If you have not yet read Kevin Mattson's thoughtful response to my criticisms of his work, please do so right away. It is a wonderful thing when a scholar that I respect engages me in such serious fashion. In return, I plan to post a response soon. I also plan to respond to several of the excellent comments on my original post and on Mattson's reply. I am particularly interested in discussing Bill Fine's criticisms regarding my take on style and substance, a topic picked up later by LD. Alas, all of this will have to wait. I am in the midst of rushing to finish up a chapter of my manuscript in the hopes of meeting a self-imposed deadline.
In the meantime, I will pose a question that might generate commentary. My wise mentor Leo Ribuffo read Mattson's essay and wrote to me about the disagreement that Mattson and I seem to have about change and continuity. Leo and I often disagree about change and continuity with regards to recent US history. He thinks I overstate the case for change. He also wrote the following, which makes for a great discussion point: "Judging change and continuity is the hardest thing historians do and probably the main justification of our existence. As you and I have battled several times, the American (perhaps human) and certainly journalistic emphasis is on newness and if we are to make semi-sense of anything we need a hearing for the counter-position."
Agree? Disagree?
Tampilkan postingan dengan label Bill Fine. Tampilkan semua postingan
Tampilkan postingan dengan label Bill Fine. Tampilkan semua postingan
Selasa, 04 September 2012
Kamis, 09 Agustus 2012
James Livingston's Comedy of History
[Today I offer you a guest post from long-time USIH blog and conference participant, William "Bill" Fine. Enjoy! - TL]
In reviewing Jim Livingston’s recent USIH articles and a few posts in his Politics and Letters blog* I’m persuaded that he speaks out of a deeply personal desire to advance a view of history that supports present and future hopes---in spite of his assertion that the priority must be on “going back” to recover historical contexts. [“Museum”]
Livingston might be seen to contradict himself in declaring that the past both exists and does not exist, or that history can be a guide and yet be open to whatever meanings we might project onto it. For him, knowledge of reality is mediated by language and other cultural forms, it’s “what we can act upon,” so “the past as such [is] indistinguishable from what we have said about it.” At the same time, he makes numerous truth-claims. For example, he’s annoyed that Paul Murphy allegedly didn’t practice sufficient “estrangement” from the ‘20s context, on the assumption that it’s a foreign world. But the warrant for that truism isn’t obvious. It’s not that Murphy draws lessons from the past, it’s that he misunderstands its relation to our “different” historical moment, and so draws the wrong lessons. Maybe we can’t understand ‘20s intellectuals without “going back,” but we have to understand them before we can assume the need to do so. [“Museum”]
Both Livingston and his interlocutors soften contradictions into paradoxes that seem to capture the multi-dimensional character of historical practice. Two of Livingston’s best are: “You can’t ‘go back’ to the past without the conviction that it’s always already different from the present, but when you feel you’re just catching up with something from the past, that difference is erased”; and “the past is both real and artificial. Like God, it’s consequential because we created it. The past is what we make of it…but we make it from these raw materials, and meanwhile they make us.” [“Museum”]
Ray Haberski generously finds in the latter a way “around” the either/or of determinism versus freedom, while Dan Wickberg opines that inconsistency is a matter of perception, and at least our modern critical tools protect us from the temptations of totalism. [“Museum”] Along similar lines, William Cronon, in “Loving History,” in Perspectives on History, sees “two fundamentally competing orientations for approaching history”---summarized as "how did things get to be this way?" and “the past is a foreign country.” But he concludes that, if history is to retain its attraction for professionals and others, “we need them both.” What Livingston said of the Rutgers conference on W.A. Williams into might apply here: “there was too much consensus, too little conflict.”
We could shift from logic to rhetoric, to see where and how Livingston deploys points that otherwise might be thought irreconcilable. Sometimes, in criticizing another historian, such as Paul Murphy, or advancing his own positions, he implies a fairly certain knowledge, saying that some views “deny reality,” while others accord with “the world as it actually exists.” There is no particular reason not to take him at his word, as others do in responding to his truth-claims. But at other junctures, to defend against the charge he isn’t a proper historian, he adopts a different rhetoric, asserting at one point that there’s no “practical difference between history, the past as such, and historiography, our interpretations of the past, because all we actually know about the past is contained in those interpretations.” [“Williams”]
The past has a number of discrete though related meanings in his work. Sometimes it’s the almost infinitely plastic material we shape in acts of knowing, as if the very idea of representation implies a closed reality. At other times the past possesses “legibility,” a metaphor he uses repeatedly. The term implies something pre-constituted as text-like, decipherable by historical actors and historians. So, for ‘20s intellectuals, the divide between traditional and modern “became legible…as fundamental change in the meanings of work, labor, and necessity.” [“Museum”] In his article on W.A. Williams, “historical circumstances” themselves are described as directly legible, as are both the “original intent” of the Open Door and the immanence of our “ethical principles” in that setting.
On the other hand, the past is presented as virtually created and cumulatively enriched through narrativizing. In his blog, discussing Edward St. Aubyn’s “Patrick Melrose” novels dealing with the trauma of a main character raped by his father, Livingston criticizes those who say it’s a denial of real suffering to read such events as only “fantasy,” since in themselves they are “meaningless.” [“Pol and Letters” - 5.2.12]. Some might insist instead that human events are by definition meaningful, though it’s not clear how much difference it makes -- to the traumatized, for instance---whether stories recount things that actually occurred. Still, if events lack their own legibility, in what sense can they be “falsified” by narratives, except by contrast to some other unnamed device? In any case, here narratives produced over time by different actors accumulate richer meanings, redeeming traumatic pasts, rendering events “significant…as moments in a meaningful sequence,” a story that can be retold. [“Politics and Letters” - 5.18.12]
Livingston’s freewheeling constructionism implies an ontological and epistemological pluralism that stands over against what he calls “metaphysical” accounts that presume an objective, realist history, a “Totalism” or “Absolute”; monolithic, deterministic, and typically declensionist. As he puts it at one point, “the truth of historical reality is always plural. The rhetorics are the reality.” [“Museum”] Perhaps he tends to universalize the interpretive chaos of our historical moment; either way, that wouldn’t prove we don’t live in a block universe after all.
Sometimes he goes further, insisting that good history confirms an emancipatory potential immanent in the historical process, and that history tends toward the good---or will if we think and act properly. For example, in his article on Williams, Livingston writes approvingly that:
“Williams assumed that a post-imperialist future was legible in the original intent of what he called the “imperialism of idealism” and in the real differences over diplomatic means and ends…. Without that assumption,…his critique…stops making sense because its fulfillment would then require the evasion of the world as it actually exists [which] would not allow for history as a way of learning. If the ethical principles of a post-imperialist future do not reside in the historical circumstances…then our only honorable recourse is to repudiate and escape those circumstances….”
Later, in the same essay, he generalizes what’s at stake:
“When people start wishing that things were better and assuring you that they won’t be, largely because nothing has ever changed except for the worse, you know that you’re in the presence of Kantian radicals who lack, or despise, historical consciousness---you’re in the presence of metaphysicians who know the past cannot be a guide to the present because it is the repository of myths, lies, deceptions, and their attendant moral atrocities.”
Livingston is fond of drawing a contrast between Kant and Hegel [though he seems to mention the former by name more than the latter], which he understands in part as the contrast between a morality that stands apart from and tries to impose itself on the world, and one that sees morality to “reside in and flow from historical circumstances,” as he wrote in his “Response to Cotkin.” [JHI 69, 1, April 2008] This may be taken as a descriptive sociological point---and Livingston among others have shown how “the social self” developed out of the interaction of Hegelian idealism and pragmatism, along with feminism. But to me this is quite different than using it to build a philosophy of history.
In “Socialism Without Socialists” [“Politics and Letters” - 7.25.12] Livingston challenges the pessimists of the left, using the terms of Kant vs Hegel to frame a stark choice: one embraces the present, recognizes that the left is everywhere, and “sees the ethical principles of socialism residing in and flowing from historical circumstances…not as ideas imposed from elsewhere,” partly because cultural has replaced political change. The other, from a fixed point of moralistic purity, gives up on a hopeless world, taking refuge in a saving remnant with no one to save, “leading us away from the world as it is.”
Whatever case might be made for Livingston’s argument that the left has been victorious, here he gives full-out expression to a historical teleology almost beyond intention or agency, a progressive conductorless orchestration that “recognize[s] what we ought to be doing in what we’re already doing.” [cf. his quotation of an early, still very Hegelian Dewey in the Williams article] Unless we accept these ideas, we’re denying reality and destroying all hope and possibility; the study of the past must affirm what present circumstances demand.
At the outset I speculated that Livingston is motivated by “deeply personal desire,” which of course goes far beyond what I could know, much less demonstrate, and it’s not terribly relevant anyway in assessing his work. I’m not sure how much is accountable as an act of will in depressing times, and how much flows from a secure confidence in his comic-religious, metaphysical vision. Because he so often frames his arguments in terms of the either/or of hope vs. despair, my guess is that there’s a good bit of trying in his believing. His efforts to show empirically that left-liberalism has “won” notwithstanding, my guess is that most people will see it as a framework brought to history---a leap of sorts---rather than supported by it. Indeed, if he is as much of a Hegelian as I think, it’s not easy to see how it ever could be, partly because we’re not done yet.
Anyway, seeing what comedy sometimes makes of irony, I miss a sense of the obdurate, of difficult trade-offs, the complexities of unintended consequences, the limitations of narrative----and a sense of the past as/in the present, the world to which we accommodate ourselves. I’m inclined to read his comic teleology as more a reflex of its historical moment than a way beyond.
