All or Nothing In the Family

The following is a guest post from Christopher Shannon in response to Chris Ramsey's recent review of Robert O. Self's latest book All In the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy Since the 1960s.  Shannon is an assistant professor of history at Christendom College in Front Royal, VA.

Chris Ramsey praises Robert Self’s All in the Family:  The Realignment of American Democracy since the 1960s as “an ambitious attempt to interweave the histories of postwar liberalism, conservatism, gender, and sexuality from the Lyndon Johnson administration to the present day.”  Not having yet read the book, I am not prepared to comment on its technical merits as a model of interdisciplinary history.  Ramsey’s review does demand a response in those areas where the book, at least by Ramsey’s description if not his judgment, seems to lack ambition:  the narrative framework that holds all this dazzling interdisciplinary together.  Unless Ramsey has irresponsibly represented Self’s argument, it would appear that Self tells the story of the heroic challenge to the established family values of “breadwinner liberalism” by feminists and cultural radicals during the 1960s, followed by the reaction against this emancipator development by the advocates of “breadwinner conservatism,” itself now under siege by a new flowering of inclusive and expansive ideas of family life best represented by recent victories on the gay marriage front.  I have no reason to doubt Ramsey’s account of Self’s narrative, for it is a narrative that one finds enshrined in the cultural commentary of the New York Times and similar mainstream liberal publications.  It is the historical common sense of the liberal educated classes.  Self’s book and Ramsey’s approving review raises the deeper question of whether, in post-Reagan-Bush America, historians can be anything more than the lap dogs of establishment liberalism.  

            I may share liberals’ distaste for what appears to be the only viable alternative—mainstream conservatism—but the righteous indignation with which liberals approach phenomenon like “breadwinner conservatism” continues to obscure ideological continuities identified in their own research.  Liberal historians continue to be surprised by the ways in which privacy rights championed by the left have so easily been invoked by the right in its attack on “big government.”  What we see in the politics of the last forty years is an underlying consensus on the primacy of free choice, followed by a secondary insistence on the need for government to mop up after the disastrous consequences of unrestricted free choice.  So, liberals insist that the government must stay out of our bedrooms, but then insist justice demands that government fund contraception and pay for abortions.  Conservative CEOs extol the virtues of the free market yet pony up to Congress with their begging bowls when it comes time for a “too big to fail” bailout.  These are two sides to the same coin that historians once called corporate liberalism—a system of socializing costs and privatizing benefits that has served as a substitute for a thickly textured conception of the common good.  Why this substitution?  Because left and right alike see thick textures as threats to freedom.

            Lest my invocation of the common good appear an unwarranted imposition of normative value preferences on to the “real” story of history, Ramsey shows Self to be more than willing to impose normative frameworks on his narrative.  The normative dimension lies in his judgment of the failure of American politics to continue the proper progressive development from the “negative rights” of the Civil Rights era to the “positive rights” aspired to in the early years of the Great Society.  This is most obvious in the conservative backlash against welfare, but the whole debate about welfare was initially bound up with debates about normative ideals of proper family life.  Ramsey approves of Self’s interpretation that efforts to instill into black men the breadwinner virtues of the white middle class issue distracted the nation from the real issue at hand: the need for “using the government to guarantee that discriminated or disadvantaged groups can effectively exercise their personal liberties.”   Leaving aside the issue that Moynihan understood instilling breadwinner virtues as itself a government responsibility, the great tragedy of the era appears, by Ramsey and Self’s account, to lie in the failure to extend to poor and minority women the opportunity to achieve the same marketplace success that the feminist movement had brought to white middle class women.  Culturally and economically, this amounts to the failure of the government to subsidize the autonomy of individuals. 

            Perhaps I should qualify this statement to read the failure of government to subsidize the prosperous autonomy of individuals.  Women are by all accounts much more autonomous today than they were fifty years ago.  For middle class women, this means successful careers.  For poor women, it means the feminization of poverty.  If some conservatives are all too willing to blame poverty on the breakdown of the family, liberals are all too willing to gloss this break down as evolution toward autonomy.  In the teleology that ends with “Modern Family,” families are not broken, they are blended, transformed, re-imagined, etc.  If liberals concede the dark side of autonomy when it comes to material poverty, they continue to evade the social and psychological costs of autonomy for the comfortably middle class.  If Betty Friedan could invoke the addiction to sleeping pills as a symptom of the quiet desperation of suburban housewives in the 1950s, what should historians conclude from the epidemic of behavioral medication among the children of the “brave new families” celebrated by historians as advancements in autonomy?

            Liberal historians approach matters of sex, family and autonomy much like the NRA approaches gun control legislation.  To suggest that the promiscuous availability of sexual partners has any inherent connection to the spread of sexually transmitted diseases is as heretical as suggesting that the easy availability of guns has any inherent connection to gun violence.  For both sex and guns, freedom trumps all other considerations.  Yes, we must be responsible citizens—for sex, using condoms, for guns, obeying the law.  In acknowledging the harm principle, we remain good pupils of John Stuart Mill, which is to say proper Victorians.  Contemporary liberalism grates against the intellect in that it so often presents itself as having a social conscience even as it advances individual autonomy.  The struggle for gay marriage is thus more about breaking down a barrier to choice rather than promoting a public good.  Historians are certainly free to take sides in the debate over family life, but in the interests of honesty, or at least clarity, there should be some recognition that “family” means nothing if it can mean anything.  Yes, I suppose there is the common denominator of warm fuzzy feelings—but in that too, we remain Victorians. 

  

Irony and Sin

The remains of the Twin Towers were still smoldering when Roger Rosenblatt's essay in Time appeared.  The aftermath of America's "worst" day since Pearl Harbor revealed the dawning of a new, profound era to Rosenblatt and other conservative observers.  "One good thing could come from this horror," he wrote, "it could spell the end of the age of irony."

Right...irony disappeared into a haze of violence and robo-patriotism.  More than a decade after the event that made our world "real" again, it seems pretty clear that without irony we are stuck wondering what the hell just happened.  I had a problem not merely with the impulse of many conservatives had to declare an end to irony--which meant to them an end to the culture wars--but with the reflexive way many conservatives and many liberals used Reinhold Niebuhr as their go-to guy for rationalizing the age that would follow the end of irony.

Niebuhr's famous essay, "Why the Christian Church Is Not Pacifist," was reworked into a clarion call for defeating evil in the age of terror.  The cold war caricature of Niebuhr was resurrected as the dark, brooding theologian of war.  His sense of irony reimagined as a the worse kind of engagement--America would be given a pass on evil acts as long as it claimed to defend (and spread) civilization.

