Has Intellectual History Had a Kuhnian Revolution?

This month marks the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a book which clearly belongs on any list of the most significant historical works of the twentieth century.  Over the weekend, the UK's The Observer featured an excellent journalistic account by John Naughton of the significance of Kuhn's book, both within the history of science and in the wider sphere of (at least educated Anglophone) culture, which got me thinking both about my encounters with the book (and Kuhn) and about the place of Kuhn's vision of of the past in intellectual history beyond the history of science.

I first read Structure as a first-semester freshman in Science A17, the first half of Owen Gingerich's history of science survey course that, as part of Harvard's Core Curriculum, was a direct heir to the Gen Ed science course whose formulation had led Thomas Kuhn from physics to the history of science and to the metahistorical revolution embodied in his book.


Usually one encounters a famous book's reputation long before actually reading the book. But reading Kuhn as a first-semester freshman in the early 1980s, I had absolutely no preconceptions.  I had no idea of the book's significance within its field. And the explosion of paradigm talk in the wider culture had yet to occur. So my sense of wonder at reading The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was relatively unmediated (though, of course, the fact that it was being assigned and discussed in a class was itself a form of mediation).  It was, I think, one of the first times that I experienced how a work of history can fundamentally change the way one understands the world, not simply through revealing what happened in the past, but also through its critical understanding of what happened in the past.  And, like many others who encounter Kuhn for the first time, I and my classmates began busily applying the idea of paradigm shifts to realms beyond science.  I remember my section leader cautioning us that Kuhn himself was very insistent that his idea of scientific change applied only to science.  That made us slow, but not stop, our excited, undergraduate Kuhnification of everything.

Sometime during my senior year I found myself at a reception with Thomas Kuhn himself.  It was, I think, a celebration of some anniversary of the Harvard Society of Fellows, of which Kuhn was a particularly notable alumnus (and with which I, it should be said, have never had a direct affiliation).  I spent much of the reception trying to work up the nerve to talk to Kuhn, who had really made an enormous intellectual difference to me, but I could never figure out what I might say to him.*

Kuhn's direct impact on the rest of my college education was slight (I took only one other history of science class), but his name frequently showed up in reviews of recent works in the history of science that I read during those years in various periodicals. I was struck both by the hostility with which many philosophers of science and scientists treated Kuhn, and by the tendency to dismiss him as an epistemic relativist. The latter was a charge that particularly puzzled me, as Kuhn's understanding of scientific revolutions relies on the appearance of anomalies in the results of "normal science" to trigger a paradigm shift.  It seemed to me that a theory-independent reality was necessary to generate those anomalies.

As John Naughton notes in his Observer article, in the ensuing decades, Kuhn--or at least Kuhn-speak--has spread throughout the culture...though it's an interesting question why this is the case and whether popular talk of "paradigm shifts" suggests real Kuhnian influence or just the shallow importation of a piece of jargon, rather like Gramsci's rising popularity in the '70s and '80s made "hegemony" a common word without actually suggesting that its users were notably Gramscian.

Certainly the rise of paradigm-talk has helped cement the book's status as a key, late 20th-century text, well beyond the history of science.  While I expect that we'll see many changes to the latter chapters of Hollinger & Capper's American Intellectual Tradition, the excerpt from Structure has a very secure place in the volume, not least because it's a fine, early example of the postmodern turn in American thought.

All of which brings me to the question posed in the post's title: what has been the impact of Kuhn on the practice of intellectual history?  Of course, that title has something of a double-meaning. It might also be read as: does the practice of intellectual history undergo Kuhnian paradigm shifts?

I actually think that this second question is easier to answer than the first: Kuhn's vision of the practice of science seems radically unlike the way intellectual history is practiced.  In Kuhn's view, "normal science" consists of problem solving within a paradigm, until anomalies in the results build up to the point that a revolutionary paradigm shift needs to take place. Under normal science, the paradigm within which science works is not only unquestioned, but in effect unquestionable.  And the new paradigm is, according to Kuhn, incommensurable with the old paradigm, hence the need for a revolutionary leap.**

This all seems very unlike the way historians (and most other humanists) work. In particular, the stark division between "normal science" and a scientific revolution simply doesn't exist. Yes, we can all think of plodding bits of archival work that do nothing but add a further example to an established historical story. And works that truly alter our sense of how historical change takes place are few and far between. But, in principle at least, our narratives, our metanarratives, even our most basic methodology are all always up for grabs.  We don't need a single stable paradigm (in the Kuhnian sense) in which to work. Nor is it possible to claim that our paradigms (in the looser, popular sense) are in any way incommensurable with each other. Indeed, much of the most vibrant activity in history involves paradigms (in this looser sense) facing off against each other.***

But if intellectual history itself doesn't quite fit the Kuhnian, er, paradigm, perhaps what we study might.  Interestingly enough, at the very moment that Kuhn was (if you'll pardon the expression) revolutionizing the history of science, a parallel revolution of sorts was going on in intellectual history: the rise of the Cambridge School.  This is not the time or place to enter into a close comparison of Kuhn and Pocock, so I'll just note that it seems to me that their visions of historical change--and historical study--are quite distinct from one another, yet clearly emerge from the same broader intellectual moment.****