---------------------------
* I draw on the following sources and indicate them following quotations:
USIH
- “Near Dark at the Museum,” 7/12/12; and
- “William Appleman Williams: Fifty Years After His Book on the Tragedy of American Diplomacy,” 7/19/12.
Politics and Letters
a. “The Weight of the Past,” Part 1 (4/22/12), Part 2 (5/2/12), and Part 3 (5/18/12);
b. “Socialism Without Socialists, or, What’s the Matter With Leftists?” 7/25/12.
In reviewing Jim Livingston’s recent USIH articles and a few posts in his Politics and Letters blog* I’m persuaded that he speaks out of a deeply personal desire to advance a view of history that supports present and future hopes---in spite of his assertion that the priority must be on “going back” to recover historical contexts. [“Museum”]
Livingston might be seen to contradict himself in declaring that the past both exists and does not exist, or that history can be a guide and yet be open to whatever meanings we might project onto it. For him, knowledge of reality is mediated by language and other cultural forms, it’s “what we can act upon,” so “the past as such [is] indistinguishable from what we have said about it.” At the same time, he makes numerous truth-claims. For example, he’s annoyed that Paul Murphy allegedly didn’t practice sufficient “estrangement” from the ‘20s context, on the assumption that it’s a foreign world. But the warrant for that truism isn’t obvious. It’s not that Murphy draws lessons from the past, it’s that he misunderstands its relation to our “different” historical moment, and so draws the wrong lessons. Maybe we can’t understand ‘20s intellectuals without “going back,” but we have to understand them before we can assume the need to do so. [“Museum”]
Both Livingston and his interlocutors soften contradictions into paradoxes that seem to capture the multi-dimensional character of historical practice. Two of Livingston’s best are: “You can’t ‘go back’ to the past without the conviction that it’s always already different from the present, but when you feel you’re just catching up with something from the past, that difference is erased”; and “the past is both real and artificial. Like God, it’s consequential because we created it. The past is what we make of it…but we make it from these raw materials, and meanwhile they make us.” [“Museum”]
Ray Haberski generously finds in the latter a way “around” the either/or of determinism versus freedom, while Dan Wickberg opines that inconsistency is a matter of perception, and at least our modern critical tools protect us from the temptations of totalism. [“Museum”] Along similar lines, William Cronon, in “Loving History,” in Perspectives on History, sees “two fundamentally competing orientations for approaching history”---summarized as "how did things get to be this way?" and “the past is a foreign country.” But he concludes that, if history is to retain its attraction for professionals and others, “we need them both.” What Livingston said of the Rutgers conference on W.A. Williams into might apply here: “there was too much consensus, too little conflict.”
We could shift from logic to rhetoric, to see where and how Livingston deploys points that otherwise might be thought irreconcilable. Sometimes, in criticizing another historian, such as Paul Murphy, or advancing his own positions, he implies a fairly certain knowledge, saying that some views “deny reality,” while others accord with “the world as it actually exists.” There is no particular reason not to take him at his word, as others do in responding to his truth-claims. But at other junctures, to defend against the charge he isn’t a proper historian, he adopts a different rhetoric, asserting at one point that there’s no “practical difference between history, the past as such, and historiography, our interpretations of the past, because all we actually know about the past is contained in those interpretations.” [“Williams”]
The past has a number of discrete though related meanings in his work. Sometimes it’s the almost infinitely plastic material we shape in acts of knowing, as if the very idea of representation implies a closed reality. At other times the past possesses “legibility,” a metaphor he uses repeatedly. The term implies something pre-constituted as text-like, decipherable by historical actors and historians. So, for ‘20s intellectuals, the divide between traditional and modern “became legible…as fundamental change in the meanings of work, labor, and necessity.” [“Museum”] In his article on W.A. Williams, “historical circumstances” themselves are described as directly legible, as are both the “original intent” of the Open Door and the immanence of our “ethical principles” in that setting.
On the other hand, the past is presented as virtually created and cumulatively enriched through narrativizing. In his blog, discussing Edward St. Aubyn’s “Patrick Melrose” novels dealing with the trauma of a main character raped by his father, Livingston criticizes those who say it’s a denial of real suffering to read such events as only “fantasy,” since in themselves they are “meaningless.” [“Pol and Letters” - 5.2.12]. Some might insist instead that human events are by definition meaningful, though it’s not clear how much difference it makes -- to the traumatized, for instance---whether stories recount things that actually occurred. Still, if events lack their own legibility, in what sense can they be “falsified” by narratives, except by contrast to some other unnamed device? In any case, here narratives produced over time by different actors accumulate richer meanings, redeeming traumatic pasts, rendering events “significant…as moments in a meaningful sequence,” a story that can be retold. [“Politics and Letters” - 5.18.12]
Livingston’s freewheeling constructionism implies an ontological and epistemological pluralism that stands over against what he calls “metaphysical” accounts that presume an objective, realist history, a “Totalism” or “Absolute”; monolithic, deterministic, and typically declensionist. As he puts it at one point, “the truth of historical reality is always plural. The rhetorics are the reality.” [“Museum”] Perhaps he tends to universalize the interpretive chaos of our historical moment; either way, that wouldn’t prove we don’t live in a block universe after all.
Sometimes he goes further, insisting that good history confirms an emancipatory potential immanent in the historical process, and that history tends toward the good---or will if we think and act properly. For example, in his article on Williams, Livingston writes approvingly that:
“Williams assumed that a post-imperialist future was legible in the original intent of what he called the “imperialism of idealism” and in the real differences over diplomatic means and ends…. Without that assumption,…his critique…stops making sense because its fulfillment would then require the evasion of the world as it actually exists [which] would not allow for history as a way of learning. If the ethical principles of a post-imperialist future do not reside in the historical circumstances…then our only honorable recourse is to repudiate and escape those circumstances….”
Later, in the same essay, he generalizes what’s at stake:
“When people start wishing that things were better and assuring you that they won’t be, largely because nothing has ever changed except for the worse, you know that you’re in the presence of Kantian radicals who lack, or despise, historical consciousness---you’re in the presence of metaphysicians who know the past cannot be a guide to the present because it is the repository of myths, lies, deceptions, and their attendant moral atrocities.”
Livingston is fond of drawing a contrast between Kant and Hegel [though he seems to mention the former by name more than the latter], which he understands in part as the contrast between a morality that stands apart from and tries to impose itself on the world, and one that sees morality to “reside in and flow from historical circumstances,” as he wrote in his “Response to Cotkin.” [JHI 69, 1, April 2008] This may be taken as a descriptive sociological point---and Livingston among others have shown how “the social self” developed out of the interaction of Hegelian idealism and pragmatism, along with feminism. But to me this is quite different than using it to build a philosophy of history.
In “Socialism Without Socialists” [“Politics and Letters” - 7.25.12] Livingston challenges the pessimists of the left, using the terms of Kant vs Hegel to frame a stark choice: one embraces the present, recognizes that the left is everywhere, and “sees the ethical principles of socialism residing in and flowing from historical circumstances…not as ideas imposed from elsewhere,” partly because cultural has replaced political change. The other, from a fixed point of moralistic purity, gives up on a hopeless world, taking refuge in a saving remnant with no one to save, “leading us away from the world as it is.”
Whatever case might be made for Livingston’s argument that the left has been victorious, here he gives full-out expression to a historical teleology almost beyond intention or agency, a progressive conductorless orchestration that “recognize[s] what we ought to be doing in what we’re already doing.” [cf. his quotation of an early, still very Hegelian Dewey in the Williams article] Unless we accept these ideas, we’re denying reality and destroying all hope and possibility; the study of the past must affirm what present circumstances demand.
At the outset I speculated that Livingston is motivated by “deeply personal desire,” which of course goes far beyond what I could know, much less demonstrate, and it’s not terribly relevant anyway in assessing his work. I’m not sure how much is accountable as an act of will in depressing times, and how much flows from a secure confidence in his comic-religious, metaphysical vision. Because he so often frames his arguments in terms of the either/or of hope vs. despair, my guess is that there’s a good bit of trying in his believing. His efforts to show empirically that left-liberalism has “won” notwithstanding, my guess is that most people will see it as a framework brought to history---a leap of sorts---rather than supported by it. Indeed, if he is as much of a Hegelian as I think, it’s not easy to see how it ever could be, partly because we’re not done yet.
Anyway, seeing what comedy sometimes makes of irony, I miss a sense of the obdurate, of difficult trade-offs, the complexities of unintended consequences, the limitations of narrative----and a sense of the past as/in the present, the world to which we accommodate ourselves. I’m inclined to read his comic teleology as more a reflex of its historical moment than a way beyond.
---------------------------
* I draw on the following sources and indicate them following quotations:
USIH
- “Near Dark at the Museum,” 7/12/12; and
- “William Appleman Williams: Fifty Years After His Book on the Tragedy of American Diplomacy,” 7/19/12.
Politics and Letters
a. “The Weight of the Past,” Part 1 (4/22/12), Part 2 (5/2/12), and Part 3 (5/18/12);
b. “Socialism Without Socialists, or, What’s the Matter With Leftists?” 7/25/12.
Jumat, 15 Juni 2012
The Sensibility of Historians
By L.D. Burnett
What gives Andrew Hartman the authority to eschew (some of) the methodological commitments of Richard Hofstadter or Daniel Wickberg? The same thing that gives Daniel Wickberg the authority to eschew (some of) the methodological commitments of Thomas Haskell and Michel Foucault. As historians, they evidently share a certain sensibility, a certain sense of responsibility, to themselves and to their profession. As I hope to show in this post, this particular sensibility of historians is what makes our work difficult, and what makes it matter.