Yet missing from this discourse was the foundation on which Niebuhr built his sense of irony--his understanding and acceptance of sin.  I write that word knowing that it might conjure images of Puritans, the devil...and the Church Lady.  I accept the slippage because the aspect that enraged me as the U.S. plowed across two countries was the willful lack of reflection.  I wrote about Susan Sontag's rage in this respect earlier, and reading the perceptive discussions on irony over the last week here made me think further about the link, as James Levy writes so evocatively about, between irony and engagement.

Niebuhr considered himself nothing if not an engaged religious intellectual.  He was a preacher more than a theologian, according to his autobiography, and had view of sin that differed markedly from versions of original sin in that he believed the fallen nature of man did not condemn humanity to existence of perpetual paralysis.  Rather he understood sin as essential to seeing or recognizing without qualifications the work that needed to be done.  In other words, humanity was in a collective of hope because it was in a collective of despair.  Irony described the state of affairs but not the state of humanity.

I admire the different discussions of irony we've had here.  And it seems to me that there are two broad ways to understand and perhaps use the term from those discussions.  Jim Livingston gives us the paring of William Appleman Williams with practicioners of irony in the first half of the cold war--Niebuhr, Burke, White.  Accordingly we are caught in a play on truth--recognition of that existence does not clarify our state but moves us from understanding our plight as tragedy to irony. And we have James Levy's philosophical discussion of irony as processed through the culture of audience.  In Levy's understanding, irony makes evident the culture of reproduction--its technocracy from top to bottom--and thus using the methods of play to create not a reproduction but a fractured mirror and therefore a critique of the culture we often can't see clearly enough to critique.

Both versions are products of modernity and as such, I think, suggest the existence of third, foundational understanding of irony. Chris Shannon in his review of cold war social science and in particular in his comments following the post, argues for a way beyond our modern use of irony--as a reminder of what the object of irony might be and therefore the point of engagement.  Shannon points out at the heart of the struggle to make sense of the world either violated or imagined by social science is the human person. Irony makes sense only if one accepted that the person was rooted in a perpetual, not a sociological, community.  By this I mean a community that was not waiting to be discovered or perfected or more fully realized by the advancements in science, technology or, even, theology.  It was a community that people lived within but had no real ability to fully understand.  And the distance between living and understanding allowed for two responses, a humility borne out of awe of ignorance and a confidence (and hubris) borne of out awe of accumulation.

Niebuhr practiced a theology of irony because he believed both positions were joined by the human condition of sin. Neither could recognize the their truths were not normative; and neither would allow that those of the other position were involved in the same struggle to preserve this perpetual community.  But accepting sin meant accepting something modernity was suppose to make obsolete--the irrational belief that, as Niebuhr wrote in 1925 as a young preacher in Detriot, the "cross is a symbol of ultimate reality."  But this ultimate reality was not to be theorized, measured, and cataloged.   Nor was it to be understood as exceptional, as a metaphysical club that gave members a pass on dealing with non-members.

This is why for Niebuhr the Christian church could not be pacifist.  Faced with the crimes of fascism and communism, Niebuhr went to war because he saw abominations against the perpetual community.  Both movements abandoned civilization in an attempt to produce a materialist definition of the person--that was tragic (and horrific).  What Niebuhr saw as ironic was the terrible prospect of responding to these abominations because whatever means would be used to counter fascism and communism would violate civilization as well.  But Niebuhr's use of sin could make him sound "churchy" and alienating.    

Yet, Niebuhr's irony, grounded as it was in sin, presaged a reality that allowed him to argue for a type of engagement that went beyond the tautology of truth that Jim Livingston points to and a world of engagement that James Levy's ironic brigades imagine for us.  As Chris Shannon notes, to make a perpetual community viable requires recognizing that there are limits on a society, and that this society also accepts a notion of perpetual community.  For Niebuhr, there was no other way to understand those two ideas than to recognize the relationship between our perpetual community and a kingdom of God.  That was the Christian life for Niebuhr and it was the source of his irony.  When many other post-9/11 conservatives rallied to return the United States to a pre-culture wars reality, claiming a return literally to God, they often used Niebuhr as a crutch.  What they utterly overlooked (or more likely willfully dismissed) was Niebuhr's radical notion of irony in calling any society back to God.  It's not that Niebuhr shared more in common with the critics of the war on terror than it's promoters acknowledged, but that his view of civilization shared little in common with a materialist notion often associated with civilization.  We often forget that Niebuhr shared Marx's visceral repulsion to the degradation of modern industrial society.  But Marx never went far enough for Niebuhr. (a view Zizek seems to share as well, correct?  Perhaps that is where Zizek is headed when he praises the Chinese cultural revolution for its ideological boldness in attempting to make community an ideology)  For Neibuhr irony described the contemporary situation, sin grounded that situation in history, and community existed as the reality that made the human person something more than a sociological study.

Review: Shannon on *Cold War Social Science*

Review of Mark Solovey and Hamilton Cravens, eds. Cold War Social Science:  Knowledge Production, Liberal Democracy, and Human Nature (New York:  Palgrave MacMillan, 2012).
ISBN: 978-0-230-34050-3, ISBN10: 0-230-34050-4

Reviewed by Christopher Shannon

Social Science as Soulcraft

As an academic genre, the edited volume of essays has a storied past in U.S. intellectual history.  The essays in John Higham and Paul Conkin’s New Directions in American Intellectual History (1979) and Richard Fox and Jackson Lears’s The Culture of Consumption (1983) revolutionized the discipline and spawned hundreds of full-length studies.   Cold War Social Science:  Knowledge Production, Liberal Democracy, and Human Nature, edited by Mark Solovey and Hamilton Cravens, may not approach the game-changing status of these classic works, but it far surpasses the run of the mill conference proceedings that many academic presses still feel compelled to publish.  The volume’s contribution lies less in charting the new than in re-charting the old.  The relationship between the Cold War and social science has been a staple of U.S. intellectual history since the time of C. Wright Mills. Though none of the essays in the collection deal with him directly, the specter of Mills hangs over the essays through their persistent attention to the relation of knowledge to power.   The essays ultimately fail to confront the contradictions of Mills’s humanism—which, in retrospect, appear to be the contradictions of a much broader modern, secular humanism. Having rejected religious and metaphysical conceptions of the soul, social scientists nonetheless have persistently sought to fashion some secular understanding of human nature.   In connecting issues of knowledge and power to questions of human nature, the essays in this volume often unknowingly suggest possibilities for moving beyond the facile distinctions between repressive and emancipatory social science that have shaped the critique and defense of social science since the era of the cold war.

