Rebirth of a Nation: Reflections, Ruminations, and Reactions

What follows are points of praise and criticism of Jackson Lears' Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920. I refuse to call this a review because that implies a smooth narrative of reflection. Creating that narrative requires more time than I have today. Plus, that kind of piece isn't needed. This book has been positively reviewed, in narrative form, in a multitude of prominent, top-notch newspapers and magazines. In addition the end pages of Lears' book are littered with quotes of praise from superstars in the history profession: Richard White, Andrew Bacevich, Michael Kazin, Todd Gitlin, and Edward L. Ayers. Finally, as noted on the cover of my paperback copy, Rebirth of a Nation was declared "Best Book of the Year" (2009) by The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Although we have discussed Lears and his works at USIH on several occasions, none of us have prominently posted anything on Rebirth of a Nation (it did come up in the comments of one discussion).

So what's left to say? I don't know in an absolute sense. I haven't read all the reviews noted above, but only skimmed them (I loved the last line of Summers' write-up). All I know is what I feel compelled to pass along--to reflect upon. Here's what I have, in bullet point form:

- I love the synthetic nature of the book. Lears blends primary texts with the best analysis from secondary sources accumulated over the past forty to fifty years. Through the latter you see how the progressive building of medium-sized ideas about the era (e.g. force, heroism, manliness, rebirth) come together to, in Richard White's words, change the metaphor. If White is right, neither Wiebe's Search for Order nor Hofstadter's Age of Reform contain the dominant heuristic thought tools for the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. It's now the capacious idea of rebirth (or regeneration), which has subsumed order and reform in it. Because of this I predict that Rebirth of a Nation will now be required reading in any upper-level undergraduate or graduate course dealing with the post-Reconstruction to World War I era. And if those students attend to to Lears' notes, the book is worth at least half of a graduate education in the fields of social, cultural, and intellectual history. You could add political history to that list if that subfield weren't so neglected. In any case, this book should be on the shelf of every single historian who proclaims to study or teach post-Civil War history. It will reward reference thumbing or close reading.

- If you're in a bad mood, the alliteration and belletristic nature of Lears' writing can become tiresome fairly quickly. I grew tired of it halfway through chapter one. In the second half of the book, however, the alliteration is either toned down or less noticeable. I confess that this is a bit of carping on my part. Perhaps I'm jealous. Then again, I received a lot of criticism for too much alliteration in my early writing, so maybe I'm over-sensitive to the issue. Anyway, when it's not tiring Lears' style makes the work easy to read. This is no small thing in relation to the fact that gender analysis---one of Lears' strengths---is not my primary analytical mode. [Aside: My title is, of course, a tongue-in-cheek tribute to Lears' alliteration.]

- In my pre-reading of Rebirth (wherein I thoroughly study the TOC, Notes, and Index), I had identified chapter five as the pivotal part of the book. I do not mean, in any way, that chapters one through four are less valuable. All four are absolutely necessary to the story. But chapter five met my expectation of importance. It stirs militarism, violence, market culture, white male supremacy, and urban-rural tensions into a hot cauldron of 1890s crises. In this cauldron, crises were dissolved into a new language of reform, order, and regeneration, manifest in market consumption, the idea of a cooperative commonwealth, and empire. Every major character of the age appears in the chapter: Addams, Adams, Beveridge, Bryan, Burnham, Coxey, Darwin, Debs, Gompers, Herron, James, Morgan, Pullman, Roosevelt, Strong, Twain, and Willard. Lears shows how misunderstandings about Darwin were put to both good and evil uses (p. 204). The introductory discussion of  empire in this chapter (pp. 200-221) is first rate, supplanted only by the contents of chapter seven, titled "Empire as a Way of Life." Lears' discussion of civil religion in the chapter compared favorably, in terms of themes, to the contents of Ray Haberski's God and War---though the later focuses on the post-World War II period and, to my knowledge, doesn't reference Lears.

- In the first 100 pages of the book I became annoyed with Lears' slight tendency to look for the erotic when its presence was questionable (pp. 61, 63, 64). At some point the search says more about the author than the material. Intemperance comes in forms other than sex--e.g. anger, verbal abuse, alcohol, etc.

- Although Lears does not seem highly sympathetic to pragmatism, based on his framing of Randolph Bourne's criticisms of John Dewey later in the book (pp. 237, 344-345), William James is a clear hero in the text. Even if Lears disapproved of James' experimentalist pragmatism (he didn't, p. 225), that disapproval would have been drowned in relation to praise for James' anti-imperialism (pp. 22, 217, 219-220), his capacious spiritualism (pp. 238-239), and his desire to subvert militarism to "more humane" ends (pp. 22, 49, 329-330). Lears' perspective on James corresponds with mine, but I think the reader should know that James is a hero in the text. Despite our agreement and Lears' praise of James, I still think that Lears offers a somewhat shallow reading of James' famous essay, "The Moral Equivalent of War" (1906). I'm not sure that James "idealized war's revitalizing force" as much as he sought to deeply subvert the language of his period (i.e. the discipline, order, and physical fitness inherent in militarism are not exclusive to it). But maybe I need to reread the essay.