In the comment thread on Andrew Hartman's recent post about Kevin Mattson's oeuvre, Bill Fine challenged Andrew Hartman to a friendly fracas regarding matters of style and substance in historiography. Their discussion explicitly addressed and implicitly raised a number of questions. Is "style versus substance" a heuristically useful or a deceptively divisive binary? Is style insubstantial? Do substantial differences come down to matters of style? Or, to paraphrase the kid from Stand By Me, "What the hell is style, anyway?"
It seems that for the purposes of this post Hartman is picking up the term straight from Mattson's Rebels All!. Hartman doesn't define how Mattson uses "style," but he dismisses the significance of Mattson's conclusions about it. Hartman writes:
Situating the work of Hofstadter as a contribution to a larger -- and better, in the sense of being more comprehensive -- inquiry that takes "sensibilities" as its object of study is just one of the more daring rhetorical moves Wickberg makes in his essay, "What Is the History of Sensibilities? On Cultural Histories, Old and New." As part of making his case for the "superior" scope of "sensibility as an object of study,"[2] Wickberg encompasses Hofstadter's historical understanding within his own. That's one way to claim your place in the profession.
Hartman doesn't challenge Fine's reading of Wickberg, or Wickberg's reading of Hofstadter. However, he does re-situate Wickberg in relation to Hofstadter. Hartman places Wickberg alongside "James, Dewey, Foucault, Derrida, [and] Hofstadter," only to dismiss them all as historians who have "a tendency" -- might one say a style, or perhaps a sensibility? -- "to overstate the conflation of style and substance." That's another way to claim your place in the profession.
So, to review: Hartman challenges Mattson's conclusions on the grounds that giving undue weight to "style" is a methodological mistake. Fine challenges Hartman's binaristic division of style and substance, invoking Wickberg's reading of Hofstadter. Hartman groups Wickberg and Hofstadter together with Derrida and Foucault, which at first glance seems like high praise for Wickberg. However, lumping historians together with theorists -- especially these theorists -- and suggesting that they think alike is not exactly a compliment. Indeed, as I noted above, the fact that Thomas Haskell purports to explore the history of sensibilities but does so through a "rather abstract and speculative argument" -- that he views his object theoretically, rather than historically -- is precisely what draws Wickberg's criticism.[3]
Wickberg and Haskell take a similar approach, though, when it comes to Foucault. However, Wickberg seems more willing to acknowledge the usefulness of Foucault's theories than Haskell, who accuses Foucault (and Stanley Fish) of playfully or perversely choosing to operate under particular methodological and epistemic assumptions that "constitute a blank check for tendentiousness."[4] Wickberg is more moderate in his critique of the French theorist, as one might expect from a historian whose recent challenge to the purported consensus regarding the state of the field of intellectual history included the suggestion that we "listen to Foucault instead" of assuming that contexts (and therefore the questions that come with them) are not in many ways fashioned by our very inquiry.[5]
Nevertheless, Wickberg claims, Foucault's usefulness is limited, because Foucault's vision is limiting. Wickberg bases this claim on the same pragmatic ground that Haskell occupies: what does Foucault get us? Here is Wickberg's answer:
The "autonomy of historical understanding" can refer to (at least!) two things. On the one hand, it refers to historical epistemology as distinct from and free from the constraining necessity of (social) scientific reasoning -- historical inquiry as ideographic rather than nomothetic.[7] In this sense, Wickberg can set aside an exclusively Foucauldian approach because it subsumes and effaces the particularities of the past beneath a homogenizing general theory about power. For the same reason, Wickberg can sharply criticize Haskell's treatment of "sensibilities" for its abstraction; rather than focusing on concrete historical manifestations of a particular humanitarian sensibility, Haskell discusses "the humanitarian sensibility" via theoretical, hypothetical speculations.
But the autonomy of historical understanding means more than just the epistemological distinctiveness of historical inquiry; it can also refer to the competence of the professional historian's intellectual and moral judgment as such an inquirer. The historian must exercise autonomy; he or she must be able to adjudicate between competing visions and versions of the past. This autonomy is not the automatic possession of the historian; it is the hard-won habitus of seasoned practitioners who, by their participation in the profession, agree to work within a set of basic norms and constraints that Haskell identifies elsewhere as characteristic of a pragmatic objectivity. Among other things, professional historians are committed
Ultimately, the legitimacy of Wickberg's challenge to Foucauldian theory, as well as the legitimacy of Hartman's challenge to Wickberg, or Fine's challenge to Hartman, derive from these historians' autonomy as members in good standing of what Haskell calls the community of competent inquirers, a community whose epistemic integrity as a whole depends on the adjudicative integrity -- the intellectual morality -- of its individual members.[9]
The challenge Fine has issued to Hartman regarding the finer points at the heart of 1960s historiography calls into question not only Hartman's methodology, but also his moral vision. Understood in terms of Wickberg's contrarian state-of-the-field essay, Fine is asking Hartman to account for the questions he asks, and the way he frames problems, precisely because this is a way that precludes other approaches. Fine wants Hartman to explain what he gains, and also to acknowledge what he loses, by eschewing approaches that do not assume sharp distinctions between "style and substance."
Just as Fine demonstrates his autonomy by asking the question, so also Hartman asserts his autonomy in giving his answer. His response to Fine demonstrates the freedom of historians to choose when to follow established models and when to set them aside. While a U.S. intellectual historian might be expected to be familiar with "James, Dewey, Foucault, Derrida, Hofstadter, Wickberg, etc.," he or she is under no obligation to see matters just as these scholars have viewed them individually or collectively. (Is there anything, I wonder, that they have all viewed in like manner?) Indeed, the historian's obligation is to exercise his or her own best judgment as a critical, competitive member of the "community of the competent."[10]
Nevertheless, I find Hartman's response to Fine somewhat unsatisfying, precisely because it does not draw upon the full authority of Hartman's moral autonomy as a historian. Hartman has explained that he doesn't like the way the history of sensibilities seems to flatten the very distinctions he would prefer to draw in sharp relief. But what he does not explain is why it is important to him -- methodologically, epistemologically, ethically -- to draw that sharp distinction.
Why is it essential for Hartman to draw a sharp distinction between the New Left and the post-60s conservative movement? I am not suggesting that such sharp distinctions don't exist, nor accepting that they do. What I want to know is this: what does that distinction get Hartman, and what does it get us? In other words, I would like to know the practical consequences of choosing to see post 1960s conservatism as sharply distinct from all the varieties of conservatism that came before.
Again, I'm not questioning the accuracy or the adequacy of that understanding; Andrew is the expert here. I just want to know how that understanding fits within Hartman's vision of the 60s and the Culture Wars (and I may have to wait for the book on that), and how that understanding in turn fits in with his more general "vision of human life."
Of course, by asserting that a historiographical method does in fact express a particular and ethically valent vision of human life, I am identifying myself with the sensibilities of similarly minded historians. However, that is not the same thing as identifying myself as a historian of sensibilities. That methodological approach is certainly well-represented in my reading list and in my graduate program, and it may or may not be well-represented in this blog post. But the extent to which I will adopt it or not is a matter of my own autonomous judgment as a historian.
This is my ethical obligation to my fellow-practitioners: to choose the methodological approach which I believe will allow me to give the best possible account of my subject, while at the same time accounting as best I can for the methods I use to attain that goal. That professional ethos characterizes the sensibility of historians, a sensibility I am pleased and proud to share with Andrew Hartman, Bill Fine, Dan Wickberg, and all the other fractious combatants in this fracas of the competent.
______________
[1]Daniel Wickberg, "What Is the History of Sensibilities? On Cultural Histories, Old and New," The American Historical Review, Vol. 112, No. 3 (June 2007), 677.
[2]Wickberg 664.
[3]Wickberg 680.
[4]Thomas Haskell, "Justifying Academic Freedom in the Era of Power/Knowledge," in Objectivity Is Not Neutrality: Explanatory Schemes in History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1998), 212.
[5]Daniel Wickberg, "The Present and Future of American Intellectual History," U.S. Intellectual History: The Blog for the Society for U.S. Intellectual History (S-USIH), 3 April 2012. http://us-intellectual-history.blogspot.com/2012/04/present-and-future-of-american.html Accessed 15 June 2012, 7:45 a.m.
[6]Wickberg, "Sensibilities," 674 (italics mine).
[7]The most systematic explication of this distinction that I have read to date is Louis Mink's essay on the subject. A perceived need to define and defend the distinctive epistemic and disciplinary autonomy of history, especially intellectual history, emerges quite clearly in many of the essays presented at the Wingspread conference and subsequently published by Higham and Conkin. See Louis O. Mink, "The Autonomy of Historical Understanding," History and Theory 5, no. 1 (1966): 24-47; John Higham and Paul Conkin, editors, New Directions in American Intellectual History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1979), especially the essays by Hollinger, Wood, Ross, May and Haskell.
[8] Thomas L. Haskell, "Objectivity is not Neutrality: Rhetoric vs. Practice in Peter Novick's That Noble Dream," History and Theory, Vol. 29 No. 2 (May, 1990), 132.
[9]Haskell, "Academic Freedom," 176.
[10] Haskell, "Academic Freedom," 178.
What gives Andrew Hartman the authority to eschew (some of) the methodological commitments of Richard Hofstadter or Daniel Wickberg? The same thing that gives Daniel Wickberg the authority to eschew (some of) the methodological commitments of Thomas Haskell and Michel Foucault. As historians, they evidently share a certain sensibility, a certain sense of responsibility, to themselves and to their profession. As I hope to show in this post, this particular sensibility of historians is what makes our work difficult, and what makes it matter.
