Tim's Light Reading (3-15-2012): Gretel Adorno, Richard Theodore Greener, Ontics, Defending First Principles, and Tony Judt via Jennifer Homans

1. Gretel Adorno: Just A Stenographer?

Martin Jay reviews Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's Towards a New Manifesto, freshly translated by Rodney Livingstone, and hints at some interesting questions about Gretel Adorno's role [right, 1] in the life her husband and his famous conversation partner. Here are some sample passages from the opening of the review (bolds mine):

Gretel Adorno was a remarkable woman about whom far too little is known.[1] Although the recent publication of her correspondence with Walter Benjamin has confirmed the impression that she was a formidable intellect in her own right, she remains largely a mystery.[2] What we do know for certain is that she was deeply devoted to her husband Theodor, whom she married in September, l937. Abandoning a career as a chemist to support his work unreservedly, she seems to have been resigned to his extra-marital affairs, and was so despondent after his death in August, l969 that she made a botched suicide attempt. Among the many services she rendered was the dutiful taking of minutes from the intellectual discussions he thought worth recording. Beginning in March of l938, shortly after his emigration to America and full integration into the life of the Institut für Sozialforschung (then resettled in New York), she wrote down a number of conversations he had with the director of the Institute, Max Horkheimer.[3] She continued to play this role well after they all returned to Frankfurt in the early l950s to reestablish the Institute. ...

It is worth remembering Gretel Adorno's role in their preparation, and not only because it reminds us of the asymmetrical gender relations that prevailed at the Institute (which never had a major female presence in its ranks). Without a tape recorder, she was responsible for faithfully putting down a highly abstract conversation developing at breakneck speed -- the editorial foreword rightly calls it "a careening flux of arguments, aphorisms, and asides, in which the trenchant alternates with the reckless, the playful with the ingenuous" -- and it has to be accounted a minor miracle that anything coherent survived at all. If we add the tendentious title introduced by the publishers, which turn a relatively minor moment in the dialogue into its telos, it is clear that we have a text that cannot be understood as the polished reflections of authors who wanted these formulations to represent their considered opinions for public consumption. ...

And yet, however gingerly we have to treat them as hasty and undercooked pronunciamentos, they do provide a fascinating snapshot of the concerns of the major Frankfurt School theoreticians at a critical moment in their development. For this, Gretel Adorno's stenographic skills have to be acknowledged with gratitude....

And the final paragraph of the review [Theodor and Gretel right, 2]:

Collective political action is impossible at the present time, they conclude, and so are personal relations that try to avoid the gravitational pull of the bourgeois order. Even women's desire to "acquire the right to dispose of their own bodies" is tied up with the idea that "human beings become their own property." (28) The belief that love is a viable refuge or meaningful alternative is therefore sadly mistaken: "Love probably contains the false negation of bourgeois society," Horkheimer avers. And Adorno responds, "it negates it in an impotent fashion, perpetuating it through its negation." (28) What, we might wonder in conclusion, was Gretel Adorno thinking as she recorded these sour thoughts?

Indeed. So we are left to wonder: Was Gretel Adorno merely a stenographer? Did she transcribe literally, or did she translate for meaning? Are the conversations of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer "hasty and undercooked pronunciamentos" because or in spite of her best efforts to make sense of them?

Read the rest of Martin Jay's intriguing review here. I would say this book and these conversations go toward our larger understand of how Marx and Critical Theory work in America.


2. Artifacts of Richard Theodore Greener (1844-1922), Harvard Class of 1870, Discovered in Attic

The story is here. Here are some pertinent passages from the story (bolds and links mine):

Hidden in the attic that McDonald was contracted to clear before the home’s 2009 demolition was a trunk. Inside were the papers of Richard T. Greener [picture from Wikipedia], the first African American to graduate from Harvard.

“I didn’t know who he was,” said McDonald, 51. “But as soon as I found out, I knew this was a story that had to be told.”

Historians thought the documents were lost in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake because Greener had passed through at the time. They were astonished to learn in the past week that Greener’s 1870 Harvard diploma — water-damaged but intact — his law license, photos and papers connected to his diplomatic role in Russia and his friendship with President Ulysses S. Grant have survived.