This is probably enough for today. I'll gather up more reflections to pass along next week. In the meantime, have you read the book? Do any of your thoughts correspond with mine? - TL

Roundtable: Remillard on Haberski's *God and War*

In Search of a New American Creed
by Arthur Remillard
Saint Francis University (PA)


Halfway through God and War, Raymond Haberski shares his own close encounter with American civil religion. In 1976, on Independence Day, the author and his family joined millions of New Yorkers to celebrate the American bicentennial. “As I look back on it now,” he reminisces, “that celebration seems to stand outside of time” (p. 98). Indeed, in this liminal zone of swelling patriotic pride, crowds of strangers found common ground in their shared history. In the wake of Vietnam and Watergate, this sentiment was a welcome reprieve from the otherwise divisive tenor of the time. But if we scratch the surface of this expression of American unity, we find the looming presence of war, as the flashes of fireworks replicate exploding artillery shells. And parades and marching bands merely domesticate images of armed troops and battle formations. War is bloody. War is confusing. War is death. But when war moves from the battlefield to the ritual stage, war is sacred.

God and War investigates the sacredness of armed conflict in America, and the thorny issues that this reality brings forth. Raymond Haberski chronicles the civil religious discourse of political leaders and public intellectuals from World War II to the present who have struggled to make sense of the human and material cost of war. From Truman to Obama, civil religious rhetoric tactically replaces the language of loss with the language of sacrifice—sacrifice for a “higher cause,” a nation “under God.” And in public speeches and print culture, the events of war gain transcendent traction by buoying the narrative of American exceptionalism. But, as Haberski shows, there are always dissenters lurking in the shadows. These prophetic figures often ask whether or not a war is just. Or they doubt those who assume that any military conflict is free from moral hazard. To be sure, the bellicose patriot finds his or her dark twin in the gadfly who refuses to accept the status quo.

It is perhaps fitting, then, that Haberski follows his memory of 1976 with a reference to Reinhold Niebuhr, a central and recurring character in the book. While the theologian had died in 1971, Haberski suggests that Niebuhr’s critique of American idealism resonated throughout the bicentennial year. “A common refrain heard from many leaders,” Haberski explains, “was for the nation to redeem itself through humility, to humble itself before God and by doing so to recall that the United States remained a nation under God’s judgment not merely his Grace—principles Niebuhr preached but had rarely seen followed in his life” (p. 99). Here, Haberski sets forth the central tension of the book, an ideological tug-of-war between grace and judgment, between national pride and collective humility, between blind faith and healthy skepticism. The author situates Niebuhr everywhere and nowhere in this tension, since the theologian’s “Christian realism” both affirmed the necessity of war, and refused to conflate God’s will with political power.

Ambiguity notwithstanding, Haberski’s choice to foreground Niebuhr provides a stable guidepost as he surveys the civil religious territory of God, nation, and war. Some voices express very little Niebuhrian nuance. We hear from Billy Graham and Cardinal Francis Spellman, who, Haberski explains, depicted the Cold War as a “battle between the forces of light and the forces of darkness” (p. 64). Similarly, after 9/11, President George W. Bush developed what the author terms, “an absolutist moral theology of the nation” (p. 222). For those sharing Bush’s civil religion, Susan Sontag and her ilk were “un-American” heretics. “Let’s by all means grieve together,” she exclaimed after 9/11. “But let’s not be stupid together” (p. 204). A distinct strength of this book is Haberski’s masterful shifts between competing perspectives. For every reference to George Weigel, Richard John Neuhaus, and First Things, we find counter-arguments from Stanley Hauerwas, Jim Wallis, and Sojourners.

Yet, as the book concludes, Haberski circles back to Niebuhr. He notes that the theologian remains part of the American civil religious conversation, with everyone from Barack Obama to Joseph Loconte of the Heritage Foundation channeling him. War hawks in particular admire Niebuhr’s abandonment of pacifism and advocacy of war in order to temper evil and establish justice. To this, though, Haberski responds, “Niebuhr’s sense of justice did not include endless wars, torture, and preemptive invasions of sovereign nations” (p. 249). Then the author steps out from his historical wizard’s curtain and presents his own civil religious prescription. “Believing in the myths that sustain American civil religion does not require the reduction of civil religion to a theology of war,” he explains. “And critiquing civil religion does not inevitably produce cynicism, for losing national myths can be as dangerous for the health of a people as believing in bad ones” (p. 253). In essence, Haberski calls forth for a new American creed where the voices of both judgment and grace have room to speak, where national pride does not require armed conflict, and where humility always trumps hubris.

