention. Jacobs emphatically declares that he's forgotten "a huge amount" right off the bat-- about 97-98 percent he thinks. But he also reflects, around the 55 second mark, on the fact that he's gained a deeper, more useful-than-trivia kind of knowledge from that reading. For instance, he cited a justified, affirming optimism about humanity's ability to adapt and grow (my words) that has resulted from his survey of the accomplishments of human civilization.
6. Midsouth Philosophy Conference: I bring this to your attention because of the openness of the call---meaning historians of the Lovejovian variety might be welcome: "The thirty-fourth annual Midsouth Philosophy Conference is scheduled for Friday afternoon and Saturday, March 5-6, at The University of Memphis. Papers in any area are welcome. There will be a $25 registration fee, payable by cash or check at the conference (but not by credit or debit card). Alastair Norcross (University of Colorado at Boulder) will deliver the keynote address."
Tampilkan postingan dengan label 2009 USIH Conference. Tampilkan semua postingan
Tampilkan postingan dengan label 2009 USIH Conference. Tampilkan semua postingan
Kamis, 17 Desember 2009
Tim's Light Reading (12/17/2009)
1. What Today's Philosophers Think: Although I understand some of the questions given here by The PhilPapers Surveys, another subset are beyond me---at least as of today. The authors of the quiz concede that they framed many of the questions within the analytic tradition, and my strengths (the few I possess) do not lie in the history of that era, or in its terminology, so my ignorance should not have surprised me. Still, I'm intrigued by what I do know of the issues. The demographics portion of the survey included a question (at the bottom) about the non-living philosophers with which today's group identified. Notice Foucault garnered only 11 votes, and Adorno only 6. I was shocked to see Hume at the top, as well as Aristotle---one of my favorites---still holding at #2. My other favorite is Aquinas, who came in at #24 with 69 votes. Dewey, Sellars, and Peirce came in at 29, 30, and 31 with 31, 30, and 28 votes, respectively. James entered at 34 with 22 votes. Based on my more recent, less historical observations of Catholic thought and the analytical framework of the questions, I'm somewhat surprised to see neither this guy nor this movement on the lists. I figured one or the other would get the 5 minimum nods to be counted.
2. Livingston At HNN: Here's a partial reprise of James Livingston's USIH address, which is also an excerpt from his new book, The World Turned Inside Out: American Thought and Culture at the End of the 20th Century. And here's his new blog address. There he takes on the criticisms of Eric Alterman given during the conference, and reveals---at the end of the post---that he told a (white) lie to Alterman and the rest of us during Q&A.
3. Culture Wars at "The Great Books College of Chicago": As an observer and student of trends in the history of the great books idea, I can't resist bringing to your attention a story out of Chicago. The gist is this: Some faculty and and students at Shimer College are worried that the administration, headed by President Thomas K. Lindsay, is engineering a conservative take over of the institution. A bit of background is necessary. Shimer began as a small liberal arts college in Illinois, originally located in Mount Carroll, that took on a great books curriculum in the 1950s. That curriculum derived from the thinking of Robert Maynard Hutchins, former University of Chicago president, and probably Mortimer J. Adler, Hutchins's friend and intellectual advisor. The college's great books list originally looked a lot like the one comprising Britannica's 1952 Great Books set, but evolved to something more liberal and inclusive as time passed. With regard to its staff, faculty, and students, Shimer became known, especially in the 1970s, for its liberal social and cultural atmosphere. This was evident not just in behavior (which hearsay has probably amplified) during the "Me Decade," but also---and more importantly---in Shimer's radically democratic shared governance scheme, the "Assembly," discussed in the first link above. While some comments to the article express dismay at the culture wars overlay in the piece, saying this is an administrative issue only, there does appear to be a right-ward trend in relation to new Board of Trustees members. This weblog is documenting student, faculty, and staff resistance to the changes. There's a lot to say about this story, but my biggest surprise is that this political-social tug-of-war is only just now hitting Shimer. I'm shocked it didn't happen in the 1980s or 1990s, well before its move to Chicago.
4. The Great Books College of C.S. Lewis: Thanks to John Fea, I have learned that a C.S. Lewis-inspired, ecumenically Christian college is opening in Northfield, MA. The curriculum is, of course, to be based on the great books idea. John didn't say which version of the great books idea they'd be utilizing, but I can imagine a Britannica connection. I'd have to explore their website to learn more. I'll wait on that project, however, until they actually open and host a first class.
5. So you read the Encyclopedia Britannica?: Continuing the great books/Britannica subtheme of today's entries, A.J. Jacobs reflects on the proportion of things-remembered to things-learned after having read the Encyclopedia Britannica near the beginning of this decade. He recorded much of that endeavor in his 2004 book, The Know-It-All. Two parts from the Youtube clip caught my attention. Jacobs emphatically declares that he's forgotten "a huge amount" right off the bat-- about 97-98 percent he thinks. But he also reflects, around the 55 second mark, on the fact that he's gained a deeper, more useful-than-trivia kind of knowledge from that reading. For instance, he cited a justified, affirming optimism about humanity's ability to adapt and grow (my words) that has resulted from his survey of the accomplishments of human civilization.
6. Midsouth Philosophy Conference: I bring this to your attention because of the openness of the call---meaning historians of the Lovejovian variety might be welcome: "The thirty-fourth annual Midsouth Philosophy Conference is scheduled for Friday afternoon and Saturday, March 5-6, at The University of Memphis. Papers in any area are welcome. There will be a $25 registration fee, payable by cash or check at the conference (but not by credit or debit card). Alastair Norcross (University of Colorado at Boulder) will deliver the keynote address."
2. Livingston At HNN: Here's a partial reprise of James Livingston's USIH address, which is also an excerpt from his new book, The World Turned Inside Out: American Thought and Culture at the End of the 20th Century. And here's his new blog address. There he takes on the criticisms of Eric Alterman given during the conference, and reveals---at the end of the post---that he told a (white) lie to Alterman and the rest of us during Q&A.
3. Culture Wars at "The Great Books College of Chicago": As an observer and student of trends in the history of the great books idea, I can't resist bringing to your attention a story out of Chicago. The gist is this: Some faculty and and students at Shimer College are worried that the administration, headed by President Thomas K. Lindsay, is engineering a conservative take over of the institution. A bit of background is necessary. Shimer began as a small liberal arts college in Illinois, originally located in Mount Carroll, that took on a great books curriculum in the 1950s. That curriculum derived from the thinking of Robert Maynard Hutchins, former University of Chicago president, and probably Mortimer J. Adler, Hutchins's friend and intellectual advisor. The college's great books list originally looked a lot like the one comprising Britannica's 1952 Great Books set, but evolved to something more liberal and inclusive as time passed. With regard to its staff, faculty, and students, Shimer became known, especially in the 1970s, for its liberal social and cultural atmosphere. This was evident not just in behavior (which hearsay has probably amplified) during the "Me Decade," but also---and more importantly---in Shimer's radically democratic shared governance scheme, the "Assembly," discussed in the first link above. While some comments to the article express dismay at the culture wars overlay in the piece, saying this is an administrative issue only, there does appear to be a right-ward trend in relation to new Board of Trustees members. This weblog is documenting student, faculty, and staff resistance to the changes. There's a lot to say about this story, but my biggest surprise is that this political-social tug-of-war is only just now hitting Shimer. I'm shocked it didn't happen in the 1980s or 1990s, well before its move to Chicago.
4. The Great Books College of C.S. Lewis: Thanks to John Fea, I have learned that a C.S. Lewis-inspired, ecumenically Christian college is opening in Northfield, MA. The curriculum is, of course, to be based on the great books idea. John didn't say which version of the great books idea they'd be utilizing, but I can imagine a Britannica connection. I'd have to explore their website to learn more. I'll wait on that project, however, until they actually open and host a first class.
5. So you read the Encyclopedia Britannica?: Continuing the great books/Britannica subtheme of today's entries, A.J. Jacobs reflects on the proportion of things-remembered to things-learned after having read the Encyclopedia Britannica near the beginning of this decade. He recorded much of that endeavor in his 2004 book, The Know-It-All. Two parts from the Youtube clip caught my attention. Jacobs emphatically declares that he's forgotten "a huge amount" right off the bat-- about 97-98 percent he thinks. But he also reflects, around the 55 second mark, on the fact that he's gained a deeper, more useful-than-trivia kind of knowledge from that reading. For instance, he cited a justified, affirming optimism about humanity's ability to adapt and grow (my words) that has resulted from his survey of the accomplishments of human civilization.
6. Midsouth Philosophy Conference: I bring this to your attention because of the openness of the call---meaning historians of the Lovejovian variety might be welcome: "The thirty-fourth annual Midsouth Philosophy Conference is scheduled for Friday afternoon and Saturday, March 5-6, at The University of Memphis. Papers in any area are welcome. There will be a $25 registration fee, payable by cash or check at the conference (but not by credit or debit card). Alastair Norcross (University of Colorado at Boulder) will deliver the keynote address."
Kamis, 03 Desember 2009
Hollinger’s “Affiliation by Revocable Consent”: From Postdiscipline to Postethnic to Obama
By Andrew Hartman
At our most recent U.S. Intellectual History Conference, the final panel was also the most anticipated: “Assessing the Legacy of the 1977 Wingspread Conference.” The panelists were Dorothy Ross, Thomas Bender, David Hall, and David Hollinger. I would like to address one of Hollinger’s central contentions, which has lead me to reexamine his most famous work, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (1995).
In reiterating a point he made in the recent Historically Speaking forum on the state of U.S. Intellectual History (which the USIH blog analyzed extensively—see posts by me, Paul Murphy, and not 1, not 2, but 3 by Tim Lacy), Hollinger argued that intellectual historians should guard against ghettoization. Rather than follow the path of the diplomatic historians, who have formed their own society (SHAFR) so as to largely avoid the mainstream societies (AHA and OAH), Hollinger would like to see intellectual history as analogous to political and social history, which are pervasive within the historical discipline writ large.
Some might say Hollinger’s advice is sound only insofar as it speaks to professionalism. In fact, the tone of the entire Wingspread panel was hyper-professional. On the one hand, this is helpful to younger scholars seeking tenured employment in a horrible job market. But, on the other hand, it’s also depressing—the job scene is such that many of us would probably rather the panelists had focused on something more exciting or uplifting. From my perspective, I would have been more interested in what they might have had to say about the workings of intellectual history in the broader public and political culture—past, present, and future.
But the more I thought about Hollinger’s warnings, the more familiar his postdisciplinary approach seemed. In other words, something other than professionalism seems to be driving his thinking. I vaguely recalled that a similar framework guided his theorizing about race and ethnicity in Postethnic, which I first read over a decade ago, before graduate school. I’ve been meaning to return to this book in researching the culture wars, since it speaks to the debates over multiculturalism that rocked the academy and beyond in the 1980s and 90s.
Sure enough, re-reading Postethnic confirmed my suspicions. Not to make too much of the comparison, especially since Hollinger’s discussion of racial and ethnic boundaries is much better theorized, not to mention more important than his discussion of disciplinary boundaries, but the two arguments do seem somewhat parallel. In both cases, Hollinger is suspicious of prescribed boundaries.
The key principal of Postethnic is “affiliation by revocable consent.” In other words, in the context of ethnic and racial identities, “blood” should not determine affiliations of solidarity. Affiliations should be voluntary. This is not to say that Hollinger is against the use of racial categories in political matters. For instance, since black Americans, by their color, and by their history, cannot easily overcome the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow, they are entitled to legal and political remedies in the form of affirmative action, a temporary and imperfect solution. But politics in this form should be decoupled from culture. A black American might need and deserve affirmative action, but he or she should not be obliged to remain tied to the cultural identity of “black America.” Such cultural rigidity drove the identity politics of the 1980s and 90s, which in turn made it more difficult to expand the circle of the American “we” to include, say, poor black Americans living in the urban ghettoes.
To the extent that Hollinger wants to expand the circle of “we” to more Americans, he is unapologetically a liberal nationalist. He assumes, correctly in my view, that the best way to make our society more egalitarian is to build upon our commonalities as Americans. He writes: “A stronger national solidarity enhances the possibility of social and economic justice within the United States. This is a simple point, but an extremely important one. Any society that cannot see its diverse members as somehow ‘in it together’ is going to have trouble distributing its resources with even a modicum of equity.” Along this line, Hollinger is quick to blame economic inequality for the tribalism of identity politics. The type of nationalism he supports is close to the fallen social democratic thinking outlined in Tony Judt’s recent New York Review of Books essay, “What is Living and What is Dead in Social Democracy?”
I would even go so far as to say that Hollinger speaks the language of civil religion (as outlined below in Ray Haberski’s compelling analysis of Obama’s civil religious rhetoric). Hollinger is much more nuanced and qualified in his critique of identity politics and his defense of a national community than, say, a Christopher Lasch or a Robert Bellah. Hollinger links the postethnic together with cosmopolitanism, which negotiates the terrain between pluralism and Kantian universalism on the one hand, and between identity politics and communitarian nationalism on the other. But despite such carefulness, I would put Hollinger in the civil religion category. In this light, my re-reading of Hollinger has compelled me to rethink how I might conclude my book-in-progress on the culture wars—the concluding chapter is to be a reflection on the age of Obama in relation to the culture wars.
In Postethnic, Hollinger sees three distinct constituencies in relation to the U.S. nation-state, circa 1995: 1) the business elite who saw little need for the nation in an era of multinational capitalism (except to enforce their interests around the world); 2) members of the various diasporas who saw the nation “more as a site for transnational affiliations than as an affiliation of its own”; and 3) the “great variety of Middle Americans, evangelical Christians, advocates of family values, and supporters of Newt Gingrich and of Rush Limbaugh… suspicious of the state except as an enforcer of personal morality, but [who] claim the nation as, in effect, their own ethnic group.”
Hollinger’s formulation is clever, and mostly correct in the context of the 90s. Constituencies two and three battled it out in the culture wars as constituency one made out like bandits. But I would add a fourth constituency, one that has waxed and waned in its influence: those Americans who claim the nation for social justice. Such a strain might include everything from populism to Popular Frontism to racial liberalism to communitarianism to, I would add, postethnic thinkers like Hollinger. This social justice variant was overwhelmed during the culture wars. Hollinger’s major achievement in Postethnic is to revitalize such a strain for those sensitive to the needs of ethnic and racial minorities.
It is hard not to read Postethnic through the lens of Obama’s electoral victory. In fact, Hollinger has written about such a connection. In an article titled “Obama, the Instability of Color Lines, and the Promise of a Postethnic Future,” Hollinger contends that the major significance of Obama’s victory is to make clear that race, formulated as class and historical legacy, is more constraining, in the twenty-first century, than race, formulated as color. This separates slavery and Jim Crow’s descendents from black immigrants, African or Caribbean. Hollinger writes: “The African-American descendants of slavery and Jim Crow are the only population group in the United States with a multicentury legacy of group-specific enslavement and institutionalized debasement, including hypo-descent racialization (“one drop of blood” makes a person black) and antimiscegenation laws (black-white marriages were against the law in most states with large black populations until 1967), carried out under constitutional authority. Neither Obama nor any other African-American of immigrant background is a member of this population group. The success of Obama in becoming [president] is, like the success of other black immigrants in other domains, an indication that something other than color-prejudice in the eye of empowered white people is at the root of structural inequality in the United States.”