“It gives me gooseflesh,” said Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., who leads Harvard’s W.E.B. DuBois Institute for African-American Research. “Greener was a leading intellectual of his time. It’s a remarkable discovery.”

His graduation blazed a trail for black Harvard intellectuals including Gates’ friend, President Barack Obama, the professor added. “He was the voice before DuBois and the president’s predecessor.”

As Ben Alpers noted on the USIH Facebook page, this passage from later in the story is amazing for its, um, lack of perspective: Gates — known for his 2009 “beer summit” on the White House lawn with President Obama and a Cambridge cop who arrested him on his own doorstep — says he would “love to bring the artifacts to Harvard.” ...That's ALL for which Gates is known?! ;)

But do read the rest of the story for what it reveals about Greener's life: born in Philadelphia, son of a slave, enrolled in Harvard in 1865 as an experiment courtesy of white sponsors, appointed philosophy professor in 1873 at the University of South Carolina, survived assassination attempt, had six children, became Howard University Law School dean, friend and rival of Booker T. Washington and Frederick Douglass, Russian ambassador under President McKinley, and on and on.


3. NYT's The Stone: Entry #1

In this post Colin McGinn [right, 3] argues that the term "philosophy" is outdated in relation to what current professional "philosophers" do. Because practitioners today no longer "love wisdom" in the way the ancients did, and because today's "philosophers" do no study human culture, McGinn argues for "ontical science" or just "ontics." And professional philosophers would become "onticists."

For my part, I have often thought that today's intellectual historians---especially those with a humanities view of the field---hew more closely to the traditional view of philosopher than today's professional onticists. Think about the works of the best intellectual historians in relation to those most respected in analytic philosophy. Or, more empirically (when possible), try arguing or discussing anything with a rigorous analytic philosopher. They will quickly translate your words into incomprehensible symbolic logic that subverts natural speech---both conversational and narrative. Rather than discussing grey areas and ambiguity, your conversation will become a pissing contest of binary code: 1000100111010110001. The discussion will become a logic game rather than a dialectic about the human condition.


4. NYT's The Stone: Entry #2

Michael P. Lynch [immediate right] and Alan Sokal [down and right] exchange thoughts on "Defending Science." Apart from the epistemelogical contest between science and religion, I found these opening paragraphs fascinating in relation to discussions about foundational and antifoundational philosophy (bolds mine):

Debates over epistemic principles sound abstract, but they have enormous practical repercussions. For instance, in order to decide policy matters (like what to put in our textbooks and what to teach in science classrooms) we need to decide on the facts.

But in order to decide on the facts, we need to decide on the best ways for knowing about those facts. And to do that, we need to agree on our epistemic principles. If we can’t, stalemate ensues. Each side looks at the other as if they inhabit a completely different world — and in a sense, they do.

So it is perplexing, even worrying, that debates over really fundamental epistemic principles can seem irresolvable. The problem is that you can’t defend first principles without presupposing them — that is what makes them “first” principles. As a result, when debates reach this point, they can seem rationally irresolvable. We can’t defend our principles without arguing in a circle.

The problem of justifying first epistemic principles is very old. It led the ancient Greek skeptics to say that knowledge is an illusion. But over the centuries, it has been more common to draw a different conclusion, one concerning the relative value of reason itself. According to many people, what the problem of justifying first principles really shows is that because reasons always run out or end up just going in circles, our starting point must always be something more like faith.

This is a great discussion. Read the rest here.

5. More On Tony Judt

Read the reflections of Judt's spouse, Jennifer Homans, on Judt's last days and his last work of intellectual history, titled Thinking the Twentieth Century. Keep some tissue nearby. Even so, here are some passages I found most intriguing (bolds mine):

The book is a history of twentieth-century thought. It begins with his reflections on Jewish idealism and Jewish suffering in Europe and ends with a devastating account of the failure of American politics in the post–cold war world. It is also an intellectual autobiography—of sorts. “Of sorts” because Tony rarely wrote in the first person, and the autobiographical sections of the book were wedged in, almost reluctantly, between the ideas, the history, the politics, and the ethical dilemmas that were central to his life.