History is sometimes said to be the pirate discipline, and I have no doubt that many intellectual historians have raided the Kuhnian castle in their efforts to understand the past. But I'm somewhat embarrassed to say that I can't think of any really successful attempt to write a strictly Kuhnian history of any non-scientific aspect of thought. Back in 1997, Adolph Reed, Jr., wrote critically of what he believed were misplaced attempts to write about African American thought in a Kuhnian way [h/t to Lauren Kientz Anderson for drawing my attention to that Reed piece].  And though Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions played an absolutely central role in my admittedly modest intellectual biography, I cannot honestly say that I pattern my own thinking consciously after his ideas (though I'm sure that he contributed to my--and my generation of historians'--general suspicion of historiographical Whiggishness).

Was Kuhn an influence on your development as an historian? Is he an influence on the way you think and/or write about the past?  What works of intellectual history (outside of the history of science) seem to you to be most influenced by Kuhn?

____________________________
* The only other person I can think of around whom I was similarly utterly tongue tied was Tom Lehrer, with whom I was at another reception that same year. 

** The Marxian notion of revolution is, of course, a very important intellectual context for the Kuhnian notion of a scientific revolution (a phrase which had previously been used to describe a single, particular moment in the history of science in a not-particularly-Marxian way).

*** I should add that the idea of the incommensurability of paradigms remains one of the most controversial aspects of Kuhn's thesis.

**** In the early days of this blog, Tim Lacy drew some interesting parallels between John C. Greene's 1957 essay on "Objectives and Methods in Intellectual History" and Kuhn's work.

Post-Civil Rights Intellectual Ferment

In the book I am writing on the history of culture wars, I place the late-twentieth-century controversies about race in the context of the larger war for the soul of America. This includes the ongoing debate about affirmative action, which came to the surface in 1978 with Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the Supreme Court decision that left affirmative action weakened but intact. It also includes the shouting matches over race, poverty, and public policy, intellectual skirmishes carried over from the Moynihan Report conflagration of the 1960s.

That race helped shape the culture wars is hardly surprising, given the degree to which the nation’s racial landscape had been transformed. Racial politics were persistently perplexing, despite the successes of the civil rights movement, largely because, as President Lyndon Johnson proclaimed in a Howard University speech on June 4, 1965, “equality as a right and a theory” was not the same thing as “equality as a fact and as a result.” In other words, the equal rights codified by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 did not entail actual equality between the races. This fact was made horrifyingly apparent by the numerous riots that plagued American cities in the 1960s, beginning with the riot that exploded in the predominantly black Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles in August of 1965, resulting in 34 deaths, thousands of injuries, and untold millions in property damage. That this riot occurred only a few days after the Voting Rights Act outlawed discriminatory voting practices highlighted the vast discrepancy between equality as a right and equality as a fact.

American intellectuals mostly agreed that post-civil rights America was not post-racial; that racial disparities persisted. But they often vehemently disagreed about how to diagnose and solve the array of problems stemming from this fact. By the 1980s, such disagreements became more pointed. Liberal stalwarts such as sociologist Frances Fox Piven continued to argue for a more robust welfare state, but could no longer expect to dominate the national conversation, due to newly created space for conservative policy intellectuals such as American Enterprise Institute Fellow Charles Murray. Author of the 1984 bestseller Losing Ground, which became something of a policy manual for the Reagan administration, and which Daniel Rodgers positions as one of the more odious representations of the microeconomic contagion that defined the “Age of Fracture,” Murray argued that expensive Great Society programs designed to alleviate poverty actually resulted in increased poverty, the unintended consequence of the ironic incentives built into welfare policy. According to Murray, after calculating the costs and benefits of marrying and seeking employment, a poor couple, whom he imagined as rational economic actors “Harold” and “Phyllis,” would have concluded that it made more sense to remain unmarried and on welfare. Rodgers crisply summarizes the implications of Murray’s contention: “The cure constructed the disease and fed on its own perverse failures.” The seductiveness of Murray’s microeconomic solution was obvious, especially in an era defined by austerity: doing less was both inexpensive and achieved a better result. At a time when urban poverty seemed more and more intractable, and more and more linked to racial inequality—evident in the racialized discourse of the so-called “underclass”—Murray’s “benign neglect” approach proved salient, particularly since the electorate was impatient with political measures that appeared to benefit blacks. It is no surprise, then, that Losing Ground helped lay the foundation for Clinton’s “end welfare as we know it” legislation.