The volume grew out of papers delivered at a workshop at Victoria College, University of Toronto, in May 2010.   That many of the contributors are not from the United States and come from more specialized disciplines such as the history and philosophy of science helps to account for the relative lack of attention to familiar, canonical figures of mainstream U.S. intellectual history.  As such canonical figures have been well-studied already, their absence is no mark against the collection. The question to ask is not “why isn’t there an essay on C. Wright Mills?,” but “why should we bother looking at Cold War social science?"  In his introductory essay, “Cold War Social Science:  Specter, Reality, or Useful Concept?,” Mark Solovey answers this question by presenting these essays as a contribution to contemporary debates about knowledge, liberal democracy and human nature.  To those who might question whether social science has anything helpful to contribute to this debate, Solovey simply replies that “life now goes on against a background of social science” and “we cannot seem to get along without the social sciences.”[1]  Having accepted social science as a de facto arbiter of reality, Solovey envisions the task of the historian as chronicling the contours of how social science rose to this position of cultural authority—that is, to ask the question, how did we get to where we are today?



The short answer to this rather Whiggish question would seem to be:  through massive public and private funding of social science projects and an enduring faith in the power of social science to solve real life problems despite the lack of any supportive empirical evidence. The long answer, scattered implicitly and explicitly throughout the essays in the volume, seems to be that social science is a good thing and the best intellectual framework through which to understand our world.  In this respect, the essays in this collection participate in the current neo-liberal moment in which the old battle lines of liberal and radical have dissolved into the warm fuzzy consensus of “progressive.”  Even as the book’s title evokes a classic radical critique of the relation between power and knowledge, Solovey frames the essays as a revision of the (by now old) New Left critique that social scientists “relinquished their duty to speak truth to power” and “often ignored the unjust and repressive character of American society and its foreign policies” (4).  For Solovey, this is all too simple.  He persuasively argues that the Cold War may not in the end be the most appropriate context for understanding developments in social science from the 1940s through the 1970s.  The intellectual foundations of mid-century social science pre-date the Cold War and have survived its passing.  Even as the adjective “Cold War” highlights the military and political framework that motivated much of the public and private funding for social science in the decades following World War II, historians might be better off understanding the social science of this period through the more blandly chronological category of “mid-century” social science (15).

In the first essay, David C. Engerman’s “The Rise and Fall of Wartime Social Science:  Harvard’s Refugee Interview Project, 1950-1954,” the logic of revision becomes something like a logic of disintegration.  Engerman writes of how the involvement of social scientists in World War II, most notably the massive research project that became The American Soldier (1949-50), convinced a generation of social scientists that the behavioral sciences, “an ill-defined but ultimately well-funded amalgam of sociology, social psychology and cultural anthropology” could help solve world problems (26).  The Cold War context of the postwar years made every world problem a political and military problem, and the U.S. military proved to be one of the most significant patrons, either directly or indirectly, for Cold War social science. 

Engerman examines the Refugee Interview Project (with the appropriate acronym, RIP), conducted by the Russian Research Center, an offshoot of Harvard’s Department of Social Relations.  Headed by Clyde Kluckhohn, a colleague of Margaret Mead and one of the leading humanist anthropologists of his day, RIP was a study of fifty thousand Displaced Persons who had fled Soviet rule to the American occupation zone following the end of the war. Sponsored by the Air Force’s Human Relations Research Institute (HRRI), the project had two main purposes: first, to understand the nature of Soviet society; second, to use this understanding to “prepare basic social-psychological guides to air attacks on the Soviet Union” (30).  Much of Engerman’s account focuses on the tension between the theoretical and practical orientation of these studies.  He emphasizes that this tension was not a product of the Cold War, but indeed characterized similar studies during World War II.  More pointedly, he stresses that the conflict between the humanistic and instrumental aspects of the study took place as much within the military as between the military and the academy:  “The Refugee Interview Project reveals the ‘academicization’ of military life as much as it does the ‘militarization’ of academic life” (31).  It also seems to reveal the failure of the interdisciplinary model of social science.  Congress ultimately cut off funding because the project failed to produce a “working model” of Soviet society that moved beyond social-scientific abstractions.  Engerman concludes that “the complexity of interaction between scholars and their Pentagon funders” calls into question the whole notion of Cold War social science:  “indeed, it is worth inquiring whether there is such a thing” (38).

It is, of course, the perennial task of revisionists to split what the previous generation has lumped or lump what the previous generation has split.  As revisionists, Engerman and many of the other contributors to this collection are in one sense splitters, problematizing and complexifying the New Left interpretation of social scientists as servants of the military-industrial complex.  Of course, things are always complex.  The emphasis on the particular and the specific, however,  risks falling into the trap of what C. Wright Mills called “crack-pot realism,” the insistence that we can draw no clear, firm conclusions until all the evidence is in—knowing full well that all the evidence will never be in, since there is always more work to be done.

Many of the essays deal with specific projects or disciplines in a way that wants to suggest that Cold War social science is a staggeringly diverse and varied phenomenon that defies generalization.  At the same time, many of these also state explicitly, or show implicitly, that “it was all connected.”  The quote comes from Noam Chomsky’s assessment of the intellectual ferment among Cambridge-based social scientists in the postwar period, quoted in Janet Martin-Nielsen’s essay on linguistics in the early cold war.  Ranging beyond the conventional social scientific fields into disciplines such as computers, electronics and cybernetics, there was a broad faith in the possibility of science uncovering what Joel Isaac identifies as the hidden “epistemic design,” the universal structures of perception that make human beings human. The Kantian underpinnings of this project clearly pre-date—and have survived—the Cold War moment.  The essays in this volume suggest that we might more fruitfully understand the Cold War as an episode in the modern, Enlightenment fashioning of an understanding of human nature than fret over the ways in which military considerations distorted an otherwise pure social science.

What understanding of the human person cuts across the variety of sub-fields and specializations of cold war social science?  Hunter Heyck captures it best in his essay, “Producing Reason,” in which he identifies the recurring tropes of the “limited chooser,” the “bounded selector” and the “finite problem-solver” (99).  Much of the debate among social scientists before, during and after the Cold War has been about how to understand the nature of the relation between freedom and constraint in the lives of individuals.  Early twentieth-century sociologists valorized the group as an alternative to the anarchic individualism of laissez-faire capitalism.  Cold War-era social scientists understood the rise of totalitarian political systems as a reaction against the failure of Western democracies to establish a stable, rational social order; consequently, they continued to emphasize the importance of external group structures and rational limits for ensuring political stability and unity in the face of the external threat of communism. This emphasis on the group in turn inspired a generation of left-liberal social critics to decry and denounce the “conformity” rampant in the “lonely crowd” of American society.  By the 1970s, this critique led social scientists to advance a new paradigm that shifted emphasis away from the stabilizing limits of structure to “a valorization of the act of choice itself” (111).  To Heyck’s credit, he points out that this new consensus cut across the conventional political divide of left and right.  Whereas conservatives have valorized choice in the area of (free market) economics, liberals have emphasized the freedom to choose in areas of lifestyle and culture, most especially in matters of sexuality.

