Tim's Light Reading (10-6-2011)

[Update: Obviously I wrote this post before the news of Steve Jobs' passing hit. - TL]

1. Stanley Fish asks: Who is your Stanley Fish?

Here's my favorite passage from the piece:

Why? Because were I ever to meet him [i.e. your "Stanley Fish"], the odds are that I would like him (the public record suggests that he is an admirable fellow) and if I liked him it would be hard for me to continue beating up on him. (Despite the proverb, familiarity does not breed contempt.) In fact I would immediately regret, and want to take back, all the nasty things I had said with such zest.

You might be surprised to know that my bugbears are not usually hard-working intellectuals. For the most part, I try to avoid bashing people who actually attempt to think through things---even when I disagree with their conclusions. I've found that my "long-time personal pinatas" are usually of the pseudo-intellectual variety: politicians, pundits (some left and right-leaning), popular culture figures (e.g the (former) cult of Oprah), or some mix of the three (e.g. Newt Gingrich). I dislike the passive and active anti-intellectualism of posers and poseurs.

2. Classroom Styles, Colorfully Described

Here's the piece (which was inspired by this). I think I've seen all but "the corporate style" at work, and I'm not eager to experience that one.

3. More on the Consensus of the 1970s Being Really Important

My title sounds mocking, but I'm on board. I agree with Andrew Hartman's spring 2011 USIH post on the subject, which built on one he wrote last fall. A common thread in those posts was Judith Stein's relatively new book, Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies (Yale, April 2010). I now have news that Stein's book is going to get "the treatment" in the November 2011 issue of The Historical Society's journal, Historically Speaking

4. Dissertations or...Peer-reviewed Journal Articles?

Michael Ruse proposes, contra Anthony Grafton, that history doctoral programs should socialize their graduates to write peer-reviewed journal articles and not dissertations (i.e. bad books). I see the point---of both. I think I'd prefer to keep the dissertation, but cap its length and require all dissertation writers to submit one chapter for publication in a journal. Perhaps a condition for graduation could be successful acceptance? I agree with Ruse that acquiring experience in article writing, submission, and publication would be highly valuable to most doctoral students in relation to the changing demands of the field (i.e. fewer t-t positions).

5. Smart Set Aside: Michael Lewis is Hot

It's not what you think. It's that things written by Michael Lewis are hot. Or, as New York magazine puts it: "It's Good to be Michael Lewis." After reading The Blind Side last year, and seeing the on-screen version of his book Moneyball this past weekend, I'm on the bandwagon. It's a great film with a thoughtful message---i.e. a message about thinking.

6. The Political Economy of History Instruction

I think this might be the best framework, or paradigm, for looking at the academic job market in history. [Full disclosure: I'm on the job market this year, so this topic is constantly in the back of my mind.] Let me connect the post explicitly to our chosen field:

When we change the frame of reference like that, we see the context for the (post-PhD) job market includes post-BA labor of graduate assistants (either as TAs in charge of sections, or in charge of discussion groups, or as graders of essays) as well as part-time and full-time instructors with BA, MA, or PhD, and post-docs with teaching duties. To put it in a formula: the real job market for [history] teachers begins post-BA, so that PhDs are not just competing against other PhDs but also against anyone else who teaches [history], holders of the BA and MA included.

When our frame of reference is the "political economy of [history] instruction" we can explicitly talk about several factors that are only implicit in the discussion of the (post-PhD) "job market."

First, we can see the role of university administrators, who are, after all, responsible for the shifts in employment patterns in [history] instruction. ...To an administrator, [sections of US, European, and world surveys, or Western civilization] ... taught by a BA or MA is a section taught, and taught at low cost. This focus on administrators enables us to connect "job market" discourse with the analyses of the "corporate university," the "privatization of the university," and like matters.

Second, we can see the connection to other issues in political economy, such as long-term employment trends toward precarious labor in other industries. We can also see the connection to constantly increasing health care costs in the US system in which employment has been a traditional avenue to health care insurance; precarious labor does not require the long-term commitment to offering health insurance that (current?) TT jobs do. And we also see the connection of the current (post-PhD) job market to "austerity" programs in response to the Global Financial Crisis of 2008.

7. The History of Philosophy for 10-Year Olds

Scott McLemee reviews a new book by Nigel Warburton titled A Little History of Philosohy (Yale Press, 2011). Yes, the book is aimed at a target audience of ten-year olds. In other words, it might work for a first-year college class on the history of philosophy. :) - TL

Historically Speaking: “America in an Age of Fracture: A Forum”

Today’s post is an overview of the forum on Daniel Rodgers, Age of Fracture, which appears in the pages of the April 2011 edition of Historically Speaking. I highly recommend that everyone read the forum. For those yet to read it, this post will serve as a sort of CliffsNotes version.

Rodgers introduces the roundtable discussion with a better encapsulation of his argument than anything he writes in the book itself. He contends that sometime during the 1970s a revolution in the American experience occurred. This revolution, though, was not political. “The battles over taxes and regulation that Reagan’s election precipitated represented no revolutionary break with history,” he writes. “Even the ‘culture wars’ and their partisan mobilization of religious loyalties replayed long-standing strains in 20th-century American politics.” Rodgers concedes that the economic realm was transformed to some degree. But the most profound metamorphosis occurred in social thought. Intellectual history matters! “A whole vocabulary of concepts that had once seemed the common sense of social thought weakened and new languages took their place.” We’ve discussed at length the new “vocabulary of concepts.” In short, more and more Americans began to think in smaller and smaller units. The individual replaced society in our ethical imaginations.

