One of the many excellent papers I heard at our recent conference was (longtime friend of USIH) Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen's "Philosophy out of Doors: Thinking as a Handicraft and Spiritual Practice in Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)" One of the main questions Jennifer addressed was how intellectual historians should treat a work like Pirsig's novel. Is it philosophy? Pirsig certainly intended it as philosophy and many of his readers experienced it as philosophy, but few if any academic philosophers took it seriously.
Much of the lively conversation that followed Jennifer's paper concerned contexts in which one might consider Pirsig's work. Mike O'Connnor offered the thought that, from the point of view of the academic discipline, it was philosophy...just not very good philosophy. Brian Lloyd, who later gave a very interesting brown-bag presentation on the Jefferson Airplane's "We Can Be Together," suggested that the novel could best be understood as a late work of the Sixties counterculture. I thought that it might even more profitably be considered alongside such other Seventies works as Richard Bach's Jonathan Livingston Seagull (1970), Gary Zukav's The Dancing Wu Li Masters (1979) and Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel Escher Bach (1979).
On Saturday after the conference, I had breakfast with a former colleague of mine, also a U.S. intellectual historian, who is no longer an academic. When I mentioned Jennifer's Pirsig paper to him, he said "oh...you mean a history of the early New Age." And, of course, he was in many ways correct...though interestingly I don't think anyone used the words "New Age" in discussing Jennifer's paper. As it turns out, my friend happens to be considering writing a book on another aspect of New Age thought.
And lately I've been thinking about the history of Western Buddhism....which can also fit into this broader category.
Are we three alone? Perhaps there's an emerging intellectual conversation here.
Just to lay a few more cards on the table:
After a lot of historical neglect, the Seventies* are finally getting the attention they deserve from historians. Indeed, it's telling that one of the first important scholarly works on the decade bore the title It Seemed Like Nothing Happened. That was certainly the way I experienced the Seventies at the time. After the Sixties, an important decade in which vast cultural, political, and social changes seemed to take place, the Seventies felt like an anticlimax. But in retrospect, they seem more and more like a watershed period, albeit one whose significance eluded many of those living through it.
I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1960s and 1970s, so New Age spirituality was a huge part of the greater world of my childhood...though it had relatively little direct impact on myself or my family. Indeed, my attitude to things New Age was--and to a great extent is--largely skeptical/hostile.** As a result, there's a side of me that doesn't want to take this material seriously. But ultimately I think such concerns are misplaced, even in regards to the fuzziest aspects of New Age thinking. As the rationalistic Judaic scholar Saul Lieberman famously said of Gershom Scholem's work on mysticism, "nonsense is nonsense, but the history of nonsense is scholarship." New Age thought strikes me as an important part of the broader intellectual history of a crucial era of which we're only now beginning to take historical stock. Which might in turn explain why a number of us seem to be circling around these issues in our thinking.***
Of course, there might also be a more New Age explanation....
_______________________________
* When I followed Brian Lloyd's comment about a Sixties context for Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by suggesting instead a Seventies context, Jennifer correctly warned against putting too much weight on decades as analytic categories. I basically agree with this. Nonetheless, it seems to me that enormously important things happened in American thought, culture and politics between, say, the election of Nixon and the election of Reagan and that this period still has not yet received the attention it deserves.
** Those who know me, however, are aware that attitudes of skepticism/hostility are often starting points for my projects.
*** I should stress that I have no plans at this point to actively work on Western Buddhism and I don't know the status of Jennifer's work on Pirsig.
Tampilkan postingan dengan label 2010 USIH Conference. Tampilkan semua postingan
Tampilkan postingan dengan label 2010 USIH Conference. Tampilkan semua postingan
Senin, 08 November 2010
Plate o' Shrimp, or Toward an Intellectual History of the New Age?
One of the many excellent papers I heard at our recent conference was (longtime friend of USIH) Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen's "Philosophy out of Doors: Thinking as a Handicraft and Spiritual Practice in Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)" One of the main questions Jennifer addressed was how intellectual historians should treat a work like Pirsig's novel. Is it philosophy? Pirsig certainly intended it as philosophy and many of his readers experienced it as philosophy, but few if any academic philosophers took it seriously.
Much of the lively conversation that followed Jennifer's paper concerned contexts in which one might consider Pirsig's work. Mike O'Connnor offered the thought that, from the point of view of the academic discipline, it was philosophy...just not very good philosophy. Brian Lloyd, who later gave a very interesting brown-bag presentation on the Jefferson Airplane's "We Can Be Together," suggested that the novel could best be understood as a late work of the Sixties counterculture. I thought that it might even more profitably be considered alongside such other Seventies works as Richard Bach's Jonathan Livingston Seagull (1970), Gary Zukav's The Dancing Wu Li Masters (1979) and Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel Escher Bach (1979).
On Saturday after the conference, I had breakfast with a former colleague of mine, also a U.S. intellectual historian, who is no longer an academic. When I mentioned Jennifer's Pirsig paper to him, he said "oh...you mean a history of the early New Age." And, of course, he was in many ways correct...though interestingly I don't think anyone used the words "New Age" in discussing Jennifer's paper. As it turns out, my friend happens to be considering writing a book on another aspect of New Age thought.
And lately I've been thinking about the history of Western Buddhism....which can also fit into this broader category.
Are we three alone? Perhaps there's an emerging intellectual conversation here.
Just to lay a few more cards on the table:
After a lot of historical neglect, the Seventies* are finally getting the attention they deserve from historians. Indeed, it's telling that one of the first important scholarly works on the decade bore the title It Seemed Like Nothing Happened. That was certainly the way I experienced the Seventies at the time. After the Sixties, an important decade in which vast cultural, political, and social changes seemed to take place, the Seventies felt like an anticlimax. But in retrospect, they seem more and more like a watershed period, albeit one whose significance eluded many of those living through it.
I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1960s and 1970s, so New Age spirituality was a huge part of the greater world of my childhood...though it had relatively little direct impact on myself or my family. Indeed, my attitude to things New Age was--and to a great extent is--largely skeptical/hostile.** As a result, there's a side of me that doesn't want to take this material seriously. But ultimately I think such concerns are misplaced, even in regards to the fuzziest aspects of New Age thinking. As the rationalistic Judaic scholar Saul Lieberman famously said of Gershom Scholem's work on mysticism, "nonsense is nonsense, but the history of nonsense is scholarship." New Age thought strikes me as an important part of the broader intellectual history of a crucial era of which we're only now beginning to take historical stock. Which might in turn explain why a number of us seem to be circling around these issues in our thinking.***
Of course, there might also be a more New Age explanation....
_______________________________
* When I followed Brian Lloyd's comment about a Sixties context for Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by suggesting instead a Seventies context, Jennifer correctly warned against putting too much weight on decades as analytic categories. I basically agree with this. Nonetheless, it seems to me that enormously important things happened in American thought, culture and politics between, say, the election of Nixon and the election of Reagan and that this period still has not yet received the attention it deserves.
** Those who know me, however, are aware that attitudes of skepticism/hostility are often starting points for my projects.
*** I should stress that I have no plans at this point to actively work on Western Buddhism and I don't know the status of Jennifer's work on Pirsig.
Much of the lively conversation that followed Jennifer's paper concerned contexts in which one might consider Pirsig's work. Mike O'Connnor offered the thought that, from the point of view of the academic discipline, it was philosophy...just not very good philosophy. Brian Lloyd, who later gave a very interesting brown-bag presentation on the Jefferson Airplane's "We Can Be Together," suggested that the novel could best be understood as a late work of the Sixties counterculture. I thought that it might even more profitably be considered alongside such other Seventies works as Richard Bach's Jonathan Livingston Seagull (1970), Gary Zukav's The Dancing Wu Li Masters (1979) and Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel Escher Bach (1979).
On Saturday after the conference, I had breakfast with a former colleague of mine, also a U.S. intellectual historian, who is no longer an academic. When I mentioned Jennifer's Pirsig paper to him, he said "oh...you mean a history of the early New Age." And, of course, he was in many ways correct...though interestingly I don't think anyone used the words "New Age" in discussing Jennifer's paper. As it turns out, my friend happens to be considering writing a book on another aspect of New Age thought.
And lately I've been thinking about the history of Western Buddhism....which can also fit into this broader category.
Are we three alone? Perhaps there's an emerging intellectual conversation here.
Just to lay a few more cards on the table:
After a lot of historical neglect, the Seventies* are finally getting the attention they deserve from historians. Indeed, it's telling that one of the first important scholarly works on the decade bore the title It Seemed Like Nothing Happened. That was certainly the way I experienced the Seventies at the time. After the Sixties, an important decade in which vast cultural, political, and social changes seemed to take place, the Seventies felt like an anticlimax. But in retrospect, they seem more and more like a watershed period, albeit one whose significance eluded many of those living through it.
I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1960s and 1970s, so New Age spirituality was a huge part of the greater world of my childhood...though it had relatively little direct impact on myself or my family. Indeed, my attitude to things New Age was--and to a great extent is--largely skeptical/hostile.** As a result, there's a side of me that doesn't want to take this material seriously. But ultimately I think such concerns are misplaced, even in regards to the fuzziest aspects of New Age thinking. As the rationalistic Judaic scholar Saul Lieberman famously said of Gershom Scholem's work on mysticism, "nonsense is nonsense, but the history of nonsense is scholarship." New Age thought strikes me as an important part of the broader intellectual history of a crucial era of which we're only now beginning to take historical stock. Which might in turn explain why a number of us seem to be circling around these issues in our thinking.***
Of course, there might also be a more New Age explanation....
_______________________________
* When I followed Brian Lloyd's comment about a Sixties context for Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by suggesting instead a Seventies context, Jennifer correctly warned against putting too much weight on decades as analytic categories. I basically agree with this. Nonetheless, it seems to me that enormously important things happened in American thought, culture and politics between, say, the election of Nixon and the election of Reagan and that this period still has not yet received the attention it deserves.
** Those who know me, however, are aware that attitudes of skepticism/hostility are often starting points for my projects.
*** I should stress that I have no plans at this point to actively work on Western Buddhism and I don't know the status of Jennifer's work on Pirsig.
Jumat, 05 November 2010
X-post: Michael Kramer Reflects On The Third Annual USIH Conference
[First posted at Michael Kramer's weblog, Culture Rover, on Oct. 28, 2010, this essay reflects on the overall meaning of the Third Annual USIH Conference. Michael attended and presented a paper, and has subsequently contributed to the thread below on the event's final plenary. Michael works at Northwestern University.]
----------------------------------------------
Instituting Intellectual History: the ins and outs of academic intellectual history.
[Christopher Lasch]
No ideas but in things. — William Carlos Williams
----------------------------------------------
At the closing panel of the third annual U.S. Intellectual History conference, whose theme was “Intellectuals and Their Publics,” the ghost of Christopher Lasch very much haunted the halls. A number of former graduate students, and even Lasch’s own daughter, delivered eloquent, forceful talks in response to the question “Intellectual History for What?” They urged colleagues and students to work not only as specialized scholars, but also as cultural and social critics.
But a question from a younger colleague in the audience revealed an underlying tension at the conference. The question was along the lines of (I paraphrase): is the historical moment for intellectual historians to serve as cultural critics and public intellectuals a la Lasch over? Or, is the “intellectual as a social type” no more?
There was a sense in which the question was almost a rhetorical one, an answer to it less crucial than its underlying point. Which was that while established scholars might hunger to reach beyond academe, speaking from the podium to urge themselves and their fellow specialists to address broader public audiences, or to dive promiscuously, as George Cotkin put it, into what David Steigerwald called “the play of ideas across time,” many younger scholars were perhaps there for more narrow reasons of professional accreditation in an academic job market that is so oversupplied that it is almost nonexistent, particularly in intellectual history. Those with security within academia longed to escape it for something less institutionalized, while those outside the gates (or within them, but marginalized) longed for institutional (and economic!) validation.
Of course, the lines between these two longings—to reach broader publics, on the one hand, and to secure positions in the historical profession, on the other—were blurry. Both established and younger scholars at the conference danced between the two. James Kloppenberg’s keynote speech, for instance, focused on the intellectual biography of Barack Obama to explain the deeper history behind the strange paradox of how the President is reviled on the right while, at the same time, met with such intense disappointment on the left.
Like many of the presentations at the conference, Kloppenberg’s talk drew upon his intellectual history “chops” to speak to contemporary political matters. For Kloppenberg, Obama’s own intellectual history provided insight into this enigmatic man. The President’s commitments to a pragmatist’s liberal vision of the United States’s democratic traditions—which turn up in Obama’s books and own education—temper his rhetoric and keep him focused on long-term social improvement while also allowing him to resist the polarizations of degraded contemporary political theater.
But despite the evidence in this marvelous keynote of the possibility that historians might move between specialized academic labor and a broader public culture, the tensions between getting out there into the world and getting in there into the academy lingered. Perhaps when it comes to the study of ideas, it’s still about the economy, stupid? Maybe. There was a sense that the tensions raised by the sharp question in the closing minutes of the conference were less about intellectual issues than institutional and economic ones. If, as the question suggested, the cultural critic of the twentieth-century is no more, if the intellectual as social type is dead, then what next for intellectual history as a public as well as a narrowly-professional concern?
George Cotkin proposed that he felt liberated to write adventurous intellectual history because of his position at a non-research university, but even those kind of academic jobs are few and far between these days, and the oversupply of able candidates for them is startling. So it is true, as Wilfred McClay pointed out, that the study of ideas remains vital both inside and outside academia even if the role of intellectual historians continues to be imperiled. But as Casey Blake essentially declared in his closing remarks, the research university may be dead for pursuing a true and only intellectual history. If civic education, teaching, and writing are still to be part of intellectual life, and intellectual historians are to participate fully in them, what institutional forms, then, should intellectual history work take? How should ideas play across time if there is no safety net below them?
Of course, there never has been a safety net, really. Both within the professional field of history and in the broad public beyond it, ideas still grow, blossom, go to seed, and bear fruit again with abundance. Blake mentioned the website The New Inquiry as an example of a new and hopeful concentration of intellectual energy, and rightly so. But is The New Inquiry an institution in the economic sense? Can it provide the sustenance necessary to sustain the intellect? What will provide the livelihood for lively intellectual engagement?