In his short but symptomatic essay, Heyck covers much of the same territory as Daniel Rodgers in his recent book-length study, Age of Fracture.  Rodgers tells a declension narrative in which the emphasis on structure over individual choice in the 1950s fostered the sense of social solidarity needed to commit to the expansion of the welfare state in the 1960s; this golden age passed away due to a variety of factors, but Rodgers clearly implicates the new emphasis on freedom of choice as a key ideological factor in the fracture of intellectual and social life in America after the 1960s.  Heyck seems to share Rodgers’s basic narrative of change, but emphasizes the tensions and contradiction within the structure/freedom frameworks of the golden age itself.  Social scientists all agreed that democracy requires free, independent and rational political actors; unfortunately, the events of the first half of the twentieth century demonstrated that individuals are not reliably rational as political actors and often choose to “escape from freedom” rather than commit to the hard work of democratic decision making.  In order to preserve democracy and freedom, social scientists thus committed themselves to the “design of systems that would generate rational choices automatically” (106).  For Heyck, this concern for true freedom “helps us understand how social scientists could be . . .  genuinely committed to liberal democracy even as they built institutions that seemed designed to constrain people’s ability to make meaningful choices” (105).  This “irony” appears as a leitmotif through many of the essays in the volume.

It is time to stop seeing this relationship between democracy and social engineering as ironic.  It is structurally foundational to social science itself and to the history of social science as practiced by U.S. intellectual historians.  So many of the arguments advanced in the history of social science tend simply to call our attention (once again) to the tension between democracy and technocracy, and then separate the sheep (democrats) from the goats (technocrats).  At this point in the cycle of revision, we must ask ourselves what purpose this ritual of identification and judgment serves.  Mark Solovey offers some clue in his introduction to the volume.  In complicating the New Left critique of social-scientific complicity in the Cold War, he invokes the “flourishing of a left-leaning perspective on modernization” as a “vivid example” of how social scientists of this era were not simply tools of the military-industrial complex (14). Hamilton Cravens’s essay, “Column Right, March!  Nationalism, Scientific Positivism, and the Conservative Turn of the American Social Sciences in the Cold War Era,” emphasizes the triumph of “conservative” versions of modernization theory, but only to bemoan the failure of sociology to live up to the “left-liberal perspective” of a figure like Robert Lynd, whose 1939 manifesto, Knowledge for What?, provides Cravens with a moral compass through which to navigate developments in Cold War social science (132).  The contributors vary in their assessment as to whether particular social-scientific movements repressed or liberated individuals, but they all share a general sympathy for an idea of liberation based upon the vision of the human person advanced by great, left-liberal, social scientific humanists such as Robert Lynd and C. Wright Mills.

What is this vision of the human person?  It is above all that of the bounded selector, understood most broadly as the free, self-creating individual whose choices are bounded by reason alone.  What is reason alone? The essays in this collection suggest that Cold War social scientists engaged in a lively debate over what reason is, bounded by a rough consensus on what reason is not.  As Heyck points out in his essay, social scientists had, since the early twentieth century, identified “nonrational beliefs and habits” with “religion and local cultural traditions” (101).  Cravens shows how the gurus of modernization theory all agreed that economic development depended upon “psychological development,” the engineering of a certain personality type appropriate to a modern, competitive world market.  Conservatives may have stressed the competitive elements of this economy, while left-liberals stressed a higher, rationalized cooperative ethic, but all agreed that development required the destruction of irrational attachments to pre-modern cooperative social structures such as family and community (128-129).

With the local, traditional and religious banished from the sphere of the rational, the boundaries between humanistic (left-liberal) and positivistic (conservative) social science proved quite fluid.  Nadine Weidman’s essay on Ashley Montagu shows how previously discredited “conservative” social-scientific theories could be rehabilitated and marshaled into the service of a left-liberal political agenda.  The Boasian cultural relativism popularized by Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict was a powerful intellectual weapon in the fight against the scientific racism that had fueled Hitler’s genocidal anti-Semitism. By the late-nineteen forties, Montagu, himself once a leading critic of scientific racism, came to reject Boasian relativism on the grounds that it undermined the commitment to certain universal values essential to the defense of liberal democracy.  Whereas Boas had argued that people are bound together in cultures by a shared pattern of values, Montagu argued that human beings are biologically hard-wired for cooperation.

Howard Brick’s contribution to the volume, “Neo-Evolutionist Anthropology, the Cold War, and the Beginnings of the World Turn in U.S. Scholarship,” similarly shows how another whipping boy of Boasian relativism, evolutionary anthropology, carried within it latent progressive tendencies.  During the Victorian era, the idea of unitary cultural evolution provided justification for the domination of “advanced” European civilization over the “primitive” cultures of the non-Western world.  Boasian relativism helped to undermine European cultural imperialism, but it also called into question the whole notion of human progress:  if all values are relative, how can we judge advancement or improvement?

Cold War social scientists repackaged the old Victorian formulas into a new “modernization” theory that proved even more destructive than its nineteenth predecessors, but Brick sets his sights on “a counternarrative to mainstream modernization theory [that]. . . . while framed by aspirations to progress, fostered a sharp critique of U.S. Cold War policy even before Vietnam and the antiwar movement” (156).

Culminating in the work of left-leaning anthropologists such as Eric Wolf, Sidney Mintz, Stanley Diamond, and Marshall Sahlins, Brick sees the emergence of a heroic alternative vision of progress, not “a kind of ‘progress’ perpetuating Euro-American domination but rather one that ‘dominated peoples’ defined for themselves” (160).  On closer examination, this radical alternative would seem to be yet another manifestation of the bounded selector of mainstream liberal social science.  By Brick’s own account of this alternative theory, Western contact sparked a change that could not be resisted, but native Third World peoples should be free to work out their own version of modernization inspired by “the specific social, cultural, economic, and ecological milieus already in force” (163-64).  Third World peoples would make history, though not under conditions of their own making.  Here Marx finds common cause with liberal Cold War humanists such as Ruth Benedict and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.[2]

Even as Brick champions the early champions of national liberation movements, he points to no clear, enduring model of national liberation.  Indeed, in the work of his progressive evolutionary anthropologists, the nation itself fades into a web of global relations.  In the aftermath of the tremendous dislocations of the battle between Cold War and neo-evolutionary visions of modernization, we are left with

A new sense of world connectivity [that] emphasized links, interactions, overlaps,     interweavings that routinely cross boundaries of all sorts, the inextricably mutual     implications of ties between what is nearby and what is far afield—all this, we  now tend to presume, characterizing the world of the past no less than the world of today (167).