God and War wraps a passionate appeal for a reformed civil religion inside a compelling intellectual history of modern America. The book’s accessibility makes it suitable for the undergraduate classroom. Questions raised by the author will no doubt generate vigorous class discussions. Scholars of American religion will also benefit by carefully reading this book. In addition to offering his own insights, Haberski opens new avenues of inquiry. For example, what would happen if we shifted focus from the metaphorical pulpit to the pew? In other words, what did the civil religion of the “common person” look like in this era? And how would it compare with the intellectuals of Haberski’s study? Yes, the old truism that good scholarship raises more questions than it answers applies to God and War. This book is a fine accomplishment and welcome contribution to the discussion of American civil religion. 

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Editor's note:  This is the third post in a roundtable of review essays on Ray Haberski's book.  Haberski will post a response essay on Thursday.

Roundtable: Hartman on Haberski's *God and War*

The Soul of the Nation
by Andrew Hartman
Illinois State University


The nation was born when people committed to kill and die in its name instead of for God. Or so goes one of the major arguments put forward in the theoretical and historical literature on nationalism, beginning with Eric Hobsbawm’s Nations and Nationalism and Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities. There are several important qualifications to this general rule, the existence of theocratic nations like Iran for instance. But among modern nations committed to Enlightenment values, this tenet has tended to hold steady in how scholars understand nations. The major exception, of course, is the United States. The first nation born of the Enlightenment, America has nevertheless always been one of the most religious nations on Earth, so much so that many Americans have believed their nation one with God. Conflating God and nation is otherwise known as “civil religion.”

Ray Haberski’s superbly written book God and War is a valiant effort to understand the American civil religion, a “strange beast” of an undercurrent in U.S. intellectual history. He writes: “There is a fundamental irony of American civil religion—the nation lives with a misbegotten confidence born from a union of religion and reason.” Haberski’s book is the best at seeking to explain how the modern democratic nation known as the United States goes to war in the name of God; how it finds national meaning in its wars. For this reason, God and War should become a touchstone for postwar U.S. intellectual historians.



Prior to reading this book, I was skeptical that civil religion was an important concept in seeking to understand the intellectual history of American nationalism in the second half of the twentieth century. It seemed to me that when Americans reached consensus on the national purpose, especially in the years between World War II and Vietnam, the non-religious terms of the Cold War were explanatory enough. For every John Foster Dulles who put the nation’s mission in millennial terms there was an Arthur Schlesinger Jr. who understood the nation’s struggle against the Soviet Union in more earthly terms. Along these lines, I remain convinced that American foreign policy is best understood via the lens of economic interests. William Appleman Williams is the best guide to comprehending how the United States got involved in wars in far-flung places like Vietnam. In contrast, Ray seems to agree with historian William Inboden, who argues that religious impulses determine U.S. foreign policy.

And as I was skeptical about the concept of civil religion in the early Cold War, I was even more pessimistic that it might help us understand post-sixties America, when fracture was the norm. In the years after the sixties, years when American history is best understood through the rubric of the culture wars, it seemed that only conservative evangelicals held that America was a Christian nation. “I believe that God promoted America to a greatness no other nation has enjoyed,” Jerry Falwell preached, “because her heritage is one of a republic governed by laws predicated on the Bible.” This type of rhetoric did more to divide Americans than bring them together. Civil religion was a ruse. Even when Americans came together for the cause of war—the Gulf War and the aftermath of September 11 being two prominent examples highlighted in God and War—such cohesion was fleeting at best. Shortly after American victory in the Gulf, Pat Buchanan declared a “cultural war” against Clinton and satanic liberals. And shortly after September 11, 2001, half the nation had turned against Bush and his ill-begotten adventure in Iraq.

In this way, civil religion operated as a sort of culture wars riptide. To his credit, Ray agrees. He writes: “The ‘culture wars’ seemed to mock the idea of civil religion.” God and War has been extremely helpful to my understanding the boundaries of the culture wars. The culture wars were a war for the soul of America. Civil religion was recognition that the nation had a soul to begin with.

But more than anything else, what brought me around to the usefulness of civil religion as a concept important for intellectual historians was Ray’s layering of the different understandings of it. On the one had were those like Falwell who believed the nation was inherently good because it was a nation under God. On the other hand were those like Lincoln and Niebuhr who had a more ironic understanding of civil religion, those who had complicated views of America in relation to God and war. In this way, Ray understands irony as a form of critical self-reflection. Lincoln and Niebuhr, the heroes of the book, believed they must fight their wars. They believed fighting their wars was the right thing to do and that their conduct must accord with Christian principles. They concluded that their religion played an important role in how they framed their wars. But these ironists never assumed they were acting in the name of God.

At times, I must confess, it was hard to see how the ironic notion of civil religion was even civil religion to begin with. But Ray’s analysis of it made for fascinating reading.