The intellectual history of the so-called underclass reveals the centrality of race to the highly contentious struggle to define a normative America. Racial liberals like Piven sought a more empathetic nation, one more willing to make sacrifices for the victims of persistent forms of institutional racism, in part, by expanding the welfare state. But a growing number of Americans, Charles Murray’s audience, believed that welfare, or government handouts, were an affront to those traits that supposedly made America great, namely hard work and individual responsibility. This conservative view, always present in American social thought, became increasingly popular after federal law was redesigned to prevent discrimination. This highlights one of the unintended consequences of civil rights legislation: racial disparities could no longer easily be blamed on racism.

In this post-civil rights context, alternative explanations for the continued presence of an underclass proliferated. William Julius Wilson’s 1987 book The Truly Disadvantaged was one of the more discussed. Wilson, a liberal sociologist then at the University of Chicago, couched his book as an explicit effort to retake the debate from conservatives like Charles Murray.
As such, he partly attributed the existence of an underclass to economic factors such as deindustrialization, which resulted in joblessness for many city inhabitants. But Wilson also dedicated several chapters to a candid analysis of “the social pathologies of the inner city,” hardly a departure from Murray. Ghetto dwellers, for Wilson, were hemmed in by a vicious cycle that perpetuated the usual litany of pathologies, including illegitimacy and crime. Wilson’s book is better remembered for its gratuitous focus on the pathological behavior of the underclass than for its economic diagnosis of urban underemployment. As such, The Truly Disadvantaged failed to advance the national discussion of the underclass beyond Losing Ground.

Murray, on the other hand, did advance the discussion, beyond even his own neoconservative framework. Joined by Harvard psychometrician Richard Herrnstein, he offered a new version of a much older social Darwinist framework in the1994 bestseller, The Bell Curve. Murray and Herrnstein contended that the underclass existed due to a gap in cognitive ability. Dull people, those with a low IQ—which they stridently defended as an unbiased measurement—were likelier to be poor and dysfunctional. Moreover, Murray and Herrnstein argued that IQ was mostly genetic and that blacks as an ethnic group were inherently duller than whites. Soon after publication, more than mere book, The Bell Curve became a phenomenon. Dissected in most major national publications, pundits of every ideological stripe weighed in on the national debate. Most liberals denounced the book. The New York Times columnist Bob Herbert labeled The Bell Curve “a scabrous piece of racial pornography masquerading as serious scholarship.” Most conservatives, even those who sought to distance themselves from The Bell Curve’s more odious conclusions, rushed to Murray and Herrnstein’s defense and attributed the controversy to the “political correctness” of their liberal critics.

Post-civil rights intellectual ferment also reshaped social thought on the left. A variety of left-leaning academics innovated theoretical approaches—new schools of thought—to explain the persistence of racial disparities in post-civil rights America. One prominent example is Critical Race Theory (CRT), which originated in the 1980s. (I’ve been enmeshed in CRT primary sources for weeks now, in preparation for an AHA paper on the topic—if you’re in Chicago next month, stop by our panel, titled, “Black Ivy: African-American Intellectuals During the Twentieth Century"). In terms of intellectual trajectories, CRT emerged as one of the stiffest challenges to conventional late-twentieth-century legal thought. Its theorists, lead among them its founding thinker, Derrick Bell (who died recently--see his obituary), drew upon older anthropological notions about the social construction of race to explain how the American legal system was complicit in the persistence—or more ominously, the permanence—of American racism. In the paper I will be giving at the AHA, I argue that Bell’s experiences at Harvard University influenced his pessimistic rendering of American law and society.

Harvard Law School hired Bell in 1969 to placate black student protests that were part of a nationwide movement to make universities more amenable to minority students. In 1971, Bell became the first African American to gain tenure at Harvard Law. Bell’s courses on law and race were legion among students, as was his famous casebook, Race, Racism, and American Law (1973). When he left Harvard in 1980 to become the dean of law at the University of Oregon, students organized protests to compel administration to replace him with a minority professor. When Harvard administrators refused, students held their own course, where they continued to read Bell’s casebook. CRT emerged out of this extracurricular course, populated by such foundational CRT thinkers as Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw. Bell returned to Harvard in 1986 for another four stormy years. In 1990, when Bell threatened to remain on unpaid leave until the law school hired a woman of color, Harvard fired Bell. Out of these experiences at Harvard, Bell and others innovated the scholarship that formed CRT. They took stock of how racism manifested in a supposedly colorblind institutional setting that operated much like the legal system. Just as Bell critiqued the hidden biases of the so-called Harvard meritocracy, he also leveled a sustained scholarly analysis of, in Cornel West’s words, “the historical centrality and complicity of law in upholding white supremacy.”