Although this point is valid and significant, for my purposes, Obama represents something different. As alluded to by Haberski, Obama taps into the fourth strain of thinking in relation to the American nation. Call it civil religion or liberal nationalism. Furthermore, Obama’s victory is a watershed moment, not only because he is the first black president, but because he has given common cause to constituencies number two, those who have viewed the American nation as a meeting place of various diasporas, and four. In short, black nationalists have inched closer to American liberal nationalism. Obama implicitly makes these connections in his writings and in his speeches. That said, the degree to which this “community” is real or lasting is debatable, especially since, in practice, the Obama administration has seemingly favored constituency number one (the business elite) by co-opting numbers two and four. Number three simply thinks he’s un-American.
Now, to conclude by way of returning to Hollinger’s postdisciplinary framework: this is pure speculation—not to mention intellectual gymnastics—but perhaps Hollinger views the relationship of U.S. intellectual history to the larger historical discipline as he views the relationship of, say, Chicano nationalism to the American nation. Chicano nationalism might be necessary in specific contexts, to improve the legal and political position of Latinos vis-à-vis the American nation. But the American nation is the ultimate guarantor of justice to those Chicanos who reside in the United States. I think Hollinger has come around to the view that our endeavors, via the blog and conference, have been necessary to improving our position vis-à-vis the larger historical discipline. He seemed enthusiastic about the conference. But allowing ourselves to be ghettoized would be, in his eyes, the academic equivalent of identity politics. “Affiliation by revocable consent.”
At our most recent U.S. Intellectual History Conference, the final panel was also the most anticipated: “Assessing the Legacy of the 1977 Wingspread Conference.” The panelists were Dorothy Ross, Thomas Bender, David Hall, and David Hollinger. I would like to address one of Hollinger’s central contentions, which has lead me to reexamine his most famous work, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (1995).
In reiterating a point he made in the recent Historically Speaking forum on the state of U.S. Intellectual History (which the USIH blog analyzed extensively—see posts by me, Paul Murphy, and not 1, not 2, but 3 by Tim Lacy), Hollinger argued that intellectual historians should guard against ghettoization. Rather than follow the path of the diplomatic historians, who have formed their own society (SHAFR) so as to largely avoid the mainstream societies (AHA and OAH), Hollinger would like to see intellectual history as analogous to political and social history, which are pervasive within the historical discipline writ large.
Some might say Hollinger’s advice is sound only insofar as it speaks to professionalism. In fact, the tone of the entire Wingspread panel was hyper-professional. On the one hand, this is helpful to younger scholars seeking tenured employment in a horrible job market. But, on the other hand, it’s also depressing—the job scene is such that many of us would probably rather the panelists had focused on something more exciting or uplifting. From my perspective, I would have been more interested in what they might have had to say about the workings of intellectual history in the broader public and political culture—past, present, and future.
But the more I thought about Hollinger’s warnings, the more familiar his postdisciplinary approach seemed. In other words, something other than professionalism seems to be driving his thinking. I vaguely recalled that a similar framework guided his theorizing about race and ethnicity in Postethnic, which I first read over a decade ago, before graduate school. I’ve been meaning to return to this book in researching the culture wars, since it speaks to the debates over multiculturalism that rocked the academy and beyond in the 1980s and 90s.
Sure enough, re-reading Postethnic confirmed my suspicions. Not to make too much of the comparison, especially since Hollinger’s discussion of racial and ethnic boundaries is much better theorized, not to mention more important than his discussion of disciplinary boundaries, but the two arguments do seem somewhat parallel. In both cases, Hollinger is suspicious of prescribed boundaries.
The key principal of Postethnic is “affiliation by revocable consent.” In other words, in the context of ethnic and racial identities, “blood” should not determine affiliations of solidarity. Affiliations should be voluntary. This is not to say that Hollinger is against the use of racial categories in political matters. For instance, since black Americans, by their color, and by their history, cannot easily overcome the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow, they are entitled to legal and political remedies in the form of affirmative action, a temporary and imperfect solution. But politics in this form should be decoupled from culture. A black American might need and deserve affirmative action, but he or she should not be obliged to remain tied to the cultural identity of “black America.” Such cultural rigidity drove the identity politics of the 1980s and 90s, which in turn made it more difficult to expand the circle of the American “we” to include, say, poor black Americans living in the urban ghettoes.
To the extent that Hollinger wants to expand the circle of “we” to more Americans, he is unapologetically a liberal nationalist. He assumes, correctly in my view, that the best way to make our society more egalitarian is to build upon our commonalities as Americans. He writes: “A stronger national solidarity enhances the possibility of social and economic justice within the United States. This is a simple point, but an extremely important one. Any society that cannot see its diverse members as somehow ‘in it together’ is going to have trouble distributing its resources with even a modicum of equity.” Along this line, Hollinger is quick to blame economic inequality for the tribalism of identity politics. The type of nationalism he supports is close to the fallen social democratic thinking outlined in Tony Judt’s recent New York Review of Books essay, “What is Living and What is Dead in Social Democracy?”
I would even go so far as to say that Hollinger speaks the language of civil religion (as outlined below in Ray Haberski’s compelling analysis of Obama’s civil religious rhetoric). Hollinger is much more nuanced and qualified in his critique of identity politics and his defense of a national community than, say, a Christopher Lasch or a Robert Bellah. Hollinger links the postethnic together with cosmopolitanism, which negotiates the terrain between pluralism and Kantian universalism on the one hand, and between identity politics and communitarian nationalism on the other. But despite such carefulness, I would put Hollinger in the civil religion category. In this light, my re-reading of Hollinger has compelled me to rethink how I might conclude my book-in-progress on the culture wars—the concluding chapter is to be a reflection on the age of Obama in relation to the culture wars.
In Postethnic, Hollinger sees three distinct constituencies in relation to the U.S. nation-state, circa 1995: 1) the business elite who saw little need for the nation in an era of multinational capitalism (except to enforce their interests around the world); 2) members of the various diasporas who saw the nation “more as a site for transnational affiliations than as an affiliation of its own”; and 3) the “great variety of Middle Americans, evangelical Christians, advocates of family values, and supporters of Newt Gingrich and of Rush Limbaugh… suspicious of the state except as an enforcer of personal morality, but [who] claim the nation as, in effect, their own ethnic group.”
Hollinger’s formulation is clever, and mostly correct in the context of the 90s. Constituencies two and three battled it out in the culture wars as constituency one made out like bandits. But I would add a fourth constituency, one that has waxed and waned in its influence: those Americans who claim the nation for social justice. Such a strain might include everything from populism to Popular Frontism to racial liberalism to communitarianism to, I would add, postethnic thinkers like Hollinger. This social justice variant was overwhelmed during the culture wars. Hollinger’s major achievement in Postethnic is to revitalize such a strain for those sensitive to the needs of ethnic and racial minorities.
It is hard not to read Postethnic through the lens of Obama’s electoral victory. In fact, Hollinger has written about such a connection. In an article titled “Obama, the Instability of Color Lines, and the Promise of a Postethnic Future,” Hollinger contends that the major significance of Obama’s victory is to make clear that race, formulated as class and historical legacy, is more constraining, in the twenty-first century, than race, formulated as color. This separates slavery and Jim Crow’s descendents from black immigrants, African or Caribbean. Hollinger writes: “The African-American descendants of slavery and Jim Crow are the only population group in the United States with a multicentury legacy of group-specific enslavement and institutionalized debasement, including hypo-descent racialization (“one drop of blood” makes a person black) and antimiscegenation laws (black-white marriages were against the law in most states with large black populations until 1967), carried out under constitutional authority. Neither Obama nor any other African-American of immigrant background is a member of this population group. The success of Obama in becoming [president] is, like the success of other black immigrants in other domains, an indication that something other than color-prejudice in the eye of empowered white people is at the root of structural inequality in the United States.”
Although this point is valid and significant, for my purposes, Obama represents something different. As alluded to by Haberski, Obama taps into the fourth strain of thinking in relation to the American nation. Call it civil religion or liberal nationalism. Furthermore, Obama’s victory is a watershed moment, not only because he is the first black president, but because he has given common cause to constituencies number two, those who have viewed the American nation as a meeting place of various diasporas, and four. In short, black nationalists have inched closer to American liberal nationalism. Obama implicitly makes these connections in his writings and in his speeches. That said, the degree to which this “community” is real or lasting is debatable, especially since, in practice, the Obama administration has seemingly favored constituency number one (the business elite) by co-opting numbers two and four. Number three simply thinks he’s un-American.
Now, to conclude by way of returning to Hollinger’s postdisciplinary framework: this is pure speculation—not to mention intellectual gymnastics—but perhaps Hollinger views the relationship of U.S. intellectual history to the larger historical discipline as he views the relationship of, say, Chicano nationalism to the American nation. Chicano nationalism might be necessary in specific contexts, to improve the legal and political position of Latinos vis-à-vis the American nation. But the American nation is the ultimate guarantor of justice to those Chicanos who reside in the United States. I think Hollinger has come around to the view that our endeavors, via the blog and conference, have been necessary to improving our position vis-à-vis the larger historical discipline. He seemed enthusiastic about the conference. But allowing ourselves to be ghettoized would be, in his eyes, the academic equivalent of identity politics. “Affiliation by revocable consent.”
Hollinger’s “Affiliation by Revocable Consent”: From Postdiscipline to Postethnic to Obama
By Andrew Hartman
At our most recent U.S. Intellectual History Conference, the final panel was also the most anticipated: “Assessing the Legacy of the 1977 Wingspread Conference.” The panelists were Dorothy Ross, Thomas Bender, David Hall, and David Hollinger. I would like to address one of Hollinger’s central contentions, which has lead me to reexamine his most famous work, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (1995).
In reiterating a point he made in the recent Historically Speaking forum on the state of U.S. Intellectual History (which the USIH blog analyzed extensively—see posts by me, Paul Murphy, and not 1, not 2, but 3 by Tim Lacy), Hollinger argued that intellectual historians should guard against ghettoization. Rather than follow the path of the diplomatic historians, who have formed their own society (SHAFR) so as to largely avoid the mainstream societies (AHA and OAH), Hollinger would like to see intellectual history as analogous to political and social history, which are pervasive within the historical discipline writ large.
Some might say Hollinger’s advice is sound only insofar as it speaks to professionalism. In fact, the tone of the entire Wingspread panel was hyper-professional. On the one hand, this is helpful to younger scholars seeking tenured employment in a horrible job market. But, on the other hand, it’s also depressing—the job scene is such that many of us would probably rather the panelists had focused on something more exciting or uplifting. From my perspective, I would have been more interested in what they might have had to say about the workings of intellectual history in the broader public and political culture—past, present, and future.
But the more I thought about Hollinger’s warnings, the more familiar his postdisciplinary approach seemed. In other words, something other than professionalism seems to be driving his thinking. I vaguely recalled that a similar framework guided his theorizing about race and ethnicity in Postethnic, which I first read over a decade ago, before graduate school. I’ve been meaning to return to this book in researching the culture wars, since it speaks to the debates over multiculturalism that rocked the academy and beyond in the 1980s and 90s.
Sure enough, re-reading Postethnic confirmed my suspicions. Not to make too much of the comparison, especially since Hollinger’s discussion of racial and ethnic boundaries is much better theorized, not to mention more important than his discussion of disciplinary boundaries, but the two arguments do seem somewhat parallel. In both cases, Hollinger is suspicious of prescribed boundaries.
The key principal of Postethnic is “affiliation by revocable consent.” In other words, in the context of ethnic and racial identities, “blood” should not determine affiliations of solidarity. Affiliations should be voluntary. This is not to say that Hollinger is against the use of racial categories in political matters. For instance, since black Americans, by their color, and by their history, cannot easily overcome the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow, they are entitled to legal and political remedies in the form of affirmative action, a temporary and imperfect solution. But politics in this form should be decoupled from culture. A black American might need and deserve affirmative action, but he or she should not be obliged to remain tied to the cultural identity of “black America.” Such cultural rigidity drove the identity politics of the 1980s and 90s, which in turn made it more difficult to expand the circle of the American “we” to include, say, poor black Americans living in the urban ghettoes.
To the extent that Hollinger wants to expand the circle of “we” to more Americans, he is unapologetically a liberal nationalist. He assumes, correctly in my view, that the best way to make our society more egalitarian is to build upon our commonalities as Americans. He writes: “A stronger national solidarity enhances the possibility of social and economic justice within the United States. This is a simple point, but an extremely important one. Any society that cannot see its diverse members as somehow ‘in it together’ is going to have trouble distributing its resources with even a modicum of equity.” Along this line, Hollinger is quick to blame economic inequality for the tribalism of identity politics. The type of nationalism he supports is close to the fallen social democratic thinking outlined in Tony Judt’s recent New York Review of Books essay, “What is Living and What is Dead in Social Democracy?”
I would even go so far as to say that Hollinger speaks the language of civil religion (as outlined below in Ray Haberski’s compelling analysis of Obama’s civil religious rhetoric). Hollinger is much more nuanced and qualified in his critique of identity politics and his defense of a national community than, say, a Christopher Lasch or a Robert Bellah. Hollinger links the postethnic together with cosmopolitanism, which negotiates the terrain between pluralism and Kantian universalism on the one hand, and between identity politics and communitarian nationalism on the other. But despite such carefulness, I would put Hollinger in the civil religion category. In this light, my re-reading of Hollinger has compelled me to rethink how I might conclude my book-in-progress on the culture wars—the concluding chapter is to be a reflection on the age of Obama in relation to the culture wars.
In Postethnic, Hollinger sees three distinct constituencies in relation to the U.S. nation-state, circa 1995: 1) the business elite who saw little need for the nation in an era of multinational capitalism (except to enforce their interests around the world); 2) members of the various diasporas who saw the nation “more as a site for transnational affiliations than as an affiliation of its own”; and 3) the “great variety of Middle Americans, evangelical Christians, advocates of family values, and supporters of Newt Gingrich and of Rush Limbaugh… suspicious of the state except as an enforcer of personal morality, but [who] claim the nation as, in effect, their own ethnic group.”
Hollinger’s formulation is clever, and mostly correct in the context of the 90s. Constituencies two and three battled it out in the culture wars as constituency one made out like bandits. But I would add a fourth constituency, one that has waxed and waned in its influence: those Americans who claim the nation for social justice. Such a strain might include everything from populism to Popular Frontism to racial liberalism to communitarianism to, I would add, postethnic thinkers like Hollinger. This social justice variant was overwhelmed during the culture wars. Hollinger’s major achievement in Postethnic is to revitalize such a strain for those sensitive to the needs of ethnic and racial minorities.