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Editor's note:  This is the second post in a roundtable of review essays on Ray Haberski's book.  Haberski will post a response essay on Thursday.

Roundtable: Sehat on Haberski's *God and War*

Civil Religion: Who Needs It?
by David Sehat
Georgia State University


The very phrase “civil religion,” the subject of Ray Haberski's God and War, commits its author to taking on several different projects simultaneously. The book is therefore written on several levels, some of which are more effective than others.  At its most general, this is a history of religion and politics from the Second World War to the present.  Slightly below that level of generality, this is a history of American foreign policy and military engagements from the Cold War to the Iraq War.  And at its most specific, this is a book about conflicting conceptions of American civil religion.  This last project is the one that Haberski intends his own book to be about. 

The basic problem is that civil religion has no real definition, or at least no stable definition.  It entered the American political discourse in a wildly successful 1967 essay by Robert Bellah.  Surveying the demise of consensus in the face of Vietnam, Bellah fretted that American society was coming apart.  He proposed a renewed civil religion, a new conception of American ideals, beliefs, and symbols, to heal the fractures of war. 

But almost immediately after Bellah proposed the term, it was taken up into political discourse and used in wildly different ways.  Some conservative religious commentators believed that civil religion was a form of idolatry, a worship of the state instead of God.  Others of a more ecumenical bent took it to be the expression of a lowest common denominator of religious expression.  This shared religious framework, ecumenicals insisted, created a unity out of diversity that held the nation together.  Still others used it in a more sociological sense.  Civil religion in this definition consisted of secular symbols, rituals, and genuflections such as the national anthem and the pledge allegiance to the flag.  And, finally, people such as Richard John Neuhaus used civil religion as a synonym for public theology, the moral framework that is available to all people because God worked his rules and laws into His creation.

God and War is, at its best, a history of this intellectual dispute about the meaning of civil religion.  But Haberski did not just focus on the contestation over these different meanings.  He also asserted his own normative definition into the book in a way that I found both unpersuasive and confusing. 

He begins the book with Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural.  For Haberski, Lincoln provides a model conception of American civil religion in this haunting address.  Trying to make sense of the Civil War, Lincoln wondered if perhaps the massive death in the war was a judgment from God for the sin of slavery.  In invoking Lincoln, Haberski agrees with him that the nation is united under God.  What that means is that it courts His judgment and can, particularly in war, lose its soul.  Civil religion in this sense is essential for Haberski in his conception of the United States. 

But even after reading this book, I’m still not sure that civil religion is all that.  For one thing, its multiple meanings suggest that it is more a rhetorical posture than an analytic category.  And because Haberski uses it to explain the thought of people who never used the term (like Lincoln), there are too many times in this book when you can never be sure just what Haberski is talking about.   Take this example: “Before Vietnam, American civil religion had been primarily about grappling with the spiritual stakes of the Cold War—steeling the American soul for the ideological conflict with communism.  After Vietnam, American civil religion would contend with a national soul in shambles”  (p. 90).  Haberski’s statement raises all kinds of questions.  Leaving aside whether the nation has a soul and whether that soul can be first steeled and then shattered, what does civil religion mean in the above statement?  Which definition is in use at that moment?  I have no idea.  The general fogginess of this passage suggests that civil religion is just not sharp enough to do the work that Harberski wishes it would.

Still, Haberski offers a fairly straight-forward pattern of conflict that saves this book from its conceptual confusion.  Throughout his account, Haberski shows the way that political leaders and their allies marshaled religion for nationalist and often militaristic purposes.  They “treated the notion that the United States was a nation ‘under God’ as if religion were a natural resource.  It provided unlimited virtue for Americans, warded off the detrimental effects that came from living with the remnants of unbelief dredged up by the Vietnam experience.”  But these politicians, Haberski laments, never “showed any intention of acting as if the nation was under God’s judgment.” (p.146).  And on the rare occasion that politicians have done so—think Jimmy Carter—they were punished for it. 

The heroes of this book then are not the politicians but the dissidents, those people like Reinhold Niebuhr who maintained an ironic detachment in the face of war, Will Herberg who lambasted the shallowness of mid-century religion, Martin Luther King Jr.  and Abraham Joshua Heschel who objected to the American involvement in Vietnam by appealing to transcendent values, and Stanley Hauerwas who has asserted, again and again, that Christian ethics are for the Christian community, not the nation. 

The best parts of this book, and I really loved them, are the ones in which Haberski shows people squaring off about the proper role that religious ideas should play in directing the nation.  This is especially true almost every time Richard John Neuhaus comes up.  Haberski is now writing an intellectual biography of Neuhaus, for which we will all be thankful once it comes out.  We get a sense of that biography here.  Neuhaus was the person most responsible for the advancement of the term civil religion through the 1980s and 1990s.  His version, though it changed over time, meant something like a public theology that drew upon revealed Christian ideas that were applicable to everyone. 