Rodgers anticipates an important criticism when he asks whether or not areas existed that transcended fracture. His conclusion: yes and no. For example: “Religious communities on the religious side of the culture wars stressed not individual autonomy but loyalties and obligations. And yet, built on their own consumer economies, drawing their members through defection from their mainstream rivals during what was said to be a general religious revival but was, in fact, a great reshuffling of faiths in the spiritual marketplace, the socially conservative churches, too, lived within worlds of choice.” In politics, even social conservatives, those most likely to summon duty, obligation, and order, reframed their language around individual rights. School prayer was their right—an argument that would have been alien to earlier moral establishmentarians who argued that a Christian public sphere was necessary for social order.

The first response in the forum comes from Bruce Schulman, who paradoxically claims that Rodgers’s “age of fracture” represents a new form of consensus history. Schulman believes that Rodgers’s sense that fracture was everywhere is a form of consensus history. “Beneath the veneer of conflict and partisanship that occasions so much handwringing in contemporary political discourse, Rodgers discerns remarkable harmony,” Schulman writes. “Indeed, ‘Age of Fracture’ refers not to the absence of, or the collapse of, an intellectual consensus, but rather to the creation of one—the widespread resonance of a view of the world as atomized, indeterminate, fractured.” This is an interesting way of thinking about Age of Fracture that I had not entertained. But I’m not sure it makes sense. The original consensus historians like Hofstadter believed that basic agreement existed among most Americans about first principles—capitalism and democracy. Rodgers, on the other hand, assumes that American social thought was increasingly disaggregated. Disaggregation as a common trend might imply that Americans were all caught in the same slipstream, but it hardly entails agreement over first principles. Although Schulman is quick to point out that there are far worse things than being lumped with Hofstadter, his most damning critique is that Rodgers repeats Hofstadter’s nostalgia. I don’t think Hofstadter or Rodgers work from a position of nostalgia.

Melani McAlister writes the next essay in the forum. Her forte is popular culture (check out her brilliant book Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East, 1945-2000 for a taste). As such, the gist of her essay is that, though she thinks Rodgers’s book is an excellent exploration of “the hothouse of journals and academic presses,” his narrative of fracture might have been complicated by going “to the movies.” In other words, unlike in other forms of social thought, centralized forms of power have prevailed in film since the 1970s. “In the imagination of Hollywood ‘the system’ is not fractured or dissipated, it is alive and well.” For support she cites Star Wars (1977), Blade Runner (1982), No Way Out (1987), Mission Impossible (1996), The Pelican Brief (1993), The Game (1997), and, most importantly, The Matrix (1999) and its sequels. The bulk of McAlister’s essay then follows as an analysis of power in The Matrix, “a near perfect exemplar of the mix of fears and delights that infused American reactions to the globalization of culture and the rise of new, powerful technologies that were in the process of transforming daily experience.” I really enjoyed this essay, but it left me unsatisfied. It is a fairly serious critique of Rodgers, but only by way of arguing that Rodgers omitted something important. One might assume that the social thought represented by film exists in an alternative universe to that represented by, say, gender theory, where Judith Butler’s theory of identity fracture seems very different from the “system.” Or does it? If we reverse the vectors of intellectual history (as Warren Susman and James Livingston advise) we should be able to bring popular culture and “high” intellectual history together. Let me briefly attempt to do this.

Rodgers points to Foucault’s theory of power as an early sign of fracture. But I would argue that his theory of power, upon which Butler based her thinking about gender, was as follows: rather than residing in the agency of sovereign subjects, power was too diffuse to be contained by mere individuals. In other words, power was not to be found solely in a specific political sphere but rather in the “politics of everyday life,” which lent philosophical support to the feminist slogan that the “personal is political.” But more important to the poststructuralist feminist theorizing of Butler, such a conception introduced the idea that power shaped people positively rather than negatively, that people acted out of desire rather than fear. So, as Nemo has written in his review of Rodgers, Butler continued to think about power, but differently. And the way she thinks about power, as diffuse but somewhere out there, playing on our desires, is precisely how power—“the system”—works in a film like The Matrix.

Michael Kimmage follows McAlister and offers one of the more insightful critiques of Age of Fracture. Thought he thinks the argument—“the will to have less in common is what Americans had in common in the 1980s and 1990s”—is brilliantly fleshed out, Kimmage disagrees with one of Rodgers’s counterintuitive historical revisions, made in the first chapter on Reagan’s presidential rhetoric. Rodgers believes that Reagan, who is often credited for winning the Cold War, in fact lost the words for the Cold War because he lost the words for the nation. Kimmage, in contrast, contends that Reagan indeed sought the nation. Reagan’s nationalism, Kimmage correctly points out, stemmed from U.S. intellectual history: “Since the early 1970s neoconservative intellectuals—Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Jeanne Kirkpatrick—had done what the could to articulate a workable ideology of American nationalism, less in the sphere of political economy than in the sphere of international relations.” To this degree, distinctions must be drawn between right and left in ways that Rodgers seems unwilling to do.

Donald Critchlow makes a similar point in his contention that fracture was far from widespread, especially when it comes to nationalism. He writes: “The belief that the United States is an exceptional country prevails among most Americans.” “This abiding faith in the free market, the rule of law, equal opportunity, and balanced government has enabled conservatives to construct a narrative that appeals to the American electorate.” Critchlow concludes: “ours is not an age of fracture, but of intellectual confusion on the part of some.” Now, to a certain degree, this avoids Rodgers’s main argument, that the revolution from aggregation to disaggregation occurred in the realm of social thought, not in the realm of politics. But I think it does open up an important point of departure: How fractured is the age when most Americans agree that their nation is exceptional? Does this assume too much?—Do most Americans even think the nation exceptional?

In Rodgers’s concluding remarks, he briefly ponders the question of the American nation. Though he says that his career has long been a search for America, he concedes that “America” cannot be found because “America is an argument: a big, multitudinous, often contradictory amalgam of persons, experiences, aspirations, and dissents.”