CRT emerged in a moment of despair. The civil rights movement narrative—grounded in the belief that the United States was progressing beyond racial discrimination, in its belief in the ability of the legal system to redress discrimination—foundered on the rocky shoals of the Reagan era. Reagan codified the growing disenchantment with civil rights efforts by redirecting the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, under Deputy Attorney General William Bradford Reynolds, away from ameliorative efforts such as affirmative action. CRT sought to theorize how and why racial disparities persisted, and in some ways worsened, despite the many legal victories of the civil rights era. CRT openly questioned the traditional civil rights premise that racial progress was possible in the United States, a pessimistic outlook that formed much of Derrick Bell’s late work, such as his brilliantly provocative book, Faces at the Bottom of the Well, subtitled, pointedly, “The Permanence of Racism.” In that 1992 book, Bell eloquently gave life to the more academic body of CRT scholarship that had shaken up the prestigious law journals during the 1980s. An excerpt:

On the one hand, contemporary color barriers are certainly less visible as a result of our successful efforts to strip the law’s endorsement from the hated Jim Crow signs. Today one can travel for thousands of miles across the country and never see a public facility designated as ‘Colored’ or ‘White.’ Indeed, the very absence of visible signs of discrimination creates an atmosphere of racial neutrality and encourages whites to believe that racism is a thing of the past. On the other hand, the general use of so-called neutral standards to continue exclusionary practices reduces the effectiveness of traditional civil rights laws, while rendering discriminatory actions more oppressive than ever… Today, because bias is masked in unofficial practices and ‘neutral’ standards, we must wrestle with the question whether race or some individual failing has cost us the job, denied us the promotion, or promoted our being rejected as tenants for an apartment. Either conclusion breeds frustration and alienation—and a rage we dare not show to others or admit to ourselves.

I argue that CRT and its many offspring, such as whiteness studies, grew to be the dominant intellectual mode of thinking about race in post-civil rights America. In this way, it was the central oppositional formation to the neoconservative, post-welfare state, colorblind discourse, though the latter obviously had far more influence over policy. Agree or disagree, intellectuals who thought about race had to reckon with Critical Race Theory and with neoconservatism, one overly focused on race and racism to the exclusion of most any other form of social analysis, the other overly quiet on race and racism as to make one wonder if race wasn’t also the main point. But in making this argument about the bifurcated discourse of race in post-civil rights America, I do not wish to lose sight of alternative modes of analysis, roads not taken, so to speak.

One alternative mode of thinking through race that influenced intellectual history and some circles of literary study is cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitan thinkers, especially Henry Louis Gates, Jr., sought to more forcefully challenge the ontology of race than did CRT thinkers. It’s not that CRT thinkers believed race ontologically “real,” rather, they fought hard to keep racial analysis, as a dichotomous black-white discourse, at the forefront, in the realist assumption that racism was the single most important foundation of American social stability and thus resistance to it demanded a focus on it. Cosmopolitan thinkers de-emphasized dichotomies and accentuated the amorphousness of racial constructs. Race for them was performative, as was gender for Judith Butler.

I wrote a chapter for the forthcoming Routledge Handbook of Cosmopolitan Studies where I implicitly argue that cosmopolitanism has not had much influence over racial thought in the Unites States. But it has influenced U.S. intellectual history, thanks in no small part to David Hollinger. His many interventions represent a cosmopolitan exploration of the ways in which our solidarities and identities—racial, religious, and national—govern our lives. In his now standard work, Postethnic America, Hollinger focuses on how solidarities and identities should ideally operate according to the principles of “affiliation by revocable consent.” In other words, he seeks to transcend the stultifying debates about multiculturalism, the players in which assume identities to be rooted in blood and immutable culture, to embrace more individualistic and voluntary conceptions of identity. However, in Hollinger’s follow-up to Postethnic, titled Cosmopolitanism and Solidarity, he emphasizes the less voluntary structures of solidarity, what he terms a “political economy of solidarity.” Solidarity, for him, “is a commodity distributed by authority,” especially when tied to the nation state. “Central to the history of nationalism, after all, has been the use of state power to establish certain ‘identities,’ understood as performative, and thus creating social cohesion on certain terms rather than others.” I would guess that the more tempered arguments made in Cosmopolitanism and Solidarity resulted from the criticism Hollinger might have received after Postethnic America from those influence by the CRT mode of analyzing race, where black-white relations might not be immutable by blood, but certainly are not very mutable by American cultural standards.

What other modes of analysis grew out of post-civil rights intellectual ferment? I am genuinely interested in reader comments here. One mode that is perhaps my favorite, though it is less influential than all of the others I describe above, is the class-based analysis of race articulated by Adolph Reed, Jr. Reed’s analysis is, like CRT, pessimistic, but in much different fashion. Although Reed is hardly a post-racial thinker along the lines of the neoconservatives—he continues to analyze the ways in which racial inequality persists—he believes that class analysis is the best mode of thinking through such inequality in a post-civil rights context. In his fabulous 1999 book, Stirrings in the Jug: Black Politics in the Post-Segregation Era, Reed unsparingly critiques the ways in which civil rights professionals legitimized black political leaders, especially the new black mayors of cities like Atlanta, allowing these black politicians to further neoliberal policies that did great harm to the majority of their black constituents. Situated as such, Reed has been more critical of Obama than perhaps anybody else on the left, even before Obama won the presidency, calling him a “vacuous opportunist” in a May 2008 Progressive article. More recently, Reed talks about the “limits of anti-racism,” which seems to take his mode of thinking even further afield from CRT and mainstream liberal-left discourse on race.