In the comment thread on Andrew Hartman's recent post about Kevin Mattson's oeuvre, Bill Fine challenged Andrew Hartman to a friendly fracas regarding matters of style and substance in historiography. Their discussion explicitly addressed and implicitly raised a number of questions. Is "style versus substance" a heuristically useful or a deceptively divisive binary? Is style insubstantial? Do substantial differences come down to matters of style? Or, to paraphrase the kid from Stand By Me, "What the hell is style, anyway?"
It seems that for the purposes of this post Hartman is picking up the term straight from Mattson's Rebels All!. Hartman doesn't define how Mattson uses "style," but he dismisses the significance of Mattson's conclusions about it. Hartman writes:
I find Mattson’s argument that conservatives are the legatees of sixties radicalism very problematic. Conservatives are rowdy anti-establishmentarians in style. So what? In the first place, sixties radicals were hardly the first Americans to evince such a style. But more importantly, style should not always be conflated with substance, especially in this case. Sixties radicals were anti-establishment because they were against the war, racism, and sexism they thought endemic to the establishment. Obviously, the same cannot be said about conservatism.Fine takes issue with the sharp distinction between style and substance that Hartman wants to draw "especially in this case," and instead offers "a richer, if less precise meaning" for the term. Fine references Hofstadter's study of the "paranoid style," and invokes Dan Wickberg's reading of Hofstadter (and others) as making a "contribution to the history of sensibilities."[1]
Situating the work of Hofstadter as a contribution to a larger -- and better, in the sense of being more comprehensive -- inquiry that takes "sensibilities" as its object of study is just one of the more daring rhetorical moves Wickberg makes in his essay, "What Is the History of Sensibilities? On Cultural Histories, Old and New." As part of making his case for the "superior" scope of "sensibility as an object of study,"[2] Wickberg encompasses Hofstadter's historical understanding within his own. That's one way to claim your place in the profession.
Hartman doesn't challenge Fine's reading of Wickberg, or Wickberg's reading of Hofstadter. However, he does re-situate Wickberg in relation to Hofstadter. Hartman places Wickberg alongside "James, Dewey, Foucault, Derrida, [and] Hofstadter," only to dismiss them all as historians who have "a tendency" -- might one say a style, or perhaps a sensibility? -- "to overstate the conflation of style and substance." That's another way to claim your place in the profession.
So, to review: Hartman challenges Mattson's conclusions on the grounds that giving undue weight to "style" is a methodological mistake. Fine challenges Hartman's binaristic division of style and substance, invoking Wickberg's reading of Hofstadter. Hartman groups Wickberg and Hofstadter together with Derrida and Foucault, which at first glance seems like high praise for Wickberg. However, lumping historians together with theorists -- especially these theorists -- and suggesting that they think alike is not exactly a compliment. Indeed, as I noted above, the fact that Thomas Haskell purports to explore the history of sensibilities but does so through a "rather abstract and speculative argument" -- that he views his object theoretically, rather than historically -- is precisely what draws Wickberg's criticism.[3]
Wickberg and Haskell take a similar approach, though, when it comes to Foucault. However, Wickberg seems more willing to acknowledge the usefulness of Foucault's theories than Haskell, who accuses Foucault (and Stanley Fish) of playfully or perversely choosing to operate under particular methodological and epistemic assumptions that "constitute a blank check for tendentiousness."[4] Wickberg is more moderate in his critique of the French theorist, as one might expect from a historian whose recent challenge to the purported consensus regarding the state of the field of intellectual history included the suggestion that we "listen to Foucault instead" of assuming that contexts (and therefore the questions that come with them) are not in many ways fashioned by our very inquiry.[5]
Nevertheless, Wickberg claims, Foucault's usefulness is limited, because Foucault's vision is limiting. Wickberg bases this claim on the same pragmatic ground that Haskell occupies: what does Foucault get us? Here is Wickberg's answer:
The overwhelming focus on instrumentalizing culture as a tool of power in some of the dominant forms of cultural history finds no room for those elements of culture that cannot be implicated in power relations. Culture is not power, nor is power the only or the most important element of culture. Power is but one dimension of culture, a dimension that might be more or less important for the historian and analyst, depending upon the concrete specifics of the cultural moment being studied. It is an impoverished vision of human life that insists on turning people's whole ways of experiencing, perceiving, and feeling into expressions of one dimension of human life.[6]What I find most striking here is not the fact that a cultural and intellectual historian who has taken the linguistic turn dares to challenge the hegemony of Foucault (though I have to admit that I somehow missed this enchanted doorway to the Land Beyond Power/Knowledge in earlier readings of this essay). Instead, what is so singular -- and at the same time so typical, so exemplary -- about this assessment of Foucauldian historiography is the way Wickberg grounds his critique in the autonomy of historical understanding.
The "autonomy of historical understanding" can refer to (at least!) two things. On the one hand, it refers to historical epistemology as distinct from and free from the constraining necessity of (social) scientific reasoning -- historical inquiry as ideographic rather than nomothetic.[7] In this sense, Wickberg can set aside an exclusively Foucauldian approach because it subsumes and effaces the particularities of the past beneath a homogenizing general theory about power. For the same reason, Wickberg can sharply criticize Haskell's treatment of "sensibilities" for its abstraction; rather than focusing on concrete historical manifestations of a particular humanitarian sensibility, Haskell discusses "the humanitarian sensibility" via theoretical, hypothetical speculations.
But the autonomy of historical understanding means more than just the epistemological distinctiveness of historical inquiry; it can also refer to the competence of the professional historian's intellectual and moral judgment as such an inquirer. The historian must exercise autonomy; he or she must be able to adjudicate between competing visions and versions of the past. This autonomy is not the automatic possession of the historian; it is the hard-won habitus of seasoned practitioners who, by their participation in the profession, agree to work within a set of basic norms and constraints that Haskell identifies elsewhere as characteristic of a pragmatic objectivity. Among other things, professional historians are committed
to do such things as abandon wishful thinking, assimilate bad news, discard pleasing interpretations that cannot pass elementary tests of evidence and logic, and, most important of all, suspend or bracket [their] own perceptions long enough to enter sympathetically into the alien and possibly repugnant perspectives of rival thinkers.[8]Historians' demonstrable commitment to this pragmatic objectivity -- verifiable because it is testable, contestable and gamely contested by their fellow practitioners, as Fine and Hartman so congenially demonstrate -- is what gives someone like Dan Wickberg the professional authority to say things like, "Foucault is of limited use here." Further, he does so not only on epistemic but also on moral grounds -- and those grounds are situated within his own understanding as a historian, and within his own understanding of history as a humanistic discipline, an understanding that, if not acquired in the contest, was doubtless sharpened by it. Wickberg's rejection of a narrow Foucauldian vision is not based on an appeal to extra-professional norms and standards, but rather grows out of a professional commitment to a particular way of understanding the past, a way that would be morally indefensible if it were not methodologically sound -- at least methodologically sound enough to be put to the test in the pages of the AHR. In a similar way, Hartman's take on the (in)sufficiency of the history of sensibilities as a methodological approach has already come under an (informal) kind of peer review, and will be subjected to the collective critical scrutiny of the professional community.
Ultimately, the legitimacy of Wickberg's challenge to Foucauldian theory, as well as the legitimacy of Hartman's challenge to Wickberg, or Fine's challenge to Hartman, derive from these historians' autonomy as members in good standing of what Haskell calls the community of competent inquirers, a community whose epistemic integrity as a whole depends on the adjudicative integrity -- the intellectual morality -- of its individual members.[9]
The challenge Fine has issued to Hartman regarding the finer points at the heart of 1960s historiography calls into question not only Hartman's methodology, but also his moral vision. Understood in terms of Wickberg's contrarian state-of-the-field essay, Fine is asking Hartman to account for the questions he asks, and the way he frames problems, precisely because this is a way that precludes other approaches. Fine wants Hartman to explain what he gains, and also to acknowledge what he loses, by eschewing approaches that do not assume sharp distinctions between "style and substance."
Just as Fine demonstrates his autonomy by asking the question, so also Hartman asserts his autonomy in giving his answer. His response to Fine demonstrates the freedom of historians to choose when to follow established models and when to set them aside. While a U.S. intellectual historian might be expected to be familiar with "James, Dewey, Foucault, Derrida, Hofstadter, Wickberg, etc.," he or she is under no obligation to see matters just as these scholars have viewed them individually or collectively. (Is there anything, I wonder, that they have all viewed in like manner?) Indeed, the historian's obligation is to exercise his or her own best judgment as a critical, competitive member of the "community of the competent."[10]
Nevertheless, I find Hartman's response to Fine somewhat unsatisfying, precisely because it does not draw upon the full authority of Hartman's moral autonomy as a historian. Hartman has explained that he doesn't like the way the history of sensibilities seems to flatten the very distinctions he would prefer to draw in sharp relief. But what he does not explain is why it is important to him -- methodologically, epistemologically, ethically -- to draw that sharp distinction.
Why is it essential for Hartman to draw a sharp distinction between the New Left and the post-60s conservative movement? I am not suggesting that such sharp distinctions don't exist, nor accepting that they do. What I want to know is this: what does that distinction get Hartman, and what does it get us? In other words, I would like to know the practical consequences of choosing to see post 1960s conservatism as sharply distinct from all the varieties of conservatism that came before.