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As an aside, it appears that Rodgers has been tuning into our discussion. He writes: “In the intellectual history blogs and again in this exchange, questions of the casual assumptions behind Age of Fracture have been pressed forward. Which foot moved first? Did the economic transformations of late capitalism set loose these new debates? Or did ideas move first? My response is neither and both.”

Historically Speaking: “America in an Age of Fracture: A Forum”

Today’s post is an overview of the forum on Daniel Rodgers, Age of Fracture, which appears in the pages of the April 2011 edition of Historically Speaking. I highly recommend that everyone read the forum. For those yet to read it, this post will serve as a sort of CliffsNotes version.

Rodgers introduces the roundtable discussion with a better encapsulation of his argument than anything he writes in the book itself. He contends that sometime during the 1970s a revolution in the American experience occurred. This revolution, though, was not political. “The battles over taxes and regulation that Reagan’s election precipitated represented no revolutionary break with history,” he writes. “Even the ‘culture wars’ and their partisan mobilization of religious loyalties replayed long-standing strains in 20th-century American politics.” Rodgers concedes that the economic realm was transformed to some degree. But the most profound metamorphosis occurred in social thought. Intellectual history matters! “A whole vocabulary of concepts that had once seemed the common sense of social thought weakened and new languages took their place.” We’ve discussed at length the new “vocabulary of concepts.” In short, more and more Americans began to think in smaller and smaller units. The individual replaced society in our ethical imaginations.

Rodgers anticipates an important criticism when he asks whether or not areas existed that transcended fracture. His conclusion: yes and no. For example: “Religious communities on the religious side of the culture wars stressed not individual autonomy but loyalties and obligations. And yet, built on their own consumer economies, drawing their members through defection from their mainstream rivals during what was said to be a general religious revival but was, in fact, a great reshuffling of faiths in the spiritual marketplace, the socially conservative churches, too, lived within worlds of choice.” In politics, even social conservatives, those most likely to summon duty, obligation, and order, reframed their language around individual rights. School prayer was their right—an argument that would have been alien to earlier moral establishmentarians who argued that a Christian public sphere was necessary for social order.

The first response in the forum comes from Bruce Schulman, who paradoxically claims that Rodgers’s “age of fracture” represents a new form of consensus history. Schulman believes that Rodgers’s sense that fracture was everywhere is a form of consensus history. “Beneath the veneer of conflict and partisanship that occasions so much handwringing in contemporary political discourse, Rodgers discerns remarkable harmony,” Schulman writes. “Indeed, ‘Age of Fracture’ refers not to the absence of, or the collapse of, an intellectual consensus, but rather to the creation of one—the widespread resonance of a view of the world as atomized, indeterminate, fractured.” This is an interesting way of thinking about Age of Fracture that I had not entertained. But I’m not sure it makes sense. The original consensus historians like Hofstadter believed that basic agreement existed among most Americans about first principles—capitalism and democracy. Rodgers, on the other hand, assumes that American social thought was increasingly disaggregated. Disaggregation as a common trend might imply that Americans were all caught in the same slipstream, but it hardly entails agreement over first principles. Although Schulman is quick to point out that there are far worse things than being lumped with Hofstadter, his most damning critique is that Rodgers repeats Hofstadter’s nostalgia. I don’t think Hofstadter or Rodgers work from a position of nostalgia.

Melani McAlister writes the next essay in the forum. Her forte is popular culture (check out her brilliant book Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East, 1945-2000 for a taste). As such, the gist of her essay is that, though she thinks Rodgers’s book is an excellent exploration of “the hothouse of journals and academic presses,” his narrative of fracture might have been complicated by going “to the movies.” In other words, unlike in other forms of social thought, centralized forms of power have prevailed in film since the 1970s. “In the imagination of Hollywood ‘the system’ is not fractured or dissipated, it is alive and well.” For support she cites Star Wars (1977), Blade Runner (1982), No Way Out (1987), Mission Impossible (1996), The Pelican Brief (1993), The Game (1997), and, most importantly, The Matrix (1999) and its sequels. The bulk of McAlister’s essay then follows as an analysis of power in The Matrix, “a near perfect exemplar of the mix of fears and delights that infused American reactions to the globalization of culture and the rise of new, powerful technologies that were in the process of transforming daily experience.” I really enjoyed this essay, but it left me unsatisfied. It is a fairly serious critique of Rodgers, but only by way of arguing that Rodgers omitted something important. One might assume that the social thought represented by film exists in an alternative universe to that represented by, say, gender theory, where Judith Butler’s theory of identity fracture seems very different from the “system.” Or does it? If we reverse the vectors of intellectual history (as Warren Susman and James Livingston advise) we should be able to bring popular culture and “high” intellectual history together. Let me briefly attempt to do this.

Rodgers points to Foucault’s theory of power as an early sign of fracture. But I would argue that his theory of power, upon which Butler based her thinking about gender, was as follows: rather than residing in the agency of sovereign subjects, power was too diffuse to be contained by mere individuals. In other words, power was not to be found solely in a specific political sphere but rather in the “politics of everyday life,” which lent philosophical support to the feminist slogan that the “personal is political.” But more important to the poststructuralist feminist theorizing of Butler, such a conception introduced the idea that power shaped people positively rather than negatively, that people acted out of desire rather than fear. So, as Nemo has written in his review of Rodgers, Butler continued to think about power, but differently. And the way she thinks about power, as diffuse but somewhere out there, playing on our desires, is precisely how power—“the system”—works in a film like The Matrix.