Some snippets:

The contemporary discourse of “antiracism” is focused much more on taxonomy than politics. It emphasizes the name by which we should call some strains of inequality—whether they should be broadly recognized as evidence of “racism”— over specifying the mechanisms that produce them or even the steps that can be taken to combat them. And, no, neither “overcoming racism” nor “rejecting whiteness” qualifies as such a step any more than does waiting for the “revolution” or urging God’s heavenly intervention. If organizing a rally against racism seems at present to be a more substantive political act than attending a prayer vigil for world peace, that’s only because contemporary antiracist activists understand themselves to be employing the same tactics and pursuing the same ends as their predecessors in the period of high insurgency in the struggle against racial segregation.
…
Ironically, as the basis for a politics, antiracism seems to reflect, several generations downstream, the victory of the postwar psychologists in depoliticizing the critique of racial injustice by shifting its focus from the social structures that generate and reproduce racial inequality to an ultimately individual, and ahistorical, domain of “prejudice” or “intolerance.”
…
All too often, “racism” is the subject of sentences that imply intentional activity or is characterized as an autonomous “force.” In this kind of formulation, “racism,” a conceptual abstraction, is imagined as a material entity. Abstractions can be useful, but they shouldn’t be given independent life.
….
I can appreciate such formulations as transient political rhetoric; hyperbolic claims made in order to draw attention and galvanize opinion against some particular injustice. But as the basis for social interpretation, and particularly interpretation directed toward strategic political action, they are useless. Their principal function is to feel good and tastily righteous in the mouths of those who propound them. People do things that reproduce patterns of racialized inequality, sometimes with self-consciously bigoted motives, sometimes not. Properly speaking, however, “racism” itself doesn’t do anything more than the Easter Bunny does.

My position is—and I can’t count the number of times I’ve said this bluntly, yet to no avail, in response to those in blissful thrall of the comforting Manicheanism—that of course racism persists, in all the disparate, often unrelated kinds of social relations and “attitudes” that are characteristically lumped together under that rubric, but from the standpoint of trying to figure out how to combat even what most of us would agree is racial inequality and injustice, that acknowledgement and $2.25 will get me a ride on the subway. It doesn’t lend itself to any particular action except more taxonomic argument about what counts as racism.

A Quote for Tuesday

I'm bringing back David Sehat's old feature--"A Quote for Tuesday"--at least for today.

"Yes, racism exists, as a conceptual condensation of practices and ideas that reproduce, or seek to reproduce, hierarchy along lines defined by race. Apostles of antiracism frequently can’t hear this sort of statement, because in their exceedingly simplistic version of the nexus of race and injustice there can be only the Manichean dichotomy of those who admit racism’s existence and those who deny it. There can be only Todd Gitlin (the sociologist and former SDS leader who has become, both fairly and as caricature, the symbol of a “class-first” line) and their own heroic, truth-telling selves, and whoever is not the latter must be the former. Thus the logic of straining to assign guilt by association substitutes for argument.

My position is—and I can’t count the number of times I’ve said this bluntly, yet to no avail, in response to those in blissful thrall of the comforting Manicheanism—that of course racism persists, in all the disparate, often unrelated kinds of social relations and “attitudes” that are characteristically lumped together under that rubric, but from the standpoint of trying to figure out how to combat even what most of us would agree is racial inequality and injustice, that acknowledgement and $2.25 will get me a ride on the subway. It doesn’t lend itself to any particular action except more taxonomic argument about what counts as racism."

Adolph Reed, Jr., "The Limits of Antiracism," Left Business Observer

The Curse of Communitarianism?

Below is Adolph Reed Jr.’s assessment of Obama shortly after the latter won his first Illinois state senate race—written in Reed’s now (in)famous article, “The Curse of Community,” Village Voice, January 16, 1996 (reprinted in Class Notes: Posing as Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene):

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.

In Reading Obama, James Kloppenberg links Obama’s political thought to three American intellectual traditions (traditions that Kloppenberg claims are interrelated): pragmatism, civic republicanism, and communitarianism. In his review of Reading Obama, John Summers takes Kloppenberg to task for, among other things, too rosy a view of the relationship between philosophical pragmatism and democratic politics—a debate that goes at least as far back as Randolph Bourne’s classic 1917 “Twilight of Idols,” where Bourne lashed out at John Dewey for supporting Woodrow Wilson’s entry into the Great War (albeit, on the grounds that Dewey had betrayed the pragmatism of William James, not out of a rejection of pragmatism per se).