This doesn’t mean that the book is not personal. For Tony, ideas were a kind of emotion, something he felt and cared about in the way that most people do about feelings like sadness or love. ...Ideas and the need for historical explanations ran deep, back then and right through to Thinking the Twentieth Century. [Judt family right, 4]

Of all of Tony’s writings, this book seems to me in need of some explanation: a backdrop or a scene, because the scene—the conditions under which it was written—was so dark and because the darkness shaped the book, in its form but also in its ideas. ...

So Thinking the Twentieth Century pours decades of thought and knowledge and days of illness into a lifelong idealism. It is an idealism that under the circumstances could be sustained only by a ferociously disciplined mind, and at great personal cost. I don’t mean that Tony believed in an ideal society. The only thing he was an idealist about was serious public debate. This was the one thing, along with love, that was always left standing no matter how much was felled by the disease, and so much was. Tony called it the core. To me it was a narrowing beam of light in the darkness that was separating Tony from us all. And if Thinking the Twentieth Century stands in the no-man’s-land between what is and what should be, as I think it does, this is in part because it was driven by the darkness but also part of the light. It was besieged, as he was.

The rest of Homans' piece is here.

The more I learn about Tony Judt, the more I want to read all of his work. - TL


---------------------------
Picture credits

1. Gretel Adorno, here.

2. Gretel and Theodor Adorno, here.

3. Colin McGinn, here.

4. Judt family, here.

Crises of Capitalism

In this lecture put to animation by RSA Animate (one of several such brilliantly animated lectures done by RSA), David Harvey explains the economic crisis of 2008 in Marxist terms. This lecture is a synthesis of Harvey's 2010 book, The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism, where he contends, among other things, that surplus capital generates problems that will turn into crises if not solved by innovations in capital accumulation. What is the basis of the current crisis? He writes:

Labour availability is no problem now for capital, and it has not been so for the last twenty-five years. But disempowered labour means low wages, and impoverished workers do not constitute a vibrant market. Persistent wage repression therefore poses the problem of lack of demand for the expanding output of capitalist corporations. One barrier to capital accumulation--the labor question--is overcome at the expense of creating another--lack of a market. So how could this second barrier be circumvented? The gap between what labour was earning and what it could spend was covered by the rise of the credit card industry and increasing indebtedness.

It hardly takes analytical imagination to understand how we got from there to the bursting of the housing bubble and the ensuing collapse of the banking system that financed it. My point here is not to say that Harvey's analysis (in this specific example) is necessarily unique. That good Keynesian Jim Livingston made a similar argument about how inequality (Harvey's "wage repression") created systemic problems (still) in need of correction. Rather, I wanted to draw attention to Harvey's work more generally, and gauge the level of familiarity or interest. I think he's one of the more lucid Marxists around (which I realize is not a large sampling).

I first read Harvey in graduate school when I was assigned The Condition of Postmodernity, which I found a brilliant combination of history, analysis, and critique. Harvey gave a total reading to an age in which total readings had supposedly been obliterated. I then quickly read some of his other books, which were more geographic or spatial explorations of capital, and also his A Brief History of Neoliberalism, which has done more to form my thinking on that topic than anything else.

I am currently reading The Enigma of Capital with my graduate students. It's a required "philosophy of history and historiography" course, and Harvey falls in the week after Marx on the syllabus. I wanted to show the students how a Marxian analysis might still apply to their world. The combination of Marx then Harvey works really well--at least, I hope it does, I'll find out more when I meet with students tomorrow night--because nobody is more familiar with Marx's Capital than Harvey. He's been teaching that text for decades. You can take the course on-line now!