Michael Kimmage follows McAlister and offers one of the more insightful critiques of Age of Fracture. Thought he thinks the argument—“the will to have less in common is what Americans had in common in the 1980s and 1990s”—is brilliantly fleshed out, Kimmage disagrees with one of Rodgers’s counterintuitive historical revisions, made in the first chapter on Reagan’s presidential rhetoric. Rodgers believes that Reagan, who is often credited for winning the Cold War, in fact lost the words for the Cold War because he lost the words for the nation. Kimmage, in contrast, contends that Reagan indeed sought the nation. Reagan’s nationalism, Kimmage correctly points out, stemmed from U.S. intellectual history: “Since the early 1970s neoconservative intellectuals—Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Jeanne Kirkpatrick—had done what the could to articulate a workable ideology of American nationalism, less in the sphere of political economy than in the sphere of international relations.” To this degree, distinctions must be drawn between right and left in ways that Rodgers seems unwilling to do.

Donald Critchlow makes a similar point in his contention that fracture was far from widespread, especially when it comes to nationalism. He writes: “The belief that the United States is an exceptional country prevails among most Americans.” “This abiding faith in the free market, the rule of law, equal opportunity, and balanced government has enabled conservatives to construct a narrative that appeals to the American electorate.” Critchlow concludes: “ours is not an age of fracture, but of intellectual confusion on the part of some.” Now, to a certain degree, this avoids Rodgers’s main argument, that the revolution from aggregation to disaggregation occurred in the realm of social thought, not in the realm of politics. But I think it does open up an important point of departure: How fractured is the age when most Americans agree that their nation is exceptional? Does this assume too much?—Do most Americans even think the nation exceptional?

In Rodgers’s concluding remarks, he briefly ponders the question of the American nation. Though he says that his career has long been a search for America, he concedes that “America” cannot be found because “America is an argument: a big, multitudinous, often contradictory amalgam of persons, experiences, aspirations, and dissents.”

---------------------

As an aside, it appears that Rodgers has been tuning into our discussion. He writes: “In the intellectual history blogs and again in this exchange, questions of the casual assumptions behind Age of Fracture have been pressed forward. Which foot moved first? Did the economic transformations of late capitalism set loose these new debates? Or did ideas move first? My response is neither and both.”

Historically Speaking Forum On Rodgers' Age of Fracture

Here is a teaser post and summary of the forum at The Historical Society blog. The forum appears in the April 2011 issue. Rodgers leads off and responses follow from Bruce Schulman, Melani McAlister, Michael Kimmage, and Donald T. Critchlow. A rejoinder from Rodgers concludes the forum. Check it out. - TL

Historically Speaking Forum On Rodgers' Age of Fracture

Here is a teaser post and summary of the forum at The Historical Society blog. The forum appears in the April 2011 issue. Rodgers leads off and responses follow from Bruce Schulman, Melani McAlister, Michael Kimmage, and Donald T. Critchlow. A rejoinder from Rodgers concludes the forum. Check it out. - TL

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!]

-------------------------------------------------

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.

Historians Need to Learn How to Write

The Historical Society blog posted selections from a roundtable in the January edition of Historically Speaking on "Teaching the Writing of History." In the lead article, Stephen J. Pyne questions why we are variously trained in a multitude of methodologies we consider legitimate--"statistics, geographic information systems, languages, oral history techniques, paleography," to name but a few--yet not in how to write a book. The forum includes responses from Michael Kammen, Jill Lepore, and John Demos.

The following passage from Demos relates to our discussion below on Louis Menand and popular history:

"Time was when writers of history held a solid stake within the larger domain of serious literature: Gibbon, Macaulay, Parkman, Prescott are the first, most obvious, names to come to mind. No doubt the change, the downgrading, has had much to do with professionalization; as the discipline became, in fact, a discipline, priorities shifted. Perhaps there was something of a seesaw effect: when concern with research and interpretive technique went up, prose composition went correspondingly down."

How would a graduate program that took the teaching of writing seriously look different? What are solid pedagogies for teaching the writing of history?

Historians Need to Learn How to Write

The Historical Society blog posted selections from a roundtable in the January edition of Historically Speaking on "Teaching the Writing of History." In the lead article, Stephen J. Pyne questions why we are variously trained in a multitude of methodologies we consider legitimate--"statistics, geographic information systems, languages, oral history techniques, paleography," to name but a few--yet not in how to write a book. The forum includes responses from Michael Kammen, Jill Lepore, and John Demos.

The following passage from Demos relates to our discussion below on Louis Menand and popular history:

"Time was when writers of history held a solid stake within the larger domain of serious literature: Gibbon, Macaulay, Parkman, Prescott are the first, most obvious, names to come to mind. No doubt the change, the downgrading, has had much to do with professionalization; as the discipline became, in fact, a discipline, priorities shifted. Perhaps there was something of a seesaw effect: when concern with research and interpretive technique went up, prose composition went correspondingly down."

How would a graduate program that took the teaching of writing seriously look different? What are solid pedagogies for teaching the writing of history?

Moving Beyond "Everywhere and Nowhere"

Reflections On Historically Speaking's Forum About The State Of U.S. Intellectual History

(Part III of III)

by Tim Lacy

[Recap: In Part I and Part II, I introduced my reorganization of the forum's essay topics into three categories: external issues, relational issues, and internal issues. Here I conclude with a relatively short discussion of the final category of my tripartite taxonomy and hierarchy.]

Internal Issues

The bottom-most category of importance in the Historically Speaking forum are issues related to professionalism and professional structures. These include: subfield recognition and organization (i.e. identity); hiring and job availability; departmental and professional politics; historiographical trends; perceptions of the subfield; finding publishing venues; promoting and organizing conferences; and creating professional organizations.

I characterize these as varieties of internal concerns. They are pertinent to those whose livelihoods are staked on the health of the subfield, but few on the outside---consumers of intellectual history, if you will---care about these issues. These topics, while necessary, are only important in a 'helping' fashion. I foresee that answering questions and solving problems in first two categories will cause internal issues to lessen in urgency.