It is hard not to read Postethnic through the lens of Obama’s electoral victory. In fact, Hollinger has written about such a connection. In an article titled “Obama, the Instability of Color Lines, and the Promise of a Postethnic Future,” Hollinger contends that the major significance of Obama’s victory is to make clear that race, formulated as class and historical legacy, is more constraining, in the twenty-first century, than race, formulated as color. This separates slavery and Jim Crow’s descendents from black immigrants, African or Caribbean. Hollinger writes: “The African-American descendants of slavery and Jim Crow are the only population group in the United States with a multicentury legacy of group-specific enslavement and institutionalized debasement, including hypo-descent racialization (“one drop of blood” makes a person black) and antimiscegenation laws (black-white marriages were against the law in most states with large black populations until 1967), carried out under constitutional authority. Neither Obama nor any other African-American of immigrant background is a member of this population group. The success of Obama in becoming [president] is, like the success of other black immigrants in other domains, an indication that something other than color-prejudice in the eye of empowered white people is at the root of structural inequality in the United States.”
Although this point is valid and significant, for my purposes, Obama represents something different. As alluded to by Haberski, Obama taps into the fourth strain of thinking in relation to the American nation. Call it civil religion or liberal nationalism. Furthermore, Obama’s victory is a watershed moment, not only because he is the first black president, but because he has given common cause to constituencies number two, those who have viewed the American nation as a meeting place of various diasporas, and four. In short, black nationalists have inched closer to American liberal nationalism. Obama implicitly makes these connections in his writings and in his speeches. That said, the degree to which this “community” is real or lasting is debatable, especially since, in practice, the Obama administration has seemingly favored constituency number one (the business elite) by co-opting numbers two and four. Number three simply thinks he’s un-American.
Now, to conclude by way of returning to Hollinger’s postdisciplinary framework: this is pure speculation—not to mention intellectual gymnastics—but perhaps Hollinger views the relationship of U.S. intellectual history to the larger historical discipline as he views the relationship of, say, Chicano nationalism to the American nation. Chicano nationalism might be necessary in specific contexts, to improve the legal and political position of Latinos vis-à-vis the American nation. But the American nation is the ultimate guarantor of justice to those Chicanos who reside in the United States. I think Hollinger has come around to the view that our endeavors, via the blog and conference, have been necessary to improving our position vis-à-vis the larger historical discipline. He seemed enthusiastic about the conference. But allowing ourselves to be ghettoized would be, in his eyes, the academic equivalent of identity politics. “Affiliation by revocable consent.”
At our most recent U.S. Intellectual History Conference, the final panel was also the most anticipated: “Assessing the Legacy of the 1977 Wingspread Conference.” The panelists were Dorothy Ross, Thomas Bender, David Hall, and David Hollinger. I would like to address one of Hollinger’s central contentions, which has lead me to reexamine his most famous work, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (1995).
In reiterating a point he made in the recent Historically Speaking forum on the state of U.S. Intellectual History (which the USIH blog analyzed extensively—see posts by me, Paul Murphy, and not 1, not 2, but 3 by Tim Lacy), Hollinger argued that intellectual historians should guard against ghettoization. Rather than follow the path of the diplomatic historians, who have formed their own society (SHAFR) so as to largely avoid the mainstream societies (AHA and OAH), Hollinger would like to see intellectual history as analogous to political and social history, which are pervasive within the historical discipline writ large.
Some might say Hollinger’s advice is sound only insofar as it speaks to professionalism. In fact, the tone of the entire Wingspread panel was hyper-professional. On the one hand, this is helpful to younger scholars seeking tenured employment in a horrible job market. But, on the other hand, it’s also depressing—the job scene is such that many of us would probably rather the panelists had focused on something more exciting or uplifting. From my perspective, I would have been more interested in what they might have had to say about the workings of intellectual history in the broader public and political culture—past, present, and future.
But the more I thought about Hollinger’s warnings, the more familiar his postdisciplinary approach seemed. In other words, something other than professionalism seems to be driving his thinking. I vaguely recalled that a similar framework guided his theorizing about race and ethnicity in Postethnic, which I first read over a decade ago, before graduate school. I’ve been meaning to return to this book in researching the culture wars, since it speaks to the debates over multiculturalism that rocked the academy and beyond in the 1980s and 90s.
Sure enough, re-reading Postethnic confirmed my suspicions. Not to make too much of the comparison, especially since Hollinger’s discussion of racial and ethnic boundaries is much better theorized, not to mention more important than his discussion of disciplinary boundaries, but the two arguments do seem somewhat parallel. In both cases, Hollinger is suspicious of prescribed boundaries.
The key principal of Postethnic is “affiliation by revocable consent.” In other words, in the context of ethnic and racial identities, “blood” should not determine affiliations of solidarity. Affiliations should be voluntary. This is not to say that Hollinger is against the use of racial categories in political matters. For instance, since black Americans, by their color, and by their history, cannot easily overcome the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow, they are entitled to legal and political remedies in the form of affirmative action, a temporary and imperfect solution. But politics in this form should be decoupled from culture. A black American might need and deserve affirmative action, but he or she should not be obliged to remain tied to the cultural identity of “black America.” Such cultural rigidity drove the identity politics of the 1980s and 90s, which in turn made it more difficult to expand the circle of the American “we” to include, say, poor black Americans living in the urban ghettoes.
To the extent that Hollinger wants to expand the circle of “we” to more Americans, he is unapologetically a liberal nationalist. He assumes, correctly in my view, that the best way to make our society more egalitarian is to build upon our commonalities as Americans. He writes: “A stronger national solidarity enhances the possibility of social and economic justice within the United States. This is a simple point, but an extremely important one. Any society that cannot see its diverse members as somehow ‘in it together’ is going to have trouble distributing its resources with even a modicum of equity.” Along this line, Hollinger is quick to blame economic inequality for the tribalism of identity politics. The type of nationalism he supports is close to the fallen social democratic thinking outlined in Tony Judt’s recent New York Review of Books essay, “What is Living and What is Dead in Social Democracy?”
I would even go so far as to say that Hollinger speaks the language of civil religion (as outlined below in Ray Haberski’s compelling analysis of Obama’s civil religious rhetoric). Hollinger is much more nuanced and qualified in his critique of identity politics and his defense of a national community than, say, a Christopher Lasch or a Robert Bellah. Hollinger links the postethnic together with cosmopolitanism, which negotiates the terrain between pluralism and Kantian universalism on the one hand, and between identity politics and communitarian nationalism on the other. But despite such carefulness, I would put Hollinger in the civil religion category. In this light, my re-reading of Hollinger has compelled me to rethink how I might conclude my book-in-progress on the culture wars—the concluding chapter is to be a reflection on the age of Obama in relation to the culture wars.
In Postethnic, Hollinger sees three distinct constituencies in relation to the U.S. nation-state, circa 1995: 1) the business elite who saw little need for the nation in an era of multinational capitalism (except to enforce their interests around the world); 2) members of the various diasporas who saw the nation “more as a site for transnational affiliations than as an affiliation of its own”; and 3) the “great variety of Middle Americans, evangelical Christians, advocates of family values, and supporters of Newt Gingrich and of Rush Limbaugh… suspicious of the state except as an enforcer of personal morality, but [who] claim the nation as, in effect, their own ethnic group.”
Hollinger’s formulation is clever, and mostly correct in the context of the 90s. Constituencies two and three battled it out in the culture wars as constituency one made out like bandits. But I would add a fourth constituency, one that has waxed and waned in its influence: those Americans who claim the nation for social justice. Such a strain might include everything from populism to Popular Frontism to racial liberalism to communitarianism to, I would add, postethnic thinkers like Hollinger. This social justice variant was overwhelmed during the culture wars. Hollinger’s major achievement in Postethnic is to revitalize such a strain for those sensitive to the needs of ethnic and racial minorities.
It is hard not to read Postethnic through the lens of Obama’s electoral victory. In fact, Hollinger has written about such a connection. In an article titled “Obama, the Instability of Color Lines, and the Promise of a Postethnic Future,” Hollinger contends that the major significance of Obama’s victory is to make clear that race, formulated as class and historical legacy, is more constraining, in the twenty-first century, than race, formulated as color. This separates slavery and Jim Crow’s descendents from black immigrants, African or Caribbean. Hollinger writes: “The African-American descendants of slavery and Jim Crow are the only population group in the United States with a multicentury legacy of group-specific enslavement and institutionalized debasement, including hypo-descent racialization (“one drop of blood” makes a person black) and antimiscegenation laws (black-white marriages were against the law in most states with large black populations until 1967), carried out under constitutional authority. Neither Obama nor any other African-American of immigrant background is a member of this population group. The success of Obama in becoming [president] is, like the success of other black immigrants in other domains, an indication that something other than color-prejudice in the eye of empowered white people is at the root of structural inequality in the United States.”
Although this point is valid and significant, for my purposes, Obama represents something different. As alluded to by Haberski, Obama taps into the fourth strain of thinking in relation to the American nation. Call it civil religion or liberal nationalism. Furthermore, Obama’s victory is a watershed moment, not only because he is the first black president, but because he has given common cause to constituencies number two, those who have viewed the American nation as a meeting place of various diasporas, and four. In short, black nationalists have inched closer to American liberal nationalism. Obama implicitly makes these connections in his writings and in his speeches. That said, the degree to which this “community” is real or lasting is debatable, especially since, in practice, the Obama administration has seemingly favored constituency number one (the business elite) by co-opting numbers two and four. Number three simply thinks he’s un-American.
Now, to conclude by way of returning to Hollinger’s postdisciplinary framework: this is pure speculation—not to mention intellectual gymnastics—but perhaps Hollinger views the relationship of U.S. intellectual history to the larger historical discipline as he views the relationship of, say, Chicano nationalism to the American nation. Chicano nationalism might be necessary in specific contexts, to improve the legal and political position of Latinos vis-à-vis the American nation. But the American nation is the ultimate guarantor of justice to those Chicanos who reside in the United States. I think Hollinger has come around to the view that our endeavors, via the blog and conference, have been necessary to improving our position vis-à-vis the larger historical discipline. He seemed enthusiastic about the conference. But allowing ourselves to be ghettoized would be, in his eyes, the academic equivalent of identity politics. “Affiliation by revocable consent.”
Senin, 23 November 2009
Is Taylorism Redeemable?
One of my favorite sessions from the second USIH conference was one put together by our own Mike O'Connor. The panel was cleverly titled, "To Market, To Market: American Thinkers Confront Twentieth-Century Capitalism," and was chaired by Jennifer Burns of recent Daily Show fame. Burns is the author of a new biography of Ayn Rand.
All of the papers were excellent. O'Connor convincingly argued that Henry Wallace gave full intellectual expression to the New Deal in his book, Sixty Million Jobs. But the bulk of the post-presentation conversation was spent on Caitlin Rosenthal's paper, "Frederick W. Taylor: The Optimistic Science of Scientific Management." Rosenthal contended that Taylor is misremembered as anti-worker, partly the result of decades of labor historiography, which paints Taylor, through a moral lens, as a tool of the corporate managers seeking to discipline an increasingly unruly industrial workforce. Rosenthal conducted a close reading of "Scientific Management," replete with rhetoric friendly to the cause of the laboring class, to recuperate Taylor. She was somewhat convincing in this, but I took issue during the Q&A session with her conclusion, where she stated that there are plenty of examples in history that point towards capital-labor cooperation. She implied that efficiency is good for everyone, the further implication of which seemed to be that in addition to Taylor, Taylorism is worthy of redemption.
I'm all for overturning conventional wisdom. But in this case, the wisdom of the labor historians, and other assorted left-leaning intellectuals--such as Jill Lepore, who recently wrote an entertaining New Yorker article on Taylor--might be conventional, but it’s still wisdom. Taylorism is not just about efficiency. It's about disciplining a workforce. Perhaps if we think about Taylorism in terms more understandable to our everyday experiences, such as Taylorism in the academy, it would be less redeemable. Sure, shifting the bulk of teaching to on-line courses is more efficient in terms of cost. But it's bad for the academic workforce... not to mention for education. IS Taylorism redeemable?
Is Taylorism Redeemable?
One of my favorite sessions from the second USIH conference was one put together by our own Mike O'Connor. The panel was cleverly titled, "To Market, To Market: American Thinkers Confront Twentieth-Century Capitalism," and was chaired by Jennifer Burns of recent Daily Show fame. Burns is the author of a new biography of Ayn Rand.
All of the papers were excellent. O'Connor convincingly argued that Henry Wallace gave full intellectual expression to the New Deal in his book, Sixty Million Jobs. But the bulk of the post-presentation conversation was spent on Caitlin Rosenthal's paper, "Frederick W. Taylor: The Optimistic Science of Scientific Management." Rosenthal contended that Taylor is misremembered as anti-worker, partly the result of decades of labor historiography, which paints Taylor, through a moral lens, as a tool of the corporate managers seeking to discipline an increasingly unruly industrial workforce. Rosenthal conducted a close reading of "Scientific Management," replete with rhetoric friendly to the cause of the laboring class, to recuperate Taylor. She was somewhat convincing in this, but I took issue during the Q&A session with her conclusion, where she stated that there are plenty of examples in history that point towards capital-labor cooperation. She implied that efficiency is good for everyone, the further implication of which seemed to be that in addition to Taylor, Taylorism is worthy of redemption.
I'm all for overturning conventional wisdom. But in this case, the wisdom of the labor historians, and other assorted left-leaning intellectuals--such as Jill Lepore, who recently wrote an entertaining New Yorker article on Taylor--might be conventional, but it’s still wisdom. Taylorism is not just about efficiency. It's about disciplining a workforce. Perhaps if we think about Taylorism in terms more understandable to our everyday experiences, such as Taylorism in the academy, it would be less redeemable. Sure, shifting the bulk of teaching to on-line courses is more efficient in terms of cost. But it's bad for the academic workforce... not to mention for education. IS Taylorism redeemable?
Senin, 16 November 2009
The Second Annual USIH Conference: Initial Thoughts, More Thank Yous, And Future Plans
As you probably surmised from Lauren's post below, the 2009 conference is over. It was a whirlwind two days. As such, I'm a bit tired. But despite my partiality, and the fact that I'm still processing everything, I will go ahead and fancy the conference a success.
The proof will be in the pudding, as they say. If the networking and connections made by attendees results in the advancement of the study of U.S. intellectual history---evidenced in articles, books, and an increased public awareness of the importance of the subfield---then it was time and money well spent. Otherwise it will be remembered as something less: mere navel gazing, or an event that only advanced the interests of historians (e.g. job hunting, academic politics). It is my sincerest hope that the former, the subject matter, benefits. After witnessing the enthusiasm and energy of the participants, as well as the quality of papers presented and comments offered, I truly believe it will.