These institutional and economic questions for the life of the mind have always been fretful ones. There was no golden age for intellectuals in America, even when we look back nostalgically on the burgeoning fields of the Cold War research university or peer through the mists into the unkempt gardens of Greenwich Village or Harlem Renaissance bohemians. Nor, for that matter is today as bleak as it sometimes seems. And even though the current pressures are for the work of public intellectuals to be “relevant” and “do something,” one can be heartened by David Steigerwald’s assertion at the final session that the main reason to pursue intellectual history is not that studying ideas somehow exerts “resistance” or “oppositionality,” but rather that it is, simply put, dignified.
Dignity is something to ponder, and perhaps even something into which we can dig our roots. Dignity constitutes a kind of public act. And it can be a fertile emotion. But this dignity needs support. One task that the U.S. Intellectual History conference, once a blog, now growing into an organization, might address is the intellectual groundwork needed to foster a more expansive institutional space for the life of the mind.
Publics are atmospheric and amorphous. Intellectuals have and will continue to be resourceful in their cultivation. And those ideas, wherever they sprout, will remain hearty. The issue isn’t extinction, it’s robustness. The more we can eat, sleep, and breathe, the more we can eat, sleep, and breathe intellectual history.
So the question posed at the end of the conference really leads to two questions. First, in a world in which history still matters (see the recent uses of the past by Glenn Beck and others), what kind of new structures can make for a less shrill and more intellectual study of ideas? Second, if not the research university as it has existed for academic intellectual history, then what? Websites and social networks? Markets or state-run institutions or non-profit think-tanks or what?
Put another way, the question might be: how do we better institute intellectual history without institutionalizing it?
----------------------------------------------
Instituting Intellectual History: the ins and outs of academic intellectual history.
[Christopher Lasch]
No ideas but in things. — William Carlos Williams
----------------------------------------------
At the closing panel of the third annual U.S. Intellectual History conference, whose theme was “Intellectuals and Their Publics,” the ghost of Christopher Lasch very much haunted the halls. A number of former graduate students, and even Lasch’s own daughter, delivered eloquent, forceful talks in response to the question “Intellectual History for What?” They urged colleagues and students to work not only as specialized scholars, but also as cultural and social critics.
But a question from a younger colleague in the audience revealed an underlying tension at the conference. The question was along the lines of (I paraphrase): is the historical moment for intellectual historians to serve as cultural critics and public intellectuals a la Lasch over? Or, is the “intellectual as a social type” no more?
There was a sense in which the question was almost a rhetorical one, an answer to it less crucial than its underlying point. Which was that while established scholars might hunger to reach beyond academe, speaking from the podium to urge themselves and their fellow specialists to address broader public audiences, or to dive promiscuously, as George Cotkin put it, into what David Steigerwald called “the play of ideas across time,” many younger scholars were perhaps there for more narrow reasons of professional accreditation in an academic job market that is so oversupplied that it is almost nonexistent, particularly in intellectual history. Those with security within academia longed to escape it for something less institutionalized, while those outside the gates (or within them, but marginalized) longed for institutional (and economic!) validation.
Of course, the lines between these two longings—to reach broader publics, on the one hand, and to secure positions in the historical profession, on the other—were blurry. Both established and younger scholars at the conference danced between the two. James Kloppenberg’s keynote speech, for instance, focused on the intellectual biography of Barack Obama to explain the deeper history behind the strange paradox of how the President is reviled on the right while, at the same time, met with such intense disappointment on the left.
Like many of the presentations at the conference, Kloppenberg’s talk drew upon his intellectual history “chops” to speak to contemporary political matters. For Kloppenberg, Obama’s own intellectual history provided insight into this enigmatic man. The President’s commitments to a pragmatist’s liberal vision of the United States’s democratic traditions—which turn up in Obama’s books and own education—temper his rhetoric and keep him focused on long-term social improvement while also allowing him to resist the polarizations of degraded contemporary political theater.
But despite the evidence in this marvelous keynote of the possibility that historians might move between specialized academic labor and a broader public culture, the tensions between getting out there into the world and getting in there into the academy lingered. Perhaps when it comes to the study of ideas, it’s still about the economy, stupid? Maybe. There was a sense that the tensions raised by the sharp question in the closing minutes of the conference were less about intellectual issues than institutional and economic ones. If, as the question suggested, the cultural critic of the twentieth-century is no more, if the intellectual as social type is dead, then what next for intellectual history as a public as well as a narrowly-professional concern?
George Cotkin proposed that he felt liberated to write adventurous intellectual history because of his position at a non-research university, but even those kind of academic jobs are few and far between these days, and the oversupply of able candidates for them is startling. So it is true, as Wilfred McClay pointed out, that the study of ideas remains vital both inside and outside academia even if the role of intellectual historians continues to be imperiled. But as Casey Blake essentially declared in his closing remarks, the research university may be dead for pursuing a true and only intellectual history. If civic education, teaching, and writing are still to be part of intellectual life, and intellectual historians are to participate fully in them, what institutional forms, then, should intellectual history work take? How should ideas play across time if there is no safety net below them?
Of course, there never has been a safety net, really. Both within the professional field of history and in the broad public beyond it, ideas still grow, blossom, go to seed, and bear fruit again with abundance. Blake mentioned the website The New Inquiry as an example of a new and hopeful concentration of intellectual energy, and rightly so. But is The New Inquiry an institution in the economic sense? Can it provide the sustenance necessary to sustain the intellect? What will provide the livelihood for lively intellectual engagement?
These institutional and economic questions for the life of the mind have always been fretful ones. There was no golden age for intellectuals in America, even when we look back nostalgically on the burgeoning fields of the Cold War research university or peer through the mists into the unkempt gardens of Greenwich Village or Harlem Renaissance bohemians. Nor, for that matter is today as bleak as it sometimes seems. And even though the current pressures are for the work of public intellectuals to be “relevant” and “do something,” one can be heartened by David Steigerwald’s assertion at the final session that the main reason to pursue intellectual history is not that studying ideas somehow exerts “resistance” or “oppositionality,” but rather that it is, simply put, dignified.
Dignity is something to ponder, and perhaps even something into which we can dig our roots. Dignity constitutes a kind of public act. And it can be a fertile emotion. But this dignity needs support. One task that the U.S. Intellectual History conference, once a blog, now growing into an organization, might address is the intellectual groundwork needed to foster a more expansive institutional space for the life of the mind.
Publics are atmospheric and amorphous. Intellectuals have and will continue to be resourceful in their cultivation. And those ideas, wherever they sprout, will remain hearty. The issue isn’t extinction, it’s robustness. The more we can eat, sleep, and breathe, the more we can eat, sleep, and breathe intellectual history.
So the question posed at the end of the conference really leads to two questions. First, in a world in which history still matters (see the recent uses of the past by Glenn Beck and others), what kind of new structures can make for a less shrill and more intellectual study of ideas? Second, if not the research university as it has existed for academic intellectual history, then what? Websites and social networks? Markets or state-run institutions or non-profit think-tanks or what?
Put another way, the question might be: how do we better institute intellectual history without institutionalizing it?
X-post: Michael Kramer Reflects On The Third Annual USIH Conference
[First posted at Michael Kramer's weblog, Culture Rover, on Oct. 28, 2010, this essay reflects on the overall meaning of the Third Annual USIH Conference. Michael attended and presented a paper, and has subsequently contributed to the thread below on the event's final plenary. Michael works at Northwestern University.]
----------------------------------------------
Instituting Intellectual History: the ins and outs of academic intellectual history.
[Christopher Lasch]
No ideas but in things. — William Carlos Williams
----------------------------------------------
At the closing panel of the third annual U.S. Intellectual History conference, whose theme was “Intellectuals and Their Publics,” the ghost of Christopher Lasch very much haunted the halls. A number of former graduate students, and even Lasch’s own daughter, delivered eloquent, forceful talks in response to the question “Intellectual History for What?” They urged colleagues and students to work not only as specialized scholars, but also as cultural and social critics.
But a question from a younger colleague in the audience revealed an underlying tension at the conference. The question was along the lines of (I paraphrase): is the historical moment for intellectual historians to serve as cultural critics and public intellectuals a la Lasch over? Or, is the “intellectual as a social type” no more?
There was a sense in which the question was almost a rhetorical one, an answer to it less crucial than its underlying point. Which was that while established scholars might hunger to reach beyond academe, speaking from the podium to urge themselves and their fellow specialists to address broader public audiences, or to dive promiscuously, as George Cotkin put it, into what David Steigerwald called “the play of ideas across time,” many younger scholars were perhaps there for more narrow reasons of professional accreditation in an academic job market that is so oversupplied that it is almost nonexistent, particularly in intellectual history. Those with security within academia longed to escape it for something less institutionalized, while those outside the gates (or within them, but marginalized) longed for institutional (and economic!) validation.
Of course, the lines between these two longings—to reach broader publics, on the one hand, and to secure positions in the historical profession, on the other—were blurry. Both established and younger scholars at the conference danced between the two. James Kloppenberg’s keynote speech, for instance, focused on the intellectual biography of Barack Obama to explain the deeper history behind the strange paradox of how the President is reviled on the right while, at the same time, met with such intense disappointment on the left.
Like many of the presentations at the conference, Kloppenberg’s talk drew upon his intellectual history “chops” to speak to contemporary political matters. For Kloppenberg, Obama’s own intellectual history provided insight into this enigmatic man. The President’s commitments to a pragmatist’s liberal vision of the United States’s democratic traditions—which turn up in Obama’s books and own education—temper his rhetoric and keep him focused on long-term social improvement while also allowing him to resist the polarizations of degraded contemporary political theater.
But despite the evidence in this marvelous keynote of the possibility that historians might move between specialized academic labor and a broader public culture, the tensions between getting out there into the world and getting in there into the academy lingered. Perhaps when it comes to the study of ideas, it’s still about the economy, stupid? Maybe. There was a sense that the tensions raised by the sharp question in the closing minutes of the conference were less about intellectual issues than institutional and economic ones. If, as the question suggested, the cultural critic of the twentieth-century is no more, if the intellectual as social type is dead, then what next for intellectual history as a public as well as a narrowly-professional concern?
George Cotkin proposed that he felt liberated to write adventurous intellectual history because of his position at a non-research university, but even those kind of academic jobs are few and far between these days, and the oversupply of able candidates for them is startling. So it is true, as Wilfred McClay pointed out, that the study of ideas remains vital both inside and outside academia even if the role of intellectual historians continues to be imperiled. But as Casey Blake essentially declared in his closing remarks, the research university may be dead for pursuing a true and only intellectual history. If civic education, teaching, and writing are still to be part of intellectual life, and intellectual historians are to participate fully in them, what institutional forms, then, should intellectual history work take? How should ideas play across time if there is no safety net below them?
Of course, there never has been a safety net, really. Both within the professional field of history and in the broad public beyond it, ideas still grow, blossom, go to seed, and bear fruit again with abundance. Blake mentioned the website The New Inquiry as an example of a new and hopeful concentration of intellectual energy, and rightly so. But is The New Inquiry an institution in the economic sense? Can it provide the sustenance necessary to sustain the intellect? What will provide the livelihood for lively intellectual engagement?
These institutional and economic questions for the life of the mind have always been fretful ones. There was no golden age for intellectuals in America, even when we look back nostalgically on the burgeoning fields of the Cold War research university or peer through the mists into the unkempt gardens of Greenwich Village or Harlem Renaissance bohemians. Nor, for that matter is today as bleak as it sometimes seems. And even though the current pressures are for the work of public intellectuals to be “relevant” and “do something,” one can be heartened by David Steigerwald’s assertion at the final session that the main reason to pursue intellectual history is not that studying ideas somehow exerts “resistance” or “oppositionality,” but rather that it is, simply put, dignified.
Dignity is something to ponder, and perhaps even something into which we can dig our roots. Dignity constitutes a kind of public act. And it can be a fertile emotion. But this dignity needs support. One task that the U.S. Intellectual History conference, once a blog, now growing into an organization, might address is the intellectual groundwork needed to foster a more expansive institutional space for the life of the mind.
Publics are atmospheric and amorphous. Intellectuals have and will continue to be resourceful in their cultivation. And those ideas, wherever they sprout, will remain hearty. The issue isn’t extinction, it’s robustness. The more we can eat, sleep, and breathe, the more we can eat, sleep, and breathe intellectual history.
So the question posed at the end of the conference really leads to two questions. First, in a world in which history still matters (see the recent uses of the past by Glenn Beck and others), what kind of new structures can make for a less shrill and more intellectual study of ideas? Second, if not the research university as it has existed for academic intellectual history, then what? Websites and social networks? Markets or state-run institutions or non-profit think-tanks or what?
Put another way, the question might be: how do we better institute intellectual history without institutionalizing it?
----------------------------------------------
Instituting Intellectual History: the ins and outs of academic intellectual history.
[Christopher Lasch]
No ideas but in things. — William Carlos Williams
----------------------------------------------
At the closing panel of the third annual U.S. Intellectual History conference, whose theme was “Intellectuals and Their Publics,” the ghost of Christopher Lasch very much haunted the halls. A number of former graduate students, and even Lasch’s own daughter, delivered eloquent, forceful talks in response to the question “Intellectual History for What?” They urged colleagues and students to work not only as specialized scholars, but also as cultural and social critics.
But a question from a younger colleague in the audience revealed an underlying tension at the conference. The question was along the lines of (I paraphrase): is the historical moment for intellectual historians to serve as cultural critics and public intellectuals a la Lasch over? Or, is the “intellectual as a social type” no more?
There was a sense in which the question was almost a rhetorical one, an answer to it less crucial than its underlying point. Which was that while established scholars might hunger to reach beyond academe, speaking from the podium to urge themselves and their fellow specialists to address broader public audiences, or to dive promiscuously, as George Cotkin put it, into what David Steigerwald called “the play of ideas across time,” many younger scholars were perhaps there for more narrow reasons of professional accreditation in an academic job market that is so oversupplied that it is almost nonexistent, particularly in intellectual history. Those with security within academia longed to escape it for something less institutionalized, while those outside the gates (or within them, but marginalized) longed for institutional (and economic!) validation.