Again, I'm not questioning the accuracy or the adequacy of that understanding; Andrew is the expert here. I just want to know how that understanding fits within Hartman's vision of the 60s and the Culture Wars (and I may have to wait for the book on that), and how that understanding in turn fits in with his more general "vision of human life."
Of course, by asserting that a historiographical method does in fact express a particular and ethically valent vision of human life, I am identifying myself with the sensibilities of similarly minded historians. However, that is not the same thing as identifying myself as a historian of sensibilities. That methodological approach is certainly well-represented in my reading list and in my graduate program, and it may or may not be well-represented in this blog post. But the extent to which I will adopt it or not is a matter of my own autonomous judgment as a historian.
This is my ethical obligation to my fellow-practitioners: to choose the methodological approach which I believe will allow me to give the best possible account of my subject, while at the same time accounting as best I can for the methods I use to attain that goal. That professional ethos characterizes the sensibility of historians, a sensibility I am pleased and proud to share with Andrew Hartman, Bill Fine, Dan Wickberg, and all the other fractious combatants in this fracas of the competent.
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[1]Daniel Wickberg, "What Is the History of Sensibilities? On Cultural Histories, Old and New," The American Historical Review, Vol. 112, No. 3 (June 2007), 677.
[2]Wickberg 664.
[3]Wickberg 680.
[4]Thomas Haskell, "Justifying Academic Freedom in the Era of Power/Knowledge," in Objectivity Is Not Neutrality: Explanatory Schemes in History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1998), 212.
[5]Daniel Wickberg, "The Present and Future of American Intellectual History," U.S. Intellectual History: The Blog for the Society for U.S. Intellectual History (S-USIH), 3 April 2012. http://us-intellectual-history.blogspot.com/2012/04/present-and-future-of-american.html Accessed 15 June 2012, 7:45 a.m.
[6]Wickberg, "Sensibilities," 674 (italics mine).
[7]The most systematic explication of this distinction that I have read to date is Louis Mink's essay on the subject. A perceived need to define and defend the distinctive epistemic and disciplinary autonomy of history, especially intellectual history, emerges quite clearly in many of the essays presented at the Wingspread conference and subsequently published by Higham and Conkin. See Louis O. Mink, "The Autonomy of Historical Understanding," History and Theory 5, no. 1 (1966): 24-47; John Higham and Paul Conkin, editors, New Directions in American Intellectual History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1979), especially the essays by Hollinger, Wood, Ross, May and Haskell.
[8] Thomas L. Haskell, "Objectivity is not Neutrality: Rhetoric vs. Practice in Peter Novick's That Noble Dream," History and Theory, Vol. 29 No. 2 (May, 1990), 132.
[9]Haskell, "Academic Freedom," 176.
[10] Haskell, "Academic Freedom," 178.
Sabtu, 07 April 2012
Where Am I?
In the last paragraph of his essay on "The Present and Future of Intellectual History," Daniel Wickberg observes, "We have yet to have a really good history of American intellectual history, one that explains how we got where we are, how much our approaches are indebted to those of the past and the assumptions they made, and how much we have departed from them."
What I find most interesting about this statement is not the claim it makes about the need for a history of the field, but the way that it frames an epistemic problem in spatial terms. We need to understand where we are. Our methodological and theoretical commitments are approaches, and they may retrace older routes to knowledge or depart from them.
Similarly, in his reflection on the role this blog might play in the future of intellectual history, Ray Haberski writes, "This is a place where intellectual historians (emerging and emerged) offer a body of work to be discussed by graduate students and senior scholars without pretense that they serve as an official organ for the field" (emphasis mine).
I draw attention to this language not because it is jarring, but because it is utterly unremarkable.
It
This is the dual purpose of field exams in a PhD program -- mapping the terrain and vetting its custodians. Professors may joke that there is an element of hazing involved in the process, but I'm afraid they're also telling the truth. I'll find out for myself next year when I take my qualifying exams. I am not looking forward to it.
To "look forward" to the future is to conceive of the temporal in particularly linear directional terms. Indeed, this way of thinking about time is the conceptual foundation for both whiggish history and its dour doppelgänger, the narrative of declension. It is, I suppose, the conceptual foundation for the Western idea of history, period.
And what is a "conceptual foundation," but a metaphor for knowledge-as-edifice? Like the concept of a "field," the concept of knowledge as something that is "built" has proved a serviceable metaphor for understanding this scholarly enterprise in which professional historians are engaged. In That Noble Dream, Peter Novick characterizes the beginnings of professional history in America as an era of "brick-making," an image borrowed from the public writing and private correspondence of J. Franklin Jameson, the founding editor of the American Historical Review. Novick writes,
This conception of the historian's task -- the patient manufacture of four-square factualist bricks to be fitted together in the ultimate objective history -- had enormous professional advantages. It offered an almost tangible image of steady, cumulative progress. Although creating a grand synthesis might require an architectonic vision, almost anyone, properly trained, could mold a brick: worthwhile employment in making a contribution to the edifice was thus guaranteed to those of the most modest endowments.*
The historian as a brick-maker tasked with converting the (presumed) raw material of the past into useable pieces of "objective" knowledge to be fitted together in a collective building enterprise has mostly been discarded, at least in theory. Instead, thanks to Theory, we have a way of stepping back from this enterprise and thinking of historical knowledge (and any other kind, for that matter) less as a given structure than as a posited construct.
Yet behind and beneath these two seemingly different ideas stands the same basic metaphor: knowledge is something we build together.
But where?
Peter Novick ends That Noble Dream with a chapter titled, "There was no king in Israel." This phrase is lifted from the last verse of the biblical Book of Judges:
In those days there was no king in Israel: every man did that which was right in his own eyes.
This verse serves for Novick as a fitting epigraph for the discordant and chaotic practice of history in a post-consensus, post-objectivity era. But quoting this verse from Judges is also a cunning, punning invocation of Carl Becker's 1931 AHA Presidential address, "Everyman His Own Historian." Becker was talking about "Mr. Everyman," not "every man." As the AHA website notes, Becker's call for a pragmatic, pluralistic (or, for some, relativistic) approach to history has been interpreted by some as a call for "greater modesty in interpretation" of the past. Nevertheless, that call for modesty was anything but modest in its bold swipe at the foundations of the brick-making, brick-laying enterprise of professional history. It must have sounded positively destructive to some.
Similarly, some read Novick's book as a narrative of declension, and perhaps Novick himself viewed the story he was telling in that light. But the "present" moment Novick described in 1988 -- a moment of cacophonous dissensus -- was also a moment of disciplinary creativity. Look at the Bancroft winners for the decade following the publication of Novick's masterpiece, and all the Bancroft winers since.** This is the scholarship that came from or came of age amidst that age of fracture, that babel of voices.
Perhaps, then, I might be excused for imaginatively situating the field -- or, perhaps, the construction site -- of U.S. intellectual history not in the land of Canaan during the time of Judges, nor in the land of Egypt during the years of bondage, but on the broad plains of Mesopatamia in the mythic age between Noah and Abraham. Though the gods have already come down once or twice to confound our speech, there is no guarantee that they will not come again. And the more we sound alike, the more we speak the same language -- or believe that we do -- the more nervous we ought to be.
So, between Daniel Wickberg and James Livingston and Daniel Rodgers and David Hollinger and Andrew Hartman and Bill Fine and Ray Haberski and David Sehat and Charles Capper -- not to mention, as David Hall wryly notes in his MIH essay, "the occasional woman"*** -- I think we're good...for now.
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*Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge UP, 1988), 56.
**Never mind Bellesiles.
***David D. Hall, "Backwards to the Future: The Cultural Turn and the Wisdom of Intellectual History," Modern Intellectual History, Vol. 9, No. 1 (2012), 176.
Selasa, 15 November 2011
Women and Gender in the Intellectual History Newsletter
This is a guest-post by Bill Fine, Professor Emeritus, University of Pittsburgh-Johnstown:Recent blog discussions of women in intellectual history (here, here, and here) led me to some initial exploration toward making it a topic for historical discussion, something which so far as I am aware has not been done.
Here my aim is merely to stimulate further study by calling attention to what might be an important site for this project -- the Intellectual History Newsletter, published in 24 annual issues from 1979 to 2002. [In its first six issues, it was called Newsletter of the Intellectual History Group.] In 2004 it morphed into the journal Modern Intellectual History.
The idea for the Group came out of the 1977 Wingspread conference on “The Tasks and Opportunities of American Intellectual History” organized by John Higham and Paul Conkin, which of course also produced New Directions in American Intellectual History (1979).
In the last issue of the Newsletter, editors Charles Capper and Anthony LaVopa summarized its career:
At a moment when the field was just emerging from its momentary partial eclipse by the rising tide of social history, the newsletter…served as a much-welcomed forum that has ensured intellectual history's vitality, adaptation, and revival in a period of Western historiography notable for both its healthy pluralism and its sometimes-lamented frag-mentation. In its pages intellectual historians have argued the case for and provided examples of the history of mentalité, the social history of ideas, contextual intellectual history, the linguistic turn, cultural history, women’s intellectual history, and more.
I reviewed all 24 issues and started with something simple and straightforward, counting what I’ll call “items” -- including articles, book reviews, course syllabi, conference reports, and individuals’ contributions to roundtables and symposia. Women produced 49 of the total of 246 items. [E.M. Hemming, the author of a conference report in #2, 1980, could not be identified, so was counted as male.] Over time, women became more prominent in the Newsletter: they authored only 10 items in the first 10 issues, but 30 in the last eight. Of course authorship is by no means indicative of an interest in women’s history, the role of women in intellectual history, identification as a feminist, etc.