As opposed to pragmatism, I’d like to focus on community, the subject of Reed’s irate 1996 article, and communitarianism, one of the philosophical traditions Kloppenberg thinks has influenced Obama. Kloppenberg rather obviously comes to different conclusions about community than Reed. Whereas Reed sees community as a cover for repressive neoliberal policies, Kloppenberg thinks communitarianism can serve the ends of justice—when he (tepidly) criticizes Obama, he does so for not living up to the ideals of communitarianism (and pragmatism and civic republicanism). Although Kloppenberg is careful to note that communitarianism can operate as a means to diverse ends, including ends that Kloppenberg—a self-described progressive—does not support, on the whole he seems rather favorable to communitarianism as a political philosophy. He writes that “the work of radical reformers has been informed by, and has been driven forward through the work of, communities—frequently religious communities… (78)

In a compelling bit of recent intellectual history, Kloppenberg examines the trajectory of John Rawls’s thought in light of communitarianism. At first, Rawls was predisposed to favor community as a political principle, made evident in his 1942 undergraduate thesis—“A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith” (which I blogged about here)—in which Rawls related the search for justice to religious traditions. But later, in A Theory of Justice, his 1971 tome that proved his most influential work, Rawls grounded justice in a more individualistic social contract theory. Behind a veil of ignorance, so Rawls theorized, people would opt for a reasonably just society on the grounds that they would not want to be on the lowest social rung if such a position were intolerable. Extending this line of thought, Rawls supposed that a just society would operate along the lines of the difference principle: degrees of inequality would be tolerated so long as inequality brought greater freedom and justice to all members of society, including those on the proverbial bottom rung. But then the late Rawls—he of Political Liberalism, his 1996 book that was, in effect, a response to his communitarian and feminist critics—partially came around to his earlier views about community. This he made clear in his elaboration on what he called “overlapping consensus,” where people enmeshed in communities could find political common ground with people enmeshed in other communities so long as the focus was indeed on common interests.

Kloppenberg maintains that the most “widely read version” of the communitarian critique of A Theory of Justice was written by one of Charles Taylor’s students, Michael Sandel, namely, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (1982). Kloppenberg writes: “From [Sandel’s communitarian] perspective, Rawls not only ignored, he ruled out of bounds, the most precious of all human commitments, the basic commitments that make us who we are” (99) Other communitarians influential to late-twentieth century American social thought include Robert Bellah, co-author of Habits of the Heart, and Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone. Putnam organized the communitarian Saguaro Seminar at Harvard, dedicated to “civic engagement in America,” which Obama attended in the late 1990s. This is one kernel of evidence that Kloppenberg applies to his thesis that Obama’s worldview is saturated with the lessons learned from the recent intellectual history of communitarianism. Another is that Obama learned from his community organizing days on the Chicago south side that people were more inclined to political activism if such activism was within the constraints of communities, usually religious. None of this convinces me that Obama is particularly familiar with the debates over Rawls that dominated one variant of social thought, but insofar as Obama does adhere to the principles of communitarianism, which both Reed and Kloppenberg maintain, from very different positions, how is this of consequence? Is communitarianism a viable political philosophy towards the ends of justice?

Count me a skeptic. I’ve always thought communitarianism a vacuous political philosophy. No, I don’t think it always operates as a cover for repression, though it often does, sometimes unwittingly. But I do think it works better in the descriptive than in the prescriptive. Of course critics were right to point out to Rawls that people are motivated by things other than individually-defined interests, as ever, and that such motivations should not be deemed irrational. But what does this mean going forward as a political philosophy?

Historical example is the best way I know how to demonstrate the problems of community as a political philosophy. In the late 1960s, blacks in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn, with political support from liberal Republican Mayor John Lindsay and with Ford Foundation largesse, undertook a controversial experiment in community control of their schools. Ocean Hill-Brownsville activists, influenced by Black Nationalist thinkers such as Malcolm X and Harold Cruse, believed that their schools were failing largely because of racism built into the city’s educational institutions. Community control activists sought to hire black teachers to replace predominantly white teachers, on the grounds that black teachers would not only better relate to black students, but also because, unlike their white counterparts, black teachers would not be beholden to “culture of poverty” presumptions that lowered expectations.

The Ocean Hill-Brownsville experiment in community control had powerful opponents, especially the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), the teacher’s union that represented the vast majority of New York City teachers, led by the outspoken Albert Shanker. Thanks to a flourishing public sector unionism in the 1960s, the UFT was powerful enough to help the centralized New York City Board of Education govern the largest school system in the nation. And as part of its collectively bargained contract, teachers were hired and promoted in accordance with a set of standardized tests that they took at several points along their career. This system, which the UFT described as objective and, thus, meritocratic, served whites well—especially Jews, who comprised a majority of the union—but left black teachers behind. Thus, as part of its community control prerogatives, Ocean Hill-Brownsville activists violated the terms of the UFT contract and fired several of the white teachers in their neighborhood, replacing them with black teachers or non-unionized whites more committed to the principles of community control, but less qualified by UFT standards. This, predictably, brought the wrath of the powerful and savvy Shanker. In a battle that included three citywide teacher’s strikes in the fall of 1968, the UFT decisively defeated Ocean Hill-Brownsville community controllers.