I intend on putting up a series of reflections based on my notes from the events I attended. But my posts will be partial in two ways. First, well, because they're only my thoughts. But second, and more importantly, since each of the 4 time slots hosted 5-6 panels, I saw only a small slice of the conference. I will rely on my colleagues, both here and in our readership, to fill in the blanks with other posts and in the comments (or even with a guest posts?). Here's what I witnessed in terms of content: Jim Livingston's provocative plenary, Panel 4 ("Abstracting Technology and Science"), Panel 12 (my own), Panel 16 ("Culture and History"), Panel 23 ("Forgetting Social Science"), and the closing session, "Assessing the Legacy of the 1977 Wingspread Conference."
But before we get too deep in posts on conference reflections, I want to thank everyone once again for their moral and material support: CUNY's Graduate Center, William P. Kelly, the Center for the Humanities, David Nasaw, Michael Washburn, several unnamed CfH student interns, Aoibbhean Sweeney, Matthew Cotter, Martin Burke, Helena Rosenblatt, all of our panel participants, and the whole USIH team---Andrew Hartman, Mike O'Connor, Ben Alpers, Lauren Kientz, David Sehat, Paul Anderson, Ray Haberski, Julian Nemeth, Sylwester Ratowt, and last but not least, Paul Murphy.
The Planning Team for next year consists of Paul Murphy, Andrew Hartman, Matthew Cotter, and volunteers. I expect that they will begin rounding up suggestions and help for next year's event in the near future. As of today we have a handshake agreement with the Center for the Humanities to host the program again.
Once I've rested up and have absorbed the many lessons from this year's event, I'm sure I'll energetically begin looking forward to our next gathering. - TL
The proof will be in the pudding, as they say. If the networking and connections made by attendees results in the advancement of the study of U.S. intellectual history---evidenced in articles, books, and an increased public awareness of the importance of the subfield---then it was time and money well spent. Otherwise it will be remembered as something less: mere navel gazing, or an event that only advanced the interests of historians (e.g. job hunting, academic politics). It is my sincerest hope that the former, the subject matter, benefits. After witnessing the enthusiasm and energy of the participants, as well as the quality of papers presented and comments offered, I truly believe it will.
I intend on putting up a series of reflections based on my notes from the events I attended. But my posts will be partial in two ways. First, well, because they're only my thoughts. But second, and more importantly, since each of the 4 time slots hosted 5-6 panels, I saw only a small slice of the conference. I will rely on my colleagues, both here and in our readership, to fill in the blanks with other posts and in the comments (or even with a guest posts?). Here's what I witnessed in terms of content: Jim Livingston's provocative plenary, Panel 4 ("Abstracting Technology and Science"), Panel 12 (my own), Panel 16 ("Culture and History"), Panel 23 ("Forgetting Social Science"), and the closing session, "Assessing the Legacy of the 1977 Wingspread Conference."
But before we get too deep in posts on conference reflections, I want to thank everyone once again for their moral and material support: CUNY's Graduate Center, William P. Kelly, the Center for the Humanities, David Nasaw, Michael Washburn, several unnamed CfH student interns, Aoibbhean Sweeney, Matthew Cotter, Martin Burke, Helena Rosenblatt, all of our panel participants, and the whole USIH team---Andrew Hartman, Mike O'Connor, Ben Alpers, Lauren Kientz, David Sehat, Paul Anderson, Ray Haberski, Julian Nemeth, Sylwester Ratowt, and last but not least, Paul Murphy.
The Planning Team for next year consists of Paul Murphy, Andrew Hartman, Matthew Cotter, and volunteers. I expect that they will begin rounding up suggestions and help for next year's event in the near future. As of today we have a handshake agreement with the Center for the Humanities to host the program again.
Once I've rested up and have absorbed the many lessons from this year's event, I'm sure I'll energetically begin looking forward to our next gathering. - TL
The Second Annual USIH Conference: Initial Thoughts, More Thank Yous, And Future Plans
As you probably surmised from Lauren's post below, the 2009 conference is over. It was a whirlwind two days. As such, I'm a bit tired. But despite my partiality, and the fact that I'm still processing everything, I will go ahead and fancy the conference a success.
The proof will be in the pudding, as they say. If the networking and connections made by attendees results in the advancement of the study of U.S. intellectual history---evidenced in articles, books, and an increased public awareness of the importance of the subfield---then it was time and money well spent. Otherwise it will be remembered as something less: mere navel gazing, or an event that only advanced the interests of historians (e.g. job hunting, academic politics). It is my sincerest hope that the former, the subject matter, benefits. After witnessing the enthusiasm and energy of the participants, as well as the quality of papers presented and comments offered, I truly believe it will.
I intend on putting up a series of reflections based on my notes from the events I attended. But my posts will be partial in two ways. First, well, because they're only my thoughts. But second, and more importantly, since each of the 4 time slots hosted 5-6 panels, I saw only a small slice of the conference. I will rely on my colleagues, both here and in our readership, to fill in the blanks with other posts and in the comments (or even with a guest posts?). Here's what I witnessed in terms of content: Jim Livingston's provocative plenary, Panel 4 ("Abstracting Technology and Science"), Panel 12 (my own), Panel 16 ("Culture and History"), Panel 23 ("Forgetting Social Science"), and the closing session, "Assessing the Legacy of the 1977 Wingspread Conference."
But before we get too deep in posts on conference reflections, I want to thank everyone once again for their moral and material support: CUNY's Graduate Center, William P. Kelly, the Center for the Humanities, David Nasaw, Michael Washburn, several unnamed CfH student interns, Aoibbhean Sweeney, Matthew Cotter, Martin Burke, Helena Rosenblatt, all of our panel participants, and the whole USIH team---Andrew Hartman, Mike O'Connor, Ben Alpers, Lauren Kientz, David Sehat, Paul Anderson, Ray Haberski, Julian Nemeth, Sylwester Ratowt, and last but not least, Paul Murphy.
The Planning Team for next year consists of Paul Murphy, Andrew Hartman, Matthew Cotter, and volunteers. I expect that they will begin rounding up suggestions and help for next year's event in the near future. As of today we have a handshake agreement with the Center for the Humanities to host the program again.
Once I've rested up and have absorbed the many lessons from this year's event, I'm sure I'll energetically begin looking forward to our next gathering. - TL
The proof will be in the pudding, as they say. If the networking and connections made by attendees results in the advancement of the study of U.S. intellectual history---evidenced in articles, books, and an increased public awareness of the importance of the subfield---then it was time and money well spent. Otherwise it will be remembered as something less: mere navel gazing, or an event that only advanced the interests of historians (e.g. job hunting, academic politics). It is my sincerest hope that the former, the subject matter, benefits. After witnessing the enthusiasm and energy of the participants, as well as the quality of papers presented and comments offered, I truly believe it will.
I intend on putting up a series of reflections based on my notes from the events I attended. But my posts will be partial in two ways. First, well, because they're only my thoughts. But second, and more importantly, since each of the 4 time slots hosted 5-6 panels, I saw only a small slice of the conference. I will rely on my colleagues, both here and in our readership, to fill in the blanks with other posts and in the comments (or even with a guest posts?). Here's what I witnessed in terms of content: Jim Livingston's provocative plenary, Panel 4 ("Abstracting Technology and Science"), Panel 12 (my own), Panel 16 ("Culture and History"), Panel 23 ("Forgetting Social Science"), and the closing session, "Assessing the Legacy of the 1977 Wingspread Conference."
But before we get too deep in posts on conference reflections, I want to thank everyone once again for their moral and material support: CUNY's Graduate Center, William P. Kelly, the Center for the Humanities, David Nasaw, Michael Washburn, several unnamed CfH student interns, Aoibbhean Sweeney, Matthew Cotter, Martin Burke, Helena Rosenblatt, all of our panel participants, and the whole USIH team---Andrew Hartman, Mike O'Connor, Ben Alpers, Lauren Kientz, David Sehat, Paul Anderson, Ray Haberski, Julian Nemeth, Sylwester Ratowt, and last but not least, Paul Murphy.
The Planning Team for next year consists of Paul Murphy, Andrew Hartman, Matthew Cotter, and volunteers. I expect that they will begin rounding up suggestions and help for next year's event in the near future. As of today we have a handshake agreement with the Center for the Humanities to host the program again.
Once I've rested up and have absorbed the many lessons from this year's event, I'm sure I'll energetically begin looking forward to our next gathering. - TL
Jumat, 02 Oktober 2009
A Registration Note For USIH Conference Attendees (Non-panelists)
Conference registration consists of paying a $35 fee---which goes entirely towards catering (drinks, snacks, labor of caterers). Make your payment (check or money order) payable to "The Graduate Center Foundation" and send it to:
The Center for the Humanities
c/o Michael Washburn, Assistant Director
The Graduate Center
City University of New York
365 Fifth Avenue
Room 5103
New York, NY 10016
If you have questions about payment please contact Michael Washburn at or 212-817-2007.
PS: Per Lauren's comment below, panelists should pay too. But they were already told this in their invitation-acceptance e-mails. - TL
- TL
The Center for the Humanities
c/o Michael Washburn, Assistant Director
The Graduate Center
City University of New York
365 Fifth Avenue
Room 5103
New York, NY 10016
If you have questions about payment please contact Michael Washburn at
PS: Per Lauren's comment below, panelists should pay too. But they were already told this in their invitation-acceptance e-mails. - TL
- TL
A Registration Note For USIH Conference Attendees (Non-panelists)
Conference registration consists of paying a $35 fee---which goes entirely towards catering (drinks, snacks, labor of caterers). Make your payment (check or money order) payable to "The Graduate Center Foundation" and send it to:
The Center for the Humanities
c/o Michael Washburn, Assistant Director
The Graduate Center
City University of New York
365 Fifth Avenue
Room 5103
New York, NY 10016
If you have questions about payment please contact Michael Washburn at or 212-817-2007.
PS: Per Lauren's comment below, panelists should pay too. But they were already told this in their invitation-acceptance e-mails. - TL
- TL
The Center for the Humanities
c/o Michael Washburn, Assistant Director
The Graduate Center
City University of New York
365 Fifth Avenue
Room 5103
New York, NY 10016
If you have questions about payment please contact Michael Washburn at
PS: Per Lauren's comment below, panelists should pay too. But they were already told this in their invitation-acceptance e-mails. - TL
- TL
Selasa, 22 September 2009
Is Intellectual History a Neglected Field? Second Take
Following up on Andrew's excellent and comprehensive summary and analysis of the September Historically Speaking symposium on the state of the field of intellectual history, I thought I would add a few thoughts, and keep the ball rolling as we look forward to our November conference, which should ventilate all of these issues in more detail:
The excellent symposium on the state of the field holds much fascination for us (I found it engrossing), but it must be baffling to outsiders, within the discipline of history but more particularly from without. The contributors are decidedly fretful about the state of the field but there is no great theoretical or methodological controversy in dispute and the actual assessment of current conditions is quite mild: Aside from a dearth of job listings in intellectual history, there is scant evidence of a problem, as all seem to admit. Intellectual historians are being hired and are writing, many are winning awards and are prominent in the field, and there are new journals (not to mention this fabulous new blog). There even seems a consensus that the great “linguistic turn” in historical studies and the shift in disciplinary authority from intellectual history to cultural history (and the tremendous rise in importance of cultural history) has actually worked to the advantage of intellectual historians, spreading their preferred methodologies, fostering critical attention to texts and contextual analysis, and fostering the theoretical and meta-theoretical proclivities so characteristic of the intellectual historians.
What strikes me, though, is a lingering frustration at our status in the field—that cultural historians have seized the moment in a way disadvantageous to certain kinds of intellectual history, the study of “highly formalized systems of thoughts and ideas” (Wickberg), of particular thinkers and schools. Daniel Wickberg’s response is much more pointed and successful than his original essay, as he seems goaded into greater clarity and sharper formulations by his respondents. Here, he defines intellectual history as that which “foregrounds ideas, thinking, and the ways in which minds structure experience.” What really smarts is when this kind of work loses salience (although once again there seem no end of interesting titles of recent books cited by the contributors that seem to be in this vein). It is unsatisfying to me to find intellectual history being done in just about any work that considers a text or uses the “tools” of intellectual history (close reading and concern for epistemology). Good grief – what historian does not read texts closely, aside from the dustiest 1970s-vintage quantitative scholar?
Moreover, I think the defensible point of concern is not loss of status so much as a loss of purpose and ambition in the subfield of intellectual history and, here, precisely the dearth of theoretical conflict might be the point. In the famous “no directions” (to borrow McClay’s snarky line, new to me) Wingspread symposium of the 1970s, intellectual historians fretted over the marginalization of their field but also recognized a theoretical crisis, that the old way of focusing on narrow, articulate elites and such things as the climate of opinion, resulting in studies of the American Mind, or Character, or the Culture of [fill in the blank] were no longer valid or respected. Since then, of course, Theory triumphed, Cultural Studies arrived and vanquished, and many historians adorn their analysis with sophisticated allusions to the conventional nature of knowledge and the determinative force of language and often deploy theories borrowed from intellectuals rooted in affiliated disciplines—gender theorists, queer theorists, sociologists of marginality and subaltern identities and Empire, Foucault, Derrida, Habermas, Bourdieu, Zizek, and so forth. As Wilfred McClay points out in his remarks on the love of historians for historiography, internal theoretical debates and analyses of fights within fields (and within disciplines and within academia) are “catnip” to us but irrelevant and boring to many outside our fields (including, probably, more than a few undergraduate students) and outside academia. So, even as a kind of intellectual history as theory has triumphed, the older intellectual history as “a proxy for the study of all Americans” (David Hollinger’s phrase), dead in the 1970s, remains dead and has not been replaced. The symposiasts point out that the state of intellectual history reflects the generally fragmented state of the entire discipline: Subdivisions and specialization abound; ever more detailed scholarship flourishes; and meanwhile the parts still are not cohering, a center is difficult to find. As academic historians abdicate the discredited practice of writing syntheses generalizing about all Americans for an audience of all Americans, nationalist histories written often by popularizers about presidents and wars and the “greatest generation” fill the vacuum.
What distinguishes intellectual history, I think, is precisely its synthetic ambitions, its effort to make the mass of specialized historical research fit into a pattern that coheres. There’s plenty of reasons to scorn such efforts—the dreaded bias towards elite cultural production—yet an intellectual history predicated on the importance of ideas as something more than tools used by social actors otherwise shaped and pushed to exert “agency” trends that way. It may well be that the discipline is becoming organized by topics and not fields, but perhaps the synthesizing viewpoint, the way in which ideas are filtered throughout complex layers of cultural production and reproduction, can represent a legitimate topic. In my view, claiming intellectual authority to make such broad generalizations was part and parcel of the modernist intellectual tradition in twentieth-century America that spawned intellectual history, American Studies, and the tradition of cultural criticism represented by the now-gone and sometimes lamented “public intellectuals.” The roots of the field (what McClay calls “the longer past of the discipline”) included a kind of history that was itself social criticism, exemplified by a scholar like Christopher Lasch (never shy about broad generalizations) or, perhaps, John Patrick Diggins, whose memory will be hailed at our upcoming conference. In the 1970s and 1980s, intellectual historians seemed interested in studying communities of discourse (or interpretive communities), a more modest way of representing the field to a fragmenting discipline that was becoming more responsive to the claims of the marginalized and previously excluded. There still seems a project in writing these histories and then assessing the relative authority of such communities and seeing how they link together into a whole.