All editors and co-editors of the Newsletter were male, but there were a few women on the editorial committee. Dorothy Ross served over the entire period, as did Joyce Appleby except for a few years in the late 1980s; Linda Kerber served in the early 1980s, as did Louise Stevenson in the later 1980s.
Women and/or women’s issues were particularly prominent in some issues:
- #15 - 1993 - 6 of 11 items authored by women in this issue, highlighted by a panel discussion on women’s intellectual history.
- #18, 1996 - 8 of 39 items in this issue, consisting mostly of a symposium on “Intellectual History in the Age of Cultural Studies.”
- #21, 1999 - women authored 3 of 11 items in this issue on “Subjectivity, Self-Culture, and the Market.” Susan Juster reviewed three books on witchcraft, all authored by women; and Mary Jo Buhle reviewed several books on the history of psychology, all authored or co-authored by women. In addition, Donald Meyer reviewed Buhle’s book, Feminism and Its Discontents: A Century of Struggle with Psychoanalysis (1998).
- #23, 2001 - 6 of 15 items in this issue on The Arts in Intellectual Life, which further explored questions raised by the growth of cultural studies.
- #24, 2002 - women authored 5 of 15 items in this issue on National and Transnational Liberalism.
Women and/in intellectual history first became an object of explicit attention in 1984 with Kathleen D. McCarthy’s article, “The Feminization of American Intellectual History,” IHN #6, 1984, 3-7. Three years later, Rosalind Rosenberg discussed “Twentieth-Century Intellectual History: Women and Gender,” IHN #9, 1987, 22-29. McCarthy reviewed books by Dolores Hayden, William Leach and Rosaline Rosenberg, which among other work has “begun to expand and refine our notions of the breadth, variety, and sophistication of the nation’s intellectual life,” as feminists are seen not merely “advancing the claims of their specific constituency, but as individuals who have helped to shape the larger contours of intellectual inquiry and social reform.” [7] Rosenberg’s essay went beyond calling attention to gradual blurring of the boundaries between the fields of women’s history and intellectual history to call attention to need for historians to explore “how changes in thinking about gender came about in the context of American intellectual history, how attitudes toward the personal, the emotional, and the sexual have affected intellectual debates in this century.” [24]
In the 1992 issue, Louise L. Stevenson of Franklin and Marshall College provided the syllabus for her Fall 1987, course on “Women and Intellectual Life,” IHN #14, 84-86. For the 1993 issue she wrote an article on “Women’s Intellectual History: A New Direction,” IHN #15, 1993, 32-38, which showed how a masculinized understanding of “intellectual” has blinded historians to the lives and thought of women. This article was one of three that year in a “Panel Discussion on ‘Discovering Women’s Intellectual History” at the American Studies Association meeting of November, 1992, in Costa Mesa, California. The others were Elisabeth Israels Perry, “The Women’s Voluntary Association as a Source of Women’s Intellectual History,” IHN #15, 1993, 39-44; and Charles Capper, “Comments on ‘Discovering Women’s Intellectual History,’” IHN #15, 1993, 45-47.
Also in the 1993 issue, Elizabeth Alice White reviewed Ann Douglas’ controversial book in “Sentimental Heresies: Rethinking The Feminization of American Culture,” IHN #15, 1993, 23-31; and Linda K. Kerber provided the syllabus for a University of Iowa course in Fall, 1992 on “Feminist Theory: Historians’ Perspective,” IHN #15, 1993, 66-70. [Kerber’s Toward an Intellectual History of Women (1997) was later reviewed in the Newsletter by Nancy F. Cott, in “Republican Motherhood Found, Revisited, Revised,” IHN #19, 69-72.]
As noted, #18 of the Newsletter, published in 1996, was mostly devoted to a symposium on “Intellectual History in the Age of Cultural Studies.” Seven of the 33 items were written by women, including, in alphabetical order, Joyce Appleby, "A Post-Opportunity for Intell Hists,” 4-5; Mary Kupiec Cayton, "Cultural History, Intellectual History, and the Problem of Agency,” 53-55; Deborah J. Coon, "Challenging the Sociological Turn, or, Preserving Intellectual History in an Age of Cultural History," 57-61; Carolyn Dean, "New Directions in Intellectual History?" 40-41; Mary Kelley, "Thinking About Women Thinking," 24-26; Dorothy Ross, "Deja-Vu All Over Again," 61-62; and Joan Shelley Rubin, "Keeping Everlastingly At It," 23-24.
Most of these did not address women or feminist issues per se, but dealt with the general implications of cultural studies for understandings of human agency and the continuation of intellectual history as a field or sub-discipline enriched and broadened by cultural history. Dorothy Ross expressed optimism about the future of intellectual history, which she said had already benefitted from the influence of social and cultural history, as seen in the work of Hollinger on scientific communities; Thomas Haskell, Mary Furner and others on intellectual disciplines; and greater attention to everyday life and experience, including gender and race. Carolyn Dean noted that intellectual history had moved away from a narrow understanding of canonical culture, one which, she said, “by definition excluded women and minorities.” [40] Mary Kelley gave the most attention to gender issues, noting the traditional focus on males in intellectual history and referring to the work of feminist theorists such as Judith Butler and Eve Sedgwick. [26]
In the same 1996 issue, Elizabeth Hedstrom, in “History and the Limits of Interpretation,” IHN #18, 89-97, provided a detailed report on a conference organized by Thomas Haskell at Rice University in March of that year. Participants included important figures such as Frank Ankersmit, Dominick LaCapra, Hans Kellner, Richard Wolin, John Zammito, David Carr and Robert Westbrook. Women, including Lynn Hunt, Carol Quillen, Joan Scott, Bonnie Smith, and Helena Michie, delivered 5 of the 14 papers. In Hedstrom’s summary, Smith’s paper on “Masculinity and the Limits of Interpretation,” was the only one to emphasize the “deeply masculinized methodology and professional identity” of history, so that “while there is room for reimagination or reappropriation, feminists unproblematically make use of historical scholarship at their peril.” [96]
In the 2001 issue, women authored 6 of the 15 articles treating The Arts and Intellectual Life, though a focus on gender issues was largely absent. These included Julia E. Liss, “The Culture of Politics and the Politics of Culture,” IHN #23, 2001, 71-77, a review of Christine Stansell, American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century (2000); Jeffrey C. Isaac, “Rethinking the Cultural Cold War,” IHN #23, 2001, 78-84, a review of Frances Stoner Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (1999); and Ruth Behar, “Blurred Genres: Autobiography, Fiction, and Ethnography,” IHN #23, 2001, 125-133, a detailed syllabus and bibliography from a University of Michigan anthropology course from Fall, 2000. The course included selections from Women Writing Culture, a book Behar had edited in 1995 with Deborah Gordon.
In the final volume, devoted to National and Transnational Liberalism, 5 of the 15 items were authored by women. Noteworthy items include Ruth H. Bloch, "Utopianism, Sentimentalism, and Liberal Culture in America,” IHN #24, 2002, 47-59, and Dorothy Ross, “Liberalism and American Exceptionalism,” IHN #24, 2002, 72-83.
Bill Fine
Sabtu, 12 Maret 2011
Fine Responds to Hartman on the Culture Wars
Bill Fine's long response to my post on the Culture Wars deserves a post of its own.
Andrew:
The figure of "culture wars" seems to illustrate what Rodgers calls "an age of… contagions," when "some words and phrases began to seem more natural than the rest -- not similes or approximations but reality itself." [11] For me, a problem with his book is that such carefully-hedged statements leave room for a wide variety of understandings of exactly what he's claiming.
In your project, a central issue seems to be whether the culture wars are your subject matter, and/or your historiographic framework -- a metaphor persistently deployed by the historical actors you examine, or the basis for your interpretation, or perhaps explanation, of what went on. These might converge or even be equivalent, but they might be quite different. You say that "the culture wars…are the defining narrative of postmodern America," but I wonder, whose narrative, theirs or yours?
You imply a difference, without spelling it out, when you limn a process by which culture wars functioned as a way of accommodating or working-through social and cultural change. The difference is almost a paradox: how, after all, while people perceived themselves to be fighting culture wars, were they actually, or ultimately, adapting to social and cultural changes? It's a distinction between intention or perception, and objective [as you might see it] consequences. You write: "fighting the culture wars allowed people at all points of the cultural spectrum to adjust to the altered moral, racial, and gendered realities." You'll have to show how this function operated, as it were, behind the backs of the social actors. I think one of the criticisms of Moreton was that she doesn't describe the agency that produced the adjustments she describes.
Of course the political interpretations of Dionne, Gitlin and Courtwright that you criticize also depend upon and exploit a distinction between perception and reality, but for them the realities are political and economic interests, with culture reduced to "mere escapades in exuberant irrationalism." Instead of reading the culture wars as "merely as a tool of the political class," you want to take them seriously as "something real in their own right."
Okay, but what sort of reality? It seems that the subject matter is, first, that many people across various issue-spectra were drawn to the metaphor as an organizing framework for thought and action. [And I'm not sure "it" is behind us, since I'm continually running into commentaries on whether the culture wars are over, have started up again, etc.] Whatever the real or perceived differences gave it such resonance, if you follow Lakoff and others, such metaphors have great power to shape thought and action.
The rhetoric of "war" suggests a high degree of organization and mobilization, extreme polarization, a kind of ultimacy of difference and antagonism. Perhaps the Cold War was the occasion, leading to the war against poverty, and later the war on drugs, war against terror, etc. I've seen references to wars against illiteracy and obesity. War may be the health of the state, but also perhaps of culture -- at least in a milieu pre-saturated with wars and rumors of wars.