Yet Neuhaus was consistently hammered, first by the liberal evangelical Jim Wallis, and then by Stanley Hauerwas, over his notion of civil religion.  The basic question in these disputes, and the basic question about the proper relationship of religion and the state in general, was, in Hauerwas’s words, “Who is the ‘us’?”  (p. 164).  “Your rhetoric,” Hauerwas complained to Neuhaus, “mixes ‘we Christians’ with ‘we Americans’ in a way that I think compromises our ability as Christians . . . to help our non-Christian fellow citizens realize the story of righteousness they associate with being Americans is deeply problematic.” (pp. 164-165).

What I like most about this response is that Hauerwas does not confuse the national community with the religious community.   He does not confuse the thick axioms of a religious tradition with the thin and minimal conceptions of moral obligation that guide the national community.  This, it seems to me, happens all to often when people talk about civil religion.  It is a rhetoric that acts to advance religious power while claiming a kind of consensus.  

But Haberski ends the book with a declaration of civil religion’s indispensability.  It is, he tells us, “the only way to acknowledge that we still need to believe in something worthy of the sacrifices that have been and will continue to be made in the name of the nation” (p. 254).  I see in this statement what I so often see when people start talking about civil religion: Christian theistic assumptions being smuggled into a debate about how people in a pluralistic nation can live and die together. 

So, Ray, why again do we Americans need civil religion?


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Editor's note:  This is the first post in a roundtable of review essays on Ray Haberski's book.  Haberski will post a response essay on Thursday.

These Historians' Deaths

By Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn

Over the past few days I have followed, with so many others, the commentary on the lives of not one or two but an entire trio of eminent historians: Eugene Genovese, Eric Hobsbawm, and Henry May. I admire the care that has gone into reflections that have appeared elsewhere as well as on this blog, including those of Leo Ribuffo on Genovese, Andrew Hartman on Hobsbawm, and Ray Haberski on May. For myself, I can only offer something along the lines of a blogger's equivalent to a moment of silence in honor of their memory, and that of the others we have already lost from their remarkable generation.

I knew only one of these three men personally. Eugene Genovese's life was intertwined with my family's at key points, a story some readers here no doubt know much better than I, and for almost as long as I can remember, his name has been a household word. I met him when we moved to Rochester in 1970 and again a few years ago when he invited me to participate in the early planning meetings for the Historical Society, including a memorable one at the New York City apartment of intellectual historian John Patrick Diggins, who died in 2009.  After learning second hand over the intervening decades of Genovese's reputation as firebrand, which in other settings he of course earned, I found his tremendous personal warmth and charm truly disarming. And enlightening.

As Genovese goes from man to a legend to many, albeit one who has erred (is there any other kind, of either?), there is genuine pathos in this moment when a soldier--for he certainly fought passionately for causes he believed in--lays down sword and shield for the final time. His life is complete now, but perhaps it is my long-term awareness of him, directly and indirectly through his best written words, as in his amazing Roll, Jordan, Roll, as someone of such presence that makes it difficult for me to believe he can no longer be living--at least not yet.

James Livingston's Comedy of History

[Today I offer you a guest post from long-time USIH blog and conference participant, William "Bill" Fine. Enjoy! - TL]

In reviewing Jim Livingston’s recent USIH articles and a few posts in his Politics and Letters blog* I’m persuaded that he speaks out of a deeply personal desire to advance a view of history that supports present and future hopes---in spite of his assertion that the priority must be on “going back” to recover historical contexts. [“Museum”]

Livingston might be seen to contradict himself in declaring that the past both exists and does not exist, or that history can be a guide and yet be open to whatever meanings we might project onto it. For him, knowledge of reality is mediated by language and other cultural forms, it’s “what we can act upon,” so “the past as such [is] indistinguishable from what we have said about it.” At the same time, he makes numerous truth-claims. For example, he’s annoyed that Paul Murphy allegedly didn’t practice sufficient “estrangement” from the ‘20s context, on the assumption that it’s a foreign world. But the warrant for that truism isn’t obvious. It’s not that Murphy draws lessons from the past, it’s that he misunderstands its relation to our “different” historical moment, and so draws the wrong lessons. Maybe we can’t understand ‘20s intellectuals without “going back,” but we have to understand them before we can assume the need to do so. [“Museum”]

Both Livingston and his interlocutors soften contradictions into paradoxes that seem to capture the multi-dimensional character of historical practice. Two of Livingston’s best are: “You can’t ‘go back’ to the past without the conviction that it’s always already different from the present, but when you feel you’re just catching up with something from the past, that difference is erased”; and “the past is both real and artificial. Like God, it’s consequential because we created it. The past is what we make of it…but we make it from these raw materials, and meanwhile they make us.” [“Museum”]


Ray Haberski generously finds in the latter a way “around” the either/or of determinism versus freedom, while Dan Wickberg opines that inconsistency is a matter of perception, and at least our modern critical tools protect us from the temptations of totalism. [“Museum”] Along similar lines, William Cronon, in “Loving History,” in Perspectives on History, sees “two fundamentally competing orientations for approaching history”---summarized as "how did things get to be this way?" and “the past is a foreign country.” But he concludes that, if history is to retain its attraction for professionals and others, “we need them both.” What Livingston said of the Rutgers conference on W.A. Williams into might apply here: “there was too much consensus, too little conflict.”