Harvey integrates actual analysis from Capital into his contemporary analysis of capitalism's crises in ways that I find very convincing, or at the very least, thought provoking. Check out how Harvey quotes Marx extensively to convince his reader that the current crisis is an intensification of past processes inherent to capitalism. Here he talks about what happens when faith in credit, which is necessary to maintaining the smooth flow of capital, breaks down (Marx called credit a Protestant thing, because of the need for faith):

From time to time, however, the expectations become so excessive and the financing so profligate as to give rise to a distinctive financial crisis within the financial system itself. Marx provides a brief description in Capital: 'The bourgeois [read Wall Street], drunk with prosperity and arrogantly certain of himself, has just declared that money is a purely imaginary creation. Commodities [read as safe as houses] alone are money,' he said. 'But now the opposite cry resounds over the markets of the world: only money [read liquidity] is a commodity. As the hart pants over fresh water, so pants his soul after money, the only wealth. In a crisis the antithesis between commodities and their value form, money, is raised to the level of an absolute contradiction.' In the depth of that contradiction, expectations become riddled with fear (neither houses nor the Bank of England appear as safe as they were once presumed to be) and the financing becomes far too meagre to to support further accumulation.

I think this nicely sums up what happened in 2008, when the value of houses crumbled alongside the exotic financial products tied to them. The Marx quote is poetic, too, but that's not surprising coming from the first great poet of capitalism.

Tim's Light Reading (6/16/2011)

1. The Educational Thought of W.E.B. Du Bois: An Intellectual History

This is the title of a short (189 page) new book by Derrick P. Alridge. Here's a review by Jon N. Hale, assistant education professor at Muskingum University. The review is quite informative, and here is Hale's conclusion (bolds mine):

Alridge provides a very important analysis and delineation of W.E.B. Du Bois’ educational thought. This book is critical for foundations of education scholars who present the traditional dichotomous Du Bois-Washington relationship that is too often used to represent black education ideologies during the Jim Crow era. This book is also important for historians interested in continuing to explore the tenets and nature of the Long Civil Rights Movement, especially the centrality of education as a critical site of racial, cultural, and ideological contestation. Beyond these specific academic circles, Alridge is an articulate author who engages primary sources and the socio-political context of his subject in a way that is meaningful, accessible, and informative to all readers. The Educational Thought of W.E.B. Du Bois is a well-written and supported text that makes important contributions to the field of education and history.

2. When It's Good to be Decanonized and Desacralized

Marshall Berman argues, in Dissent, that the fall of communism was the best thing to happen to Marx and Engels. I agree. [Note: The essay is actually "the introduction to [a new] Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition of the Communist Manifesto published [this past] March."]

3. Science as Cultural Integrative Force in U.S. History

Check out David A. Hollinger's take on this: "The Unity of Knowledge and the Diversity of Knowers: Science as an Agent of Cultural Integration in the United States between the Two World Wars," Pacific Historical Review, 80 (May 2011), 211-30.

4. The Faulty Mind of An Historian

Ta-Nehisi Coates is reading Shelby Foote's trilogy on the Civil War. Having learned more, however, about Foote's philosophy of history regarding the Civil War, Coates (properly) faults Foote's "white romanticism." Here's the conclusion of Coates' post on the subject:

[Foote] gave twenty years of his life, and three volumes of important and significant words to the Civil War, but he he could never see himself in the slave. He could not get that the promise of free bread can not cope with the promise of free hands. Shelby Foote wrote The Civil War, but he never understood it. Understanding the Civil War was a luxury his whiteness could ill-afford.

5. FYI: TOC for the Forthcoming American Studies (50 3/4, June 2011)

- “One Nation Over Coals: Cold War Nationalism and the Barbecue” - Kristin Matthews
- “When Modernism Was Still Radical: The Design Laboratory and the Cultural Politics of Depression-Era America” - Shannan Clark
- “What Almost Was: The Politics of the Contemporary Alternate History Novel” - Matthew Schneider-Mayerson
- “Howard Fast’s American Revolution” - Neil York
- "Black Presidents, Gay Marriages, and Hawaiian Sovereignty: Reimagining Citizenship in the Age of Obama" - Judy Rohrer

From here.

6. A New Journal and Society

There is now an "International Society for the Study of Skepticism." Its first journal, appropriately titled International Journal for the Study of Skepticism, came out last month. Here is the society's "about us" page.