The excellent symposium on the state of the field holds much fascination for us (I found it engrossing), but it must be baffling to outsiders, within the discipline of history but more particularly from without. The contributors are decidedly fretful about the state of the field but there is no great theoretical or methodological controversy in dispute and the actual assessment of current conditions is quite mild: Aside from a dearth of job listings in intellectual history, there is scant evidence of a problem, as all seem to admit. Intellectual historians are being hired and are writing, many are winning awards and are prominent in the field, and there are new journals (not to mention this fabulous new blog). There even seems a consensus that the great “linguistic turn” in historical studies and the shift in disciplinary authority from intellectual history to cultural history (and the tremendous rise in importance of cultural history) has actually worked to the advantage of intellectual historians, spreading their preferred methodologies, fostering critical attention to texts and contextual analysis, and fostering the theoretical and meta-theoretical proclivities so characteristic of the intellectual historians.
What strikes me, though, is a lingering frustration at our status in the field—that cultural historians have seized the moment in a way disadvantageous to certain kinds of intellectual history, the study of “highly formalized systems of thoughts and ideas” (Wickberg), of particular thinkers and schools. Daniel Wickberg’s response is much more pointed and successful than his original essay, as he seems goaded into greater clarity and sharper formulations by his respondents. Here, he defines intellectual history as that which “foregrounds ideas, thinking, and the ways in which minds structure experience.” What really smarts is when this kind of work loses salience (although once again there seem no end of interesting titles of recent books cited by the contributors that seem to be in this vein). It is unsatisfying to me to find intellectual history being done in just about any work that considers a text or uses the “tools” of intellectual history (close reading and concern for epistemology). Good grief – what historian does not read texts closely, aside from the dustiest 1970s-vintage quantitative scholar?
Moreover, I think the defensible point of concern is not loss of status so much as a loss of purpose and ambition in the subfield of intellectual history and, here, precisely the dearth of theoretical conflict might be the point. In the famous “no directions” (to borrow McClay’s snarky line, new to me) Wingspread symposium of the 1970s, intellectual historians fretted over the marginalization of their field but also recognized a theoretical crisis, that the old way of focusing on narrow, articulate elites and such things as the climate of opinion, resulting in studies of the American Mind, or Character, or the Culture of [fill in the blank] were no longer valid or respected. Since then, of course, Theory triumphed, Cultural Studies arrived and vanquished, and many historians adorn their analysis with sophisticated allusions to the conventional nature of knowledge and the determinative force of language and often deploy theories borrowed from intellectuals rooted in affiliated disciplines—gender theorists, queer theorists, sociologists of marginality and subaltern identities and Empire, Foucault, Derrida, Habermas, Bourdieu, Zizek, and so forth. As Wilfred McClay points out in his remarks on the love of historians for historiography, internal theoretical debates and analyses of fights within fields (and within disciplines and within academia) are “catnip” to us but irrelevant and boring to many outside our fields (including, probably, more than a few undergraduate students) and outside academia. So, even as a kind of intellectual history as theory has triumphed, the older intellectual history as “a proxy for the study of all Americans” (David Hollinger’s phrase), dead in the 1970s, remains dead and has not been replaced. The symposiasts point out that the state of intellectual history reflects the generally fragmented state of the entire discipline: Subdivisions and specialization abound; ever more detailed scholarship flourishes; and meanwhile the parts still are not cohering, a center is difficult to find. As academic historians abdicate the discredited practice of writing syntheses generalizing about all Americans for an audience of all Americans, nationalist histories written often by popularizers about presidents and wars and the “greatest generation” fill the vacuum.
What distinguishes intellectual history, I think, is precisely its synthetic ambitions, its effort to make the mass of specialized historical research fit into a pattern that coheres. There’s plenty of reasons to scorn such efforts—the dreaded bias towards elite cultural production—yet an intellectual history predicated on the importance of ideas as something more than tools used by social actors otherwise shaped and pushed to exert “agency” trends that way. It may well be that the discipline is becoming organized by topics and not fields, but perhaps the synthesizing viewpoint, the way in which ideas are filtered throughout complex layers of cultural production and reproduction, can represent a legitimate topic. In my view, claiming intellectual authority to make such broad generalizations was part and parcel of the modernist intellectual tradition in twentieth-century America that spawned intellectual history, American Studies, and the tradition of cultural criticism represented by the now-gone and sometimes lamented “public intellectuals.” The roots of the field (what McClay calls “the longer past of the discipline”) included a kind of history that was itself social criticism, exemplified by a scholar like Christopher Lasch (never shy about broad generalizations) or, perhaps, John Patrick Diggins, whose memory will be hailed at our upcoming conference. In the 1970s and 1980s, intellectual historians seemed interested in studying communities of discourse (or interpretive communities), a more modest way of representing the field to a fragmenting discipline that was becoming more responsive to the claims of the marginalized and previously excluded. There still seems a project in writing these histories and then assessing the relative authority of such communities and seeing how they link together into a whole.
Is Intellectual History a Neglected Field? Second Take
Following up on Andrew's excellent and comprehensive summary and analysis of the September Historically Speaking symposium on the state of the field of intellectual history, I thought I would add a few thoughts, and keep the ball rolling as we look forward to our November conference, which should ventilate all of these issues in more detail:
The excellent symposium on the state of the field holds much fascination for us (I found it engrossing), but it must be baffling to outsiders, within the discipline of history but more particularly from without. The contributors are decidedly fretful about the state of the field but there is no great theoretical or methodological controversy in dispute and the actual assessment of current conditions is quite mild: Aside from a dearth of job listings in intellectual history, there is scant evidence of a problem, as all seem to admit. Intellectual historians are being hired and are writing, many are winning awards and are prominent in the field, and there are new journals (not to mention this fabulous new blog). There even seems a consensus that the great “linguistic turn” in historical studies and the shift in disciplinary authority from intellectual history to cultural history (and the tremendous rise in importance of cultural history) has actually worked to the advantage of intellectual historians, spreading their preferred methodologies, fostering critical attention to texts and contextual analysis, and fostering the theoretical and meta-theoretical proclivities so characteristic of the intellectual historians.
What strikes me, though, is a lingering frustration at our status in the field—that cultural historians have seized the moment in a way disadvantageous to certain kinds of intellectual history, the study of “highly formalized systems of thoughts and ideas” (Wickberg), of particular thinkers and schools. Daniel Wickberg’s response is much more pointed and successful than his original essay, as he seems goaded into greater clarity and sharper formulations by his respondents. Here, he defines intellectual history as that which “foregrounds ideas, thinking, and the ways in which minds structure experience.” What really smarts is when this kind of work loses salience (although once again there seem no end of interesting titles of recent books cited by the contributors that seem to be in this vein). It is unsatisfying to me to find intellectual history being done in just about any work that considers a text or uses the “tools” of intellectual history (close reading and concern for epistemology). Good grief – what historian does not read texts closely, aside from the dustiest 1970s-vintage quantitative scholar?
Moreover, I think the defensible point of concern is not loss of status so much as a loss of purpose and ambition in the subfield of intellectual history and, here, precisely the dearth of theoretical conflict might be the point. In the famous “no directions” (to borrow McClay’s snarky line, new to me) Wingspread symposium of the 1970s, intellectual historians fretted over the marginalization of their field but also recognized a theoretical crisis, that the old way of focusing on narrow, articulate elites and such things as the climate of opinion, resulting in studies of the American Mind, or Character, or the Culture of [fill in the blank] were no longer valid or respected. Since then, of course, Theory triumphed, Cultural Studies arrived and vanquished, and many historians adorn their analysis with sophisticated allusions to the conventional nature of knowledge and the determinative force of language and often deploy theories borrowed from intellectuals rooted in affiliated disciplines—gender theorists, queer theorists, sociologists of marginality and subaltern identities and Empire, Foucault, Derrida, Habermas, Bourdieu, Zizek, and so forth. As Wilfred McClay points out in his remarks on the love of historians for historiography, internal theoretical debates and analyses of fights within fields (and within disciplines and within academia) are “catnip” to us but irrelevant and boring to many outside our fields (including, probably, more than a few undergraduate students) and outside academia. So, even as a kind of intellectual history as theory has triumphed, the older intellectual history as “a proxy for the study of all Americans” (David Hollinger’s phrase), dead in the 1970s, remains dead and has not been replaced. The symposiasts point out that the state of intellectual history reflects the generally fragmented state of the entire discipline: Subdivisions and specialization abound; ever more detailed scholarship flourishes; and meanwhile the parts still are not cohering, a center is difficult to find. As academic historians abdicate the discredited practice of writing syntheses generalizing about all Americans for an audience of all Americans, nationalist histories written often by popularizers about presidents and wars and the “greatest generation” fill the vacuum.
What distinguishes intellectual history, I think, is precisely its synthetic ambitions, its effort to make the mass of specialized historical research fit into a pattern that coheres. There’s plenty of reasons to scorn such efforts—the dreaded bias towards elite cultural production—yet an intellectual history predicated on the importance of ideas as something more than tools used by social actors otherwise shaped and pushed to exert “agency” trends that way. It may well be that the discipline is becoming organized by topics and not fields, but perhaps the synthesizing viewpoint, the way in which ideas are filtered throughout complex layers of cultural production and reproduction, can represent a legitimate topic. In my view, claiming intellectual authority to make such broad generalizations was part and parcel of the modernist intellectual tradition in twentieth-century America that spawned intellectual history, American Studies, and the tradition of cultural criticism represented by the now-gone and sometimes lamented “public intellectuals.” The roots of the field (what McClay calls “the longer past of the discipline”) included a kind of history that was itself social criticism, exemplified by a scholar like Christopher Lasch (never shy about broad generalizations) or, perhaps, John Patrick Diggins, whose memory will be hailed at our upcoming conference. In the 1970s and 1980s, intellectual historians seemed interested in studying communities of discourse (or interpretive communities), a more modest way of representing the field to a fragmenting discipline that was becoming more responsive to the claims of the marginalized and previously excluded. There still seems a project in writing these histories and then assessing the relative authority of such communities and seeing how they link together into a whole.
The excellent symposium on the state of the field holds much fascination for us (I found it engrossing), but it must be baffling to outsiders, within the discipline of history but more particularly from without. The contributors are decidedly fretful about the state of the field but there is no great theoretical or methodological controversy in dispute and the actual assessment of current conditions is quite mild: Aside from a dearth of job listings in intellectual history, there is scant evidence of a problem, as all seem to admit. Intellectual historians are being hired and are writing, many are winning awards and are prominent in the field, and there are new journals (not to mention this fabulous new blog). There even seems a consensus that the great “linguistic turn” in historical studies and the shift in disciplinary authority from intellectual history to cultural history (and the tremendous rise in importance of cultural history) has actually worked to the advantage of intellectual historians, spreading their preferred methodologies, fostering critical attention to texts and contextual analysis, and fostering the theoretical and meta-theoretical proclivities so characteristic of the intellectual historians.
What strikes me, though, is a lingering frustration at our status in the field—that cultural historians have seized the moment in a way disadvantageous to certain kinds of intellectual history, the study of “highly formalized systems of thoughts and ideas” (Wickberg), of particular thinkers and schools. Daniel Wickberg’s response is much more pointed and successful than his original essay, as he seems goaded into greater clarity and sharper formulations by his respondents. Here, he defines intellectual history as that which “foregrounds ideas, thinking, and the ways in which minds structure experience.” What really smarts is when this kind of work loses salience (although once again there seem no end of interesting titles of recent books cited by the contributors that seem to be in this vein). It is unsatisfying to me to find intellectual history being done in just about any work that considers a text or uses the “tools” of intellectual history (close reading and concern for epistemology). Good grief – what historian does not read texts closely, aside from the dustiest 1970s-vintage quantitative scholar?
Moreover, I think the defensible point of concern is not loss of status so much as a loss of purpose and ambition in the subfield of intellectual history and, here, precisely the dearth of theoretical conflict might be the point. In the famous “no directions” (to borrow McClay’s snarky line, new to me) Wingspread symposium of the 1970s, intellectual historians fretted over the marginalization of their field but also recognized a theoretical crisis, that the old way of focusing on narrow, articulate elites and such things as the climate of opinion, resulting in studies of the American Mind, or Character, or the Culture of [fill in the blank] were no longer valid or respected. Since then, of course, Theory triumphed, Cultural Studies arrived and vanquished, and many historians adorn their analysis with sophisticated allusions to the conventional nature of knowledge and the determinative force of language and often deploy theories borrowed from intellectuals rooted in affiliated disciplines—gender theorists, queer theorists, sociologists of marginality and subaltern identities and Empire, Foucault, Derrida, Habermas, Bourdieu, Zizek, and so forth. As Wilfred McClay points out in his remarks on the love of historians for historiography, internal theoretical debates and analyses of fights within fields (and within disciplines and within academia) are “catnip” to us but irrelevant and boring to many outside our fields (including, probably, more than a few undergraduate students) and outside academia. So, even as a kind of intellectual history as theory has triumphed, the older intellectual history as “a proxy for the study of all Americans” (David Hollinger’s phrase), dead in the 1970s, remains dead and has not been replaced. The symposiasts point out that the state of intellectual history reflects the generally fragmented state of the entire discipline: Subdivisions and specialization abound; ever more detailed scholarship flourishes; and meanwhile the parts still are not cohering, a center is difficult to find. As academic historians abdicate the discredited practice of writing syntheses generalizing about all Americans for an audience of all Americans, nationalist histories written often by popularizers about presidents and wars and the “greatest generation” fill the vacuum.
What distinguishes intellectual history, I think, is precisely its synthetic ambitions, its effort to make the mass of specialized historical research fit into a pattern that coheres. There’s plenty of reasons to scorn such efforts—the dreaded bias towards elite cultural production—yet an intellectual history predicated on the importance of ideas as something more than tools used by social actors otherwise shaped and pushed to exert “agency” trends that way. It may well be that the discipline is becoming organized by topics and not fields, but perhaps the synthesizing viewpoint, the way in which ideas are filtered throughout complex layers of cultural production and reproduction, can represent a legitimate topic. In my view, claiming intellectual authority to make such broad generalizations was part and parcel of the modernist intellectual tradition in twentieth-century America that spawned intellectual history, American Studies, and the tradition of cultural criticism represented by the now-gone and sometimes lamented “public intellectuals.” The roots of the field (what McClay calls “the longer past of the discipline”) included a kind of history that was itself social criticism, exemplified by a scholar like Christopher Lasch (never shy about broad generalizations) or, perhaps, John Patrick Diggins, whose memory will be hailed at our upcoming conference. In the 1970s and 1980s, intellectual historians seemed interested in studying communities of discourse (or interpretive communities), a more modest way of representing the field to a fragmenting discipline that was becoming more responsive to the claims of the marginalized and previously excluded. There still seems a project in writing these histories and then assessing the relative authority of such communities and seeing how they link together into a whole.