We could shift from logic to rhetoric, to see where and how Livingston deploys points that otherwise might be thought irreconcilable. Sometimes, in criticizing another historian, such as Paul Murphy, or advancing his own positions, he implies a fairly certain knowledge, saying that some views “deny reality,” while others accord with “the world as it actually exists.” There is no particular reason not to take him at his word, as others do in responding to his truth-claims. But at other junctures, to defend against the charge he isn’t a proper historian, he adopts a different rhetoric, asserting at one point that there’s no “practical difference between history, the past as such, and historiography, our interpretations of the past, because all we actually know about the past is contained in those interpretations.” [“Williams”]

The past has a number of discrete though related meanings in his work. Sometimes it’s the almost infinitely plastic material we shape in acts of knowing, as if the very idea of representation implies a closed reality. At other times the past possesses “legibility,” a metaphor he uses repeatedly. The term implies something pre-constituted as text-like, decipherable by historical actors and historians. So, for ‘20s intellectuals, the divide between traditional and modern “became legible…as fundamental change in the meanings of work, labor, and necessity.” [“Museum”] In his article on W.A. Williams, “historical circumstances” themselves are described as directly legible, as are both the “original intent” of the Open Door and the immanence of our “ethical principles” in that setting.

On the other hand, the past is presented as virtually created and cumulatively enriched through narrativizing. In his blog, discussing Edward St. Aubyn’s “Patrick Melrose” novels dealing with the trauma of a main character raped by his father, Livingston criticizes those who say it’s a denial of real suffering to read such events as only “fantasy,” since in themselves they are “meaningless.” [“Pol and Letters” - 5.2.12]. Some might insist instead that human events are by definition meaningful, though it’s not clear how much difference it makes -- to the traumatized, for instance---whether stories recount things that actually occurred. Still, if events lack their own legibility, in what sense can they be “falsified” by narratives, except by contrast to some other unnamed device? In any case, here narratives produced over time by different actors accumulate richer meanings, redeeming traumatic pasts, rendering events “significant…as moments in a meaningful sequence,” a story that can be retold. [“Politics and Letters” - 5.18.12]

Livingston’s freewheeling constructionism implies an ontological and epistemological pluralism that stands over against what he calls “metaphysical” accounts that presume an objective, realist history, a “Totalism” or “Absolute”; monolithic, deterministic, and typically declensionist. As he puts it at one point, “the truth of historical reality is always plural. The rhetorics are the reality.” [“Museum”] Perhaps he tends to universalize the interpretive chaos of our historical moment; either way, that wouldn’t prove we don’t live in a block universe after all.

Sometimes he goes further, insisting that good history confirms an emancipatory potential immanent in the historical process, and that history tends toward the good---or will if we think and act properly. For example, in his article on Williams, Livingston writes approvingly that:

“Williams assumed that a post-imperialist future was legible in the original intent of what he called the “imperialism of idealism” and in the real differences over diplomatic means and ends…. Without that assumption,…his critique…stops making sense because its fulfillment would then require the evasion of the world as it actually exists [which] would not allow for history as a way of learning. If the ethical principles of a post-imperialist future do not reside in the historical circumstances…then our only honorable recourse is to repudiate and escape those circumstances….”

Later, in the same essay, he generalizes what’s at stake:

“When people start wishing that things were better and assuring you that they won’t be, largely because nothing has ever changed except for the worse, you know that you’re in the presence of Kantian radicals who lack, or despise, historical consciousness---you’re in the presence of metaphysicians who know the past cannot be a guide to the present because it is the repository of myths, lies, deceptions, and their attendant moral atrocities.”

Livingston is fond of drawing a contrast between Kant and Hegel [though he seems to mention the former by name more than the latter], which he understands in part as the contrast between a morality that stands apart from and tries to impose itself on the world, and one that sees morality to “reside in and flow from historical circumstances,” as he wrote in his “Response to Cotkin.” [JHI 69, 1, April 2008] This may be taken as a descriptive sociological point---and Livingston among others have shown how “the social self” developed out of the interaction of Hegelian idealism and pragmatism, along with feminism. But to me this is quite different than using it to build a philosophy of history.