Brick is smart and self-aware enough to acknowledge that this happy ending could be read as itself “too much in thrall to [a] Eurocentric notion of evolution and progress” (168).  This does not stop him from hoping that it might be something more.  It is a hope that hangs over most of the essays in this collection, but a hope for which the essays provide no historical evidence.  The years since the end of the Cold War have seen not progress so much as a continued belief in progress, a belief that social science can make the world a better place.  The only thing social science has successfully made is a certain kind of person, one for whom the breathless liminality of Brick’s vision of global interconnectedness counts as man’s natural, existential state of being.  The discourse of social science keeps its practitioners, elite and popular, in a perpetual state of detachment from those original sworn enemies of reason, “religion and local cultural traditions.”  Walt Whitman Rostow is no doubt smiling up at us now. 

____________________
[1]Mark Solovey, “Cold War Social Science:  Specter, Reality, or Useful Concept?, in Mark Solovey and Hamilton Cravens, eds. Cold War Social Science:  Knowledge Production, Liberal Democracy, and Human Nature (New York:  Palgrave MacMillan, 2012), 16.  All subsequent page references to this essay and other essays from this collection will be in parentheses following the quote or paraphrase.

[2]See Christopher Shannon, A World Made Safe for Differences:  Cold War Intellectuals and the Politics of Identity (Lanham:  Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc,  2001), ch. 1, “Integrating the World.”


Christopher Shannon is associate professor of history at Christendom College in Front Royal, Virginia.  He teaches courses in Western Civilization, U.S. History and Historiography.  He is the author of two works in U.S. Intellectual History:   Conspicuous Criticism:  Tradition, the Individual and Culture in Modern American Social Thought and A World Made Safe for Differences:  Cold War Intellectuals and the Politics of Identity.

From Traditions to Histories: Back from the Brink

[Editor's Note: Today's post is authored by William Fine, University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown - emeritus. It responds to a forum in the January 2011 issue of Historically Speaking titled "From Histories to Traditions: A New Paradigm of Pluralism in the Study of the Past." The lead-off piece is authored by Christopher Shannon, with three responses from Daniel Wickberg, Mark Weiner, and Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, as well as a final reply from Shannon. This particular forum is part of an ongoing HS series dedicated to "questioning the assumptions of academic history." The topic was first mentioned at USIH about three weeks ago. Enjoy!]

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In "From Histories to Traditions," Christopher Shannon raises important issues about the discipline of history and where it's going. But it's difficult to see exactly what he's proposing, which generates some uncertainty and perhaps uneasiness in his interlocutors. He calls for a pluralism broader and deeper than "liberal" history, but "tradition-based history" evokes fears of orthodoxy. Does his pluralist paradigm imply a postmodern relativism, or might it presage some new catechism?

To complicate matters, while calling for a shift "from histories to traditions," Shannon draws upon Alasdair MacIntyre to characterize liberal history as already a "tradition," though denying itself as such. Like the "liberal modernity" to which it's inextricably bound, it's unwilling "to confront its true nature." While it sees itself using abstracted, value-neutral analytic practices and procedures to generate impersonal, value-free knowledge, the reality for Shannon is that history rests on mostly unexamined philosophical assumptions and moral values. Indeed, it's a holistic culture or moral community that both requires and produces particular kinds of persons deeply committed to it.

Shannon distinguishes his new pluralist paradigm from liberal history, though he admits difficulty in describing it, and indeed it's a somewhat murky concept. Because liberal history is now seen as a tradition, rather than a set of detachable, neutral analytical practices, it engages with other traditions on a deep epistemological, moral and existential level. As he puts it, a plurality of traditions "highlight[s] the substantive and incommensurable pretheoretical frameworks" used in historical study, which "put[s] historical debate on the proper footing," which is to say, the "study of history across traditions… becomes something like interfaith dialogue."

History seems to lead a double life: the liberal history "tradition" specifically, and history as a pluralistic space, a site at which diverse traditions, including liberal history, challenge one another. The latter implies not only rules of engagement, but a language that can mediate incommensurables, building on commonalities while respecting differences, fostering challenge without divisive conflict, moderating the interplay of traditions, etc. But this sounds like the old pretense of liberal rules abstracted from any cultural base. Or, if they do constitute a sort of super-tradition, at what point does it come up for critical examination? The question is, what becomes of history when it's conceived as a faith, or as a site modeled on religious dialogue? Is this a post-secular post, a great leap backward, or some weird hybrid?

If reason cannot be divorced from faith, as Shannon contends, one has to ask, whose faith? Yet some sort of answer seems to be assumed, since the "new model of professional pluralism would distinguish itself from its liberal predecessor by an explicit commitment to the pursuit of Truth -- that is, a truth beyond that which is empirically verifiable." Pluralism may have its limits, even though Shannon assures us no "grid of catechism" is to be imposed. At one point, though, responding to the concern his paradigm might imply a Babel of views, he reassures us that a "truly traditional Muslim perspective" could be excluded. Maybe "Truth" just can't be a plural.

The range of possible outcomes seems clear: utter incommunicability, conflict and fragmentation, a restricted pluralism, Truth wedded to faith, or the continuation of something much like "liberal history," perhaps with ghettoized subfields. In any case, ours is a time when many see conventional history as shallow or thin, formalistic, detached from real life and public issues, fragmented, inauthentic. One is reminded of Christopher Lasch's depiction of the late Victorian restlessness of the new intellectuals; or, indeed, the concluding paragraph of Max Weber's essay "Science as a Vocation," still the best articulation of issues of objectivity and neutrality. In this sort of milieu, tradition has great appeal -- as do similarly capacious and integrating concepts such as revolution and epochal breaks and turns. This is due in part to its totalizing or holistic character, its insistence on the inseparability, on the non-abstractable character of things -- the shallow and the deep, means and ends, technique and culture, everyday life and ultimate meaning, minutiae and fundamentals, practices and their original forms, facts and interpretive frameworks, how we're living and who we are. It provides at once the reassurance of a meaningful whole, an invitation to explore non-obvious, deep and distant connections, and an urgent raison d'etre for critical thinking.

In this holistic approach to the discipline, all facets and levels are seen tightly bound, sometimes in ways that appear quite deterministic. Neither Talcott Parsons nor Louis Althusser could do much better. The behavior of professional historians is sociologically bound to their socialization as particular kinds of persons, and an identitarian mechanism ensures that "who they are" explains their approach to history. [In Walter Benn Michaels' terms, this is identity politics with a vengeance, as issues of truth become matters of "who we are," history becomes tradition, and science turns into faith.] Analytical and research practices are meaningfully, even logically, bound to underlying values and epistemological preconceptions; and a sort of historiographic determinism explains that liberal historians invariably celebrate the progress of choice, freedom and agency. Finally, a political determination guarantees that liberal history mirrors and helps reproduce liberal modernity.