7. Deweyan Playground Rhymes

Here's a little Thursday humor for you.

Tim's Light Reading (6/16/2011)

1. The Educational Thought of W.E.B. Du Bois: An Intellectual History

This is the title of a short (189 page) new book by Derrick P. Alridge. Here's a review by Jon N. Hale, assistant education professor at Muskingum University. The review is quite informative, and here is Hale's conclusion (bolds mine):

Alridge provides a very important analysis and delineation of W.E.B. Du Bois’ educational thought. This book is critical for foundations of education scholars who present the traditional dichotomous Du Bois-Washington relationship that is too often used to represent black education ideologies during the Jim Crow era. This book is also important for historians interested in continuing to explore the tenets and nature of the Long Civil Rights Movement, especially the centrality of education as a critical site of racial, cultural, and ideological contestation. Beyond these specific academic circles, Alridge is an articulate author who engages primary sources and the socio-political context of his subject in a way that is meaningful, accessible, and informative to all readers. The Educational Thought of W.E.B. Du Bois is a well-written and supported text that makes important contributions to the field of education and history.

2. When It's Good to be Decanonized and Desacralized

Marshall Berman argues, in Dissent, that the fall of communism was the best thing to happen to Marx and Engels. I agree. [Note: The essay is actually "the introduction to [a new] Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition of the Communist Manifesto published [this past] March."]

3. Science as Cultural Integrative Force in U.S. History

Check out David A. Hollinger's take on this: "The Unity of Knowledge and the Diversity of Knowers: Science as an Agent of Cultural Integration in the United States between the Two World Wars," Pacific Historical Review, 80 (May 2011), 211-30.

4. The Faulty Mind of An Historian

Ta-Nehisi Coates is reading Shelby Foote's trilogy on the Civil War. Having learned more, however, about Foote's philosophy of history regarding the Civil War, Coates (properly) faults Foote's "white romanticism." Here's the conclusion of Coates' post on the subject:

[Foote] gave twenty years of his life, and three volumes of important and significant words to the Civil War, but he he could never see himself in the slave. He could not get that the promise of free bread can not cope with the promise of free hands. Shelby Foote wrote The Civil War, but he never understood it. Understanding the Civil War was a luxury his whiteness could ill-afford.

5. FYI: TOC for the Forthcoming American Studies (50 3/4, June 2011)

- “One Nation Over Coals: Cold War Nationalism and the Barbecue” - Kristin Matthews
- “When Modernism Was Still Radical: The Design Laboratory and the Cultural Politics of Depression-Era America” - Shannan Clark
- “What Almost Was: The Politics of the Contemporary Alternate History Novel” - Matthew Schneider-Mayerson
- “Howard Fast’s American Revolution” - Neil York
- "Black Presidents, Gay Marriages, and Hawaiian Sovereignty: Reimagining Citizenship in the Age of Obama" - Judy Rohrer

From here.

6. A New Journal and Society

There is now an "International Society for the Study of Skepticism." Its first journal, appropriately titled International Journal for the Study of Skepticism, came out last month. Here is the society's "about us" page.

7. Deweyan Playground Rhymes

Here's a little Thursday humor for you.

Neoconservatism and the Spirit of the Anti-Sixties

(My first post since it was announced that USIH won the 2010 Cliopatria Award for best group blog!)

At risk of opening up a discussion of another vague, contradictory, often polemical and even more often misunderstood political label, I’m going to move the discussion from neoliberalism to neoconservatism. How should intellectual historians frame neoconservatism? (This post is lacking in that I have yet to read Justin Vaïsse’s much-discussed new book, Neoconservatism: The Biography of a Movement—I’ll get to it!)

Leo Ribuffo always gives the best advice on all things conservative history, in a grumpy senior scholar sort of way. For a classic Ribuffo statement on the field of conservative history, check out the paper he gave at last year’s OAH: “Seventeen Suggestions for Studying the Right Now that Studying the Right is Trendy.” One of his suggestions is that we take Lionel Trilling’s famous statement that there are no conservative ideas in America, only irritable gestures, and “bury it in a deep hole with nuclear waste.” Point taken. Of course, anyone who has read George Nash's 1976 bible, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America, hardly needs this bit of advice. But there are several other nuggets of wisdom in the Ribuffo essay. I highly recommend it, crankiness and all.