In “Socialism Without Socialists” [“Politics and Letters” - 7.25.12] Livingston challenges the pessimists of the left, using the terms of Kant vs Hegel to frame a stark choice: one embraces the present, recognizes that the left is everywhere, and “sees the ethical principles of socialism residing in and flowing from historical circumstances…not as ideas imposed from elsewhere,” partly because cultural has replaced political change. The other, from a fixed point of moralistic purity, gives up on a hopeless world, taking refuge in a saving remnant with no one to save, “leading us away from the world as it is.”

Whatever case might be made for Livingston’s argument that the left has been victorious, here he gives full-out expression to a historical teleology almost beyond intention or agency, a progressive conductorless orchestration that “recognize[s] what we ought to be doing in what we’re already doing.” [cf. his quotation of an early, still very Hegelian Dewey in the Williams article] Unless we accept these ideas, we’re denying reality and destroying all hope and possibility; the study of the past must affirm what present circumstances demand.

At the outset I speculated that Livingston is motivated by “deeply personal desire,” which of course goes far beyond what I could know, much less demonstrate, and it’s not terribly relevant anyway in assessing his work. I’m not sure how much is accountable as an act of will in depressing times, and how much flows from a secure confidence in his comic-religious, metaphysical vision. Because he so often frames his arguments in terms of the either/or of hope vs. despair, my guess is that there’s a good bit of trying in his believing. His efforts to show empirically that left-liberalism has “won” notwithstanding, my guess is that most people will see it as a framework brought to history---a leap of sorts---rather than supported by it. Indeed, if he is as much of a Hegelian as I think, it’s not easy to see how it ever could be, partly because we’re not done yet.

Anyway, seeing what comedy sometimes makes of irony, I miss a sense of the obdurate, of difficult trade-offs, the complexities of unintended consequences, the limitations of narrative----and a sense of the past as/in the present, the world to which we accommodate ourselves. I’m inclined to read his comic teleology as more a reflex of its historical moment than a way beyond.

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 * I draw on the following sources and indicate them following quotations:

 USIH

- “Near Dark at the Museum,” 7/12/12; and
- “William Appleman Williams: Fifty Years After His Book on the Tragedy of American Diplomacy,” 7/19/12.

Politics and Letters

a. “The Weight of the Past,” Part 1 (4/22/12), Part 2 (5/2/12), and Part 3 (5/18/12);

b.  “Socialism Without Socialists, or, What’s the Matter With Leftists?” 7/25/12.

Where Am I?

In the last paragraph of his essay on "The Present and Future of Intellectual History," Daniel Wickberg observes, "We have yet to have a really good history of American intellectual history, one that explains how we got where we are, how much our approaches are indebted to those of the past and the assumptions they made, and how much we have departed from them."  

What I find most interesting about this statement is not the claim it makes about the need for a history of the field, but the way that it frames an epistemic problem in spatial terms.  We need to understand where we are.  Our methodological and theoretical commitments are approaches, and they may retrace older routes to knowledge or depart from them.  

Similarly, in his reflection on the role this blog might play in the future of intellectual history, Ray Haberski writes, "This is a place where intellectual historians (emerging and emerged) offer a body of work to be discussed by graduate students and senior scholars without pretense that they serve as an official organ for the field" (emphasis mine).

I draw attention to this language not because it is jarring, but because it is utterly unremarkable. 

It is seems perfectly natural to conceptualize thinking and knowing in spatial terms.  Indeed, the sense of space is implicit in the idea of a "field" -- it is a conceptual territory with contested boundaries that allow us to define what is a proper subject of inquiry, and who is properly authorized to make such inquiries.  

This is the dual purpose of field exams in a PhD program -- mapping the terrain and vetting its custodians.  Professors may joke that there is an element of hazing involved in the process, but I'm afraid they're also telling the truth.  I'll find out for myself next year when I take my qualifying exams.  I am not looking forward to it.  

To "look forward" to the future is to conceive of the temporal in particularly linear directional terms.  Indeed, this way of thinking about time is the conceptual foundation for both whiggish history and its dour doppelgänger, the narrative of declension.  It is, I suppose, the conceptual foundation for the Western idea of history, period.  

And what is a "conceptual foundation," but a metaphor for knowledge-as-edifice?   Like the concept of a "field," the concept of knowledge as something that is "built" has proved a serviceable metaphor for understanding this scholarly enterprise in which professional historians are engaged.   In That Noble Dream, Peter Novick characterizes the beginnings of professional history in America as an era of "brick-making," an image borrowed from the public writing and private correspondence of J. Franklin Jameson, the founding editor of the American Historical Review.  Novick writes, 

This conception of the historian's task -- the patient manufacture of four-square factualist bricks to be fitted together in the ultimate objective history -- had enormous professional advantages.  It offered an almost tangible image of steady, cumulative progress.  Although creating a grand synthesis might require an architectonic vision, almost anyone, properly trained, could mold a brick: worthwhile employment in making a contribution to the edifice was thus guaranteed to those of the most modest endowments.*

The historian as a brick-maker tasked with converting the (presumed) raw material of the past into useable pieces of "objective" knowledge to be fitted together in a collective building enterprise has mostly been discarded, at least in theory.  Instead, thanks to Theory, we have a way of stepping back from this enterprise and thinking of historical knowledge (and any other kind, for that matter) less as a given structure than as a posited construct. 