The problem with internal concerns is that they often feel tedious, whiney, petty, and self-serving. McClay aptly summed this negative side up in a word: "careerism" (p. 21). Because of this I will limit my discussion to only a few issues---even though all four forum contributors make legitimate points about internal concerns. I do not mean to underplay their observations about jobs, neglect, decline, status, pride, past "eminence," and Igo's influence-versus-autonomy dichotomy (p. 19) by failing to summarize them here. My primary concerns are identity, infrastructure, and community. I intentionally underscore these particular internal issues because they are forward-looking and positive.

To address my three concerns I am increasingly of the opinion that a USIH society must be formed. I see this as necessary, if not convenient or fun. This society would provide the structural legitimacy needed to affiliate with either OAH or AHA. I am unaware of THS's policies on partnering or affiliation. But neither of the older organizations contains a constitutional allowance for sub-field solidarity building. To link yourself to a larger organization, you have to establish your identity independently and prior, then build a partnership.

Establishing a society will provide a sense of identity and, hopefully, community. The primary goal of the society should be to host a regular conference. Whether regularity is defined as an annual or bi-annual meeting is of less importance than creating a home forum where professionals are guaranteed numerous opportunities for presenting historical topics related to the life of the mind, history of ideas, philosophy, thought-promoting institutions, etc. This home forum will be a prime place for feedback from like-mined historians on your work. And that self-correcting feedback will help move the field forward---opening new avenues for research and presentation, as well as preventing past mistakes in topical emphasis (e.g. elitism). Practically speaking, aspirants and professionals will also be able to look to the society as both a forum for concerns and place where actions might be taken.

I propose, therefore, the creation of a 501(c)(3) called either "The U.S. Intellectual History Conference" or the "U.S. Intellectual History Society." This group would not, initially at least, be concerned about funds. The fee for entry could be as low as $1 per year. The purpose of the society would be to create a friendly, democratic structure that, to begin, provides intellectual historians with the option of partnering a subfield conference with OAH, THS, or AHA.

If members choose to remain independent of either superstructure, then the group would have officers whose primary concern is the maintenance of the weblog and the annual (or bi-annual) administration of the USIH conference. If the organization chose to raise membership rates in the future for the purposes of conference stability and the distribution of funds for scholarly endeavors (e.g. award for best paper, travel grants for grad students), then that's an option.

Speaking personally, I am willing to help in this endeavor. I cannot, however, take the lead because of a pressing concern to draft my first book (i.e. turn my dissertation into a book manuscript). That is my first professional priority for the next 12-24 months. Indeed, this series of reflections on History Speaking's forum will be my last lengthy online post at USIH for some time. I think my USIH presence will be reduced to quick-hit "light reading" posts.

Conclusion

My purpose in summarizing and extending the forum's contents is to re-present the rich material therein in an alternative fashion that may speak to another audience. Other tropes are available, but the external-relational-internal structure allowed me to get behind the forum's well-written, individual reflections in order to systematize and prioritize the issues. But if my presentation is inadequate, one can always return to the forum. I will reiterate that I felt every essay in it held astute points presented persuasively.

But, to me, some prioritization of the issues raised felt pressing. Why? On the one hand, in terms of perception, the potential exists for non-intellectual historians to view, in the extreme, some of the concerns raised in the forum as self-serving. This falls under McClay's "careerism" observation. As such, it is therefore not only an outside-in problem. It's an internal one that perpetuates a destructive, dog-chasing-tail theme in some subfield discussions. I have been guilty of this in the past.

On the other hand, I wanted to convey what I felt were the essential, highest-priority issues moving forward. There is most certainly a positive agenda to be discerned in the essays---ways to move beyond intellectual history's current "everywhere and nowhere" status. First is the work of foregrounding ideas, thought processes, and thinkers in history. Everything else a distant second. Creating a low-key society should aid the primary cause. - TL

Moving Beyond "Everywhere and Nowhere"

Reflections On Historically Speaking's Forum About The State Of U.S. Intellectual History

(Part III of III)

by Tim Lacy

[Recap: In Part I and Part II, I introduced my reorganization of the forum's essay topics into three categories: external issues, relational issues, and internal issues. Here I conclude with a relatively short discussion of the final category of my tripartite taxonomy and hierarchy.]

Internal Issues

The bottom-most category of importance in the Historically Speaking forum are issues related to professionalism and professional structures. These include: subfield recognition and organization (i.e. identity); hiring and job availability; departmental and professional politics; historiographical trends; perceptions of the subfield; finding publishing venues; promoting and organizing conferences; and creating professional organizations.

I characterize these as varieties of internal concerns. They are pertinent to those whose livelihoods are staked on the health of the subfield, but few on the outside---consumers of intellectual history, if you will---care about these issues. These topics, while necessary, are only important in a 'helping' fashion. I foresee that answering questions and solving problems in first two categories will cause internal issues to lessen in urgency.

The problem with internal concerns is that they often feel tedious, whiney, petty, and self-serving. McClay aptly summed this negative side up in a word: "careerism" (p. 21). Because of this I will limit my discussion to only a few issues---even though all four forum contributors make legitimate points about internal concerns. I do not mean to underplay their observations about jobs, neglect, decline, status, pride, past "eminence," and Igo's influence-versus-autonomy dichotomy (p. 19) by failing to summarize them here. My primary concerns are identity, infrastructure, and community. I intentionally underscore these particular internal issues because they are forward-looking and positive.

To address my three concerns I am increasingly of the opinion that a USIH society must be formed. I see this as necessary, if not convenient or fun. This society would provide the structural legitimacy needed to affiliate with either OAH or AHA. I am unaware of THS's policies on partnering or affiliation. But neither of the older organizations contains a constitutional allowance for sub-field solidarity building. To link yourself to a larger organization, you have to establish your identity independently and prior, then build a partnership.