Of course, the lines between these two longings—to reach broader publics, on the one hand, and to secure positions in the historical profession, on the other—were blurry. Both established and younger scholars at the conference danced between the two. James Kloppenberg’s keynote speech, for instance, focused on the intellectual biography of Barack Obama to explain the deeper history behind the strange paradox of how the President is reviled on the right while, at the same time, met with such intense disappointment on the left.
Like many of the presentations at the conference, Kloppenberg’s talk drew upon his intellectual history “chops” to speak to contemporary political matters. For Kloppenberg, Obama’s own intellectual history provided insight into this enigmatic man. The President’s commitments to a pragmatist’s liberal vision of the United States’s democratic traditions—which turn up in Obama’s books and own education—temper his rhetoric and keep him focused on long-term social improvement while also allowing him to resist the polarizations of degraded contemporary political theater.
But despite the evidence in this marvelous keynote of the possibility that historians might move between specialized academic labor and a broader public culture, the tensions between getting out there into the world and getting in there into the academy lingered. Perhaps when it comes to the study of ideas, it’s still about the economy, stupid? Maybe. There was a sense that the tensions raised by the sharp question in the closing minutes of the conference were less about intellectual issues than institutional and economic ones. If, as the question suggested, the cultural critic of the twentieth-century is no more, if the intellectual as social type is dead, then what next for intellectual history as a public as well as a narrowly-professional concern?
George Cotkin proposed that he felt liberated to write adventurous intellectual history because of his position at a non-research university, but even those kind of academic jobs are few and far between these days, and the oversupply of able candidates for them is startling. So it is true, as Wilfred McClay pointed out, that the study of ideas remains vital both inside and outside academia even if the role of intellectual historians continues to be imperiled. But as Casey Blake essentially declared in his closing remarks, the research university may be dead for pursuing a true and only intellectual history. If civic education, teaching, and writing are still to be part of intellectual life, and intellectual historians are to participate fully in them, what institutional forms, then, should intellectual history work take? How should ideas play across time if there is no safety net below them?
Of course, there never has been a safety net, really. Both within the professional field of history and in the broad public beyond it, ideas still grow, blossom, go to seed, and bear fruit again with abundance. Blake mentioned the website The New Inquiry as an example of a new and hopeful concentration of intellectual energy, and rightly so. But is The New Inquiry an institution in the economic sense? Can it provide the sustenance necessary to sustain the intellect? What will provide the livelihood for lively intellectual engagement?
These institutional and economic questions for the life of the mind have always been fretful ones. There was no golden age for intellectuals in America, even when we look back nostalgically on the burgeoning fields of the Cold War research university or peer through the mists into the unkempt gardens of Greenwich Village or Harlem Renaissance bohemians. Nor, for that matter is today as bleak as it sometimes seems. And even though the current pressures are for the work of public intellectuals to be “relevant” and “do something,” one can be heartened by David Steigerwald’s assertion at the final session that the main reason to pursue intellectual history is not that studying ideas somehow exerts “resistance” or “oppositionality,” but rather that it is, simply put, dignified.
Dignity is something to ponder, and perhaps even something into which we can dig our roots. Dignity constitutes a kind of public act. And it can be a fertile emotion. But this dignity needs support. One task that the U.S. Intellectual History conference, once a blog, now growing into an organization, might address is the intellectual groundwork needed to foster a more expansive institutional space for the life of the mind.
Publics are atmospheric and amorphous. Intellectuals have and will continue to be resourceful in their cultivation. And those ideas, wherever they sprout, will remain hearty. The issue isn’t extinction, it’s robustness. The more we can eat, sleep, and breathe, the more we can eat, sleep, and breathe intellectual history.
So the question posed at the end of the conference really leads to two questions. First, in a world in which history still matters (see the recent uses of the past by Glenn Beck and others), what kind of new structures can make for a less shrill and more intellectual study of ideas? Second, if not the research university as it has existed for academic intellectual history, then what? Websites and social networks? Markets or state-run institutions or non-profit think-tanks or what?
Put another way, the question might be: how do we better institute intellectual history without institutionalizing it?
Senin, 01 November 2010
Twilight of the Idols
As Andrew and Tim have already noted, our recently concluded conference featured two sharply different views of Barack Obama. Thursday's plenary panel featured, among others, Adolph Reed, Jr., whose book The Perils of Obamamania (Verso, 2009 forthcoming [h/t Andrew Hartman in comments!]) elaborates a critique of our current president that he first formulated when Barack Obama was just a candidate for the Illinois State Senate. James Kloppenberg's Friday keynote address focused on his latest book, Reading Obama (Princeton, 2011), which offers a rich and sympathetic portrait of the President. (You can find a recording of the plenary panel with Reed--which focused on his recent co-edited volume, Renewing Black Intellectual History (Paradigm, 2010)--here. Kloppenberg's keynote is available here.)
Like many others, I was impressed by the portrait of Obama that Kloppenberg drew. Impressed, that is, both by the care with which Kloppenberg analyzed the President's habits of mind and by the picture of Obama that emerged from the analysis. Obama, according to Kloppenberg, is a true philosophical pragmatist, a man with a deep and subtle understanding of the American past, who tries to make his political practice match a set of admirable intellectual commitments. Like Kloppenberg, I find myself substantially to the left of this President...but I would be substantially to the left of anyone likely to be elected president. But like Kloppenberg, too, I am deeply attracted to Obama, or at least to the man described in Kloppenberg's talk (and book, which I look forward to reading). Short of someone who truly shares my politics (which is pretty much an impossibility), a brilliant, philosophical pragmatist with a rich sense of U.S. history sounds like an almost ideal president.
And yet. As the question and answer session suggested--I'm sure to nobody's surprise--this room full of people to whom this portrait of Obama as philosophical pragmatist doubtless appealed expressed deep frustration with the Obama administration so far. On war and peace, on transparency, on executive power, on Fourth Amendment rights, on education (among other areas), this president has disappointed. And though I think we'd all agree that Obama has come to office in politically extremely challenging times, many of the perceived failures have involved matters that the President hasn't had to run through Congress.
I left Kloppenberg's keynote feeling if anything a little more depressed about our politics. Not because I wasn't convinced by Kloppenberg, but rather because I largely was. If this administration is what one gets from a philosophical pragmatist as president, that suggested to me that I might have to reevaluate some of my commitments to philosophical pragmatism, at least in the political realm.
Needless to say, I wouldn't be the first person to make such a journey. I immediately thought of Randolph Bourne's scathing attack on John Dewey's support for U.S. involvement in World War I, "Twilight of the Idols" (1917). As readers of this blog probably know, rather than seeing that support simply as a betrayal of Dewey's pragmatism, Bourne suggested that pragmatists' support for the war effort reflected deep problems with that philosophy in practice:
The wartime context has tended to dominate many readings of "Twilight of the Idols" over the decades, in large measure because we continue to get involved in wars which many self-described liberals and progressives support, much to the dismay of other liberals and progressives. Alongside his unfinished essay on "The State" (1918), Bourne's "Twilight of the Idols" is a classic portrait of how war distorts democratic life. And to be fair to Bourne, he never quite abandons pragmatism as such in "Twilight." The essay is haunted by the ghost of William James, who Bourne hopes would have drawn different conclusions from Dewey.
But much in "Twilight" might help fill in the interpretive gap between Kloppenberg's Obama and the frequently disappointing performance of this White House. I'll close this already too-long post with a final quote from the essay that, I think, helps us do that:
Like many others, I was impressed by the portrait of Obama that Kloppenberg drew. Impressed, that is, both by the care with which Kloppenberg analyzed the President's habits of mind and by the picture of Obama that emerged from the analysis. Obama, according to Kloppenberg, is a true philosophical pragmatist, a man with a deep and subtle understanding of the American past, who tries to make his political practice match a set of admirable intellectual commitments. Like Kloppenberg, I find myself substantially to the left of this President...but I would be substantially to the left of anyone likely to be elected president. But like Kloppenberg, too, I am deeply attracted to Obama, or at least to the man described in Kloppenberg's talk (and book, which I look forward to reading). Short of someone who truly shares my politics (which is pretty much an impossibility), a brilliant, philosophical pragmatist with a rich sense of U.S. history sounds like an almost ideal president.
And yet. As the question and answer session suggested--I'm sure to nobody's surprise--this room full of people to whom this portrait of Obama as philosophical pragmatist doubtless appealed expressed deep frustration with the Obama administration so far. On war and peace, on transparency, on executive power, on Fourth Amendment rights, on education (among other areas), this president has disappointed. And though I think we'd all agree that Obama has come to office in politically extremely challenging times, many of the perceived failures have involved matters that the President hasn't had to run through Congress.
I left Kloppenberg's keynote feeling if anything a little more depressed about our politics. Not because I wasn't convinced by Kloppenberg, but rather because I largely was. If this administration is what one gets from a philosophical pragmatist as president, that suggested to me that I might have to reevaluate some of my commitments to philosophical pragmatism, at least in the political realm.
Needless to say, I wouldn't be the first person to make such a journey. I immediately thought of Randolph Bourne's scathing attack on John Dewey's support for U.S. involvement in World War I, "Twilight of the Idols" (1917). As readers of this blog probably know, rather than seeing that support simply as a betrayal of Dewey's pragmatism, Bourne suggested that pragmatists' support for the war effort reflected deep problems with that philosophy in practice:
To those of us who have taken Dewey's philosophy almost as our American religion, it never occurred that values could be subordinated to technique. We were instrumentalists, but we had our private utopias so clearly before our minds that the means fell always into its place as contributory. And Dewey, of course, always meant his philosophy, when taken as a philosophy of life, to start with values. But there was always that unhappy ambiguity in his doctrine as to just how values were created, and it became easier and easier to assume that just any growth was justified and almost any activity valuable so long as it achieved ends. The American, in living out this philosophy, has habitually confused results with product, and been content with getting somewhere without asking too closely whether it was the desirable place to get. It is now bumming plain that unless you start with the vividest kind of poetic vision, your instrumentalism is likely to land you just where it has landed this younger intelligentsia which is so happily and busily engaged in the national enterprise of war. You must have your vision and you must have your technique. The practical effect of Dewey's philosophy has evidently been to develop the sense of the latter at the expense of the former. . . . The trouble with our situation is not only that values have been generally ignored in favor of technique, but that those who have struggled to keep values foremost, have been too bloodless and too near-sighted in their vision. The defect of any philosophy of "adaptation" or "adjustment," even when it means adjustment to changing, living experience, is that there is no provision for thought or experience getting beyond itself. If your ideal is to be adjustment to your situation, in radiant cooperation with reality, then your success is likely to be just that and no more. You never transcend anything. You grow, but your spirit never jumps out of your skin to go on wild adventures. If your policy as a publicist reformer is to take what you can get, you are likely to find that you get something less than you should be willing to take. Italy in the settlement is said to be demanding one hundred in order to get twenty, and this machiavellian principle might well be adopted by the radical. Vision must constantly outshoot technique, opportunist efforts usually achieve less even than what seemed obviously possible. An impossibilist elan that appeals to desire will often carry further. A philosophy of adjustment will not even make for adjustment. If you try merely to "meet" situations as they come, you will not even meet them. Instead you will only pile up behind you deficits and arrears that will some day bankrupt you.
The wartime context has tended to dominate many readings of "Twilight of the Idols" over the decades, in large measure because we continue to get involved in wars which many self-described liberals and progressives support, much to the dismay of other liberals and progressives. Alongside his unfinished essay on "The State" (1918), Bourne's "Twilight of the Idols" is a classic portrait of how war distorts democratic life. And to be fair to Bourne, he never quite abandons pragmatism as such in "Twilight." The essay is haunted by the ghost of William James, who Bourne hopes would have drawn different conclusions from Dewey.
But much in "Twilight" might help fill in the interpretive gap between Kloppenberg's Obama and the frequently disappointing performance of this White House. I'll close this already too-long post with a final quote from the essay that, I think, helps us do that:
We are in the war because an American Government practiced a philosophy of adjustment, and an instrumentalism for minor ends, instead of creating new values and setting at once a large standard to which the nations might repair. An intellectual attitude of mere adjustment, of mere use of the creative intelligence to make your progress, must end in caution, regression, and a virtual failure to effect even that change which you so clear-sightedly and desirously see. This is the root of our dissatisfaction with much of the current political and social realism that is preached to us.
Twilight of the Idols
As Andrew and Tim have already noted, our recently concluded conference featured two sharply different views of Barack Obama. Thursday's plenary panel featured, among others, Adolph Reed, Jr., whose book The Perils of Obamamania (Verso, 2009 forthcoming [h/t Andrew Hartman in comments!]) elaborates a critique of our current president that he first formulated when Barack Obama was just a candidate for the Illinois State Senate. James Kloppenberg's Friday keynote address focused on his latest book, Reading Obama (Princeton, 2011), which offers a rich and sympathetic portrait of the President. (You can find a recording of the plenary panel with Reed--which focused on his recent co-edited volume, Renewing Black Intellectual History (Paradigm, 2010)--here. Kloppenberg's keynote is available here.)
Like many others, I was impressed by the portrait of Obama that Kloppenberg drew. Impressed, that is, both by the care with which Kloppenberg analyzed the President's habits of mind and by the picture of Obama that emerged from the analysis. Obama, according to Kloppenberg, is a true philosophical pragmatist, a man with a deep and subtle understanding of the American past, who tries to make his political practice match a set of admirable intellectual commitments. Like Kloppenberg, I find myself substantially to the left of this President...but I would be substantially to the left of anyone likely to be elected president. But like Kloppenberg, too, I am deeply attracted to Obama, or at least to the man described in Kloppenberg's talk (and book, which I look forward to reading). Short of someone who truly shares my politics (which is pretty much an impossibility), a brilliant, philosophical pragmatist with a rich sense of U.S. history sounds like an almost ideal president.
And yet. As the question and answer session suggested--I'm sure to nobody's surprise--this room full of people to whom this portrait of Obama as philosophical pragmatist doubtless appealed expressed deep frustration with the Obama administration so far. On war and peace, on transparency, on executive power, on Fourth Amendment rights, on education (among other areas), this president has disappointed. And though I think we'd all agree that Obama has come to office in politically extremely challenging times, many of the perceived failures have involved matters that the President hasn't had to run through Congress.
I left Kloppenberg's keynote feeling if anything a little more depressed about our politics. Not because I wasn't convinced by Kloppenberg, but rather because I largely was. If this administration is what one gets from a philosophical pragmatist as president, that suggested to me that I might have to reevaluate some of my commitments to philosophical pragmatism, at least in the political realm.