Sabtu, 19 September 2009
Is Intellectual History a Neglected Field of Study? (Historically Speaking forum)
This month’s edition of Historically Speaking, the monthly magazine of The Historical Society, includes a forum on intellectual history (accessible through Project Muse, carried by most academic libraries). The Historical Society was founded over ten years ago on the premise that the traditional sub-disciplines of intellectual, political, economic, and diplomatic history were important and deserved better treatment than given in the larger societies, where it was believed these fields were neglected because they were not as politically correct as social and cultural history. Although The Historical Society has changed somewhat, and in my opinion is less distinguishable from the older historical associations, Historically Speaking sees fit to address whether or not these older fields of study remain neglected. It will run similar panel discussions on the other “neglected” fields in the future. This, on intellectual history, is its first.
The title of the forum suggests the conversation will not be limited by national boundaries, but all four panelists—Daniel Wickberg, David Hollinger, Sarah Igo, and Wilfred McClay—are Americanists, much to the benefit of U.S. intellectual history enthusiasts. Wickberg initiates the collegial forum with a provocative essay titled, “Is Intellectual History a Neglected Field of Study?” His answer is an ambivalent and qualified yes.
Wickberg first examines the ways in which intellectual history is alive and well. Even though the social history takeover of the discipline pushed intellectual history to the margins—because it was supposedly “concerned with phenomena largely irrelevant to the ‘real’ substance of history: material conditions, economic interests, the social relations of everyday life”—Wickberg argues that the cultural and linguistic turns brought intellectual history back to the mainstream. Because historians became more aware of the power of language, “the intellectual historian’s skills in readings texts, analyzing arguments, and contextualizing ideas had a kind of renewed value…” Thus, intellectual history remains viable, but mostly subsumed under the category of cultural history.
Even though Wickberg is enthusiastic about the fact that the habits of mind of the intellectual historian are central to the overarching discipline, he laments that intellectual history is not bracketed off institutionally. He thinks this is bad for intellectual history, and for the larger discipline, which needs intellectual history. This is the paradox that drives his analysis.
Wickberg presents several pieces of evidence, mostly impressionistic, that seem to prove intellectual history is neglected. First, he points to the “anti-intellectualism of the intellectuals,” by whom he means by the social historians. “If some intellectual historians can justly be accused of over-identifying with their objects of study, with granting significance to thinking in history because they think about history, some social historians can equally be found guilty of compensating for their own elite status by insisting that ideas and thinkers are not important to history at all.”
Some other points that speak to the neglect of intellectual history: the poor coverage of intellectual history in American survey courses; the lack of jobs specifically defined as intellectual history; the departmental marginalization of intellectual historians who do manage to get hired; and the lack of a strong institutional presence, such as a society of our own.
On this last note, Wickberg points to encouraging signs, such as the renewed vigor on display in the journals of intellectual history, specifically Modern Intellectual History and The Journal of the History of Ideas. “Perhaps more significantly,” he writes, “a younger group of U.S. intellectual historians, consisting of recent Ph.D.’s and graduate students, has initiated a blog in U.S. history.” (That would be us.) “The same group has put together an annual conference in U.S. intellectual history. The first meeting was, by all reports, very successful, and the second meeting will likely have occurred by the time this appears in print.” (Close, but not quite.) “That the initiative… has been taken by younger historians is significant; it suggests that the field has a strong future.”
Not that I am posting this review merely to give ourselves a pat on the back, but… in his reply to Wickberg, Wilfred McClay also praises the work we have done. “I, too, have noticed that some of the most interesting and imaginative in the cohort of younger scholars are being drawn to the study of intellectual history. Indeed, one could plausibly argue that it is in fact the young, such as the creators of the U.S. Intellectual History blog and conference to which Wickberg refers, who are leading the way. What makes their dedication so impressive, and moving, is the fact that these are precisely the ones who have the most to lose professionally, in a precarious time of shrinking jobs and disappearing venues, but who are taking up the cause of intellectual history’s future in the teeth of all this discouragement. Something more than careerism or opportunism must be motivating them. What could it be, other than the love of the subject?”
Not that I am one to disagree with such high praise. Indeed, I know for a fact that none of us write for this blog for reasons of careerism or opportunism. But, I would argue that informally institutionalizing our sub-discipline has been highly productive. It has helped us to define and redefine our creative labors as U.S. intellectual historians, with colleagues who want us to succeed, because they want to advance the sub-discipline.
Perhaps this is the point of Wickberg’s desire for institutionalization, of his wishes that intellectual history be seen as an entity to itself. Why is this necessary? “Because intellectual historians are trained to think of ideas as historical objects that are contexts for other ideas—to think of ideas as environments as well as tools—they bring something more than a method or set of approaches to a historical problem; they bring a distinctive perspective.” This is the rationale for intellectual history.
Wickberg writes the above passage in his final response to the three replies from Hollinger, McClay and Igo. He is specifically referring to Igo’s optimism that we need not fret over the lack of institutional space for intellectual history, since intellectual historical methods have conquered the entire discipline. Igo points especially to authors of significant works in her field of study—policy history—as being in the grain of intellectual history without being called as such, such as Alice O’Conner’s Poverty Knowledge. This seems to be the most significant point of contention in the entire forum, as the participants mostly preach to the choir.
Hollinger thinks intellectual history is much better off than Wickberg, and lists dozens of important recent books to prove it. In fact, all of the authors reel off impressive lists of recent books, including one written by our own Ben Alpers, Dictators, Democracy, and American Public Culture: Envisioning the Totalitarian Enemy, 1920s -1950s. But Hollinger laments that, although intellectual historians might get jobs, they do not get jobs as intellectual historians. We have to sell ourselves as something different. Furthermore: “What I find most troubling is the tendency of many departments to suppose that period-defined jobs, such as 19th Century, or U.S. since 1945, or Colonial, are more appropriately filled with social historians than by intellectual or political historians.” But he is hopeful: “This tendency may represent something of a behavioral lag, since there is so much evidence, outside the hiring process, for renewed engagement with the contributions of intellectual history.” Let us hope so.
There are many other topics covered in the forum. McClay, for example, argues that being forced to the margins has helped intellectual historians rethink the big intellectual historical questions, and get away from studies of the inane. And all of the authors touch upon the differences and similarities of intellectual and cultural history. They all agree that what was once called intellectual history, prior to the rise of social history, was similar to what now goes by cultural history. That is, in its heyday, intellectual history was about both elite thinkers and cultural structures of feeling. To this end, it might not be worth the effort to delineate differences between intellectual and cultural history. Wickberg disagrees, since he thinks the study of a system of ideas, the types of systems worked out by intellectuals—“high” intellectual history—is worthy of historical attention as apart from popular discourses. This might be a good topic for further discussion—I know the writers of this blog have different views on this issue.
In sum, I highly recommend everyone read the panel. I suspect similar conversations will continue at our conference in November.
Is Intellectual History a Neglected Field of Study? (Historically Speaking forum)
This month’s edition of Historically Speaking, the monthly magazine of The Historical Society, includes a forum on intellectual history (accessible through Project Muse, carried by most academic libraries). The Historical Society was founded over ten years ago on the premise that the traditional sub-disciplines of intellectual, political, economic, and diplomatic history were important and deserved better treatment than given in the larger societies, where it was believed these fields were neglected because they were not as politically correct as social and cultural history. Although The Historical Society has changed somewhat, and in my opinion is less distinguishable from the older historical associations, Historically Speaking sees fit to address whether or not these older fields of study remain neglected. It will run similar panel discussions on the other “neglected” fields in the future. This, on intellectual history, is its first.
The title of the forum suggests the conversation will not be limited by national boundaries, but all four panelists—Daniel Wickberg, David Hollinger, Sarah Igo, and Wilfred McClay—are Americanists, much to the benefit of U.S. intellectual history enthusiasts. Wickberg initiates the collegial forum with a provocative essay titled, “Is Intellectual History a Neglected Field of Study?” His answer is an ambivalent and qualified yes.
Wickberg first examines the ways in which intellectual history is alive and well. Even though the social history takeover of the discipline pushed intellectual history to the margins—because it was supposedly “concerned with phenomena largely irrelevant to the ‘real’ substance of history: material conditions, economic interests, the social relations of everyday life”—Wickberg argues that the cultural and linguistic turns brought intellectual history back to the mainstream. Because historians became more aware of the power of language, “the intellectual historian’s skills in readings texts, analyzing arguments, and contextualizing ideas had a kind of renewed value…” Thus, intellectual history remains viable, but mostly subsumed under the category of cultural history.
Even though Wickberg is enthusiastic about the fact that the habits of mind of the intellectual historian are central to the overarching discipline, he laments that intellectual history is not bracketed off institutionally. He thinks this is bad for intellectual history, and for the larger discipline, which needs intellectual history. This is the paradox that drives his analysis.
Wickberg presents several pieces of evidence, mostly impressionistic, that seem to prove intellectual history is neglected. First, he points to the “anti-intellectualism of the intellectuals,” by whom he means by the social historians. “If some intellectual historians can justly be accused of over-identifying with their objects of study, with granting significance to thinking in history because they think about history, some social historians can equally be found guilty of compensating for their own elite status by insisting that ideas and thinkers are not important to history at all.”
Some other points that speak to the neglect of intellectual history: the poor coverage of intellectual history in American survey courses; the lack of jobs specifically defined as intellectual history; the departmental marginalization of intellectual historians who do manage to get hired; and the lack of a strong institutional presence, such as a society of our own.
On this last note, Wickberg points to encouraging signs, such as the renewed vigor on display in the journals of intellectual history, specifically Modern Intellectual History and The Journal of the History of Ideas. “Perhaps more significantly,” he writes, “a younger group of U.S. intellectual historians, consisting of recent Ph.D.’s and graduate students, has initiated a blog in U.S. history.” (That would be us.) “The same group has put together an annual conference in U.S. intellectual history. The first meeting was, by all reports, very successful, and the second meeting will likely have occurred by the time this appears in print.” (Close, but not quite.) “That the initiative… has been taken by younger historians is significant; it suggests that the field has a strong future.”
Not that I am posting this review merely to give ourselves a pat on the back, but… in his reply to Wickberg, Wilfred McClay also praises the work we have done. “I, too, have noticed that some of the most interesting and imaginative in the cohort of younger scholars are being drawn to the study of intellectual history. Indeed, one could plausibly argue that it is in fact the young, such as the creators of the U.S. Intellectual History blog and conference to which Wickberg refers, who are leading the way. What makes their dedication so impressive, and moving, is the fact that these are precisely the ones who have the most to lose professionally, in a precarious time of shrinking jobs and disappearing venues, but who are taking up the cause of intellectual history’s future in the teeth of all this discouragement. Something more than careerism or opportunism must be motivating them. What could it be, other than the love of the subject?”
Not that I am one to disagree with such high praise. Indeed, I know for a fact that none of us write for this blog for reasons of careerism or opportunism. But, I would argue that informally institutionalizing our sub-discipline has been highly productive. It has helped us to define and redefine our creative labors as U.S. intellectual historians, with colleagues who want us to succeed, because they want to advance the sub-discipline.
Perhaps this is the point of Wickberg’s desire for institutionalization, of his wishes that intellectual history be seen as an entity to itself. Why is this necessary? “Because intellectual historians are trained to think of ideas as historical objects that are contexts for other ideas—to think of ideas as environments as well as tools—they bring something more than a method or set of approaches to a historical problem; they bring a distinctive perspective.” This is the rationale for intellectual history.
Wickberg writes the above passage in his final response to the three replies from Hollinger, McClay and Igo. He is specifically referring to Igo’s optimism that we need not fret over the lack of institutional space for intellectual history, since intellectual historical methods have conquered the entire discipline. Igo points especially to authors of significant works in her field of study—policy history—as being in the grain of intellectual history without being called as such, such as Alice O’Conner’s Poverty Knowledge. This seems to be the most significant point of contention in the entire forum, as the participants mostly preach to the choir.
Hollinger thinks intellectual history is much better off than Wickberg, and lists dozens of important recent books to prove it. In fact, all of the authors reel off impressive lists of recent books, including one written by our own Ben Alpers, Dictators, Democracy, and American Public Culture: Envisioning the Totalitarian Enemy, 1920s -1950s. But Hollinger laments that, although intellectual historians might get jobs, they do not get jobs as intellectual historians. We have to sell ourselves as something different. Furthermore: “What I find most troubling is the tendency of many departments to suppose that period-defined jobs, such as 19th Century, or U.S. since 1945, or Colonial, are more appropriately filled with social historians than by intellectual or political historians.” But he is hopeful: “This tendency may represent something of a behavioral lag, since there is so much evidence, outside the hiring process, for renewed engagement with the contributions of intellectual history.” Let us hope so.
There are many other topics covered in the forum. McClay, for example, argues that being forced to the margins has helped intellectual historians rethink the big intellectual historical questions, and get away from studies of the inane. And all of the authors touch upon the differences and similarities of intellectual and cultural history. They all agree that what was once called intellectual history, prior to the rise of social history, was similar to what now goes by cultural history. That is, in its heyday, intellectual history was about both elite thinkers and cultural structures of feeling. To this end, it might not be worth the effort to delineate differences between intellectual and cultural history. Wickberg disagrees, since he thinks the study of a system of ideas, the types of systems worked out by intellectuals—“high” intellectual history—is worthy of historical attention as apart from popular discourses. This might be a good topic for further discussion—I know the writers of this blog have different views on this issue.
In sum, I highly recommend everyone read the panel. I suspect similar conversations will continue at our conference in November.
Selasa, 15 September 2009
Not Unexpected News: Confirmation Of Budget Cuts For History Departments
InsideHigherEd reported bad news yesterday on funding for history departments in the United States. Here are some of the numbers (specific and vague) derived from an AHA survey of history departments compiled by Robert Townsend:
1. The AHA sent surveys to 110 history departments and received responses from 63.
2. Two-thirds of that 63 are experiencing budget cuts (so 42?).
3. (a) 5 departments reported being relatively untouched (but according the number above it should be 21, yes?).
(b) 15 characterized their cuts as "modest."
(c) The rest (either 42 or 27?) I guess are experiencing severe cuts? Perhaps the 15 + 5 equals roughly the 1/3 that are not being characterized as facing cuts, leaving the 43 others in severe mode?
4. "Most departments reported freezes on hiring."
5. "Most departments reported salary freezes."
6. "Departments with graduate programs generally said that they had cut slots for students."
7. "Other cuts included non-academic staff positions, travel, and supplies (especially paper)."