Yet behind and beneath these two seemingly different ideas stands the same basic metaphor:  knowledge is something we build together.  

But where?

Peter Novick ends That Noble Dream with a chapter titled, "There was no king in Israel."  This phrase is lifted from the last verse of the biblical Book of Judges:  

In those days there was no king in Israel: every man did that which was right in his own eyes.

This verse serves for Novick as a fitting epigraph for the discordant and chaotic practice of history in a post-consensus, post-objectivity era.  But quoting this verse from Judges is also a cunning, punning invocation of Carl Becker's 1931 AHA Presidential address, "Everyman His Own Historian."  Becker was talking about "Mr. Everyman," not "every man."  As the AHA website notes, Becker's call for a pragmatic, pluralistic (or, for some, relativistic) approach to history has been interpreted by some as a call for "greater modesty in interpretation" of the past.  Nevertheless, that call for modesty was anything but modest in its bold swipe at the foundations of the brick-making, brick-laying enterprise of professional history.  It must have sounded positively destructive to some.

Similarly, some read Novick's book as a narrative of declension, and perhaps Novick himself viewed the story he was telling in that light.  But the "present" moment Novick described in 1988 -- a moment of cacophonous dissensus -- was also a moment of disciplinary creativity.  Look at the Bancroft winners for the decade following the publication of Novick's masterpiece, and all the Bancroft winers since.**  This is the scholarship that came from or came of age amidst that age of fracture, that babel of voices.

Perhaps, then, I might be excused for imaginatively situating the field -- or, perhaps, the construction site -- of U.S. intellectual history not in the land of Canaan during the time of Judges, nor in the land of Egypt during the years of bondage, but on the broad plains of Mesopatamia in the mythic age between Noah and Abraham.    Though the gods have already come down once or twice to confound our speech, there is no guarantee that they will not come again.  And the more we sound alike, the more we speak the same language -- or believe that we do -- the more nervous we ought to be.  

So, between Daniel Wickberg and James Livingston and Daniel Rodgers and David Hollinger and Andrew Hartman and Bill Fine and Ray Haberski and David Sehat and Charles Capper -- not to mention, as David Hall wryly notes in his MIH essay, "the occasional woman"*** -- I think we're good...for now.

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

*Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge UP, 1988), 56.

**Never mind Bellesiles.

***David D. Hall, "Backwards to the Future: The Cultural Turn and the Wisdom of Intellectual History," Modern Intellectual History, Vol. 9, No. 1 (2012), 176.

Doing an index: it's important but still a drag

I am in the midst of doing the index for the book you see to the left. The book is due to appear in the summer of 2012, but the index needs to be done a bit sooner--in two weeks. I am reading through the page proofs just now, looking for any errors and assembling the index as I go.

This is not the first time I've done an index but each time I set to work on one I have a fantasy of handing off the job to someone else. And then a little voice enters my mind.

Actually, the little voice is Jeffrey Herf, the very good modern European historian at University Maryland, who was a mentor of sorts to me when he was at Ohio University in the late 1990s. At the time, I had just finished my doctorate and had received a contract from the University Press of Kentucky for my first book, It's Only a Movie. I had to do my first index and Jeff told me that no one other than the writer should do an index, though almost every professor I had at that time had long given that task to someone else.

One of my colleagues had a girlfriend who had become a professional editor and indexer. She offered to help me with the mechanics of indexing and when I asked how much she charged for doing this stuff, the figure was not unreasonable but would have pretty much absorbed the modest advance I received for the book--and I wanted that advance to buy the computer that would help me write a new and, of course, truly great book. Funny, the computer I bought did not have a key to help that process along.

And so, I am doing my index, and once again wringing my hands over how to list a term such as "civil religion" which is the subtitle of the book and in some ways on every single page. I wonder how far to divide up a term like this, and whether I should get a bit creative and use a term that might not appear a great deal in the book but that covers the points I make nonetheless. I know I must go beyond the obvious personal names, places, and terms, but I always deliberate over the threshold that needs to be met for inclusion in the index.

For example, if a person appears in the book but is simply part of a list of names to illustrate a larger point, should I include the names on that list, or just the term associated with the point? The publisher of this book, Rutgers University Press, has given me guidance, of course, but I am still the author of both the book and the index and can make some decisions that emphasize aspects of my work in ways that no one else really can. That was Jeff's point. And while I will not give the task of indexing to anyone else (at least for now...) I am curious what other writers use for guidance as they consider an index. I like looking at indexes when I am sizing up a book; I understand how important it is to do this well.

What makes a good index?