The other term in the phrase seems important as well, since the metaphor presumes a prior cultural turn, and of course culture has often been a substitute for race, suggesting essentialized characteristics seen to underlie and account for diverse behaviors, closely linked to identity, i.e., having to do with "who we are." In this way, culture wars suggests a kind of fundamentalization.
So, the subject might be how differences of people and issues came to be constructed as culture wars, and what that meant in terms of rhetoric and mobilization, how contention was framed. But you might argue that it was "just" a metaphor, one which resonated because it had real, representational bite, because it captured actually existing, deep differences of social position and culture, values, religion, etc. In this case, it might be more challenging to show its accommodative functions.
Some people describe a single culture war, while others see a plurality -- and Rodgers describes it in both ways. At one point, describing his view, you suggest "the culture wars were a battle between those who celebrated cultural fracture with those who…sought to piece the national culture back together out of an older stock." This implies a single, master culture war that recurs across various sites and issues, perhaps a latter day reprise of the old traditionalist vs. modernist divide. Hunter seems to adopt this position, though he makes religion the original site of difference. [On another matter, it seems arbitrary to say that he "altogether ignores intellectual history."]
Then you ask which "older cultural stock" was most fundamental, noting that Rodgers emphasizes issues raised by the women's movement, while Szefel stresses changes in gender, and Moreton treats the challenges of reconciling the neo-liberal economy with traditional institutions and values, including the family.
But instead of a single culture war, perhaps there were many, linked by little more than use of the war metaphor. Do you actually find individuals and groups aligned in parallel fashion across the various battle sites, or are the similarities and differences more issue-specific?
I wonder what it means that Rodgers doesn’t seem to make the culture war theme central in his narrative, since he might have presented it as a sort of civil war working toward disaggregation. Perhaps the culture war theme can't finally be folded into the fracture narrative.
Finally, apropos of the theme that the culture war may be continuing, I think the following letter to the editor of my local paper deserves to be blogified:
Well, there they are. All of the public school teacher's union leaders bonded together to sound the alarm that the Republican Governor may actually sponsor a program to give parents of school aged children the right to choose the school to which their children might attend. Lordy, lordy we can't have that. Listen to all the reasons they spout why such a program is horrid. What they don't tell you are the real reasons they are opposed to school choice. They might lose their ability to pound the theory of evolution into the brains of the kids as if it were fact. The theory of global warming could be exposed as a hoax. Sexual immorality might very well be taught as something to be avoided. Multiculturalism might be examined as an un-American concept. Protection of underperforming teachers would be harder to do. But most importantly, they might not have as much union dues to funnel into the Democrat party. I can see where those union leaders deserve to be alarmed.
These forgoing reasons are supported by the union leadership nationally but I pray are not in the minds of the rank and file public school teachers here in Bedford County.
Andrew:
The figure of "culture wars" seems to illustrate what Rodgers calls "an age of… contagions," when "some words and phrases began to seem more natural than the rest -- not similes or approximations but reality itself." [11] For me, a problem with his book is that such carefully-hedged statements leave room for a wide variety of understandings of exactly what he's claiming.
In your project, a central issue seems to be whether the culture wars are your subject matter, and/or your historiographic framework -- a metaphor persistently deployed by the historical actors you examine, or the basis for your interpretation, or perhaps explanation, of what went on. These might converge or even be equivalent, but they might be quite different. You say that "the culture wars…are the defining narrative of postmodern America," but I wonder, whose narrative, theirs or yours?
You imply a difference, without spelling it out, when you limn a process by which culture wars functioned as a way of accommodating or working-through social and cultural change. The difference is almost a paradox: how, after all, while people perceived themselves to be fighting culture wars, were they actually, or ultimately, adapting to social and cultural changes? It's a distinction between intention or perception, and objective [as you might see it] consequences. You write: "fighting the culture wars allowed people at all points of the cultural spectrum to adjust to the altered moral, racial, and gendered realities." You'll have to show how this function operated, as it were, behind the backs of the social actors. I think one of the criticisms of Moreton was that she doesn't describe the agency that produced the adjustments she describes.
Of course the political interpretations of Dionne, Gitlin and Courtwright that you criticize also depend upon and exploit a distinction between perception and reality, but for them the realities are political and economic interests, with culture reduced to "mere escapades in exuberant irrationalism." Instead of reading the culture wars as "merely as a tool of the political class," you want to take them seriously as "something real in their own right."
Okay, but what sort of reality? It seems that the subject matter is, first, that many people across various issue-spectra were drawn to the metaphor as an organizing framework for thought and action. [And I'm not sure "it" is behind us, since I'm continually running into commentaries on whether the culture wars are over, have started up again, etc.] Whatever the real or perceived differences gave it such resonance, if you follow Lakoff and others, such metaphors have great power to shape thought and action.
The rhetoric of "war" suggests a high degree of organization and mobilization, extreme polarization, a kind of ultimacy of difference and antagonism. Perhaps the Cold War was the occasion, leading to the war against poverty, and later the war on drugs, war against terror, etc. I've seen references to wars against illiteracy and obesity. War may be the health of the state, but also perhaps of culture -- at least in a milieu pre-saturated with wars and rumors of wars.
The other term in the phrase seems important as well, since the metaphor presumes a prior cultural turn, and of course culture has often been a substitute for race, suggesting essentialized characteristics seen to underlie and account for diverse behaviors, closely linked to identity, i.e., having to do with "who we are." In this way, culture wars suggests a kind of fundamentalization.
So, the subject might be how differences of people and issues came to be constructed as culture wars, and what that meant in terms of rhetoric and mobilization, how contention was framed. But you might argue that it was "just" a metaphor, one which resonated because it had real, representational bite, because it captured actually existing, deep differences of social position and culture, values, religion, etc. In this case, it might be more challenging to show its accommodative functions.
Some people describe a single culture war, while others see a plurality -- and Rodgers describes it in both ways. At one point, describing his view, you suggest "the culture wars were a battle between those who celebrated cultural fracture with those who…sought to piece the national culture back together out of an older stock." This implies a single, master culture war that recurs across various sites and issues, perhaps a latter day reprise of the old traditionalist vs. modernist divide. Hunter seems to adopt this position, though he makes religion the original site of difference. [On another matter, it seems arbitrary to say that he "altogether ignores intellectual history."]
Then you ask which "older cultural stock" was most fundamental, noting that Rodgers emphasizes issues raised by the women's movement, while Szefel stresses changes in gender, and Moreton treats the challenges of reconciling the neo-liberal economy with traditional institutions and values, including the family.
But instead of a single culture war, perhaps there were many, linked by little more than use of the war metaphor. Do you actually find individuals and groups aligned in parallel fashion across the various battle sites, or are the similarities and differences more issue-specific?
I wonder what it means that Rodgers doesn’t seem to make the culture war theme central in his narrative, since he might have presented it as a sort of civil war working toward disaggregation. Perhaps the culture war theme can't finally be folded into the fracture narrative.
Finally, apropos of the theme that the culture war may be continuing, I think the following letter to the editor of my local paper deserves to be blogified:
Well, there they are. All of the public school teacher's union leaders bonded together to sound the alarm that the Republican Governor may actually sponsor a program to give parents of school aged children the right to choose the school to which their children might attend. Lordy, lordy we can't have that. Listen to all the reasons they spout why such a program is horrid. What they don't tell you are the real reasons they are opposed to school choice. They might lose their ability to pound the theory of evolution into the brains of the kids as if it were fact. The theory of global warming could be exposed as a hoax. Sexual immorality might very well be taught as something to be avoided. Multiculturalism might be examined as an un-American concept. Protection of underperforming teachers would be harder to do. But most importantly, they might not have as much union dues to funnel into the Democrat party. I can see where those union leaders deserve to be alarmed.
These forgoing reasons are supported by the union leadership nationally but I pray are not in the minds of the rank and file public school teachers here in Bedford County.
Fine Responds to Hartman on the Culture Wars
Bill Fine's long response to my post on the Culture Wars deserves a post of its own.
Andrew:
The figure of "culture wars" seems to illustrate what Rodgers calls "an age of… contagions," when "some words and phrases began to seem more natural than the rest -- not similes or approximations but reality itself." [11] For me, a problem with his book is that such carefully-hedged statements leave room for a wide variety of understandings of exactly what he's claiming.
In your project, a central issue seems to be whether the culture wars are your subject matter, and/or your historiographic framework -- a metaphor persistently deployed by the historical actors you examine, or the basis for your interpretation, or perhaps explanation, of what went on. These might converge or even be equivalent, but they might be quite different. You say that "the culture wars…are the defining narrative of postmodern America," but I wonder, whose narrative, theirs or yours?
You imply a difference, without spelling it out, when you limn a process by which culture wars functioned as a way of accommodating or working-through social and cultural change. The difference is almost a paradox: how, after all, while people perceived themselves to be fighting culture wars, were they actually, or ultimately, adapting to social and cultural changes? It's a distinction between intention or perception, and objective [as you might see it] consequences. You write: "fighting the culture wars allowed people at all points of the cultural spectrum to adjust to the altered moral, racial, and gendered realities." You'll have to show how this function operated, as it were, behind the backs of the social actors. I think one of the criticisms of Moreton was that she doesn't describe the agency that produced the adjustments she describes.
Of course the political interpretations of Dionne, Gitlin and Courtwright that you criticize also depend upon and exploit a distinction between perception and reality, but for them the realities are political and economic interests, with culture reduced to "mere escapades in exuberant irrationalism." Instead of reading the culture wars as "merely as a tool of the political class," you want to take them seriously as "something real in their own right."