I hope this will not be the case, but I fear the last line means that we'll see folks backing out of the Second Annual USIH Conference this fall. - TL
1. The AHA sent surveys to 110 history departments and received responses from 63.
2. Two-thirds of that 63 are experiencing budget cuts (so 42?).
3. (a) 5 departments reported being relatively untouched (but according the number above it should be 21, yes?).
(b) 15 characterized their cuts as "modest."
(c) The rest (either 42 or 27?) I guess are experiencing severe cuts? Perhaps the 15 + 5 equals roughly the 1/3 that are not being characterized as facing cuts, leaving the 43 others in severe mode?
4. "Most departments reported freezes on hiring."
5. "Most departments reported salary freezes."
6. "Departments with graduate programs generally said that they had cut slots for students."
7. "Other cuts included non-academic staff positions, travel, and supplies (especially paper)."
I hope this will not be the case, but I fear the last line means that we'll see folks backing out of the Second Annual USIH Conference this fall. - TL
Not Unexpected News: Confirmation Of Budget Cuts For History Departments
InsideHigherEd reported bad news yesterday on funding for history departments in the United States. Here are some of the numbers (specific and vague) derived from an AHA survey of history departments compiled by Robert Townsend:
1. The AHA sent surveys to 110 history departments and received responses from 63.
2. Two-thirds of that 63 are experiencing budget cuts (so 42?).
3. (a) 5 departments reported being relatively untouched (but according the number above it should be 21, yes?).
(b) 15 characterized their cuts as "modest."
(c) The rest (either 42 or 27?) I guess are experiencing severe cuts? Perhaps the 15 + 5 equals roughly the 1/3 that are not being characterized as facing cuts, leaving the 43 others in severe mode?
4. "Most departments reported freezes on hiring."
5. "Most departments reported salary freezes."
6. "Departments with graduate programs generally said that they had cut slots for students."
7. "Other cuts included non-academic staff positions, travel, and supplies (especially paper)."
I hope this will not be the case, but I fear the last line means that we'll see folks backing out of the Second Annual USIH Conference this fall. - TL
1. The AHA sent surveys to 110 history departments and received responses from 63.
2. Two-thirds of that 63 are experiencing budget cuts (so 42?).
3. (a) 5 departments reported being relatively untouched (but according the number above it should be 21, yes?).
(b) 15 characterized their cuts as "modest."
(c) The rest (either 42 or 27?) I guess are experiencing severe cuts? Perhaps the 15 + 5 equals roughly the 1/3 that are not being characterized as facing cuts, leaving the 43 others in severe mode?
4. "Most departments reported freezes on hiring."
5. "Most departments reported salary freezes."
6. "Departments with graduate programs generally said that they had cut slots for students."
7. "Other cuts included non-academic staff positions, travel, and supplies (especially paper)."
I hope this will not be the case, but I fear the last line means that we'll see folks backing out of the Second Annual USIH Conference this fall. - TL
Selasa, 28 Juli 2009
Second Annual USIH Conference: Program
________________________________________
Program for the Second Annual USIH Conference
Center for the Humanities
The Graduate Center
CUNY
November 12-13, 2009
[Updated: 11/9/2009 9:20 AM CST]
________________________________________
Program Notes:
1. All functions will take place in one of seven places: Martin E. Segal Theatre and Rooms C201-205, C197.
2. Conference headquarters, beverage service, and publisher tables will be in C197. This room will open at 3 pm on Thursday, Nov. 12.
3. No money will change hands at the conference. All registration fees should be paid prior to, or after, attendance. The cost is $35 and checks should be sent to: The Center for the Humanities, c/o Michael Washburn, Assistant Director, The Graduate Center, City University of New York, 365 Fifth Avenue, Room 5103, New York, NY 10016.
________________________________________
Thursday, Nov. 12, 2009
1-3 pm
Martin E. Segal Theatre, Plenary Address
"Seeing, Hearing, and Writing the End of Modernity: From Reading Pragmatism to Watching Movies"
James Livingston, Rutgers University
3:30-5:30 pm
Martin E. Segal Theatre, Panel 1
Creating and Contesting Intellectual Traditions in 20th-Century American Thought
Black and Chicano Power in the Academy: The Intellectual Origins of Identity Politics
Andrew Hartman, Illinois State University
Antifoundationalism on Native Grounds
Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Black Progressives: The Politics of Knowledge in the Age of Washington
James Anders Levy, Hofstra University
Commentator: Martin Woessner, City University of New York
C201, Panel 2
Reconsidering Pragmatism and the Cold War Era
‘Postmodern, Bourgeois, Cold War Liberalism’: Rethinking Rorty and Late Twentieth Century Pragmatism
Anthony Hutchison, University of Nottingham
Pragmatism and the Civil Rights Movement: A (Re)consideration
Peter Kuryla, Belmont University
Pragmatism and American Thought at Mid-Century
Jeffrey Coker, Belmont University
Commentator: Ray Haberski, Marian College
C202, Panel 3
Intellectual Legacy of the 1960s
Confronting a “crisis in historical perspective”: Gabriel Kolko, Walter LaFeber and the History of American Empire during the Late Cold War
Nick Witham, University of Nottingham
David Horowitz, Todd Gitlin, and the Debate Over the Legacy of the 1960s
Jason D. Roberts, Northern Virginia Community College
Slaughterhouse at Forty: Kurt Vonnegut's Dresden Novel, Revisited
Gregory Sumner, University of Detroit Mercy
Commentator: David Engerman, Brandeis University
C203, Panel 4
Abstracting Technology and Science
Mimeographed Community: The mimeographed report and the rise of intellectual communities in early 20th century U.S.
Sylwester Ratowt, American Philosophical Society
Social Constructions of Nature and the Creation of the American City
Michael J. Rawson, Brooklyn College
Ambiguous Intellectual Boundary-Work of U.S. Demographers in Facing Postwar World Population Growth
Yu-Ling Huang, SUNY-Binghamton
Commentator: Neil B. Miller, Independent Scholar/H-Ideas Advisory Board
C204, Panel 5
Bridging the Class Divide in Progressive America
Wealth Taxation and Redistribution – Then and Now
Alexandra Wagner, Brandeis University
Corn-Pone Opinions: Liberalism and Political Economy in “The Age of Discussion”
Mark Schmeller, Northeastern Illinois University
Beyond Uplift: Democratizing Conversation in Progressive-era Chicago
Amy Kittelstrom, Sonoma State University/Princeton University
Commentator: John Recchiuti, Mount Union College
C205, Panel 6
“Brownie, You're Doing a Heck of a Job”: Conservative Ideology and the American State During the Age of Reagan
Conservative Ideology & Policymaking in the Age of Reagan
Timothy Kneeland, Nazareth College
Ronald Reagan’s Pragmatic Conservatism
Jon Peterson, Ohio University
Hurricane Andrew and Reagan’s American State
Natalie Schuster, University of Houston
Commentator: Jeffrey Bloodworth, Gannon University
6:30-8:30 pm
Martin E. Segal Theatre, John Patrick Diggins Retrospective
Neil Jumonville, Florida State University
Martin J. Burke, CUNY Graduate Center/Lehman College
James Oakes, CUNY Graduate Center
James Livingston, Rutgers University
Andrew Robertson, CUNY Lehman College
Matthew J. Cotter, Chair, CUNY Graduate Center
Friday, Nov. 13, 2009
9-11 am
Martin E. Segal Theatre, Panel 7
African Across the Atlantic: Ideas, Identity, and Ideologies
‘Quite High Minded’: African-American Appropriations of Antebellum Concepts of Benevolence and Intellectual Development
Jeffrey Mullins, St. Cloud State University
Matthew J. Hudock, Ph.D. Candidate, University of Delaware: “Africa vs. ‘Africa’: Redefining African Identity in the 19th Century”
Matthew Hudock, University of Delaware
The African American Press and the Parisian Presse Noire: A Transnational Comparison of Racial Ideologies and Protests, 1885-1935
Jennifer Moses, University of Delaware
Commentator: Wilson J. Moses, Pennsylvania State University
C201, Panel 8
Mysticism & the Religion of Democracy in Social Movements
Jane Addams, Horizontal Mysticism & the “Subjective Necessity” to Oppose War
John Pettegrew, Lehigh University
The New Thought Movement and the Emergence of the Feminist Self
Lilian Barger, University of Texas-Dallas
Title---TBD
David Bailey, Michigan State University
Commentator: Matthew Hedstrom, University of Virginia
C202, Panel 9
The Intellectual and Policy Roots of Our Economic Crises
Thorstein Veblen: a Genuine Historical Economist: On the conceptual link between History and Economy in Veblen's early work
Noam Yuran, Ben Gurion University
The Intellectual Roots of the Financial Crisis
James R. Hackney, Northeastern University
“The Follies of Individualism” Credit Men and the Social Gospel, 1893-1925
David Sellers Smith, Northwestern University
Commentator: Daniel J. Walkowitz, New York University
** Canceled ** -- C203, Panel 10 -- ** Canceled **
Intellectuals, Culture and Economic Crisis
Politics without Hope: or, History, Post-History, and Alternatives
John Michael, University of Rochester
The Recurrence of Crisis, the Crisis of Recurrence
Paul Smith, George Mason University
On the Road Again: Cinematic Populisms, Then and Now
Sharon Willis, University of Rochester
Commentator: Casey N. Blake, Columbia University
C204, Panel 11
Culture, Thought, and Politics During The Cold War
"Who Is Afraid of Martha Graham?” A new perspective on Martha Graham’s tour to Great Britain in 1954 and its importance for the cultural diplomacy of the Cold War
Camelia Lenart, University at Albany
"The Trade Journal of the Cold War": The New Leader and the Problem of Liberal Anticommunism
Peter Aigner, CUNY Graduate Center
Archibald MacLeish, Robert Oppenheimer, and “The Conquest of America”
Gary Grieve-Carlson, Lebanon Valley College
Michael Day, Lebanon Valley College
Commentator: David Steigerwald, The Ohio State University
C205, Panel 12
Catholics Looking Inside Out: Catholic Intellectual Contributions to Framing the Cold War
Ought Catholics Be Liberal? John Courtney Murray and John Cogley Face the Cold War
Ray Haberski, Marian College
Aquinas and the World State: Catholic Intellectual Undercurrents of the Early Cold War Movement for World Federalism
Tim Lacy, University of Illinois at Chicago
Edmund A. Walsh, S.J., “Ph.D.,” and the Irony of Intellectual Politics in the Early Cold War, 1945-1952
Patrick McNamara, Diocese of Brooklyn
Commentator: James McCartin, Seton Hall University
1-3 pm
Martin E. Segal Theatre, Panel 13
The Varieties of Conservatism
“A Position That Is Neither Liberal Nor Conservative”: The Goldwin Readers and the Spread of Straussian Political Thought in 1960s America
Benjamin Alpers, University of Oklahoma
Cultural Criticism on the Eve of the Linguistic Turn and Thick Description: Richard Hofstadter’s Analysis of the American Rightwing Extremism for the Fund for the Republic, 1958-1959
Robert Faber, Bradley University
Commentator: Casey N. Blake, Columbia University
C201, Panel 14
The New Left and its Legacies
Student Radicalism and Academic Freedom in the 1960s
Julian Nemeth, Brandeis University
Pornography and the 'Marketplace of Ideas': From Feminist Activism to Feminist Legal Theory in the Anti-Pornography Movement
Clara Altman, Brandeis University
Scaring the Shit Out of Honky America: the Weather Underground, the Transnational Global Left and 'Enlightenment' Cosmopolitanism
Jeffrey Bloodworth, Gannon University
Commentator: Alice Echols, University of Southern California
C202, Panel 15
Reconciling Religion With Modern Life
John Dewey on Religion and Religious Experience
Marina Ozernov, University of Texas-Dallas
Two Faiths, Christianity and Culture: Religious Response to the Promotion of Culture in the Late-Nineteenth Century United States
Ryan T.A. Swihart, Baruch College /Manhattan College/CUNY
“A Hierarchy of Rights”: Internationalizing the First Amendment in the American Century
Fred Beuttler, Historian’s Office, U.S. House of Representatives
Commentator: David Sehat, Georgia State University
C203, Panel 16
Culture and History
Fashion Theory in U.S. Intellectual Historical Context
Damayanthie Eluwawalage, SUNY-Oneonta
Interpreting a “Hieroglyphic” Civilization: Warren Susman, the 1920s, and the Modernist Tradition
Paul Murphy, Grand Valley State University
The Historical Man: Henry Chapman Mercer and the Transcendent Aesthetics of History
Kathleen Brennan, CUNY Graduate Center
Commentator: Joan Shelley Rubin, University of Rochester
C204, Panel 17
Science, Salvation, and Rationalism: Innovations in Nineteenth-Century American Thought
“Uninteresting truth and interesting falsehood”: Thoreau, Indians, and Nineteenth-Century Religious Liberalism
Daniel Dillard, Florida State University
The ‘Good Minister’: Emerson, Hedge, and Transcendental Religion
Ryan Tobler, University of Chicago
“I Object to the Names Deism and Infidelity”: Theodore Parker and the Boundaries of Christianity in Antebellum America
Benjamin Park, University of Edinburgh
Commentator: Charles Capper, Boston University
C205, Panel 18
Race and Identity Formulations
The Byrd Affair: Black and White Conflict in the Early Days of the New Deal
Lauren Kientz, Michigan State University
“A Process of Culture”: The White Supremacy Campaign and the Christian Educators of Trinity College, 1894-1903
Jennifer Eckel, University of Texas-Austin
The Psychological Turn in the History of American Justice: Segregation and Empathy from Plessy to Brown
Paul A. Dambowic, Pratt Institute
Commentator: K.J. Greene, Thomas Jefferson School of Law
3:30-5:30 pm
Martin E. Segal Theatre, Panel 19
The Psychology of 20th Century America
Moving the Body: Experimenting with Psychological Aesthetics
Susan Lanzoni, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
On Whose Shoulders Does Democracy Rest? Harold Lasswell and the Crisis in the American Social Sciences
Robert Genter, Nassau Community College
The shared liberal orientation of B.F. Skinner and Carl Rogers
Theodore Wisniewski, Simon Fraser University
Commentator: Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, Syracuse University
C201, Panel 20
Objectivity, Cultural Criticism and the History of Ideas in the American Academy
Revising the Myth of the Myth of Objectivity in American Historiography
Eileen Cheng, Sarah Lawrence College
Back to the Future: The History of Ideas after the Linguistic and Culture Turns
Daniel Wickberg, University of Texas, Dallas
Masks of Perfect Clarity: A Semiological Analysis of the Cold War Cultural Criticism of Jacques Barzun
W. Colin Church, University of Colorado
Commentator: James Kloppenberg, Harvard University
C202, Panel 21
Linguistic Theory, Philosophy, and Literature
Derrida and US Historiography: Then and now
Andrew Dunstall, Macquarie University
The Presence of the Past: A New Answer to the Riddle of Paul de Man
Gregory Jones-Katz, Husson University
Commentator: Paul Anderson, University of Michigan
C203, Panel 22
To Market, To Market: American Thinkers Confront Twentieth-Century Capitalism
‘Progressive Capitalism’ or ‘Creeping Socialism’?: Henry Wallace, Full Employment and Sixty Million Jobs
Mike O'Connor, Georgia State University
Frederick W. Taylor: The Optimistic Science of Scientific Management
Caitlin Rosenthal, Harvard University
From Entrepreneurship to the Corporation: Samuel Gompers Adjusts
Claire Goldstene, University of Maryland
Commentator: Jennifer Burns, University of Virginia
C204, Panel 23
Forgetting Social Science: Reviving Lost Histories of Social Scientific Thought in America
“Now I am an Imperialist” and Then I was Gone: Fredrick Starr, American Social Science the Tensions of Liberal Internationalism
Brian Foster, Carleton University
Demography’s Darling, Sociology’s Suppressed Memory and the Guise of Culture in Population Science
Karen Foster, Carleton University
"Men are less prone to learn from their victims": the sociological education of Emily Greene Balch's cosmopolitanism
Andrew Johnston, Carleton University
Commentator: Daniel Geary, Trinity College (Dublin)
6:30-8:30 pm
Martin E. Segal Theatre
Assessing the Legacy of the 1977 Wingspread Conference
David Hollinger, University of California-Berkeley
Thomas Bender, New York University
Dorothy Ross, Johns Hopkins University
David Hall, Harvard University
Commentator: Charles Capper, Boston University
Program for the Second Annual USIH Conference
Center for the Humanities
The Graduate Center
CUNY
November 12-13, 2009
[Updated: 11/9/2009 9:20 AM CST]
________________________________________
Program Notes:
1. All functions will take place in one of seven places: Martin E. Segal Theatre and Rooms C201-205, C197.
2. Conference headquarters, beverage service, and publisher tables will be in C197. This room will open at 3 pm on Thursday, Nov. 12.