Another panel at last year’s OAH offered suggestions on the field. (Wow, how often do I remember not one but two panels from an academic conference that took place nearly a year ago? Other than the USIH annual conference, of course, where all the panels are memorable!) The panel, on rethinking conservative intellectual history, featured, among others, Jennifer Burns, whose biography of Ayn Rand: The Goddess of the Market, is one of the best books in intellectual history of the last five years. To that extent, surprisingly, the panel hardly offered any sage advice. The basic point I gathered: we should go beyond Nash—we should go beyond a narrow definition of intellectuals in studying conservative intellectual history. Beverly Gage, for instance, suggested that we consider the texts of political figures like J. Edgar Hoover as intellectual texts (she just happens to be writing a book on Hoover). This is good advice. But did we need this advice? (For video links to this OAH panel, featuring Burns, Gage, and Angus Burgin, click here.)

Certainly Eliot Weinberger does not need such advice, based on his brilliant and hilarious review of George Bush’s presidential memoir, the number one selling book in America, Decision Points. Weinberger treats Decision Points as a postmodern text, arguing that were Foucault still alive, he would have considered it one of the quintessential demonstrations of that philosophical question, “What is an author?” (Weinberger also reads Turning Points as a country and western song: “one minute they’re raising hell and the next they’re jerking tears.”)

Lately I’ve been diving into the work of one of the most important neoconservative thinkers, Gertrude Himmelfarb (aka Bea Kristol, wife of neoconservative "godfather" Irving, mother of Republican house intellectual Bill). As an intellectual historian, her example serves as one model for how to think about conservative intellectual history. Himmelfarb is a firm adherent of that paleoconservative Richard Weaver’s mantra that “ideas have consequences.” In other words, her theory of intellectual history is explicitly non-materialist, or, at least, non-Marxist, in the sense that ideas do not take a back seat to economic forces. Ideas, for Himmelfarb, quite often shape material reality. In her view, this is a properly conservative approach to intellectual history, even though, on its face, it is also a properly postmodern approach to intellectual history.

What ideas have consequences in Himmelfarb’s work? Most prominently, she contends, in The De-Moralization of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values and elsewhere, that what the Victorians referred to as “virtue,” or morality, shaped the culture of nineteenth century Britain (and America) to a greater degree than did the political economy. In this, Himmelfarb thinks she proves wrong one of the more popular passages from The Communist Manifesto, about how the bourgeoisie has “pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties…[and] the family its sentimental veil…” Marx and Engels were wrong since Victorian virtues, for example, made the traditional family stronger than ever in nineteenth century Britain, at the height of rapid industrialization. For Himmelfarb, this goes to her larger point that capitalism is not to blame for our contemporary pathologies: crime, illegitimacy, welfare dependency, pornography—the usual litany (see Charles Murray for a complete run-down). Older ideas about work and thrift kept people in line in spite of the “all that is solid melts into air” vertigo experience of capitalism or modernity. Rather than capitalism, Himmelfarb argues, the cultural and moral shift that took place during the sixties is to blame for our current pathological society. Duh, it’s the sixties! Always the sixties!

Himmelfarb’s dissonant interpretation raises three questions for me:

1) Must intellectual history be all ideas or all material? All text or all context? One or the other?

It seems to me that the new intellectual history as practiced by those who write for this blog, and as practiced by most of those who regularly attend the USIH conference, seeks to situate ideas in cultural context without necessarily reducing those ideas to some opaque reflection of “reality.” In other words, it’s not a question of either-or.

2) Even if Himmelfarb is correct in her assertion that major cultural changes did not obliterate Victorian values until the 1960s—dubious, but OK—why does this prove Marx wrong? Is there a statute of limitations on the “all that is solid melts into air” theory of dissolution?