Needless to say, I wouldn't be the first person to make such a journey. I immediately thought of Randolph Bourne's scathing attack on John Dewey's support for U.S. involvement in World War I, "Twilight of the Idols" (1917). As readers of this blog probably know, rather than seeing that support simply as a betrayal of Dewey's pragmatism, Bourne suggested that pragmatists' support for the war effort reflected deep problems with that philosophy in practice:
The wartime context has tended to dominate many readings of "Twilight of the Idols" over the decades, in large measure because we continue to get involved in wars which many self-described liberals and progressives support, much to the dismay of other liberals and progressives. Alongside his unfinished essay on "The State" (1918), Bourne's "Twilight of the Idols" is a classic portrait of how war distorts democratic life. And to be fair to Bourne, he never quite abandons pragmatism as such in "Twilight." The essay is haunted by the ghost of William James, who Bourne hopes would have drawn different conclusions from Dewey.
But much in "Twilight" might help fill in the interpretive gap between Kloppenberg's Obama and the frequently disappointing performance of this White House. I'll close this already too-long post with a final quote from the essay that, I think, helps us do that:
Like many others, I was impressed by the portrait of Obama that Kloppenberg drew. Impressed, that is, both by the care with which Kloppenberg analyzed the President's habits of mind and by the picture of Obama that emerged from the analysis. Obama, according to Kloppenberg, is a true philosophical pragmatist, a man with a deep and subtle understanding of the American past, who tries to make his political practice match a set of admirable intellectual commitments. Like Kloppenberg, I find myself substantially to the left of this President...but I would be substantially to the left of anyone likely to be elected president. But like Kloppenberg, too, I am deeply attracted to Obama, or at least to the man described in Kloppenberg's talk (and book, which I look forward to reading). Short of someone who truly shares my politics (which is pretty much an impossibility), a brilliant, philosophical pragmatist with a rich sense of U.S. history sounds like an almost ideal president.
And yet. As the question and answer session suggested--I'm sure to nobody's surprise--this room full of people to whom this portrait of Obama as philosophical pragmatist doubtless appealed expressed deep frustration with the Obama administration so far. On war and peace, on transparency, on executive power, on Fourth Amendment rights, on education (among other areas), this president has disappointed. And though I think we'd all agree that Obama has come to office in politically extremely challenging times, many of the perceived failures have involved matters that the President hasn't had to run through Congress.
I left Kloppenberg's keynote feeling if anything a little more depressed about our politics. Not because I wasn't convinced by Kloppenberg, but rather because I largely was. If this administration is what one gets from a philosophical pragmatist as president, that suggested to me that I might have to reevaluate some of my commitments to philosophical pragmatism, at least in the political realm.
Needless to say, I wouldn't be the first person to make such a journey. I immediately thought of Randolph Bourne's scathing attack on John Dewey's support for U.S. involvement in World War I, "Twilight of the Idols" (1917). As readers of this blog probably know, rather than seeing that support simply as a betrayal of Dewey's pragmatism, Bourne suggested that pragmatists' support for the war effort reflected deep problems with that philosophy in practice:
To those of us who have taken Dewey's philosophy almost as our American religion, it never occurred that values could be subordinated to technique. We were instrumentalists, but we had our private utopias so clearly before our minds that the means fell always into its place as contributory. And Dewey, of course, always meant his philosophy, when taken as a philosophy of life, to start with values. But there was always that unhappy ambiguity in his doctrine as to just how values were created, and it became easier and easier to assume that just any growth was justified and almost any activity valuable so long as it achieved ends. The American, in living out this philosophy, has habitually confused results with product, and been content with getting somewhere without asking too closely whether it was the desirable place to get. It is now bumming plain that unless you start with the vividest kind of poetic vision, your instrumentalism is likely to land you just where it has landed this younger intelligentsia which is so happily and busily engaged in the national enterprise of war. You must have your vision and you must have your technique. The practical effect of Dewey's philosophy has evidently been to develop the sense of the latter at the expense of the former. . . . The trouble with our situation is not only that values have been generally ignored in favor of technique, but that those who have struggled to keep values foremost, have been too bloodless and too near-sighted in their vision. The defect of any philosophy of "adaptation" or "adjustment," even when it means adjustment to changing, living experience, is that there is no provision for thought or experience getting beyond itself. If your ideal is to be adjustment to your situation, in radiant cooperation with reality, then your success is likely to be just that and no more. You never transcend anything. You grow, but your spirit never jumps out of your skin to go on wild adventures. If your policy as a publicist reformer is to take what you can get, you are likely to find that you get something less than you should be willing to take. Italy in the settlement is said to be demanding one hundred in order to get twenty, and this machiavellian principle might well be adopted by the radical. Vision must constantly outshoot technique, opportunist efforts usually achieve less even than what seemed obviously possible. An impossibilist elan that appeals to desire will often carry further. A philosophy of adjustment will not even make for adjustment. If you try merely to "meet" situations as they come, you will not even meet them. Instead you will only pile up behind you deficits and arrears that will some day bankrupt you.
The wartime context has tended to dominate many readings of "Twilight of the Idols" over the decades, in large measure because we continue to get involved in wars which many self-described liberals and progressives support, much to the dismay of other liberals and progressives. Alongside his unfinished essay on "The State" (1918), Bourne's "Twilight of the Idols" is a classic portrait of how war distorts democratic life. And to be fair to Bourne, he never quite abandons pragmatism as such in "Twilight." The essay is haunted by the ghost of William James, who Bourne hopes would have drawn different conclusions from Dewey.
But much in "Twilight" might help fill in the interpretive gap between Kloppenberg's Obama and the frequently disappointing performance of this White House. I'll close this already too-long post with a final quote from the essay that, I think, helps us do that:
We are in the war because an American Government practiced a philosophy of adjustment, and an instrumentalism for minor ends, instead of creating new values and setting at once a large standard to which the nations might repair. An intellectual attitude of mere adjustment, of mere use of the creative intelligence to make your progress, must end in caution, regression, and a virtual failure to effect even that change which you so clear-sightedly and desirously see. This is the root of our dissatisfaction with much of the current political and social realism that is preached to us.
Jumat, 29 Oktober 2010
Historical Materialist Approaches to Black Intellectual History
This post, the first of my now regular Friday posts, serves as my reflections on the first plenary of the Third Annual U.S. Intellectual Conference, on Renewing Black Intellectual History. Adolph Reed, Jr., Kenneth Warren, and Dean Robinson were the panelists.
To be quite honest, the session got off to a slower start than I anticipated. Being quite familiar with the work of Reed, the first speaker, I expected his usual brilliant polemics. Instead, he patiently discussed the origins of the collection Renewing Black Intellectual History, which he edited alongside his friend Warren. It seems that the book arose from several bitch sessions at Hyde Park watering holes. Reed and Warren were disgusted with the non-materialist approach to black intellectual history, the types of approaches they thought dominated African-American Studies programs during the 1980s and 1990s, which emphasized culturalism and deemphasized political economy. They desired stronger contextual analysis. Racism is protean in character and needs to be posited contextually.
Dean Robinson spoke from his contribution to the collection, a distillation of his 2001 book, Black Nationalism in American Politics and Thought. Robinson is critical of treatment of Black Nationalism that ignores political failure and emphasizes cultural success. He particularly mentioned the work of William Van Deburg and Peniel Joseph for this type of faulty analysis, which he sees as a reversal of Harold Cruse. Robinson and his fellow panelists find black politics—and left politics—lamentable in its current state, because activists and intellectuals tend to think about politics as performance of the self, instead of as strategic thinking. These are valuable points and I was happy to hear them, in spite of the aforementioned slow start.
The session picked up steam in the Q&A. The first question was posed by Randal Jelks, who wanted to know why the collection did not include a single essay on black religious thought, a curious omission considering the centrality of religion to African-American history. Jelks implied, I think, that Reed and Warren ignore religion because they dislike it. I’m not sure if this is true or not, but I wish this would have been explored in more depth. Reed replied to Jelks that he did not think an essay on religion would have altered the central messages of the book. But Reed has long been critical of what he considers an over-emphasis on religious leaders in relation to the civil rights movement, dating back to his book on Jesse Jackson. I wish this would have been discussed more polemically and less cryptically. I think it might have shed light on Reed’s historical materialism, which ultimately informs his longtime criticism of Obama. Reed thinks that black political leaders, and all political leaders, are only as good as the movements they speak for.
Speaking of which: Kloppenberg referenced Reed’s 1996 critique of Obama. Here is that passage in its entirety for your reading pleasure, written shortly after Obama won his first Illinois state senate race:
“In Chicago, we’ve gotten a foretaste of the new breed of foundation-hatched black communitarian voices; one of them, a smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable do-good credentials and vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal politics, has won a state senate seat on a base mainly in the liberal foundation and development worlds. His fundamentally bootstrap line was softened by a patina of the rhetoric of authentic community, talk about meeting in kitchens, small-scale solutions to social problems, and the predictable elevation of process over program -- the point where identity politics converges with old-fashioned middle-class reform in favoring form over substance. I suspect that his ilk is the wave of the future in U.S. black politics, as in Haiti and wherever else the International Monetary Fund has sway. So far the black activist response hasn’t been up to the challenge. We have to do better.”
“The Curse of Community,” Village Voice, January 16, 1996—reprinted in Reed’s Class Notes: Posing as Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene (New Press, 2000).
To be quite honest, the session got off to a slower start than I anticipated. Being quite familiar with the work of Reed, the first speaker, I expected his usual brilliant polemics. Instead, he patiently discussed the origins of the collection Renewing Black Intellectual History, which he edited alongside his friend Warren. It seems that the book arose from several bitch sessions at Hyde Park watering holes. Reed and Warren were disgusted with the non-materialist approach to black intellectual history, the types of approaches they thought dominated African-American Studies programs during the 1980s and 1990s, which emphasized culturalism and deemphasized political economy. They desired stronger contextual analysis. Racism is protean in character and needs to be posited contextually.
Dean Robinson spoke from his contribution to the collection, a distillation of his 2001 book, Black Nationalism in American Politics and Thought. Robinson is critical of treatment of Black Nationalism that ignores political failure and emphasizes cultural success. He particularly mentioned the work of William Van Deburg and Peniel Joseph for this type of faulty analysis, which he sees as a reversal of Harold Cruse. Robinson and his fellow panelists find black politics—and left politics—lamentable in its current state, because activists and intellectuals tend to think about politics as performance of the self, instead of as strategic thinking. These are valuable points and I was happy to hear them, in spite of the aforementioned slow start.
The session picked up steam in the Q&A. The first question was posed by Randal Jelks, who wanted to know why the collection did not include a single essay on black religious thought, a curious omission considering the centrality of religion to African-American history. Jelks implied, I think, that Reed and Warren ignore religion because they dislike it. I’m not sure if this is true or not, but I wish this would have been explored in more depth. Reed replied to Jelks that he did not think an essay on religion would have altered the central messages of the book. But Reed has long been critical of what he considers an over-emphasis on religious leaders in relation to the civil rights movement, dating back to his book on Jesse Jackson. I wish this would have been discussed more polemically and less cryptically. I think it might have shed light on Reed’s historical materialism, which ultimately informs his longtime criticism of Obama. Reed thinks that black political leaders, and all political leaders, are only as good as the movements they speak for.
Speaking of which: Kloppenberg referenced Reed’s 1996 critique of Obama. Here is that passage in its entirety for your reading pleasure, written shortly after Obama won his first Illinois state senate race:
“In Chicago, we’ve gotten a foretaste of the new breed of foundation-hatched black communitarian voices; one of them, a smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable do-good credentials and vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal politics, has won a state senate seat on a base mainly in the liberal foundation and development worlds. His fundamentally bootstrap line was softened by a patina of the rhetoric of authentic community, talk about meeting in kitchens, small-scale solutions to social problems, and the predictable elevation of process over program -- the point where identity politics converges with old-fashioned middle-class reform in favoring form over substance. I suspect that his ilk is the wave of the future in U.S. black politics, as in Haiti and wherever else the International Monetary Fund has sway. So far the black activist response hasn’t been up to the challenge. We have to do better.”
“The Curse of Community,” Village Voice, January 16, 1996—reprinted in Reed’s Class Notes: Posing as Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene (New Press, 2000).
Historical Materialist Approaches to Black Intellectual History
This post, the first of my now regular Friday posts, serves as my reflections on the first plenary of the Third Annual U.S. Intellectual Conference, on Renewing Black Intellectual History. Adolph Reed, Jr., Kenneth Warren, and Dean Robinson were the panelists.
To be quite honest, the session got off to a slower start than I anticipated. Being quite familiar with the work of Reed, the first speaker, I expected his usual brilliant polemics. Instead, he patiently discussed the origins of the collection Renewing Black Intellectual History, which he edited alongside his friend Warren. It seems that the book arose from several bitch sessions at Hyde Park watering holes. Reed and Warren were disgusted with the non-materialist approach to black intellectual history, the types of approaches they thought dominated African-American Studies programs during the 1980s and 1990s, which emphasized culturalism and deemphasized political economy. They desired stronger contextual analysis. Racism is protean in character and needs to be posited contextually.
Dean Robinson spoke from his contribution to the collection, a distillation of his 2001 book, Black Nationalism in American Politics and Thought. Robinson is critical of treatment of Black Nationalism that ignores political failure and emphasizes cultural success. He particularly mentioned the work of William Van Deburg and Peniel Joseph for this type of faulty analysis, which he sees as a reversal of Harold Cruse. Robinson and his fellow panelists find black politics—and left politics—lamentable in its current state, because activists and intellectuals tend to think about politics as performance of the self, instead of as strategic thinking. These are valuable points and I was happy to hear them, in spite of the aforementioned slow start.
The session picked up steam in the Q&A. The first question was posed by Randal Jelks, who wanted to know why the collection did not include a single essay on black religious thought, a curious omission considering the centrality of religion to African-American history. Jelks implied, I think, that Reed and Warren ignore religion because they dislike it. I’m not sure if this is true or not, but I wish this would have been explored in more depth. Reed replied to Jelks that he did not think an essay on religion would have altered the central messages of the book. But Reed has long been critical of what he considers an over-emphasis on religious leaders in relation to the civil rights movement, dating back to his book on Jesse Jackson. I wish this would have been discussed more polemically and less cryptically. I think it might have shed light on Reed’s historical materialism, which ultimately informs his longtime criticism of Obama. Reed thinks that black political leaders, and all political leaders, are only as good as the movements they speak for.