3. No money will change hands at the conference. All registration fees should be paid prior to, or after, attendance. The cost is $35 and checks should be sent to: The Center for the Humanities, c/o Michael Washburn, Assistant Director, The Graduate Center, City University of New York, 365 Fifth Avenue, Room 5103, New York, NY 10016.
________________________________________
Thursday, Nov. 12, 2009
1-3 pm
Martin E. Segal Theatre, Plenary Address
"Seeing, Hearing, and Writing the End of Modernity: From Reading Pragmatism to Watching Movies"
James Livingston, Rutgers University
3:30-5:30 pm
Martin E. Segal Theatre, Panel 1
Creating and Contesting Intellectual Traditions in 20th-Century American Thought
Black and Chicano Power in the Academy: The Intellectual Origins of Identity Politics
Andrew Hartman, Illinois State University
Antifoundationalism on Native Grounds
Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Black Progressives: The Politics of Knowledge in the Age of Washington
James Anders Levy, Hofstra University
Commentator: Martin Woessner, City University of New York
C201, Panel 2
Reconsidering Pragmatism and the Cold War Era
‘Postmodern, Bourgeois, Cold War Liberalism’: Rethinking Rorty and Late Twentieth Century Pragmatism
Anthony Hutchison, University of Nottingham
Pragmatism and the Civil Rights Movement: A (Re)consideration
Peter Kuryla, Belmont University
Pragmatism and American Thought at Mid-Century
Jeffrey Coker, Belmont University
Commentator: Ray Haberski, Marian College
C202, Panel 3
Intellectual Legacy of the 1960s
Confronting a “crisis in historical perspective”: Gabriel Kolko, Walter LaFeber and the History of American Empire during the Late Cold War
Nick Witham, University of Nottingham
David Horowitz, Todd Gitlin, and the Debate Over the Legacy of the 1960s
Jason D. Roberts, Northern Virginia Community College
Slaughterhouse at Forty: Kurt Vonnegut's Dresden Novel, Revisited
Gregory Sumner, University of Detroit Mercy
Commentator: David Engerman, Brandeis University
C203, Panel 4
Abstracting Technology and Science
Mimeographed Community: The mimeographed report and the rise of intellectual communities in early 20th century U.S.
Sylwester Ratowt, American Philosophical Society
Social Constructions of Nature and the Creation of the American City
Michael J. Rawson, Brooklyn College
Ambiguous Intellectual Boundary-Work of U.S. Demographers in Facing Postwar World Population Growth
Yu-Ling Huang, SUNY-Binghamton
Commentator: Neil B. Miller, Independent Scholar/H-Ideas Advisory Board
C204, Panel 5
Bridging the Class Divide in Progressive America
Wealth Taxation and Redistribution – Then and Now
Alexandra Wagner, Brandeis University
Corn-Pone Opinions: Liberalism and Political Economy in “The Age of Discussion”
Mark Schmeller, Northeastern Illinois University
Beyond Uplift: Democratizing Conversation in Progressive-era Chicago
Amy Kittelstrom, Sonoma State University/Princeton University
Commentator: John Recchiuti, Mount Union College
C205, Panel 6
“Brownie, You're Doing a Heck of a Job”: Conservative Ideology and the American State During the Age of Reagan
Conservative Ideology & Policymaking in the Age of Reagan
Timothy Kneeland, Nazareth College
Ronald Reagan’s Pragmatic Conservatism
Jon Peterson, Ohio University
Hurricane Andrew and Reagan’s American State
Natalie Schuster, University of Houston
Commentator: Jeffrey Bloodworth, Gannon University
6:30-8:30 pm
Martin E. Segal Theatre, John Patrick Diggins Retrospective
Neil Jumonville, Florida State University
Martin J. Burke, CUNY Graduate Center/Lehman College
James Oakes, CUNY Graduate Center
James Livingston, Rutgers University
Andrew Robertson, CUNY Lehman College
Matthew J. Cotter, Chair, CUNY Graduate Center
Friday, Nov. 13, 2009
9-11 am
Martin E. Segal Theatre, Panel 7
African Across the Atlantic: Ideas, Identity, and Ideologies
‘Quite High Minded’: African-American Appropriations of Antebellum Concepts of Benevolence and Intellectual Development
Jeffrey Mullins, St. Cloud State University
Matthew J. Hudock, Ph.D. Candidate, University of Delaware: “Africa vs. ‘Africa’: Redefining African Identity in the 19th Century”
Matthew Hudock, University of Delaware
The African American Press and the Parisian Presse Noire: A Transnational Comparison of Racial Ideologies and Protests, 1885-1935
Jennifer Moses, University of Delaware
Commentator: Wilson J. Moses, Pennsylvania State University
C201, Panel 8
Mysticism & the Religion of Democracy in Social Movements
Jane Addams, Horizontal Mysticism & the “Subjective Necessity” to Oppose War
John Pettegrew, Lehigh University
The New Thought Movement and the Emergence of the Feminist Self
Lilian Barger, University of Texas-Dallas
Title---TBD
David Bailey, Michigan State University
Commentator: Matthew Hedstrom, University of Virginia
C202, Panel 9
The Intellectual and Policy Roots of Our Economic Crises
Thorstein Veblen: a Genuine Historical Economist: On the conceptual link between History and Economy in Veblen's early work
Noam Yuran, Ben Gurion University
The Intellectual Roots of the Financial Crisis
James R. Hackney, Northeastern University
“The Follies of Individualism” Credit Men and the Social Gospel, 1893-1925
David Sellers Smith, Northwestern University
Commentator: Daniel J. Walkowitz, New York University
** Canceled ** -- C203, Panel 10 -- ** Canceled **
Intellectuals, Culture and Economic Crisis
Politics without Hope: or, History, Post-History, and Alternatives
John Michael, University of Rochester
The Recurrence of Crisis, the Crisis of Recurrence
Paul Smith, George Mason University
On the Road Again: Cinematic Populisms, Then and Now
Sharon Willis, University of Rochester
Commentator: Casey N. Blake, Columbia University
C204, Panel 11
Culture, Thought, and Politics During The Cold War
"Who Is Afraid of Martha Graham?” A new perspective on Martha Graham’s tour to Great Britain in 1954 and its importance for the cultural diplomacy of the Cold War
Camelia Lenart, University at Albany
"The Trade Journal of the Cold War": The New Leader and the Problem of Liberal Anticommunism
Peter Aigner, CUNY Graduate Center
Archibald MacLeish, Robert Oppenheimer, and “The Conquest of America”
Gary Grieve-Carlson, Lebanon Valley College
Michael Day, Lebanon Valley College
Commentator: David Steigerwald, The Ohio State University
C205, Panel 12
Catholics Looking Inside Out: Catholic Intellectual Contributions to Framing the Cold War
Ought Catholics Be Liberal? John Courtney Murray and John Cogley Face the Cold War
Ray Haberski, Marian College
Aquinas and the World State: Catholic Intellectual Undercurrents of the Early Cold War Movement for World Federalism
Tim Lacy, University of Illinois at Chicago
Edmund A. Walsh, S.J., “Ph.D.,” and the Irony of Intellectual Politics in the Early Cold War, 1945-1952
Patrick McNamara, Diocese of Brooklyn
Commentator: James McCartin, Seton Hall University
1-3 pm
Martin E. Segal Theatre, Panel 13
The Varieties of Conservatism
“A Position That Is Neither Liberal Nor Conservative”: The Goldwin Readers and the Spread of Straussian Political Thought in 1960s America
Benjamin Alpers, University of Oklahoma
Cultural Criticism on the Eve of the Linguistic Turn and Thick Description: Richard Hofstadter’s Analysis of the American Rightwing Extremism for the Fund for the Republic, 1958-1959
Robert Faber, Bradley University
Commentator: Casey N. Blake, Columbia University
C201, Panel 14
The New Left and its Legacies
Student Radicalism and Academic Freedom in the 1960s
Julian Nemeth, Brandeis University
Pornography and the 'Marketplace of Ideas': From Feminist Activism to Feminist Legal Theory in the Anti-Pornography Movement
Clara Altman, Brandeis University
Scaring the Shit Out of Honky America: the Weather Underground, the Transnational Global Left and 'Enlightenment' Cosmopolitanism
Jeffrey Bloodworth, Gannon University
Commentator: Alice Echols, University of Southern California
C202, Panel 15
Reconciling Religion With Modern Life
John Dewey on Religion and Religious Experience
Marina Ozernov, University of Texas-Dallas
Two Faiths, Christianity and Culture: Religious Response to the Promotion of Culture in the Late-Nineteenth Century United States
Ryan T.A. Swihart, Baruch College /Manhattan College/CUNY
“A Hierarchy of Rights”: Internationalizing the First Amendment in the American Century
Fred Beuttler, Historian’s Office, U.S. House of Representatives
Commentator: David Sehat, Georgia State University
C203, Panel 16
Culture and History
Fashion Theory in U.S. Intellectual Historical Context
Damayanthie Eluwawalage, SUNY-Oneonta
Interpreting a “Hieroglyphic” Civilization: Warren Susman, the 1920s, and the Modernist Tradition
Paul Murphy, Grand Valley State University
The Historical Man: Henry Chapman Mercer and the Transcendent Aesthetics of History
Kathleen Brennan, CUNY Graduate Center
Commentator: Joan Shelley Rubin, University of Rochester
C204, Panel 17
Science, Salvation, and Rationalism: Innovations in Nineteenth-Century American Thought
“Uninteresting truth and interesting falsehood”: Thoreau, Indians, and Nineteenth-Century Religious Liberalism
Daniel Dillard, Florida State University
The ‘Good Minister’: Emerson, Hedge, and Transcendental Religion
Ryan Tobler, University of Chicago
“I Object to the Names Deism and Infidelity”: Theodore Parker and the Boundaries of Christianity in Antebellum America
Benjamin Park, University of Edinburgh
Commentator: Charles Capper, Boston University
C205, Panel 18
Race and Identity Formulations
The Byrd Affair: Black and White Conflict in the Early Days of the New Deal
Lauren Kientz, Michigan State University
“A Process of Culture”: The White Supremacy Campaign and the Christian Educators of Trinity College, 1894-1903
Jennifer Eckel, University of Texas-Austin
The Psychological Turn in the History of American Justice: Segregation and Empathy from Plessy to Brown
Paul A. Dambowic, Pratt Institute
Commentator: K.J. Greene, Thomas Jefferson School of Law
3:30-5:30 pm
Martin E. Segal Theatre, Panel 19
The Psychology of 20th Century America
Moving the Body: Experimenting with Psychological Aesthetics
Susan Lanzoni, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
On Whose Shoulders Does Democracy Rest? Harold Lasswell and the Crisis in the American Social Sciences
Robert Genter, Nassau Community College
The shared liberal orientation of B.F. Skinner and Carl Rogers
Theodore Wisniewski, Simon Fraser University
Commentator: Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, Syracuse University
C201, Panel 20
Objectivity, Cultural Criticism and the History of Ideas in the American Academy
Revising the Myth of the Myth of Objectivity in American Historiography
Eileen Cheng, Sarah Lawrence College
Back to the Future: The History of Ideas after the Linguistic and Culture Turns
Daniel Wickberg, University of Texas, Dallas
Masks of Perfect Clarity: A Semiological Analysis of the Cold War Cultural Criticism of Jacques Barzun
W. Colin Church, University of Colorado
Commentator: James Kloppenberg, Harvard University
C202, Panel 21
Linguistic Theory, Philosophy, and Literature
Derrida and US Historiography: Then and now
Andrew Dunstall, Macquarie University
The Presence of the Past: A New Answer to the Riddle of Paul de Man
Gregory Jones-Katz, Husson University
Commentator: Paul Anderson, University of Michigan
C203, Panel 22
To Market, To Market: American Thinkers Confront Twentieth-Century Capitalism
‘Progressive Capitalism’ or ‘Creeping Socialism’?: Henry Wallace, Full Employment and Sixty Million Jobs
Mike O'Connor, Georgia State University
Frederick W. Taylor: The Optimistic Science of Scientific Management
Caitlin Rosenthal, Harvard University
From Entrepreneurship to the Corporation: Samuel Gompers Adjusts
Claire Goldstene, University of Maryland
Commentator: Jennifer Burns, University of Virginia
C204, Panel 23
Forgetting Social Science: Reviving Lost Histories of Social Scientific Thought in America
“Now I am an Imperialist” and Then I was Gone: Fredrick Starr, American Social Science the Tensions of Liberal Internationalism
Brian Foster, Carleton University
Demography’s Darling, Sociology’s Suppressed Memory and the Guise of Culture in Population Science
Karen Foster, Carleton University
"Men are less prone to learn from their victims": the sociological education of Emily Greene Balch's cosmopolitanism
Andrew Johnston, Carleton University
Commentator: Daniel Geary, Trinity College (Dublin)
6:30-8:30 pm
Martin E. Segal Theatre
Assessing the Legacy of the 1977 Wingspread Conference
David Hollinger, University of California-Berkeley
Thomas Bender, New York University
Dorothy Ross, Johns Hopkins University
David Hall, Harvard University
Commentator: Charles Capper, Boston University
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