A new book by Daniel Rodgers, The Age of Fracture, which I predict will be the most talked about work of intellectual history since Louis Menand’s Metaphysical Club, implies that Marx’s thesis is a pretty good explanation for our postmodern condition. As Robert Westbrook writes in an excellent review, Rodgers “hints, much like Marx and Engels, that at the bottom of things lay the powerfully destabilizing impact of capitalism.”

3) Why do neoconservatives always blame the Sixties?

This is one of the major currents of intellectual history that I am exploring at length in researching and writing my book on the culture wars. There are several reasons for this, most of which I won’t get into here for reasons of time and space (this is already far too long for a blog post!) A major reason, though, is the neoconservative distaste for antinomianism. This is made clear in a new biography of Norman Podhoretz, who, as editor of Commentary from 1960 to 1995, was equally if not more important than Kristol in delineating the neoconservative mind. Podhoretz had a longstanding yet latent (in terms of outspokenness) distaste for antinomianism and sexual liberation, revealed as early as 1958, when he wrote a scathing Partisan Review essay on the Beats, titled, “The Know-Nothing Bohemians.” Anti-antinomianism became foundational to his distaste for the sixties.

Of course, not all of the neoconservatives rooted the origins of cultural demise in the sixties. Robert Bork, in Slouching Towards Gomorrah (don’t you love that title!) argued that the sixties enshrined the radical individualism of the Declaration of Independence. Allan Bloom went much further back. For him, it was all downhill after Plato. But the larger point: the sixties formed the neoconservative view on American culture. Thus, if neoliberalism is, as I argued a few weeks ago, the spirit of the sixties, neoconservatism is the spirit of the anti-sixties.

Neoconservatism and the Spirit of the Anti-Sixties

(My first post since it was announced that USIH won the 2010 Cliopatria Award for best group blog!)

At risk of opening up a discussion of another vague, contradictory, often polemical and even more often misunderstood political label, I’m going to move the discussion from neoliberalism to neoconservatism. How should intellectual historians frame neoconservatism? (This post is lacking in that I have yet to read Justin Vaïsse’s much-discussed new book, Neoconservatism: The Biography of a Movement—I’ll get to it!)

Leo Ribuffo always gives the best advice on all things conservative history, in a grumpy senior scholar sort of way. For a classic Ribuffo statement on the field of conservative history, check out the paper he gave at last year’s OAH: “Seventeen Suggestions for Studying the Right Now that Studying the Right is Trendy.” One of his suggestions is that we take Lionel Trilling’s famous statement that there are no conservative ideas in America, only irritable gestures, and “bury it in a deep hole with nuclear waste.” Point taken. Of course, anyone who has read George Nash's 1976 bible, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America, hardly needs this bit of advice. But there are several other nuggets of wisdom in the Ribuffo essay. I highly recommend it, crankiness and all.

Another panel at last year’s OAH offered suggestions on the field. (Wow, how often do I remember not one but two panels from an academic conference that took place nearly a year ago? Other than the USIH annual conference, of course, where all the panels are memorable!) The panel, on rethinking conservative intellectual history, featured, among others, Jennifer Burns, whose biography of Ayn Rand: The Goddess of the Market, is one of the best books in intellectual history of the last five years. To that extent, surprisingly, the panel hardly offered any sage advice. The basic point I gathered: we should go beyond Nash—we should go beyond a narrow definition of intellectuals in studying conservative intellectual history. Beverly Gage, for instance, suggested that we consider the texts of political figures like J. Edgar Hoover as intellectual texts (she just happens to be writing a book on Hoover). This is good advice. But did we need this advice? (For video links to this OAH panel, featuring Burns, Gage, and Angus Burgin, click here.)

Certainly Eliot Weinberger does not need such advice, based on his brilliant and hilarious review of George Bush’s presidential memoir, the number one selling book in America, Decision Points. Weinberger treats Decision Points as a postmodern text, arguing that were Foucault still alive, he would have considered it one of the quintessential demonstrations of that philosophical question, “What is an author?” (Weinberger also reads Turning Points as a country and western song: “one minute they’re raising hell and the next they’re jerking tears.”)