Shannon's totalizing view of the discipline gives his piece a something-for-everyone character. To Daniel Wickberg, it supports the view that history, for reasons more "practical and ideological…than intellectual," diversified its topics instead of facing up to the philosophical challenge of the linguistic turn, clinging to "the modernist certitude of fact." Like Shannon, he criticizes Gabrielle Spiegel's effort to historicize postmodernism as [in fact?] politically motivated epistemic avoidance. For Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, Shannon raises important questions about the "underlying assumptions and dominating practices" of history, including its empty careerist model of identity and "interpretive exhaustion." Thus liberal history gears directly into the "meaningless" freedom-without-purpose of modern therapeutic society, which can prompt an escape from freedom into some new bondage. But she seems less concerned finally that "Catholic history" would threaten the discipline as a whole than that it would be absorbed into a "totalizing pluralism" in which fundamental debates have been replaced by each historian's freedom to choose whatever perspective "works for her" and doesn't "interfere with her lifestyle," to use the clichés.

Mark Weiner believes Shannon’s arguments can provide a “quickening agent” for liberal ends, challenging historians to articulate their core values, find out who they are, and incorporate the interpretive and stylistic approaches of a wider diversity of traditions, including non-western. Here is an improved liberalism that recalls and updates Raymond Williams’ sense of culture as a critique of bourgeois society. At the same time¸ even as they criticize liberal history, none of the articles question the market model of history as a profession, rendering it a microcosm of liberal modernity. This may both assume and give away too much, foreclosing possibilities for critical thinking.

Of the possible outcomes, continuation of something approximating "liberal history" appears most likely, short of utter societal collapse. Over the last hundred years, history has faced challenges that strike at the foundations, which it has dealt with or sidestepped in one way or another, wobbling but coming back to some version of the "myth of objectivity," to the artificiality of specialized attention. For better or worse, there are powerful mechanisms that tend to maintain the secularized professionalism of modern disciplines, including a periodic re-negotiation of boundaries and an only occasional focus on moral, political, epistemological issues with which they're not well equipped to deal. Which isn't to argue they shouldn't make an effort. These mechanisms of course include the translation of epistemological challenges into historical topics, which both Shannon and Wickberg criticize. Along with this, as Novick describes, specialized journals like History and Theory can proliferate in all directions, allowing, in this case, epistemological issues "too hot to handle" to be "formally ghettoized as an esoteric concern." Who now reads History and Theory?

These are part of the persistent and dominant tendency, which is to generate until-further-notice agreements to deal primarily with questions that can be answered to some level of felt adequacy, using recognized disciplinary procedures of rational analysis and conventions for deciding what constitutes evidence. For all its limitations, there is something to be said for this, just as there is for scientists giving most of their time and attention as scientists to the study of natural processes, rather than pondering the ultimate meaning of creation -- unless like the old natural philosophers they can manage both at once. There are good reasons to talk about science as a tradition, perhaps analogous in some respects to faith. But that's a long way from re-framing it as an interfaith dialogue, between, say, evolution and intelligent design -- and the distance is not reduced by our yearning for "meaning."

Paradoxically, to argue that history become authentic by conducting itself as a tradition may turn it into something radically different from what it's been, which is perhaps the point. It both promises and asks too much, taking accountability and the hope of authenticity to the point of absurdity. We shouldn't overly burden ourselves, as if everything in the world depended on what we think and say. [But of course all of this begs the question.] There's a slippery slide of perception, as the discipline moves from a fiction of autonomy, to a synecdoche of the whole, to being seen as foundational, as if the global really could be remade locally. I can't but recall my sad experience in "radical" American Studies in the late 60s and early 70s: first it was a site from which to launch an American revolution, then imperceptibly [to us] became a project to revolutionize the field of American Studies, and, finally, pretty routine academic politics. Passion, commitment and a fierce urgency were undiminished throughout. This is the sort of thing helps account for the otherwise bizarre turn famously described by Todd Gitlin, in which efforts to transform society turned into struggles to control the English Department.

From Traditions to Histories: Back from the Brink

[Editor's Note: Today's post is authored by William Fine, University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown - emeritus. It responds to a forum in the January 2011 issue of Historically Speaking titled "From Histories to Traditions: A New Paradigm of Pluralism in the Study of the Past." The lead-off piece is authored by Christopher Shannon, with three responses from Daniel Wickberg, Mark Weiner, and Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, as well as a final reply from Shannon. This particular forum is part of an ongoing HS series dedicated to "questioning the assumptions of academic history." The topic was first mentioned at USIH about three weeks ago. Enjoy!]

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In "From Histories to Traditions," Christopher Shannon raises important issues about the discipline of history and where it's going. But it's difficult to see exactly what he's proposing, which generates some uncertainty and perhaps uneasiness in his interlocutors. He calls for a pluralism broader and deeper than "liberal" history, but "tradition-based history" evokes fears of orthodoxy. Does his pluralist paradigm imply a postmodern relativism, or might it presage some new catechism?

To complicate matters, while calling for a shift "from histories to traditions," Shannon draws upon Alasdair MacIntyre to characterize liberal history as already a "tradition," though denying itself as such. Like the "liberal modernity" to which it's inextricably bound, it's unwilling "to confront its true nature." While it sees itself using abstracted, value-neutral analytic practices and procedures to generate impersonal, value-free knowledge, the reality for Shannon is that history rests on mostly unexamined philosophical assumptions and moral values. Indeed, it's a holistic culture or moral community that both requires and produces particular kinds of persons deeply committed to it.

Shannon distinguishes his new pluralist paradigm from liberal history, though he admits difficulty in describing it, and indeed it's a somewhat murky concept. Because liberal history is now seen as a tradition, rather than a set of detachable, neutral analytical practices, it engages with other traditions on a deep epistemological, moral and existential level. As he puts it, a plurality of traditions "highlight[s] the substantive and incommensurable pretheoretical frameworks" used in historical study, which "put[s] historical debate on the proper footing," which is to say, the "study of history across traditions… becomes something like interfaith dialogue."

History seems to lead a double life: the liberal history "tradition" specifically, and history as a pluralistic space, a site at which diverse traditions, including liberal history, challenge one another. The latter implies not only rules of engagement, but a language that can mediate incommensurables, building on commonalities while respecting differences, fostering challenge without divisive conflict, moderating the interplay of traditions, etc. But this sounds like the old pretense of liberal rules abstracted from any cultural base. Or, if they do constitute a sort of super-tradition, at what point does it come up for critical examination? The question is, what becomes of history when it's conceived as a faith, or as a site modeled on religious dialogue? Is this a post-secular post, a great leap backward, or some weird hybrid?