Speaking of which: Kloppenberg referenced Reed’s 1996 critique of Obama. Here is that passage in its entirety for your reading pleasure, written shortly after Obama won his first Illinois state senate race:
“In Chicago, we’ve gotten a foretaste of the new breed of foundation-hatched black communitarian voices; one of them, a smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable do-good credentials and vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal politics, has won a state senate seat on a base mainly in the liberal foundation and development worlds. His fundamentally bootstrap line was softened by a patina of the rhetoric of authentic community, talk about meeting in kitchens, small-scale solutions to social problems, and the predictable elevation of process over program -- the point where identity politics converges with old-fashioned middle-class reform in favoring form over substance. I suspect that his ilk is the wave of the future in U.S. black politics, as in Haiti and wherever else the International Monetary Fund has sway. So far the black activist response hasn’t been up to the challenge. We have to do better.”
“The Curse of Community,” Village Voice, January 16, 1996—reprinted in Reed’s Class Notes: Posing as Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene (New Press, 2000).
To be quite honest, the session got off to a slower start than I anticipated. Being quite familiar with the work of Reed, the first speaker, I expected his usual brilliant polemics. Instead, he patiently discussed the origins of the collection Renewing Black Intellectual History, which he edited alongside his friend Warren. It seems that the book arose from several bitch sessions at Hyde Park watering holes. Reed and Warren were disgusted with the non-materialist approach to black intellectual history, the types of approaches they thought dominated African-American Studies programs during the 1980s and 1990s, which emphasized culturalism and deemphasized political economy. They desired stronger contextual analysis. Racism is protean in character and needs to be posited contextually.
Dean Robinson spoke from his contribution to the collection, a distillation of his 2001 book, Black Nationalism in American Politics and Thought. Robinson is critical of treatment of Black Nationalism that ignores political failure and emphasizes cultural success. He particularly mentioned the work of William Van Deburg and Peniel Joseph for this type of faulty analysis, which he sees as a reversal of Harold Cruse. Robinson and his fellow panelists find black politics—and left politics—lamentable in its current state, because activists and intellectuals tend to think about politics as performance of the self, instead of as strategic thinking. These are valuable points and I was happy to hear them, in spite of the aforementioned slow start.
The session picked up steam in the Q&A. The first question was posed by Randal Jelks, who wanted to know why the collection did not include a single essay on black religious thought, a curious omission considering the centrality of religion to African-American history. Jelks implied, I think, that Reed and Warren ignore religion because they dislike it. I’m not sure if this is true or not, but I wish this would have been explored in more depth. Reed replied to Jelks that he did not think an essay on religion would have altered the central messages of the book. But Reed has long been critical of what he considers an over-emphasis on religious leaders in relation to the civil rights movement, dating back to his book on Jesse Jackson. I wish this would have been discussed more polemically and less cryptically. I think it might have shed light on Reed’s historical materialism, which ultimately informs his longtime criticism of Obama. Reed thinks that black political leaders, and all political leaders, are only as good as the movements they speak for.
Speaking of which: Kloppenberg referenced Reed’s 1996 critique of Obama. Here is that passage in its entirety for your reading pleasure, written shortly after Obama won his first Illinois state senate race:
“In Chicago, we’ve gotten a foretaste of the new breed of foundation-hatched black communitarian voices; one of them, a smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable do-good credentials and vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal politics, has won a state senate seat on a base mainly in the liberal foundation and development worlds. His fundamentally bootstrap line was softened by a patina of the rhetoric of authentic community, talk about meeting in kitchens, small-scale solutions to social problems, and the predictable elevation of process over program -- the point where identity politics converges with old-fashioned middle-class reform in favoring form over substance. I suspect that his ilk is the wave of the future in U.S. black politics, as in Haiti and wherever else the International Monetary Fund has sway. So far the black activist response hasn’t been up to the challenge. We have to do better.”
“The Curse of Community,” Village Voice, January 16, 1996—reprinted in Reed’s Class Notes: Posing as Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene (New Press, 2000).
Kamis, 28 Oktober 2010
The Kloppenberg Plenary: Obama's (Controversial?) Intellectual Biography
Our Third Annual USIH Conference almost received a direct reference in Patricia Cohen's review of James T. Kloppenberg's newest book, Reading Obama: Dreams, Hopes, and the American Political Tradition (Princeton Press, 2010). Here are her two near misses (bolds mine): (1) "In New York City last week to give a standing-room-only lecture about his forthcoming intellectual biography... ." and (2) "Those who heard Mr. Kloppenberg present his argument at a conference on intellectual history at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center responded with prolonged applause." 
The USIH omission is a shame because I'm pretty sure I remember Kloppenberg saying in the plenary that his book was released that same day, October 22. The article says "on Sunday," but it is unclear whether Cohen meant this coming Sunday (Oct. 31) or the Sunday after the conference (Oct. 24). In any case, I guess we'll have to wait 'til next year on our conference's first direct NYT appearance. C'est la vie.
We can take some pride, however, in the fact that Cohen quoted from one of our own: Andrew Hartman. Here are her two references to him:
(1) "The way he traced Obama’s intellectual influences was fascinating for us, given that Obama’s academic background seems so similar to ours," said Andrew Hartman, a historian at Illinois State University who helped organize the conference.
(2) "There seemed to be skepticism regarding whether Obama’s intellectual background actually translated into policies that the mostly left-leaning audience could get behind," Mr. Hartman said. "Several audience members, myself included, probably view Obama the president as a centrist like Clinton rather than a progressive intellectual as painted by Kloppenberg."
Andrew deserves the credit for the "standing-room-only" crowd. The plenary was held in the Segal Theatre, and thirty-five seats were available both on the right and left sides of the room. Along with the nineteen standing in the back of the room (which included me), I counted roughly 90 people attending. I round up to 90 because I could not see everyone around the columns, and only noticed a random seat or two empty in the chairs.
The book review fairly summarizes Kloppenberg's talk. I was pleased to see two specific things cited. First, Kloppenberg emphasized at the start of his talk that Obama's intellectual development occurred in relation to three key themes, or "matrices" (a term left out by Cohen but used by him): (a) the history of American democracy, (b) the ongoing development of the philosophy of pragmatism, and finally (c) the history of the intellectual (and social and cultural) upheavals of the 1970s-1990s. Cohen presents all three of these themes in the tenth paragraph of her piece, or roughly half-way through.
Second, I was also happy to see this humorous line from the talk make into Cohen's write up (bolds mine):
Conservatives who argue that Mr. Obama is a socialist or an anti-colonialist (as Dinesh D’Souza does in his book “The Roots of Obama’s Rage”) are far off the mark, [Kloppenberg] said. “Adams and Jefferson were the only anti-colonialists whom Obama has been affected by,” he told the audience in New York. “He has a profound love of America.”
Although I liked seeing those two references, there were some further details Kloppenberg relayed in relation to his three key themes. When he discussed the upheavals of the Culture Wars, he stressed the theme--and the tension---between "universality and particularity." He asserted that Obama absorbed the lessons of Thomas Kuhn, Clifford Geertz, and John Rawls in relation to creating "provisional fixed points" and "useful fictions." In other words, Kloppenberg sees Obama as incorporating the inherent, contingent nature of pragmatism in his thinking about policy and the culture wars. Obama attempts to undercut the passion of ideological thinking by seeing phenomenological truths rooted in events and episodes.
There is no denying the relativism of this philosophical approach, but Kloppenberg did not specify in his talk whether that framework permeated ~all~ aspects of Obama's life (e.g. religion), or just his political philosophy. If the former, then conservatives of all stripes will jump on Kloppenberg's book as proof of Obama's radical leftism, or at least of his lack of deep roots in the long Western tradition (i.e. transcendent truths, achievement of pure objectivity, etc.). And Kloppenberg's explicit reference to Nietzsche as being a part of Obama's intellectual history will push another corner of cultural critics, particularly the Bloomian/Straussian crowd, into apoplexy. I must say that though Kloppenberg made that connection, he did not specify exactly where---in the talk at least---Nietzsche directly entered Obama's story.
One could counter the relativism charge in relation to Obama's political philosophy by citing the (liberal) historicism of Obama's constitutional thinking. Cohen sets this up as the now familiar "living" versus "dead" constitutional philosophies. Here is her passage on this:
Taking his cue from Madison, Mr. Obama writes in his 2006 book “The Audacity of Hope” that the constitutional framework is “designed to force us into a conversation,” that it offers “a way by which we argue about our future.” This notion of a living document is directly at odds with the conception of Justice Antonin Scalia of the Supreme Court, who has spoken of “the good, old dead Constitution.”
But Cohen's---and Kloppenberg's---reference to James Madison shows how Obama's philosophy splits, in my opinion, the living/dead difference. Kloppenberg called the following "the only smoking gun" that arose from his research, but he spoke of a November 1991 document wherein Obama elaborated on a "curvature of Constitutional space" around the process of deliberation that informed the document's creation (i.e. the Constitutional Convention itself as a process of compromise).
So if Scalia and his crowd represent one historical tradition in thinking about the U.S. Constitution "works," then Obama---and Madison and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. and the Warren Court---represent another. Both traditions are historical, but both are not seen as valid in the eyes of (legal) ideologues. I favor the living/deliberative/curvature interpretation, but my point is that appeals to history don't answer which is better, at least not in the limited context of a discussion about Obama's intellectual history. The argument is a moral-political one about which interpretative tradition is superior. Conservatives can't use history to prove wrong a liberal constitutional train of thought.
As a mild digression, I offer that proof in either direction would have to come through a utilitarian study of the effects of both philosophies on policies that touch people. But do we have the time to figure this out by scientific study? No. We're living the study. And U.S. citizens already complain that our congress doesn't act fast enough (which would itself be an argument in the direction of living/deliberative tradition---anyway).
That Kloppenberg's plenary and book served up such meaty history to chew on is a credit to him and the planning team for the conference---Paul Murphy, Lauren Kientz, and especially Andrew Hartman.
I end these reflections by offering a hearty thank you to James Kloppenberg. It was a great pleasure having him at the conference. - TL
The USIH omission is a shame because I'm pretty sure I remember Kloppenberg saying in the plenary that his book was released that same day, October 22. The article says "on Sunday," but it is unclear whether Cohen meant this coming Sunday (Oct. 31) or the Sunday after the conference (Oct. 24). In any case, I guess we'll have to wait 'til next year on our conference's first direct NYT appearance. C'est la vie.
We can take some pride, however, in the fact that Cohen quoted from one of our own: Andrew Hartman. Here are her two references to him:
(1) "The way he traced Obama’s intellectual influences was fascinating for us, given that Obama’s academic background seems so similar to ours," said Andrew Hartman, a historian at Illinois State University who helped organize the conference.
(2) "There seemed to be skepticism regarding whether Obama’s intellectual background actually translated into policies that the mostly left-leaning audience could get behind," Mr. Hartman said. "Several audience members, myself included, probably view Obama the president as a centrist like Clinton rather than a progressive intellectual as painted by Kloppenberg."
Andrew deserves the credit for the "standing-room-only" crowd. The plenary was held in the Segal Theatre, and thirty-five seats were available both on the right and left sides of the room. Along with the nineteen standing in the back of the room (which included me), I counted roughly 90 people attending. I round up to 90 because I could not see everyone around the columns, and only noticed a random seat or two empty in the chairs.
The book review fairly summarizes Kloppenberg's talk. I was pleased to see two specific things cited. First, Kloppenberg emphasized at the start of his talk that Obama's intellectual development occurred in relation to three key themes, or "matrices" (a term left out by Cohen but used by him): (a) the history of American democracy, (b) the ongoing development of the philosophy of pragmatism, and finally (c) the history of the intellectual (and social and cultural) upheavals of the 1970s-1990s. Cohen presents all three of these themes in the tenth paragraph of her piece, or roughly half-way through.
Second, I was also happy to see this humorous line from the talk make into Cohen's write up (bolds mine):
Conservatives who argue that Mr. Obama is a socialist or an anti-colonialist (as Dinesh D’Souza does in his book “The Roots of Obama’s Rage”) are far off the mark, [Kloppenberg] said. “Adams and Jefferson were the only anti-colonialists whom Obama has been affected by,” he told the audience in New York. “He has a profound love of America.”
Although I liked seeing those two references, there were some further details Kloppenberg relayed in relation to his three key themes. When he discussed the upheavals of the Culture Wars, he stressed the theme--and the tension---between "universality and particularity." He asserted that Obama absorbed the lessons of Thomas Kuhn, Clifford Geertz, and John Rawls in relation to creating "provisional fixed points" and "useful fictions." In other words, Kloppenberg sees Obama as incorporating the inherent, contingent nature of pragmatism in his thinking about policy and the culture wars. Obama attempts to undercut the passion of ideological thinking by seeing phenomenological truths rooted in events and episodes.
There is no denying the relativism of this philosophical approach, but Kloppenberg did not specify in his talk whether that framework permeated ~all~ aspects of Obama's life (e.g. religion), or just his political philosophy. If the former, then conservatives of all stripes will jump on Kloppenberg's book as proof of Obama's radical leftism, or at least of his lack of deep roots in the long Western tradition (i.e. transcendent truths, achievement of pure objectivity, etc.). And Kloppenberg's explicit reference to Nietzsche as being a part of Obama's intellectual history will push another corner of cultural critics, particularly the Bloomian/Straussian crowd, into apoplexy. I must say that though Kloppenberg made that connection, he did not specify exactly where---in the talk at least---Nietzsche directly entered Obama's story.
One could counter the relativism charge in relation to Obama's political philosophy by citing the (liberal) historicism of Obama's constitutional thinking. Cohen sets this up as the now familiar "living" versus "dead" constitutional philosophies. Here is her passage on this:
Taking his cue from Madison, Mr. Obama writes in his 2006 book “The Audacity of Hope” that the constitutional framework is “designed to force us into a conversation,” that it offers “a way by which we argue about our future.” This notion of a living document is directly at odds with the conception of Justice Antonin Scalia of the Supreme Court, who has spoken of “the good, old dead Constitution.”