Lately I’ve been diving into the work of one of the most important neoconservative thinkers, Gertrude Himmelfarb (aka Bea Kristol, wife of neoconservative "godfather" Irving, mother of Republican house intellectual Bill). As an intellectual historian, her example serves as one model for how to think about conservative intellectual history. Himmelfarb is a firm adherent of that paleoconservative Richard Weaver’s mantra that “ideas have consequences.” In other words, her theory of intellectual history is explicitly non-materialist, or, at least, non-Marxist, in the sense that ideas do not take a back seat to economic forces. Ideas, for Himmelfarb, quite often shape material reality. In her view, this is a properly conservative approach to intellectual history, even though, on its face, it is also a properly postmodern approach to intellectual history.

What ideas have consequences in Himmelfarb’s work? Most prominently, she contends, in The De-Moralization of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values and elsewhere, that what the Victorians referred to as “virtue,” or morality, shaped the culture of nineteenth century Britain (and America) to a greater degree than did the political economy. In this, Himmelfarb thinks she proves wrong one of the more popular passages from The Communist Manifesto, about how the bourgeoisie has “pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties…[and] the family its sentimental veil…” Marx and Engels were wrong since Victorian virtues, for example, made the traditional family stronger than ever in nineteenth century Britain, at the height of rapid industrialization. For Himmelfarb, this goes to her larger point that capitalism is not to blame for our contemporary pathologies: crime, illegitimacy, welfare dependency, pornography—the usual litany (see Charles Murray for a complete run-down). Older ideas about work and thrift kept people in line in spite of the “all that is solid melts into air” vertigo experience of capitalism or modernity. Rather than capitalism, Himmelfarb argues, the cultural and moral shift that took place during the sixties is to blame for our current pathological society. Duh, it’s the sixties! Always the sixties!

Himmelfarb’s dissonant interpretation raises three questions for me:

1) Must intellectual history be all ideas or all material? All text or all context? One or the other?

It seems to me that the new intellectual history as practiced by those who write for this blog, and as practiced by most of those who regularly attend the USIH conference, seeks to situate ideas in cultural context without necessarily reducing those ideas to some opaque reflection of “reality.” In other words, it’s not a question of either-or.

2) Even if Himmelfarb is correct in her assertion that major cultural changes did not obliterate Victorian values until the 1960s—dubious, but OK—why does this prove Marx wrong? Is there a statute of limitations on the “all that is solid melts into air” theory of dissolution?

A new book by Daniel Rodgers, The Age of Fracture, which I predict will be the most talked about work of intellectual history since Louis Menand’s Metaphysical Club, implies that Marx’s thesis is a pretty good explanation for our postmodern condition. As Robert Westbrook writes in an excellent review, Rodgers “hints, much like Marx and Engels, that at the bottom of things lay the powerfully destabilizing impact of capitalism.”

3) Why do neoconservatives always blame the Sixties?

This is one of the major currents of intellectual history that I am exploring at length in researching and writing my book on the culture wars. There are several reasons for this, most of which I won’t get into here for reasons of time and space (this is already far too long for a blog post!) A major reason, though, is the neoconservative distaste for antinomianism. This is made clear in a new biography of Norman Podhoretz, who, as editor of Commentary from 1960 to 1995, was equally if not more important than Kristol in delineating the neoconservative mind. Podhoretz had a longstanding yet latent (in terms of outspokenness) distaste for antinomianism and sexual liberation, revealed as early as 1958, when he wrote a scathing Partisan Review essay on the Beats, titled, “The Know-Nothing Bohemians.” Anti-antinomianism became foundational to his distaste for the sixties.

Of course, not all of the neoconservatives rooted the origins of cultural demise in the sixties. Robert Bork, in Slouching Towards Gomorrah (don’t you love that title!) argued that the sixties enshrined the radical individualism of the Declaration of Independence. Allan Bloom went much further back. For him, it was all downhill after Plato. But the larger point: the sixties formed the neoconservative view on American culture. Thus, if neoliberalism is, as I argued a few weeks ago, the spirit of the sixties, neoconservatism is the spirit of the anti-sixties.