If reason cannot be divorced from faith, as Shannon contends, one has to ask, whose faith? Yet some sort of answer seems to be assumed, since the "new model of professional pluralism would distinguish itself from its liberal predecessor by an explicit commitment to the pursuit of Truth -- that is, a truth beyond that which is empirically verifiable." Pluralism may have its limits, even though Shannon assures us no "grid of catechism" is to be imposed. At one point, though, responding to the concern his paradigm might imply a Babel of views, he reassures us that a "truly traditional Muslim perspective" could be excluded. Maybe "Truth" just can't be a plural.

The range of possible outcomes seems clear: utter incommunicability, conflict and fragmentation, a restricted pluralism, Truth wedded to faith, or the continuation of something much like "liberal history," perhaps with ghettoized subfields. In any case, ours is a time when many see conventional history as shallow or thin, formalistic, detached from real life and public issues, fragmented, inauthentic. One is reminded of Christopher Lasch's depiction of the late Victorian restlessness of the new intellectuals; or, indeed, the concluding paragraph of Max Weber's essay "Science as a Vocation," still the best articulation of issues of objectivity and neutrality. In this sort of milieu, tradition has great appeal -- as do similarly capacious and integrating concepts such as revolution and epochal breaks and turns. This is due in part to its totalizing or holistic character, its insistence on the inseparability, on the non-abstractable character of things -- the shallow and the deep, means and ends, technique and culture, everyday life and ultimate meaning, minutiae and fundamentals, practices and their original forms, facts and interpretive frameworks, how we're living and who we are. It provides at once the reassurance of a meaningful whole, an invitation to explore non-obvious, deep and distant connections, and an urgent raison d'etre for critical thinking.

In this holistic approach to the discipline, all facets and levels are seen tightly bound, sometimes in ways that appear quite deterministic. Neither Talcott Parsons nor Louis Althusser could do much better. The behavior of professional historians is sociologically bound to their socialization as particular kinds of persons, and an identitarian mechanism ensures that "who they are" explains their approach to history. [In Walter Benn Michaels' terms, this is identity politics with a vengeance, as issues of truth become matters of "who we are," history becomes tradition, and science turns into faith.] Analytical and research practices are meaningfully, even logically, bound to underlying values and epistemological preconceptions; and a sort of historiographic determinism explains that liberal historians invariably celebrate the progress of choice, freedom and agency. Finally, a political determination guarantees that liberal history mirrors and helps reproduce liberal modernity.

Shannon's totalizing view of the discipline gives his piece a something-for-everyone character. To Daniel Wickberg, it supports the view that history, for reasons more "practical and ideological…than intellectual," diversified its topics instead of facing up to the philosophical challenge of the linguistic turn, clinging to "the modernist certitude of fact." Like Shannon, he criticizes Gabrielle Spiegel's effort to historicize postmodernism as [in fact?] politically motivated epistemic avoidance. For Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, Shannon raises important questions about the "underlying assumptions and dominating practices" of history, including its empty careerist model of identity and "interpretive exhaustion." Thus liberal history gears directly into the "meaningless" freedom-without-purpose of modern therapeutic society, which can prompt an escape from freedom into some new bondage. But she seems less concerned finally that "Catholic history" would threaten the discipline as a whole than that it would be absorbed into a "totalizing pluralism" in which fundamental debates have been replaced by each historian's freedom to choose whatever perspective "works for her" and doesn't "interfere with her lifestyle," to use the clichés.

Mark Weiner believes Shannon’s arguments can provide a “quickening agent” for liberal ends, challenging historians to articulate their core values, find out who they are, and incorporate the interpretive and stylistic approaches of a wider diversity of traditions, including non-western. Here is an improved liberalism that recalls and updates Raymond Williams’ sense of culture as a critique of bourgeois society. At the same time¸ even as they criticize liberal history, none of the articles question the market model of history as a profession, rendering it a microcosm of liberal modernity. This may both assume and give away too much, foreclosing possibilities for critical thinking.

Of the possible outcomes, continuation of something approximating "liberal history" appears most likely, short of utter societal collapse. Over the last hundred years, history has faced challenges that strike at the foundations, which it has dealt with or sidestepped in one way or another, wobbling but coming back to some version of the "myth of objectivity," to the artificiality of specialized attention. For better or worse, there are powerful mechanisms that tend to maintain the secularized professionalism of modern disciplines, including a periodic re-negotiation of boundaries and an only occasional focus on moral, political, epistemological issues with which they're not well equipped to deal. Which isn't to argue they shouldn't make an effort. These mechanisms of course include the translation of epistemological challenges into historical topics, which both Shannon and Wickberg criticize. Along with this, as Novick describes, specialized journals like History and Theory can proliferate in all directions, allowing, in this case, epistemological issues "too hot to handle" to be "formally ghettoized as an esoteric concern." Who now reads History and Theory?

These are part of the persistent and dominant tendency, which is to generate until-further-notice agreements to deal primarily with questions that can be answered to some level of felt adequacy, using recognized disciplinary procedures of rational analysis and conventions for deciding what constitutes evidence. For all its limitations, there is something to be said for this, just as there is for scientists giving most of their time and attention as scientists to the study of natural processes, rather than pondering the ultimate meaning of creation -- unless like the old natural philosophers they can manage both at once. There are good reasons to talk about science as a tradition, perhaps analogous in some respects to faith. But that's a long way from re-framing it as an interfaith dialogue, between, say, evolution and intelligent design -- and the distance is not reduced by our yearning for "meaning."

Paradoxically, to argue that history become authentic by conducting itself as a tradition may turn it into something radically different from what it's been, which is perhaps the point. It both promises and asks too much, taking accountability and the hope of authenticity to the point of absurdity. We shouldn't overly burden ourselves, as if everything in the world depended on what we think and say. [But of course all of this begs the question.] There's a slippery slide of perception, as the discipline moves from a fiction of autonomy, to a synecdoche of the whole, to being seen as foundational, as if the global really could be remade locally. I can't but recall my sad experience in "radical" American Studies in the late 60s and early 70s: first it was a site from which to launch an American revolution, then imperceptibly [to us] became a project to revolutionize the field of American Studies, and, finally, pretty routine academic politics. Passion, commitment and a fierce urgency were undiminished throughout. This is the sort of thing helps account for the otherwise bizarre turn famously described by Todd Gitlin, in which efforts to transform society turned into struggles to control the English Department.

Tim's Light Reading (1/21/2011)

1 (of 5). How Does Technology Change Our Thinking Patterns?

Nicholas Carr might be the best thing going for discussions on how technology, particularly the internet, influences the way we think. Check out this podcast at his blog, Rough Type, where he attempts a brief (Western) intellectual history of way that maps, mechanical clocks, and the printed book have changed our modes of perception and apprehension. Carr is perhaps best known for a bestselling book titled The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google. None of this is earth-shattering by itself, except in that Carr has been taking lessons from the past and applying them to internet. Is anyone else doing better, or equal, than Carr in terms of reflecting on how the internet is reworking our minds?