Establishing a society will provide a sense of identity and, hopefully, community. The primary goal of the society should be to host a regular conference. Whether regularity is defined as an annual or bi-annual meeting is of less importance than creating a home forum where professionals are guaranteed numerous opportunities for presenting historical topics related to the life of the mind, history of ideas, philosophy, thought-promoting institutions, etc. This home forum will be a prime place for feedback from like-mined historians on your work. And that self-correcting feedback will help move the field forward---opening new avenues for research and presentation, as well as preventing past mistakes in topical emphasis (e.g. elitism). Practically speaking, aspirants and professionals will also be able to look to the society as both a forum for concerns and place where actions might be taken.

I propose, therefore, the creation of a 501(c)(3) called either "The U.S. Intellectual History Conference" or the "U.S. Intellectual History Society." This group would not, initially at least, be concerned about funds. The fee for entry could be as low as $1 per year. The purpose of the society would be to create a friendly, democratic structure that, to begin, provides intellectual historians with the option of partnering a subfield conference with OAH, THS, or AHA.

If members choose to remain independent of either superstructure, then the group would have officers whose primary concern is the maintenance of the weblog and the annual (or bi-annual) administration of the USIH conference. If the organization chose to raise membership rates in the future for the purposes of conference stability and the distribution of funds for scholarly endeavors (e.g. award for best paper, travel grants for grad students), then that's an option.

Speaking personally, I am willing to help in this endeavor. I cannot, however, take the lead because of a pressing concern to draft my first book (i.e. turn my dissertation into a book manuscript). That is my first professional priority for the next 12-24 months. Indeed, this series of reflections on History Speaking's forum will be my last lengthy online post at USIH for some time. I think my USIH presence will be reduced to quick-hit "light reading" posts.

Conclusion

My purpose in summarizing and extending the forum's contents is to re-present the rich material therein in an alternative fashion that may speak to another audience. Other tropes are available, but the external-relational-internal structure allowed me to get behind the forum's well-written, individual reflections in order to systematize and prioritize the issues. But if my presentation is inadequate, one can always return to the forum. I will reiterate that I felt every essay in it held astute points presented persuasively.

But, to me, some prioritization of the issues raised felt pressing. Why? On the one hand, in terms of perception, the potential exists for non-intellectual historians to view, in the extreme, some of the concerns raised in the forum as self-serving. This falls under McClay's "careerism" observation. As such, it is therefore not only an outside-in problem. It's an internal one that perpetuates a destructive, dog-chasing-tail theme in some subfield discussions. I have been guilty of this in the past.

On the other hand, I wanted to convey what I felt were the essential, highest-priority issues moving forward. There is most certainly a positive agenda to be discerned in the essays---ways to move beyond intellectual history's current "everywhere and nowhere" status. First is the work of foregrounding ideas, thought processes, and thinkers in history. Everything else a distant second. Creating a low-key society should aid the primary cause. - TL

Moving Beyond "Everywhere and Nowhere"

Reflections On Historically Speaking's Forum About The State Of U.S. Intellectual History

(Part II of III)

by Tim Lacy

[Recap: In Part I, I introduced my reorganization of the forum's essay topics into three categories: external issues, relational issues, and internal issues. The first post then offered my reflections and extensions on external issues. Today I will move on to the second category. - TL]

Relational Issues

Second in importance are relational issues between the external and internal categories. Relational issues bridge the difference between objective historical concerns, including intellectual history's outward thrust into the larger world, and internal professional topics. Wickberg addresses the relational category in the second-to-last paragraph of his rejoinder. Please indulge me as I relay this long but fundamental paragraph (underscores mine):

Perhaps many of us do not want to see ideas [as "in the driver's seat"], for reasons that McClay points to in his discussion of historians' fascination with historiography. Historians, like social scientists, are inclined to see the categories and ideas they use as having a life apart from the objects they are designed to understand and explain. They want to evaluate theories, categories, and methods on their functional use and intellectual adequacy rather than seeing those very categories and theories as "inside" culture, as part of the very thing being examined and explained; the old object-subject distinctions that have been repeatedly undermined over the past century are still with us. If we historicize such concepts as "class," "attitude," "gender," "assimilation," or "average"---all social scientifically derived keywords that speak to a worldview or sensibility---it makes it harder to present our students [or readers] a naturalized view of the objects such categories represent. . . .I suspect that many historians, as much as they acknowledge this condition in the abstract, in practice want their ideas to be outside of history, rather than all over it.

When I first read the opening sentences of this counterintuitive passage I thought I had read it wrong. Was Wickberg really saying that we are sometimes poor historians with regard to our own beliefs? When I began graduate school in the late 1990s, it seemed that the profession was all about you, as a developing historian, understanding your own theory of history. Theory was the thing. Of course a professional "animus" to this existed even then, as Wickberg relays in his opening piece, in the form of craft-like empiricism (p. 16). But are we now reacting to the old theory debates by participating in what Wickberg called a kind of professional anti-intellectualism, thereby ignoring the importance of intellectual history? (p. 15). And how does thinking about our own theories help relate external and internal issues in the field?

This passage is clearly challenging us to continually be aware of, and revisit, our own controlling assumptions. And it does seem that historians have to be reminded, per their graduate courses in historiography, that history applies to every historian's own philosophy about the field. Recognizing our assumptions, via intellectual history applied inwardly, is necessary for professional health and honesty. The practice of intellectual history and its fraternal twin, the history of ideas, enables historians to be more self-aware. Intellectual history helps historians examine their own metanarratives. The history of ideas presents us with another layer of contextualization that aids the historian in being more holistic and honest about the roots and boundaries of her or his discourse. All people think with and in categories. And if ideas are, or at least can function as, instruments---as John Dewey told us and Wickberg reminds us (p. 23)---it is sometimes appropriate to work backward into the ultimate ideas. This makes intellectual history relevant to the reader and the writer of history. Otherwise it is like analyzing a farm harvest by talking only about the scythe or the plow (the instrument), and ignoring a discussion of the person or the tractor (the power behind the instrument).