But Cohen's---and Kloppenberg's---reference to James Madison shows how Obama's philosophy splits, in my opinion, the living/dead difference. Kloppenberg called the following "the only smoking gun" that arose from his research, but he spoke of a November 1991 document wherein Obama elaborated on a "curvature of Constitutional space" around the process of deliberation that informed the document's creation (i.e. the Constitutional Convention itself as a process of compromise).
So if Scalia and his crowd represent one historical tradition in thinking about the U.S. Constitution "works," then Obama---and Madison and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. and the Warren Court---represent another. Both traditions are historical, but both are not seen as valid in the eyes of (legal) ideologues. I favor the living/deliberative/curvature interpretation, but my point is that appeals to history don't answer which is better, at least not in the limited context of a discussion about Obama's intellectual history. The argument is a moral-political one about which interpretative tradition is superior. Conservatives can't use history to prove wrong a liberal constitutional train of thought.
As a mild digression, I offer that proof in either direction would have to come through a utilitarian study of the effects of both philosophies on policies that touch people. But do we have the time to figure this out by scientific study? No. We're living the study. And U.S. citizens already complain that our congress doesn't act fast enough (which would itself be an argument in the direction of living/deliberative tradition---anyway).
That Kloppenberg's plenary and book served up such meaty history to chew on is a credit to him and the planning team for the conference---Paul Murphy, Lauren Kientz, and especially Andrew Hartman.
I end these reflections by offering a hearty thank you to James Kloppenberg. It was a great pleasure having him at the conference. - TL
The Kloppenberg Plenary: Obama's (Controversial?) Intellectual Biography
Our Third Annual USIH Conference almost received a direct reference in Patricia Cohen's review of James T. Kloppenberg's newest book, Reading Obama: Dreams, Hopes, and the American Political Tradition (Princeton Press, 2010). Here are her two near misses (bolds mine): (1) "In New York City last week to give a standing-room-only lecture about his forthcoming intellectual biography... ." and (2) "Those who heard Mr. Kloppenberg present his argument at a conference on intellectual history at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center responded with prolonged applause."
The USIH omission is a shame because I'm pretty sure I remember Kloppenberg saying in the plenary that his book was released that same day, October 22. The article says "on Sunday," but it is unclear whether Cohen meant this coming Sunday (Oct. 31) or the Sunday after the conference (Oct. 24). In any case, I guess we'll have to wait 'til next year on our conference's first direct NYT appearance. C'est la vie.
We can take some pride, however, in the fact that Cohen quoted from one of our own: Andrew Hartman. Here are her two references to him:
(1) "The way he traced Obama’s intellectual influences was fascinating for us, given that Obama’s academic background seems so similar to ours," said Andrew Hartman, a historian at Illinois State University who helped organize the conference.
(2) "There seemed to be skepticism regarding whether Obama’s intellectual background actually translated into policies that the mostly left-leaning audience could get behind," Mr. Hartman said. "Several audience members, myself included, probably view Obama the president as a centrist like Clinton rather than a progressive intellectual as painted by Kloppenberg."
Andrew deserves the credit for the "standing-room-only" crowd. The plenary was held in the Segal Theatre, and thirty-five seats were available both on the right and left sides of the room. Along with the nineteen standing in the back of the room (which included me), I counted roughly 90 people attending. I round up to 90 because I could not see everyone around the columns, and only noticed a random seat or two empty in the chairs.
The book review fairly summarizes Kloppenberg's talk. I was pleased to see two specific things cited. First, Kloppenberg emphasized at the start of his talk that Obama's intellectual development occurred in relation to three key themes, or "matrices" (a term left out by Cohen but used by him): (a) the history of American democracy, (b) the ongoing development of the philosophy of pragmatism, and finally (c) the history of the intellectual (and social and cultural) upheavals of the 1970s-1990s. Cohen presents all three of these themes in the tenth paragraph of her piece, or roughly half-way through.
Second, I was also happy to see this humorous line from the talk make into Cohen's write up (bolds mine):
Conservatives who argue that Mr. Obama is a socialist or an anti-colonialist (as Dinesh D’Souza does in his book “The Roots of Obama’s Rage”) are far off the mark, [Kloppenberg] said. “Adams and Jefferson were the only anti-colonialists whom Obama has been affected by,” he told the audience in New York. “He has a profound love of America.”
Although I liked seeing those two references, there were some further details Kloppenberg relayed in relation to his three key themes. When he discussed the upheavals of the Culture Wars, he stressed the theme--and the tension---between "universality and particularity." He asserted that Obama absorbed the lessons of Thomas Kuhn, Clifford Geertz, and John Rawls in relation to creating "provisional fixed points" and "useful fictions." In other words, Kloppenberg sees Obama as incorporating the inherent, contingent nature of pragmatism in his thinking about policy and the culture wars. Obama attempts to undercut the passion of ideological thinking by seeing phenomenological truths rooted in events and episodes.
There is no denying the relativism of this philosophical approach, but Kloppenberg did not specify in his talk whether that framework permeated ~all~ aspects of Obama's life (e.g. religion), or just his political philosophy. If the former, then conservatives of all stripes will jump on Kloppenberg's book as proof of Obama's radical leftism, or at least of his lack of deep roots in the long Western tradition (i.e. transcendent truths, achievement of pure objectivity, etc.). And Kloppenberg's explicit reference to Nietzsche as being a part of Obama's intellectual history will push another corner of cultural critics, particularly the Bloomian/Straussian crowd, into apoplexy. I must say that though Kloppenberg made that connection, he did not specify exactly where---in the talk at least---Nietzsche directly entered Obama's story.
One could counter the relativism charge in relation to Obama's political philosophy by citing the (liberal) historicism of Obama's constitutional thinking. Cohen sets this up as the now familiar "living" versus "dead" constitutional philosophies. Here is her passage on this:
Taking his cue from Madison, Mr. Obama writes in his 2006 book “The Audacity of Hope” that the constitutional framework is “designed to force us into a conversation,” that it offers “a way by which we argue about our future.” This notion of a living document is directly at odds with the conception of Justice Antonin Scalia of the Supreme Court, who has spoken of “the good, old dead Constitution.”
But Cohen's---and Kloppenberg's---reference to James Madison shows how Obama's philosophy splits, in my opinion, the living/dead difference. Kloppenberg called the following "the only smoking gun" that arose from his research, but he spoke of a November 1991 document wherein Obama elaborated on a "curvature of Constitutional space" around the process of deliberation that informed the document's creation (i.e. the Constitutional Convention itself as a process of compromise).
So if Scalia and his crowd represent one historical tradition in thinking about the U.S. Constitution "works," then Obama---and Madison and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. and the Warren Court---represent another. Both traditions are historical, but both are not seen as valid in the eyes of (legal) ideologues. I favor the living/deliberative/curvature interpretation, but my point is that appeals to history don't answer which is better, at least not in the limited context of a discussion about Obama's intellectual history. The argument is a moral-political one about which interpretative tradition is superior. Conservatives can't use history to prove wrong a liberal constitutional train of thought.
As a mild digression, I offer that proof in either direction would have to come through a utilitarian study of the effects of both philosophies on policies that touch people. But do we have the time to figure this out by scientific study? No. We're living the study. And U.S. citizens already complain that our congress doesn't act fast enough (which would itself be an argument in the direction of living/deliberative tradition---anyway).
That Kloppenberg's plenary and book served up such meaty history to chew on is a credit to him and the planning team for the conference---Paul Murphy, Lauren Kientz, and especially Andrew Hartman.
I end these reflections by offering a hearty thank you to James Kloppenberg. It was a great pleasure having him at the conference. - TL
The USIH omission is a shame because I'm pretty sure I remember Kloppenberg saying in the plenary that his book was released that same day, October 22. The article says "on Sunday," but it is unclear whether Cohen meant this coming Sunday (Oct. 31) or the Sunday after the conference (Oct. 24). In any case, I guess we'll have to wait 'til next year on our conference's first direct NYT appearance. C'est la vie.
We can take some pride, however, in the fact that Cohen quoted from one of our own: Andrew Hartman. Here are her two references to him:
(1) "The way he traced Obama’s intellectual influences was fascinating for us, given that Obama’s academic background seems so similar to ours," said Andrew Hartman, a historian at Illinois State University who helped organize the conference.
(2) "There seemed to be skepticism regarding whether Obama’s intellectual background actually translated into policies that the mostly left-leaning audience could get behind," Mr. Hartman said. "Several audience members, myself included, probably view Obama the president as a centrist like Clinton rather than a progressive intellectual as painted by Kloppenberg."
Andrew deserves the credit for the "standing-room-only" crowd. The plenary was held in the Segal Theatre, and thirty-five seats were available both on the right and left sides of the room. Along with the nineteen standing in the back of the room (which included me), I counted roughly 90 people attending. I round up to 90 because I could not see everyone around the columns, and only noticed a random seat or two empty in the chairs.
The book review fairly summarizes Kloppenberg's talk. I was pleased to see two specific things cited. First, Kloppenberg emphasized at the start of his talk that Obama's intellectual development occurred in relation to three key themes, or "matrices" (a term left out by Cohen but used by him): (a) the history of American democracy, (b) the ongoing development of the philosophy of pragmatism, and finally (c) the history of the intellectual (and social and cultural) upheavals of the 1970s-1990s. Cohen presents all three of these themes in the tenth paragraph of her piece, or roughly half-way through.
Second, I was also happy to see this humorous line from the talk make into Cohen's write up (bolds mine):
Conservatives who argue that Mr. Obama is a socialist or an anti-colonialist (as Dinesh D’Souza does in his book “The Roots of Obama’s Rage”) are far off the mark, [Kloppenberg] said. “Adams and Jefferson were the only anti-colonialists whom Obama has been affected by,” he told the audience in New York. “He has a profound love of America.”
Although I liked seeing those two references, there were some further details Kloppenberg relayed in relation to his three key themes. When he discussed the upheavals of the Culture Wars, he stressed the theme--and the tension---between "universality and particularity." He asserted that Obama absorbed the lessons of Thomas Kuhn, Clifford Geertz, and John Rawls in relation to creating "provisional fixed points" and "useful fictions." In other words, Kloppenberg sees Obama as incorporating the inherent, contingent nature of pragmatism in his thinking about policy and the culture wars. Obama attempts to undercut the passion of ideological thinking by seeing phenomenological truths rooted in events and episodes.
There is no denying the relativism of this philosophical approach, but Kloppenberg did not specify in his talk whether that framework permeated ~all~ aspects of Obama's life (e.g. religion), or just his political philosophy. If the former, then conservatives of all stripes will jump on Kloppenberg's book as proof of Obama's radical leftism, or at least of his lack of deep roots in the long Western tradition (i.e. transcendent truths, achievement of pure objectivity, etc.). And Kloppenberg's explicit reference to Nietzsche as being a part of Obama's intellectual history will push another corner of cultural critics, particularly the Bloomian/Straussian crowd, into apoplexy. I must say that though Kloppenberg made that connection, he did not specify exactly where---in the talk at least---Nietzsche directly entered Obama's story.
One could counter the relativism charge in relation to Obama's political philosophy by citing the (liberal) historicism of Obama's constitutional thinking. Cohen sets this up as the now familiar "living" versus "dead" constitutional philosophies. Here is her passage on this:
Taking his cue from Madison, Mr. Obama writes in his 2006 book “The Audacity of Hope” that the constitutional framework is “designed to force us into a conversation,” that it offers “a way by which we argue about our future.” This notion of a living document is directly at odds with the conception of Justice Antonin Scalia of the Supreme Court, who has spoken of “the good, old dead Constitution.”
But Cohen's---and Kloppenberg's---reference to James Madison shows how Obama's philosophy splits, in my opinion, the living/dead difference. Kloppenberg called the following "the only smoking gun" that arose from his research, but he spoke of a November 1991 document wherein Obama elaborated on a "curvature of Constitutional space" around the process of deliberation that informed the document's creation (i.e. the Constitutional Convention itself as a process of compromise).
So if Scalia and his crowd represent one historical tradition in thinking about the U.S. Constitution "works," then Obama---and Madison and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. and the Warren Court---represent another. Both traditions are historical, but both are not seen as valid in the eyes of (legal) ideologues. I favor the living/deliberative/curvature interpretation, but my point is that appeals to history don't answer which is better, at least not in the limited context of a discussion about Obama's intellectual history. The argument is a moral-political one about which interpretative tradition is superior. Conservatives can't use history to prove wrong a liberal constitutional train of thought.
As a mild digression, I offer that proof in either direction would have to come through a utilitarian study of the effects of both philosophies on policies that touch people. But do we have the time to figure this out by scientific study? No. We're living the study. And U.S. citizens already complain that our congress doesn't act fast enough (which would itself be an argument in the direction of living/deliberative tradition---anyway).
That Kloppenberg's plenary and book served up such meaty history to chew on is a credit to him and the planning team for the conference---Paul Murphy, Lauren Kientz, and especially Andrew Hartman.
I end these reflections by offering a hearty thank you to James Kloppenberg. It was a great pleasure having him at the conference. - TL
Selasa, 26 Oktober 2010
"Intellectual History for What?” Laschian Analysis for the Soul
It is time to reflect on the Third Annual U.S. Intellectual History Conference, another successful meeting. One of the more memorable moments for me was the final plenary, which grappled with the question, “Intellectual History for What?” The six panelists contended with this question in a variety of ways.
George Cotkin answered by way of a moving, intimate look into his fine career as a writer of intellectual history that despite, or even because of, its setbacks, has nourished his soul. Rochelle Gurstein argued that intellectual historians need to write for “serious, engaged readers,” in order to recreate or reinvent a “public,” singular. The conference theme “Intellectuals and Their Publics,” plural, did not resonate with her.
Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, pulling no punches, advised that U.S. intellectual historians not stoop to the level of our colleagues in other fields, in terms of perpetual self-examination or self-flagellation. She also wished that we would be more cosmopolitan, read more continental theory, learn more languages. In general, she and the others lamented the technocratic, careerist, anti-intellectual culture that pervades academia and elsewhere.