Although raw power defeated the Ocean Hill-Brownsville experiment in community control, power was not the only principle guiding it. The Ocean Hill-Brownsville communitarians believed that their values were more consistent with justice than the values of the white teachers. They contrasted their belief in mutuality with the individualistic materialism of the white middle-class world inhabited by the teachers. They theorized that they were better equipped to make education relevant to black children.

The problem, as explained by Gerald Podair in his excellent book, The Strike that Changed New York: Blacks, Whites, and the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Crisis, is that community meant different things to different people. Whereas Ocean Hill-Brownsville blacks could plausibly claim that their communitarianism served the ends of justice, if only because it was a response to institutionalized racism, community looked very different when whites in the Canarsie neighborhood of Brooklyn organized to bar blacks from being bussed into their schools. Jonathan Rieder, author of Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn Against Liberalism, calls the protest the result of “deferred white vengeance for the New York school crisis of 1968.” As one Canarsie resident addressed the media: “You and the God-damned liberals, you screamed along with the blacks in 1968 for community control... now whites want what the blacks have, and you say we can’t have it.”

So to return to Rawls: how could blacks and whites in Brooklyn have found an overlapping consensus? Didn’t “community” prevent such a consensus from prevailing? As both Podair and Rieder argue, a new consensus was formed, that between formerly antagonistic outer-borough Jews and the city’s mostly Catholic Italians. Blacks were left in the lurch, especially when the city responded to its fiscal crisis of the 1970s by cutting social services that blacks were most dependent upon. Blacks were powerless to stop these cuts because they no longer had many white allies in the city. The Jews whom blacks previously relied upon as a sort of cosmopolitan buffer between themselves and the rest of the white population could no longer be counted on as such, in part because of the anti-Semitic-baiting that accompanied the 1968 controversy.

To conclude: to me, the history of Ocean Hill-Brownsville serves as a warning against community as a political principle. Am I missing something?

The Curse of Communitarianism?

Below is Adolph Reed Jr.’s assessment of Obama shortly after the latter won his first Illinois state senate race—written in Reed’s now (in)famous article, “The Curse of Community,” Village Voice, January 16, 1996 (reprinted in Class Notes: Posing as Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene):

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.

In Reading Obama, James Kloppenberg links Obama’s political thought to three American intellectual traditions (traditions that Kloppenberg claims are interrelated): pragmatism, civic republicanism, and communitarianism. In his review of Reading Obama, John Summers takes Kloppenberg to task for, among other things, too rosy a view of the relationship between philosophical pragmatism and democratic politics—a debate that goes at least as far back as Randolph Bourne’s classic 1917 “Twilight of Idols,” where Bourne lashed out at John Dewey for supporting Woodrow Wilson’s entry into the Great War (albeit, on the grounds that Dewey had betrayed the pragmatism of William James, not out of a rejection of pragmatism per se).

As opposed to pragmatism, I’d like to focus on community, the subject of Reed’s irate 1996 article, and communitarianism, one of the philosophical traditions Kloppenberg thinks has influenced Obama. Kloppenberg rather obviously comes to different conclusions about community than Reed. Whereas Reed sees community as a cover for repressive neoliberal policies, Kloppenberg thinks communitarianism can serve the ends of justice—when he (tepidly) criticizes Obama, he does so for not living up to the ideals of communitarianism (and pragmatism and civic republicanism). Although Kloppenberg is careful to note that communitarianism can operate as a means to diverse ends, including ends that Kloppenberg—a self-described progressive—does not support, on the whole he seems rather favorable to communitarianism as a political philosophy. He writes that “the work of radical reformers has been informed by, and has been driven forward through the work of, communities—frequently religious communities… (78)

In a compelling bit of recent intellectual history, Kloppenberg examines the trajectory of John Rawls’s thought in light of communitarianism. At first, Rawls was predisposed to favor community as a political principle, made evident in his 1942 undergraduate thesis—“A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith” (which I blogged about here)—in which Rawls related the search for justice to religious traditions. But later, in A Theory of Justice, his 1971 tome that proved his most influential work, Rawls grounded justice in a more individualistic social contract theory. Behind a veil of ignorance, so Rawls theorized, people would opt for a reasonably just society on the grounds that they would not want to be on the lowest social rung if such a position were intolerable. Extending this line of thought, Rawls supposed that a just society would operate along the lines of the difference principle: degrees of inequality would be tolerated so long as inequality brought greater freedom and justice to all members of society, including those on the proverbial bottom rung. But then the late Rawls—he of Political Liberalism, his 1996 book that was, in effect, a response to his communitarian and feminist critics—partially came around to his earlier views about community. This he made clear in his elaboration on what he called “overlapping consensus,” where people enmeshed in communities could find political common ground with people enmeshed in other communities so long as the focus was indeed on common interests.