To provide an example from personal experience, this process of backing up demonstrated to me how questions of gender, as I understand them, moved into questions about power structure, moral values, religion, and culture. As a graduate student I enjoyed the study of gender and women's history precisely because it brought me back to larger ideas and issues in Western and world history. This is how I came to appreciate the lessons of gender history as a reader. And Wickberg's argument, with which I agree, is that this is necessary for everyone---both in the beginning and as we renew our vows to the field. It demonstrates a relation of the role of intellectual history to both external and internal issues. Showing the links to larger, older, and sometimes more attractive ideas or metanarratives, helps draw the reader into the special lessons that need to be taught about race, class, gender, emotions, etc.

Another relational issue concerns topics studied within U.S. intellectual history and their interest to both the profession and readers of history. For instance, Daniel Wickberg reminds us that a tool of intellectual history, known today as the linguistic turn, and the important "bottom up" dictum of social history, helped feed the cultural turn that displaced intellectual history from the forefront of the discipline. This displacement, partially shown to be true by course offering percentages in Hollinger's essay (p. 17), was easy because the prevailing feeling was that intellectual history concentrated on elites and elite systems of thought---topics no longer in vogue. And such narrow foci led to intellectual history's "neglect" and the growth of exciting new avenues of exploration in cultural and social history. The profession seemed to feel, collectively, that a more democratic history of ideas and thought must necessarily evolve going forward. New topics must be explored.

This was the consensus of the participants in the 1977 Wingspread Conference. As a result a democratization has, in some ways, come about. It is being done in African-American history, as Sarah Igo, Wickberg, and Hollinger all noted (p. 15, 18-19). In addition, I am aware that Caroline Merithew, Toby Higbie, and others are doing work on the thoughts and minds of the working class. I have little doubt that other subfields could put forward representative examples of new topics and topical genre blurring indicative of a democratized U.S. intellectual history.

Interdisciplinary efforts comprise another relational subcategory. Work in this realm provides intellectual history with an opportunity to connect with non-historical disciplines, thereby increasing the audience possibilities for the subfield and anchoring the subfield in academy. If intellectual history shows itself to be useful to scientists, philosophers, literary scholars, and political scientists, then the demand for professional intellectual historians will be high. Wickberg notes that the "interdisciplinary impulse...is peculiarly suited to intellectual history," and that those historians "often find themselves in dialogue with those on the margins of other disciplines," be they philosophers, political scientists, or anthropologists to name a few (p. 16). I agree with this by way of desire and my own reading list, but not so much in person; I don't meet often with philosophers, psychologists, legal scholars, and political scientiests, but I read their works.

Igo observed the same "mixing" as Wickberg, but also that the interdisciplinary movement works from the outside in. She has noticed that ideas "are growing in importance for many scholars, no matter how they categorize themselves" (p. 19). McClay and Hollinger, in addition, believe that intellectual history works best in an interdisciplinary fashion as "a meeting ground…for the dissidents within existing disciplines" (p. 21). For them, it seems, dialogue about ideas, especially marginal ones, defines intellectual history. I find much to like in this notion, and the loss of that feeling would be my only regret if U.S. intellectually history were to be mainstreamed again. Returning to the sub-theme, I fear that hitching the success of intellectual history to the academic interdisciplinary movement may just perpetuate the "everywhere and nowhere" situation so aptly summarized by McClay (p. 20).

Hollinger provides a useful segue into our third category, internal professional concerns, by pointing to intellectual history's interdisciplinary usefulness within the profession in general. He laments how, somewhere in the past 35 years, social history came to be seen as the most wide-ranging and useful subfield even while intellectual history never lost its inter-subfield relevance. In European history the situation still allows for, or favors, intellectual history as a connector, but Hollinger calls this "a genuine blind spot" within the profession on the U.S. side of the ledger.

[This concludes Part II. Part III will explore Internal Issues within the hierarchy of my tripartite taxonomy, and will likely go up here on Thursday, 10/15/2009.]

Moving Beyond "Everywhere and Nowhere"

Reflections On Historically Speaking's Forum About The State Of U.S. Intellectual History

(Part II of III)

by Tim Lacy

[Recap: In Part I, I introduced my reorganization of the forum's essay topics into three categories: external issues, relational issues, and internal issues. The first post then offered my reflections and extensions on external issues. Today I will move on to the second category. - TL]

Relational Issues

Second in importance are relational issues between the external and internal categories. Relational issues bridge the difference between objective historical concerns, including intellectual history's outward thrust into the larger world, and internal professional topics. Wickberg addresses the relational category in the second-to-last paragraph of his rejoinder. Please indulge me as I relay this long but fundamental paragraph (underscores mine):

Perhaps many of us do not want to see ideas [as "in the driver's seat"], for reasons that McClay points to in his discussion of historians' fascination with historiography. Historians, like social scientists, are inclined to see the categories and ideas they use as having a life apart from the objects they are designed to understand and explain. They want to evaluate theories, categories, and methods on their functional use and intellectual adequacy rather than seeing those very categories and theories as "inside" culture, as part of the very thing being examined and explained; the old object-subject distinctions that have been repeatedly undermined over the past century are still with us. If we historicize such concepts as "class," "attitude," "gender," "assimilation," or "average"---all social scientifically derived keywords that speak to a worldview or sensibility---it makes it harder to present our students [or readers] a naturalized view of the objects such categories represent. . . .I suspect that many historians, as much as they acknowledge this condition in the abstract, in practice want their ideas to be outside of history, rather than all over it.