Bill McClay, although pessimistic about our place as intellectual historians in the larger profession, pointed out that all historians do intellectual history when they do historiography. He pointed to the example of the great 1985 debate, in the pages of the American Historical Review, between Thomas Haskell and David Brion Davis about the problem of slavery and capitalism (the debate was later published as a book). This, for McClay, is intellectual history at its finest, even if nobody called it by its name.
David Steigerwald argued that intellectual history is inherently expansive and that we should be shameless trespassers. This spoke to me, as the type of intellectual history I write invades and occupies political, cultural, and educational history. In reflecting upon the wide variety of papers given, it seems to me that U.S. intellectual history, as practiced at our conference, has invaded American Studies, perhaps changing or altering it in productive ways, by putting expressive culture into conversation with more formal systems of ideas.
Casey Nelson Blake, who organized the plenary, concluded by arguing that one of the most important things we as intellectual historians can do is offer contextual maps to intellectuals, activists, and citizens engaged in daily work or struggle. He gave the example of artists who ask him, as an art historian, to help them put their work in a broader contextual framework.
The one theme that remained constant during this plenary session is the despair that humanistic values cannot live in a culture dominated by technocratic or vulgar utilitarian purposes. Humanistic study, including intellectual history, is not long for such a world. To this extent, Christopher Lasch was the not-so-subtle backdrop. Three of the panelists (Gurstein, Steigerwald, Blake) studied with Lasch at Rochester. And, of course, another is his daughter. Blake makes clear in a Commonweal review of a new biography of Lasch (requires subscription to access) how highly he thinks of his mentor. He concludes his essay, “What Emerson wrote of Thoreau holds true for Christopher Lasch: ‘wherever there is knowledge, wherever there is virtue, wherever there is beauty, he will find a home.’”
The questions I pose to readers: Is the fate of intellectual history so closely tied to the fate of the humanities? Is there, then, reason for despair? More specifically, to those in attendance Friday night: What did you think of the plenary?
George Cotkin answered by way of a moving, intimate look into his fine career as a writer of intellectual history that despite, or even because of, its setbacks, has nourished his soul. Rochelle Gurstein argued that intellectual historians need to write for “serious, engaged readers,” in order to recreate or reinvent a “public,” singular. The conference theme “Intellectuals and Their Publics,” plural, did not resonate with her.
Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, pulling no punches, advised that U.S. intellectual historians not stoop to the level of our colleagues in other fields, in terms of perpetual self-examination or self-flagellation. She also wished that we would be more cosmopolitan, read more continental theory, learn more languages. In general, she and the others lamented the technocratic, careerist, anti-intellectual culture that pervades academia and elsewhere.
Bill McClay, although pessimistic about our place as intellectual historians in the larger profession, pointed out that all historians do intellectual history when they do historiography. He pointed to the example of the great 1985 debate, in the pages of the American Historical Review, between Thomas Haskell and David Brion Davis about the problem of slavery and capitalism (the debate was later published as a book). This, for McClay, is intellectual history at its finest, even if nobody called it by its name.
David Steigerwald argued that intellectual history is inherently expansive and that we should be shameless trespassers. This spoke to me, as the type of intellectual history I write invades and occupies political, cultural, and educational history. In reflecting upon the wide variety of papers given, it seems to me that U.S. intellectual history, as practiced at our conference, has invaded American Studies, perhaps changing or altering it in productive ways, by putting expressive culture into conversation with more formal systems of ideas.
Casey Nelson Blake, who organized the plenary, concluded by arguing that one of the most important things we as intellectual historians can do is offer contextual maps to intellectuals, activists, and citizens engaged in daily work or struggle. He gave the example of artists who ask him, as an art historian, to help them put their work in a broader contextual framework.
The one theme that remained constant during this plenary session is the despair that humanistic values cannot live in a culture dominated by technocratic or vulgar utilitarian purposes. Humanistic study, including intellectual history, is not long for such a world. To this extent, Christopher Lasch was the not-so-subtle backdrop. Three of the panelists (Gurstein, Steigerwald, Blake) studied with Lasch at Rochester. And, of course, another is his daughter. Blake makes clear in a Commonweal review of a new biography of Lasch (requires subscription to access) how highly he thinks of his mentor. He concludes his essay, “What Emerson wrote of Thoreau holds true for Christopher Lasch: ‘wherever there is knowledge, wherever there is virtue, wherever there is beauty, he will find a home.’”
The questions I pose to readers: Is the fate of intellectual history so closely tied to the fate of the humanities? Is there, then, reason for despair? More specifically, to those in attendance Friday night: What did you think of the plenary?
"Intellectual History for What?” Laschian Analysis for the Soul
It is time to reflect on the Third Annual U.S. Intellectual History Conference, another successful meeting. One of the more memorable moments for me was the final plenary, which grappled with the question, “Intellectual History for What?” The six panelists contended with this question in a variety of ways.
George Cotkin answered by way of a moving, intimate look into his fine career as a writer of intellectual history that despite, or even because of, its setbacks, has nourished his soul. Rochelle Gurstein argued that intellectual historians need to write for “serious, engaged readers,” in order to recreate or reinvent a “public,” singular. The conference theme “Intellectuals and Their Publics,” plural, did not resonate with her.
Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, pulling no punches, advised that U.S. intellectual historians not stoop to the level of our colleagues in other fields, in terms of perpetual self-examination or self-flagellation. She also wished that we would be more cosmopolitan, read more continental theory, learn more languages. In general, she and the others lamented the technocratic, careerist, anti-intellectual culture that pervades academia and elsewhere.
Bill McClay, although pessimistic about our place as intellectual historians in the larger profession, pointed out that all historians do intellectual history when they do historiography. He pointed to the example of the great 1985 debate, in the pages of the American Historical Review, between Thomas Haskell and David Brion Davis about the problem of slavery and capitalism (the debate was later published as a book). This, for McClay, is intellectual history at its finest, even if nobody called it by its name.
David Steigerwald argued that intellectual history is inherently expansive and that we should be shameless trespassers. This spoke to me, as the type of intellectual history I write invades and occupies political, cultural, and educational history. In reflecting upon the wide variety of papers given, it seems to me that U.S. intellectual history, as practiced at our conference, has invaded American Studies, perhaps changing or altering it in productive ways, by putting expressive culture into conversation with more formal systems of ideas.
Casey Nelson Blake, who organized the plenary, concluded by arguing that one of the most important things we as intellectual historians can do is offer contextual maps to intellectuals, activists, and citizens engaged in daily work or struggle. He gave the example of artists who ask him, as an art historian, to help them put their work in a broader contextual framework.
The one theme that remained constant during this plenary session is the despair that humanistic values cannot live in a culture dominated by technocratic or vulgar utilitarian purposes. Humanistic study, including intellectual history, is not long for such a world. To this extent, Christopher Lasch was the not-so-subtle backdrop. Three of the panelists (Gurstein, Steigerwald, Blake) studied with Lasch at Rochester. And, of course, another is his daughter. Blake makes clear in a Commonweal review of a new biography of Lasch (requires subscription to access) how highly he thinks of his mentor. He concludes his essay, “What Emerson wrote of Thoreau holds true for Christopher Lasch: ‘wherever there is knowledge, wherever there is virtue, wherever there is beauty, he will find a home.’”
The questions I pose to readers: Is the fate of intellectual history so closely tied to the fate of the humanities? Is there, then, reason for despair? More specifically, to those in attendance Friday night: What did you think of the plenary?
George Cotkin answered by way of a moving, intimate look into his fine career as a writer of intellectual history that despite, or even because of, its setbacks, has nourished his soul. Rochelle Gurstein argued that intellectual historians need to write for “serious, engaged readers,” in order to recreate or reinvent a “public,” singular. The conference theme “Intellectuals and Their Publics,” plural, did not resonate with her.
Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, pulling no punches, advised that U.S. intellectual historians not stoop to the level of our colleagues in other fields, in terms of perpetual self-examination or self-flagellation. She also wished that we would be more cosmopolitan, read more continental theory, learn more languages. In general, she and the others lamented the technocratic, careerist, anti-intellectual culture that pervades academia and elsewhere.
Bill McClay, although pessimistic about our place as intellectual historians in the larger profession, pointed out that all historians do intellectual history when they do historiography. He pointed to the example of the great 1985 debate, in the pages of the American Historical Review, between Thomas Haskell and David Brion Davis about the problem of slavery and capitalism (the debate was later published as a book). This, for McClay, is intellectual history at its finest, even if nobody called it by its name.
David Steigerwald argued that intellectual history is inherently expansive and that we should be shameless trespassers. This spoke to me, as the type of intellectual history I write invades and occupies political, cultural, and educational history. In reflecting upon the wide variety of papers given, it seems to me that U.S. intellectual history, as practiced at our conference, has invaded American Studies, perhaps changing or altering it in productive ways, by putting expressive culture into conversation with more formal systems of ideas.
Casey Nelson Blake, who organized the plenary, concluded by arguing that one of the most important things we as intellectual historians can do is offer contextual maps to intellectuals, activists, and citizens engaged in daily work or struggle. He gave the example of artists who ask him, as an art historian, to help them put their work in a broader contextual framework.
The one theme that remained constant during this plenary session is the despair that humanistic values cannot live in a culture dominated by technocratic or vulgar utilitarian purposes. Humanistic study, including intellectual history, is not long for such a world. To this extent, Christopher Lasch was the not-so-subtle backdrop. Three of the panelists (Gurstein, Steigerwald, Blake) studied with Lasch at Rochester. And, of course, another is his daughter. Blake makes clear in a Commonweal review of a new biography of Lasch (requires subscription to access) how highly he thinks of his mentor. He concludes his essay, “What Emerson wrote of Thoreau holds true for Christopher Lasch: ‘wherever there is knowledge, wherever there is virtue, wherever there is beauty, he will find a home.’”
The questions I pose to readers: Is the fate of intellectual history so closely tied to the fate of the humanities? Is there, then, reason for despair? More specifically, to those in attendance Friday night: What did you think of the plenary?
Jumat, 01 Oktober 2010
USIH Conference: Book Exhibit
We are very excited that the Third Annual U.S. Intellectual History Conference will include a book exhibit, organized by the LIBRARY OF SOCIAL SCIENCE
The exhibit will provide a comprehensive collection of the latest and most significant titles in the field and will contribute substantially to the excitement and intellectual value of our meeting. The book exhibit will be open throughout the conference, on the concourse level. Please stop by early and often, say hello to book exhibit manager Richard Klein—and browse to your heart’s content. All books are on sale at special, discounted rates.
The following are among the publishers whose titles will be featured in the display:
Bedford/St. Martins
Brill
U. of California Press
Cambridge U. Press
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
David Brown Book Co.
Fordham U. Press
Harvard U. Press
U. of Iowa Press
ISI Books
NYU Press
Oxford U. Press
Palgrave Macmillan
Paradigm Publishers
Paulist Press
U. of Pennsylvania Press
Polity
Princeton U. Press
Prometheus Books
Routledge USA
Routledge UK
Rutgers U. Press
Smithsonian Books
Soft Skull Press
Taylor & Francis USA
Temple U. P.
W.W. Norton & Co.
Wesleyan U. Press
U. of Wisconsin
For more information on LIBRARY OF SOCIAL SCIENCE BOOK EXHIBITS, please call Richard Klein at (718) 393-1075 or email LSSBookExhibits@earthlink.net.
THE BOOK EXHIBIT IS LOCATED ON THE CONCOURSE LEVEL, NEXT TO THE SESSION ROOMS
The exhibit will provide a comprehensive collection of the latest and most significant titles in the field and will contribute substantially to the excitement and intellectual value of our meeting. The book exhibit will be open throughout the conference, on the concourse level. Please stop by early and often, say hello to book exhibit manager Richard Klein—and browse to your heart’s content. All books are on sale at special, discounted rates.
The following are among the publishers whose titles will be featured in the display:
Bedford/St. Martins
Brill
U. of California Press
Cambridge U. Press
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
David Brown Book Co.
Fordham U. Press
Harvard U. Press
U. of Iowa Press
ISI Books
NYU Press
Oxford U. Press
Palgrave Macmillan
Paradigm Publishers
Paulist Press
U. of Pennsylvania Press
Polity
Princeton U. Press
Prometheus Books
Routledge USA
Routledge UK
Rutgers U. Press
Smithsonian Books
Soft Skull Press
Taylor & Francis USA
Temple U. P.
W.W. Norton & Co.
Wesleyan U. Press
U. of Wisconsin
For more information on LIBRARY OF SOCIAL SCIENCE BOOK EXHIBITS, please call Richard Klein at (718) 393-1075 or email LSSBookExhibits@earthlink.net.
THE BOOK EXHIBIT IS LOCATED ON THE CONCOURSE LEVEL, NEXT TO THE SESSION ROOMS
USIH Conference: Book Exhibit
We are very excited that the Third Annual U.S. Intellectual History Conference will include a book exhibit, organized by the LIBRARY OF SOCIAL SCIENCE
The exhibit will provide a comprehensive collection of the latest and most significant titles in the field and will contribute substantially to the excitement and intellectual value of our meeting. The book exhibit will be open throughout the conference, on the concourse level. Please stop by early and often, say hello to book exhibit manager Richard Klein—and browse to your heart’s content. All books are on sale at special, discounted rates.
The following are among the publishers whose titles will be featured in the display:
Bedford/St. Martins
Brill
U. of California Press
Cambridge U. Press
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
David Brown Book Co.
Fordham U. Press
Harvard U. Press
U. of Iowa Press
ISI Books
NYU Press
Oxford U. Press
Palgrave Macmillan
Paradigm Publishers
Paulist Press
U. of Pennsylvania Press
Polity
Princeton U. Press
Prometheus Books
Routledge USA
Routledge UK
Rutgers U. Press
Smithsonian Books
Soft Skull Press
Taylor & Francis USA
Temple U. P.
W.W. Norton & Co.
Wesleyan U. Press
U. of Wisconsin
For more information on LIBRARY OF SOCIAL SCIENCE BOOK EXHIBITS, please call Richard Klein at (718) 393-1075 or email LSSBookExhibits@earthlink.net.