2. What Is Jürgen Habermas' Significance To U.S. Intellectual Historians?

Courtesy of Brian Leiter's Reports, I learned that a new biography on Jürgen Habermas is out. Authored by Matthew Specter, Peter E. Gordon reviewed the book at The New Republic. Leiter believes Habermas' importance as a philosopher is overstated, but thinks that Gordon (and Specter) get Habermas' role as a public intellectual about right. The comments on the Leiter thread are of interest. I'm not knowledgeable enough about Habermas to confirm or deny statements about his importance or unimportance. And no graduate or undergraduate class of mine required Habermas, either as a book or excerpted (which amazes me). Nevertheless, I have a copy of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society on my shelf. Apparently, however, that book is more historical than philosophical, and therefore should be of interest to intellectual historians. What is the significance of Habermas to you? Or why should he be of interest to intellectual historians?

3. New Periodical: The Journal For The History Of Analytical Philosophy

Here's the site. I found these lines from the journal's self-description to be of interest (bolds mine): "JHAP takes the history of analytical philosophy to be part of analytical philosophy. Accordingly, it publishes historical research that interacts with the ongoing concerns of analytical philosophy and with the history of other twentieth century philosophical traditions."

4. Who Is The "Americanized Heidegger"?

Courtesy again of Brian Leiter, I learned that there is a distinction in the literature between Martin Heidegger's significance in Europe versus the United States---aside from the distinction between his philosophy and personal failings (i.e. Nazism). Leiter introduces this distinction in the context of discussing a 1999 BBC documentary on Heidegger (49 minutes, Richard Rorty makes an appearance). But I suspect that we intellectual historians would be better served by tackling Martin Woessner's new book, Heidegger in America (Cambridge, 2010). Here's the blurb from the Cambridge site:

The German philosopher Martin Heidegger was one of the most influential and controversial thinkers of the twentieth century. Offering a novel account of Heidegger's place in the recent history of ideas, Heidegger in America explores the surprising legacy of his life and thought in the United States of America. As a critic of modern life, Heidegger often lamented the growing global influence of all things American. But it was precisely in America where his thought inspired the work of generations of thinkers – not only philosophers but also theologians, architects, novelists, and even pundits. As a result, the reception and dissemination of Heidegger's philosophical writings transformed the intellectual and cultural history of the United States at a time when American influence was itself transforming the world. A case study in the complex and sometimes contradictory process of transnational exchange, Heidegger in America recasts the scope and methods of contemporary intellectual and cultural history in the age of globalization, while challenging what we think we know about Heidegger and American ideas simultaneously.

5. A New Philosophy of History?

Christopher Shannon appropriates Alasdair MacIntyre's idea of tradition to introduce a new "approach to the study of the past" in the January 2011 issue of Historically Speaking. I'm eager to check this out. Have any USIH readers read the essay already? The same issue offers responses from Mark Weiner, Daniel Wickberg, and Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn---as well as a final rejoinder from Shannon. Aside: I love the dialectical presentation of topics in each HS issue. Mortimer Adler would've appreciated it. :) - TL

Tim's Light Reading (1/21/2011)

1 (of 5). How Does Technology Change Our Thinking Patterns?

Nicholas Carr might be the best thing going for discussions on how technology, particularly the internet, influences the way we think. Check out this podcast at his blog, Rough Type, where he attempts a brief (Western) intellectual history of way that maps, mechanical clocks, and the printed book have changed our modes of perception and apprehension. Carr is perhaps best known for a bestselling book titled The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google. None of this is earth-shattering by itself, except in that Carr has been taking lessons from the past and applying them to internet. Is anyone else doing better, or equal, than Carr in terms of reflecting on how the internet is reworking our minds?

2. What Is Jürgen Habermas' Significance To U.S. Intellectual Historians?

Courtesy of Brian Leiter's Reports, I learned that a new biography on Jürgen Habermas is out. Authored by Matthew Specter, Peter E. Gordon reviewed the book at The New Republic. Leiter believes Habermas' importance as a philosopher is overstated, but thinks that Gordon (and Specter) get Habermas' role as a public intellectual about right. The comments on the Leiter thread are of interest. I'm not knowledgeable enough about Habermas to confirm or deny statements about his importance or unimportance. And no graduate or undergraduate class of mine required Habermas, either as a book or excerpted (which amazes me). Nevertheless, I have a copy of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society on my shelf. Apparently, however, that book is more historical than philosophical, and therefore should be of interest to intellectual historians. What is the significance of Habermas to you? Or why should he be of interest to intellectual historians?

3. New Periodical: The Journal For The History Of Analytical Philosophy

Here's the site. I found these lines from the journal's self-description to be of interest (bolds mine): "JHAP takes the history of analytical philosophy to be part of analytical philosophy. Accordingly, it publishes historical research that interacts with the ongoing concerns of analytical philosophy and with the history of other twentieth century philosophical traditions."

4. Who Is The "Americanized Heidegger"?

Courtesy again of Brian Leiter, I learned that there is a distinction in the literature between Martin Heidegger's significance in Europe versus the United States---aside from the distinction between his philosophy and personal failings (i.e. Nazism). Leiter introduces this distinction in the context of discussing a 1999 BBC documentary on Heidegger (49 minutes, Richard Rorty makes an appearance). But I suspect that we intellectual historians would be better served by tackling Martin Woessner's new book, Heidegger in America (Cambridge, 2010). Here's the blurb from the Cambridge site:

The German philosopher Martin Heidegger was one of the most influential and controversial thinkers of the twentieth century. Offering a novel account of Heidegger's place in the recent history of ideas, Heidegger in America explores the surprising legacy of his life and thought in the United States of America. As a critic of modern life, Heidegger often lamented the growing global influence of all things American. But it was precisely in America where his thought inspired the work of generations of thinkers – not only philosophers but also theologians, architects, novelists, and even pundits. As a result, the reception and dissemination of Heidegger's philosophical writings transformed the intellectual and cultural history of the United States at a time when American influence was itself transforming the world. A case study in the complex and sometimes contradictory process of transnational exchange, Heidegger in America recasts the scope and methods of contemporary intellectual and cultural history in the age of globalization, while challenging what we think we know about Heidegger and American ideas simultaneously.

5. A New Philosophy of History?

Christopher Shannon appropriates Alasdair MacIntyre's idea of tradition to introduce a new "approach to the study of the past" in the January 2011 issue of Historically Speaking. I'm eager to check this out. Have any USIH readers read the essay already? The same issue offers responses from Mark Weiner, Daniel Wickberg, and Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn---as well as a final rejoinder from Shannon. Aside: I love the dialectical presentation of topics in each HS issue. Mortimer Adler would've appreciated it. :) - TL