Kloppenberg maintains that the most “widely read version” of the communitarian critique of A Theory of Justice was written by one of Charles Taylor’s students, Michael Sandel, namely, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (1982). Kloppenberg writes: “From [Sandel’s communitarian] perspective, Rawls not only ignored, he ruled out of bounds, the most precious of all human commitments, the basic commitments that make us who we are” (99) Other communitarians influential to late-twentieth century American social thought include Robert Bellah, co-author of Habits of the Heart, and Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone. Putnam organized the communitarian Saguaro Seminar at Harvard, dedicated to “civic engagement in America,” which Obama attended in the late 1990s. This is one kernel of evidence that Kloppenberg applies to his thesis that Obama’s worldview is saturated with the lessons learned from the recent intellectual history of communitarianism. Another is that Obama learned from his community organizing days on the Chicago south side that people were more inclined to political activism if such activism was within the constraints of communities, usually religious. None of this convinces me that Obama is particularly familiar with the debates over Rawls that dominated one variant of social thought, but insofar as Obama does adhere to the principles of communitarianism, which both Reed and Kloppenberg maintain, from very different positions, how is this of consequence? Is communitarianism a viable political philosophy towards the ends of justice?

Count me a skeptic. I’ve always thought communitarianism a vacuous political philosophy. No, I don’t think it always operates as a cover for repression, though it often does, sometimes unwittingly. But I do think it works better in the descriptive than in the prescriptive. Of course critics were right to point out to Rawls that people are motivated by things other than individually-defined interests, as ever, and that such motivations should not be deemed irrational. But what does this mean going forward as a political philosophy?

Historical example is the best way I know how to demonstrate the problems of community as a political philosophy. In the late 1960s, blacks in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn, with political support from liberal Republican Mayor John Lindsay and with Ford Foundation largesse, undertook a controversial experiment in community control of their schools. Ocean Hill-Brownsville activists, influenced by Black Nationalist thinkers such as Malcolm X and Harold Cruse, believed that their schools were failing largely because of racism built into the city’s educational institutions. Community control activists sought to hire black teachers to replace predominantly white teachers, on the grounds that black teachers would not only better relate to black students, but also because, unlike their white counterparts, black teachers would not be beholden to “culture of poverty” presumptions that lowered expectations.

The Ocean Hill-Brownsville experiment in community control had powerful opponents, especially the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), the teacher’s union that represented the vast majority of New York City teachers, led by the outspoken Albert Shanker. Thanks to a flourishing public sector unionism in the 1960s, the UFT was powerful enough to help the centralized New York City Board of Education govern the largest school system in the nation. And as part of its collectively bargained contract, teachers were hired and promoted in accordance with a set of standardized tests that they took at several points along their career. This system, which the UFT described as objective and, thus, meritocratic, served whites well—especially Jews, who comprised a majority of the union—but left black teachers behind. Thus, as part of its community control prerogatives, Ocean Hill-Brownsville activists violated the terms of the UFT contract and fired several of the white teachers in their neighborhood, replacing them with black teachers or non-unionized whites more committed to the principles of community control, but less qualified by UFT standards. This, predictably, brought the wrath of the powerful and savvy Shanker. In a battle that included three citywide teacher’s strikes in the fall of 1968, the UFT decisively defeated Ocean Hill-Brownsville community controllers.

Although raw power defeated the Ocean Hill-Brownsville experiment in community control, power was not the only principle guiding it. The Ocean Hill-Brownsville communitarians believed that their values were more consistent with justice than the values of the white teachers. They contrasted their belief in mutuality with the individualistic materialism of the white middle-class world inhabited by the teachers. They theorized that they were better equipped to make education relevant to black children.

The problem, as explained by Gerald Podair in his excellent book, The Strike that Changed New York: Blacks, Whites, and the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Crisis, is that community meant different things to different people. Whereas Ocean Hill-Brownsville blacks could plausibly claim that their communitarianism served the ends of justice, if only because it was a response to institutionalized racism, community looked very different when whites in the Canarsie neighborhood of Brooklyn organized to bar blacks from being bussed into their schools. Jonathan Rieder, author of Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn Against Liberalism, calls the protest the result of “deferred white vengeance for the New York school crisis of 1968.” As one Canarsie resident addressed the media: “You and the God-damned liberals, you screamed along with the blacks in 1968 for community control... now whites want what the blacks have, and you say we can’t have it.”

So to return to Rawls: how could blacks and whites in Brooklyn have found an overlapping consensus? Didn’t “community” prevent such a consensus from prevailing? As both Podair and Rieder argue, a new consensus was formed, that between formerly antagonistic outer-borough Jews and the city’s mostly Catholic Italians. Blacks were left in the lurch, especially when the city responded to its fiscal crisis of the 1970s by cutting social services that blacks were most dependent upon. Blacks were powerless to stop these cuts because they no longer had many white allies in the city. The Jews whom blacks previously relied upon as a sort of cosmopolitan buffer between themselves and the rest of the white population could no longer be counted on as such, in part because of the anti-Semitic-baiting that accompanied the 1968 controversy.

To conclude: to me, the history of Ocean Hill-Brownsville serves as a warning against community as a political principle. Am I missing something?

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:

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:

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.

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).

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).