THE BOOK EXHIBIT IS LOCATED ON THE CONCOURSE LEVEL, NEXT TO THE SESSION ROOMS
The exhibit will provide a comprehensive collection of the latest and most significant titles in the field and will contribute substantially to the excitement and intellectual value of our meeting. The book exhibit will be open throughout the conference, on the concourse level. Please stop by early and often, say hello to book exhibit manager Richard Klein—and browse to your heart’s content. All books are on sale at special, discounted rates.
The following are among the publishers whose titles will be featured in the display:
Bedford/St. Martins
Brill
U. of California Press
Cambridge U. Press
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
David Brown Book Co.
Fordham U. Press
Harvard U. Press
U. of Iowa Press
ISI Books
NYU Press
Oxford U. Press
Palgrave Macmillan
Paradigm Publishers
Paulist Press
U. of Pennsylvania Press
Polity
Princeton U. Press
Prometheus Books
Routledge USA
Routledge UK
Rutgers U. Press
Smithsonian Books
Soft Skull Press
Taylor & Francis USA
Temple U. P.
W.W. Norton & Co.
Wesleyan U. Press
U. of Wisconsin
For more information on LIBRARY OF SOCIAL SCIENCE BOOK EXHIBITS, please call Richard Klein at (718) 393-1075 or email LSSBookExhibits@earthlink.net.
THE BOOK EXHIBIT IS LOCATED ON THE CONCOURSE LEVEL, NEXT TO THE SESSION ROOMS
Jumat, 27 Agustus 2010
Are You Searching For A USIH Conference Roommate?
If so, e-mail fellow USIH contributor Lauren Kientz at kientzla@msu.edu. She's helping put folks in touch. - TL
Are You Searching For A USIH Conference Roommate?
If so, e-mail fellow USIH contributor Lauren Kientz at kientzla@msu.edu. She's helping put folks in touch. - TL
Senin, 26 Juli 2010
Chomsky's [43-year-old] Challenge To Public Intellectuals
As with my last post, I offer another inspirational prompt on the topic of public intellectuals in relation to this fall's USIH conference.
Wisconsin Public Radio's regular program, To The Best of Our Knowledge, hosted Noam Chomsky on June 20, 2010 to discuss his 1967 essay, "The Responsibility of Intellectuals."
Published on February 23 of that year, as a special supplement to the New York Review of Books, Chomsky used the context of the escalating Vietnam War as an opportunity to lambaste the "the cult of the experts" and challenge intellectuals "to speak the truth and to expose lies." In addition, he added, "If it is the responsibility of the intellectual to insist upon the truth, it is also his duty to see events in their historical perspective."
For perceived breaches in the public's trust, Chomsky directed his wrath first at the actions of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Walt Rostow, and the "New Frontiersmen" in general. But he also touched on misguided or irresponsible statements made in the public sphere by Irving Kristol, McGeorge Bundy, David N. Rowe, Daniel Bell, and others.
Here's a link to the NPR program. The Chomsky interview occurs during segment one---the 0:00-17:00 minute portion of the show.
Is Chomsky's essay still relevant? Or does the context of Vietnam War negate its effectiveness---rendering it meaningless to today's reader? Does the public today think of intellectuals in terms of truth and lies? Or are public intellectuals just another form of 'infotainment' to today's reading public? Do we only expect irony and/or skepticism from our public intellectuals? - TL
Wisconsin Public Radio's regular program, To The Best of Our Knowledge, hosted Noam Chomsky on June 20, 2010 to discuss his 1967 essay, "The Responsibility of Intellectuals."
Published on February 23 of that year, as a special supplement to the New York Review of Books, Chomsky used the context of the escalating Vietnam War as an opportunity to lambaste the "the cult of the experts" and challenge intellectuals "to speak the truth and to expose lies." In addition, he added, "If it is the responsibility of the intellectual to insist upon the truth, it is also his duty to see events in their historical perspective."
For perceived breaches in the public's trust, Chomsky directed his wrath first at the actions of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Walt Rostow, and the "New Frontiersmen" in general. But he also touched on misguided or irresponsible statements made in the public sphere by Irving Kristol, McGeorge Bundy, David N. Rowe, Daniel Bell, and others.
Here's a link to the NPR program. The Chomsky interview occurs during segment one---the 0:00-17:00 minute portion of the show.
Is Chomsky's essay still relevant? Or does the context of Vietnam War negate its effectiveness---rendering it meaningless to today's reader? Does the public today think of intellectuals in terms of truth and lies? Or are public intellectuals just another form of 'infotainment' to today's reading public? Do we only expect irony and/or skepticism from our public intellectuals? - TL
Chomsky's [43-year-old] Challenge To Public Intellectuals
As with my last post, I offer another inspirational prompt on the topic of public intellectuals in relation to this fall's USIH conference.
Wisconsin Public Radio's regular program, To The Best of Our Knowledge, hosted Noam Chomsky on June 20, 2010 to discuss his 1967 essay, "The Responsibility of Intellectuals."
Published on February 23 of that year, as a special supplement to the New York Review of Books, Chomsky used the context of the escalating Vietnam War as an opportunity to lambaste the "the cult of the experts" and challenge intellectuals "to speak the truth and to expose lies." In addition, he added, "If it is the responsibility of the intellectual to insist upon the truth, it is also his duty to see events in their historical perspective."
For perceived breaches in the public's trust, Chomsky directed his wrath first at the actions of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Walt Rostow, and the "New Frontiersmen" in general. But he also touched on misguided or irresponsible statements made in the public sphere by Irving Kristol, McGeorge Bundy, David N. Rowe, Daniel Bell, and others.
Here's a link to the NPR program. The Chomsky interview occurs during segment one---the 0:00-17:00 minute portion of the show.
Is Chomsky's essay still relevant? Or does the context of Vietnam War negate its effectiveness---rendering it meaningless to today's reader? Does the public today think of intellectuals in terms of truth and lies? Or are public intellectuals just another form of 'infotainment' to today's reading public? Do we only expect irony and/or skepticism from our public intellectuals? - TL
Wisconsin Public Radio's regular program, To The Best of Our Knowledge, hosted Noam Chomsky on June 20, 2010 to discuss his 1967 essay, "The Responsibility of Intellectuals."
Published on February 23 of that year, as a special supplement to the New York Review of Books, Chomsky used the context of the escalating Vietnam War as an opportunity to lambaste the "the cult of the experts" and challenge intellectuals "to speak the truth and to expose lies." In addition, he added, "If it is the responsibility of the intellectual to insist upon the truth, it is also his duty to see events in their historical perspective."
For perceived breaches in the public's trust, Chomsky directed his wrath first at the actions of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Walt Rostow, and the "New Frontiersmen" in general. But he also touched on misguided or irresponsible statements made in the public sphere by Irving Kristol, McGeorge Bundy, David N. Rowe, Daniel Bell, and others.
Here's a link to the NPR program. The Chomsky interview occurs during segment one---the 0:00-17:00 minute portion of the show.
Is Chomsky's essay still relevant? Or does the context of Vietnam War negate its effectiveness---rendering it meaningless to today's reader? Does the public today think of intellectuals in terms of truth and lies? Or are public intellectuals just another form of 'infotainment' to today's reading public? Do we only expect irony and/or skepticism from our public intellectuals? - TL
Senin, 19 Juli 2010
"There was no United States": Bender On Historians And Their Publics
In honor of our USIH 3.0 conference program release, I offer this related essay by Thomas Bender on the role of historians as public intellectuals. Titled "Historians in Public," Bender uses the article to think about the audiences of historians in relation to both historians' particular kinds of expertise and their means of communication. I found this reminder from Bender, appearing early in the essay, to be most worthy (underlining mine):
As Émile Zola declaimed, the intellectual is by definition a public actor; moreover, all professions, including the academic ones, claim a public aspect by definition to justify their privileges of incorporation and self-regulation.
If we follow Zola's prompt, the distinction between an 'intellectual' and a 'scholar' is the starting point for thinking about audiences for intellectuals (their 'publics') in the twentieth century. Words to ponder as we begin thinking through our manuscripts for the fall program.
And here's another passage---with no small implications for USIH as a subfield and its conference (this fall and beyond, underlining mine):
At the time the AHA was founded the overriding cultural and political project was restoring the union. The price of reconciliation was accepting a regime of white terror imposed on black Americans in the former Confederate states. One of the great accomplishments of recent scholarship has been to make this clear.[13] In fact the scholarship of the past two or three decades has focused on a variety of exclusions—many people who were previously excluded from the American narrative—and by implication—the American public. Now race, gender, ethnicity, and sexual orientation have been written into history and public life. This was obviously a good thing, and it had a large impact in schools, the media, and the law, among other dimensions of our lives.
Yet something was lost—the nation and the state. The recovered persons were incorporated into society, not into a narrative of the nation or the state, into identity politics, not citizenship. In the 1980s and 1990s instead of talk about and inquiry into “the public,” there was talk of publics, alternative publics, counter-publics, a black public sphere, and more. The list got pretty long, but the public dissolved in this otherwise invaluable historiography of the 1980s and 1990s. There was no United States. History was all parts, no whole.
Wow. But Bender's essay contains much more. Indeed, we could mine this piece for days. I won't reproduce the rest here, but would be happy to converse about his other points---large and small---in the comments below. - TL
As Émile Zola declaimed, the intellectual is by definition a public actor; moreover, all professions, including the academic ones, claim a public aspect by definition to justify their privileges of incorporation and self-regulation.
If we follow Zola's prompt, the distinction between an 'intellectual' and a 'scholar' is the starting point for thinking about audiences for intellectuals (their 'publics') in the twentieth century. Words to ponder as we begin thinking through our manuscripts for the fall program.
And here's another passage---with no small implications for USIH as a subfield and its conference (this fall and beyond, underlining mine):
At the time the AHA was founded the overriding cultural and political project was restoring the union. The price of reconciliation was accepting a regime of white terror imposed on black Americans in the former Confederate states. One of the great accomplishments of recent scholarship has been to make this clear.[13] In fact the scholarship of the past two or three decades has focused on a variety of exclusions—many people who were previously excluded from the American narrative—and by implication—the American public. Now race, gender, ethnicity, and sexual orientation have been written into history and public life. This was obviously a good thing, and it had a large impact in schools, the media, and the law, among other dimensions of our lives.
Yet something was lost—the nation and the state. The recovered persons were incorporated into society, not into a narrative of the nation or the state, into identity politics, not citizenship. In the 1980s and 1990s instead of talk about and inquiry into “the public,” there was talk of publics, alternative publics, counter-publics, a black public sphere, and more. The list got pretty long, but the public dissolved in this otherwise invaluable historiography of the 1980s and 1990s. There was no United States. History was all parts, no whole.
Wow. But Bender's essay contains much more. Indeed, we could mine this piece for days. I won't reproduce the rest here, but would be happy to converse about his other points---large and small---in the comments below. - TL
"There was no United States": Bender On Historians And Their Publics
In honor of our USIH 3.0 conference program release, I offer this related essay by Thomas Bender on the role of historians as public intellectuals. Titled "Historians in Public," Bender uses the article to think about the audiences of historians in relation to both historians' particular kinds of expertise and their means of communication. I found this reminder from Bender, appearing early in the essay, to be most worthy (underlining mine):
As Émile Zola declaimed, the intellectual is by definition a public actor; moreover, all professions, including the academic ones, claim a public aspect by definition to justify their privileges of incorporation and self-regulation.
If we follow Zola's prompt, the distinction between an 'intellectual' and a 'scholar' is the starting point for thinking about audiences for intellectuals (their 'publics') in the twentieth century. Words to ponder as we begin thinking through our manuscripts for the fall program.
And here's another passage---with no small implications for USIH as a subfield and its conference (this fall and beyond, underlining mine):
At the time the AHA was founded the overriding cultural and political project was restoring the union. The price of reconciliation was accepting a regime of white terror imposed on black Americans in the former Confederate states. One of the great accomplishments of recent scholarship has been to make this clear.[13] In fact the scholarship of the past two or three decades has focused on a variety of exclusions—many people who were previously excluded from the American narrative—and by implication—the American public. Now race, gender, ethnicity, and sexual orientation have been written into history and public life. This was obviously a good thing, and it had a large impact in schools, the media, and the law, among other dimensions of our lives.
Yet something was lost—the nation and the state. The recovered persons were incorporated into society, not into a narrative of the nation or the state, into identity politics, not citizenship. In the 1980s and 1990s instead of talk about and inquiry into “the public,” there was talk of publics, alternative publics, counter-publics, a black public sphere, and more. The list got pretty long, but the public dissolved in this otherwise invaluable historiography of the 1980s and 1990s. There was no United States. History was all parts, no whole.
Wow. But Bender's essay contains much more. Indeed, we could mine this piece for days. I won't reproduce the rest here, but would be happy to converse about his other points---large and small---in the comments below. - TL
As Émile Zola declaimed, the intellectual is by definition a public actor; moreover, all professions, including the academic ones, claim a public aspect by definition to justify their privileges of incorporation and self-regulation.
If we follow Zola's prompt, the distinction between an 'intellectual' and a 'scholar' is the starting point for thinking about audiences for intellectuals (their 'publics') in the twentieth century. Words to ponder as we begin thinking through our manuscripts for the fall program.
And here's another passage---with no small implications for USIH as a subfield and its conference (this fall and beyond, underlining mine):
At the time the AHA was founded the overriding cultural and political project was restoring the union. The price of reconciliation was accepting a regime of white terror imposed on black Americans in the former Confederate states. One of the great accomplishments of recent scholarship has been to make this clear.[13] In fact the scholarship of the past two or three decades has focused on a variety of exclusions—many people who were previously excluded from the American narrative—and by implication—the American public. Now race, gender, ethnicity, and sexual orientation have been written into history and public life. This was obviously a good thing, and it had a large impact in schools, the media, and the law, among other dimensions of our lives.
Yet something was lost—the nation and the state. The recovered persons were incorporated into society, not into a narrative of the nation or the state, into identity politics, not citizenship. In the 1980s and 1990s instead of talk about and inquiry into “the public,” there was talk of publics, alternative publics, counter-publics, a black public sphere, and more. The list got pretty long, but the public dissolved in this otherwise invaluable historiography of the 1980s and 1990s. There was no United States. History was all parts, no whole.
Wow. But Bender's essay contains much more. Indeed, we could mine this piece for days. I won't reproduce the rest here, but would be happy to converse about his other points---large and small---in the comments below. - TL
Langganan:
Komentar (Atom)