Okay, but what sort of reality? It seems that the subject matter is, first, that many people across various issue-spectra were drawn to the metaphor as an organizing framework for thought and action. [And I'm not sure "it" is behind us, since I'm continually running into commentaries on whether the culture wars are over, have started up again, etc.] Whatever the real or perceived differences gave it such resonance, if you follow Lakoff and others, such metaphors have great power to shape thought and action.
The rhetoric of "war" suggests a high degree of organization and mobilization, extreme polarization, a kind of ultimacy of difference and antagonism. Perhaps the Cold War was the occasion, leading to the war against poverty, and later the war on drugs, war against terror, etc. I've seen references to wars against illiteracy and obesity. War may be the health of the state, but also perhaps of culture -- at least in a milieu pre-saturated with wars and rumors of wars.
The other term in the phrase seems important as well, since the metaphor presumes a prior cultural turn, and of course culture has often been a substitute for race, suggesting essentialized characteristics seen to underlie and account for diverse behaviors, closely linked to identity, i.e., having to do with "who we are." In this way, culture wars suggests a kind of fundamentalization.
So, the subject might be how differences of people and issues came to be constructed as culture wars, and what that meant in terms of rhetoric and mobilization, how contention was framed. But you might argue that it was "just" a metaphor, one which resonated because it had real, representational bite, because it captured actually existing, deep differences of social position and culture, values, religion, etc. In this case, it might be more challenging to show its accommodative functions.
Some people describe a single culture war, while others see a plurality -- and Rodgers describes it in both ways. At one point, describing his view, you suggest "the culture wars were a battle between those who celebrated cultural fracture with those who…sought to piece the national culture back together out of an older stock." This implies a single, master culture war that recurs across various sites and issues, perhaps a latter day reprise of the old traditionalist vs. modernist divide. Hunter seems to adopt this position, though he makes religion the original site of difference. [On another matter, it seems arbitrary to say that he "altogether ignores intellectual history."]
Then you ask which "older cultural stock" was most fundamental, noting that Rodgers emphasizes issues raised by the women's movement, while Szefel stresses changes in gender, and Moreton treats the challenges of reconciling the neo-liberal economy with traditional institutions and values, including the family.
But instead of a single culture war, perhaps there were many, linked by little more than use of the war metaphor. Do you actually find individuals and groups aligned in parallel fashion across the various battle sites, or are the similarities and differences more issue-specific?
I wonder what it means that Rodgers doesn’t seem to make the culture war theme central in his narrative, since he might have presented it as a sort of civil war working toward disaggregation. Perhaps the culture war theme can't finally be folded into the fracture narrative.
Finally, apropos of the theme that the culture war may be continuing, I think the following letter to the editor of my local paper deserves to be blogified:
Well, there they are. All of the public school teacher's union leaders bonded together to sound the alarm that the Republican Governor may actually sponsor a program to give parents of school aged children the right to choose the school to which their children might attend. Lordy, lordy we can't have that. Listen to all the reasons they spout why such a program is horrid. What they don't tell you are the real reasons they are opposed to school choice. They might lose their ability to pound the theory of evolution into the brains of the kids as if it were fact. The theory of global warming could be exposed as a hoax. Sexual immorality might very well be taught as something to be avoided. Multiculturalism might be examined as an un-American concept. Protection of underperforming teachers would be harder to do. But most importantly, they might not have as much union dues to funnel into the Democrat party. I can see where those union leaders deserve to be alarmed.
These forgoing reasons are supported by the union leadership nationally but I pray are not in the minds of the rank and file public school teachers here in Bedford County.
Andrew:
The figure of "culture wars" seems to illustrate what Rodgers calls "an age of… contagions," when "some words and phrases began to seem more natural than the rest -- not similes or approximations but reality itself." [11] For me, a problem with his book is that such carefully-hedged statements leave room for a wide variety of understandings of exactly what he's claiming.
In your project, a central issue seems to be whether the culture wars are your subject matter, and/or your historiographic framework -- a metaphor persistently deployed by the historical actors you examine, or the basis for your interpretation, or perhaps explanation, of what went on. These might converge or even be equivalent, but they might be quite different. You say that "the culture wars…are the defining narrative of postmodern America," but I wonder, whose narrative, theirs or yours?
You imply a difference, without spelling it out, when you limn a process by which culture wars functioned as a way of accommodating or working-through social and cultural change. The difference is almost a paradox: how, after all, while people perceived themselves to be fighting culture wars, were they actually, or ultimately, adapting to social and cultural changes? It's a distinction between intention or perception, and objective [as you might see it] consequences. You write: "fighting the culture wars allowed people at all points of the cultural spectrum to adjust to the altered moral, racial, and gendered realities." You'll have to show how this function operated, as it were, behind the backs of the social actors. I think one of the criticisms of Moreton was that she doesn't describe the agency that produced the adjustments she describes.
Of course the political interpretations of Dionne, Gitlin and Courtwright that you criticize also depend upon and exploit a distinction between perception and reality, but for them the realities are political and economic interests, with culture reduced to "mere escapades in exuberant irrationalism." Instead of reading the culture wars as "merely as a tool of the political class," you want to take them seriously as "something real in their own right."
Okay, but what sort of reality? It seems that the subject matter is, first, that many people across various issue-spectra were drawn to the metaphor as an organizing framework for thought and action. [And I'm not sure "it" is behind us, since I'm continually running into commentaries on whether the culture wars are over, have started up again, etc.] Whatever the real or perceived differences gave it such resonance, if you follow Lakoff and others, such metaphors have great power to shape thought and action.
The rhetoric of "war" suggests a high degree of organization and mobilization, extreme polarization, a kind of ultimacy of difference and antagonism. Perhaps the Cold War was the occasion, leading to the war against poverty, and later the war on drugs, war against terror, etc. I've seen references to wars against illiteracy and obesity. War may be the health of the state, but also perhaps of culture -- at least in a milieu pre-saturated with wars and rumors of wars.
The other term in the phrase seems important as well, since the metaphor presumes a prior cultural turn, and of course culture has often been a substitute for race, suggesting essentialized characteristics seen to underlie and account for diverse behaviors, closely linked to identity, i.e., having to do with "who we are." In this way, culture wars suggests a kind of fundamentalization.
So, the subject might be how differences of people and issues came to be constructed as culture wars, and what that meant in terms of rhetoric and mobilization, how contention was framed. But you might argue that it was "just" a metaphor, one which resonated because it had real, representational bite, because it captured actually existing, deep differences of social position and culture, values, religion, etc. In this case, it might be more challenging to show its accommodative functions.
Some people describe a single culture war, while others see a plurality -- and Rodgers describes it in both ways. At one point, describing his view, you suggest "the culture wars were a battle between those who celebrated cultural fracture with those who…sought to piece the national culture back together out of an older stock." This implies a single, master culture war that recurs across various sites and issues, perhaps a latter day reprise of the old traditionalist vs. modernist divide. Hunter seems to adopt this position, though he makes religion the original site of difference. [On another matter, it seems arbitrary to say that he "altogether ignores intellectual history."]
Then you ask which "older cultural stock" was most fundamental, noting that Rodgers emphasizes issues raised by the women's movement, while Szefel stresses changes in gender, and Moreton treats the challenges of reconciling the neo-liberal economy with traditional institutions and values, including the family.
But instead of a single culture war, perhaps there were many, linked by little more than use of the war metaphor. Do you actually find individuals and groups aligned in parallel fashion across the various battle sites, or are the similarities and differences more issue-specific?
I wonder what it means that Rodgers doesn’t seem to make the culture war theme central in his narrative, since he might have presented it as a sort of civil war working toward disaggregation. Perhaps the culture war theme can't finally be folded into the fracture narrative.
Finally, apropos of the theme that the culture war may be continuing, I think the following letter to the editor of my local paper deserves to be blogified:
Well, there they are. All of the public school teacher's union leaders bonded together to sound the alarm that the Republican Governor may actually sponsor a program to give parents of school aged children the right to choose the school to which their children might attend. Lordy, lordy we can't have that. Listen to all the reasons they spout why such a program is horrid. What they don't tell you are the real reasons they are opposed to school choice. They might lose their ability to pound the theory of evolution into the brains of the kids as if it were fact. The theory of global warming could be exposed as a hoax. Sexual immorality might very well be taught as something to be avoided. Multiculturalism might be examined as an un-American concept. Protection of underperforming teachers would be harder to do. But most importantly, they might not have as much union dues to funnel into the Democrat party. I can see where those union leaders deserve to be alarmed.
These forgoing reasons are supported by the union leadership nationally but I pray are not in the minds of the rank and file public school teachers here in Bedford County.
Rabu, 02 Maret 2011
Bill Fine on Tim Lacy on George Cotkin
Tim Lacy's recent thought-provoking review of George Cotkin's book Morality's Muddy Waters has elicited an interesting series of comments from Bill Fine. As I am home sick with a sick kid, I will defer to a conversation that is taking place on a post that certainly serves up more food for thought. Please see Tim's original review here and Bill's comments here. You will need to scroll down just a bit to find Bill's comments.
Bill Fine on Tim Lacy on George Cotkin
Tim Lacy's recent thought-provoking review of George Cotkin's book Morality's Muddy Waters has elicited an interesting series of comments from Bill Fine. As I am home sick with a sick kid, I will defer to a conversation that is taking place on a post that certainly serves up more food for thought. Please see Tim's original review here and Bill's comments here. You will need to scroll down just a bit to find Bill's comments.
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