When I first read the opening sentences of this counterintuitive passage I thought I had read it wrong. Was Wickberg really saying that we are sometimes poor historians with regard to our own beliefs? When I began graduate school in the late 1990s, it seemed that the profession was all about you, as a developing historian, understanding your own theory of history. Theory was the thing. Of course a professional "animus" to this existed even then, as Wickberg relays in his opening piece, in the form of craft-like empiricism (p. 16). But are we now reacting to the old theory debates by participating in what Wickberg called a kind of professional anti-intellectualism, thereby ignoring the importance of intellectual history? (p. 15). And how does thinking about our own theories help relate external and internal issues in the field?

This passage is clearly challenging us to continually be aware of, and revisit, our own controlling assumptions. And it does seem that historians have to be reminded, per their graduate courses in historiography, that history applies to every historian's own philosophy about the field. Recognizing our assumptions, via intellectual history applied inwardly, is necessary for professional health and honesty. The practice of intellectual history and its fraternal twin, the history of ideas, enables historians to be more self-aware. Intellectual history helps historians examine their own metanarratives. The history of ideas presents us with another layer of contextualization that aids the historian in being more holistic and honest about the roots and boundaries of her or his discourse. All people think with and in categories. And if ideas are, or at least can function as, instruments---as John Dewey told us and Wickberg reminds us (p. 23)---it is sometimes appropriate to work backward into the ultimate ideas. This makes intellectual history relevant to the reader and the writer of history. Otherwise it is like analyzing a farm harvest by talking only about the scythe or the plow (the instrument), and ignoring a discussion of the person or the tractor (the power behind the instrument).

To provide an example from personal experience, this process of backing up demonstrated to me how questions of gender, as I understand them, moved into questions about power structure, moral values, religion, and culture. As a graduate student I enjoyed the study of gender and women's history precisely because it brought me back to larger ideas and issues in Western and world history. This is how I came to appreciate the lessons of gender history as a reader. And Wickberg's argument, with which I agree, is that this is necessary for everyone---both in the beginning and as we renew our vows to the field. It demonstrates a relation of the role of intellectual history to both external and internal issues. Showing the links to larger, older, and sometimes more attractive ideas or metanarratives, helps draw the reader into the special lessons that need to be taught about race, class, gender, emotions, etc.

Another relational issue concerns topics studied within U.S. intellectual history and their interest to both the profession and readers of history. For instance, Daniel Wickberg reminds us that a tool of intellectual history, known today as the linguistic turn, and the important "bottom up" dictum of social history, helped feed the cultural turn that displaced intellectual history from the forefront of the discipline. This displacement, partially shown to be true by course offering percentages in Hollinger's essay (p. 17), was easy because the prevailing feeling was that intellectual history concentrated on elites and elite systems of thought---topics no longer in vogue. And such narrow foci led to intellectual history's "neglect" and the growth of exciting new avenues of exploration in cultural and social history. The profession seemed to feel, collectively, that a more democratic history of ideas and thought must necessarily evolve going forward. New topics must be explored.

This was the consensus of the participants in the 1977 Wingspread Conference. As a result a democratization has, in some ways, come about. It is being done in African-American history, as Sarah Igo, Wickberg, and Hollinger all noted (p. 15, 18-19). In addition, I am aware that Caroline Merithew, Toby Higbie, and others are doing work on the thoughts and minds of the working class. I have little doubt that other subfields could put forward representative examples of new topics and topical genre blurring indicative of a democratized U.S. intellectual history.

Interdisciplinary efforts comprise another relational subcategory. Work in this realm provides intellectual history with an opportunity to connect with non-historical disciplines, thereby increasing the audience possibilities for the subfield and anchoring the subfield in academy. If intellectual history shows itself to be useful to scientists, philosophers, literary scholars, and political scientists, then the demand for professional intellectual historians will be high. Wickberg notes that the "interdisciplinary impulse...is peculiarly suited to intellectual history," and that those historians "often find themselves in dialogue with those on the margins of other disciplines," be they philosophers, political scientists, or anthropologists to name a few (p. 16). I agree with this by way of desire and my own reading list, but not so much in person; I don't meet often with philosophers, psychologists, legal scholars, and political scientiests, but I read their works.

Igo observed the same "mixing" as Wickberg, but also that the interdisciplinary movement works from the outside in. She has noticed that ideas "are growing in importance for many scholars, no matter how they categorize themselves" (p. 19). McClay and Hollinger, in addition, believe that intellectual history works best in an interdisciplinary fashion as "a meeting ground…for the dissidents within existing disciplines" (p. 21). For them, it seems, dialogue about ideas, especially marginal ones, defines intellectual history. I find much to like in this notion, and the loss of that feeling would be my only regret if U.S. intellectually history were to be mainstreamed again. Returning to the sub-theme, I fear that hitching the success of intellectual history to the academic interdisciplinary movement may just perpetuate the "everywhere and nowhere" situation so aptly summarized by McClay (p. 20).

Hollinger provides a useful segue into our third category, internal professional concerns, by pointing to intellectual history's interdisciplinary usefulness within the profession in general. He laments how, somewhere in the past 35 years, social history came to be seen as the most wide-ranging and useful subfield even while intellectual history never lost its inter-subfield relevance. In European history the situation still allows for, or favors, intellectual history as a connector, but Hollinger calls this "a genuine blind spot" within the profession on the U.S. side of the ledger.

[This concludes Part II. Part III will explore Internal Issues within the hierarchy of my tripartite taxonomy, and will likely go up here on Thursday, 10/15/2009.]