Varad Mehta's Rejoinder To Shalev's Review Response

Varad Mehta has posted nearly 1600 words of comment as a rejoinder to Eran Shalev's response to Mehta's review of Rome Reborn on Western Shores. Mehta's comments take up three slots at the bottom of Shalev's post. Check it out. - TL

Eran Shalev Responds to Varad Mehta

Eran Shalev is an associate professor of history at Haifa University, Israel. The following is a guest post by Shalev in response to Varah Mehta's review of Rome Reborn.

An author, as we know, has little control over a book once it reaches its audience. But an author should, I believe, attempt to rectify a gross misreading of his work. For this reason I address two of Varad Mehta’s claims in his review of Rome Reborn on Western Shores.

Mehta attributes to me unusual claims to the extreme, namely that revolutionary Americans “thought not only that they could emulate Brutus, but that the ‘American Brutus’ would actually be the Brutus, resurrected 1,800 years later”; not less bizarre is the assertion that I imply that the numerous Americans who were using classical pseudonyms wished to hoax their readers into believing that they were reading texts about America written by actual classical Romans. “Even to suggest that,” Mehta writes, “is to make fools and dupes out of the Americans, who knew perfectly well that such a possibility was nonsense…it also makes Hamilton, Madison, and Jay [who wrote the Federalist as the Roman “Publius”] look like fools for believing they could trick their readers into believing it (177).”

Mehta is of course right. But nowhere do I make such an absurd insinuation. No scholar in his senses would. Indeed, in the end of the paragraph from which Mehta quotes I explicitly write: “The Federalist Papers were thus defined by the conspicuously false pretence of having been written by the founder of the Roman republic.” Defined by their conspicuously false Roman identity, not an attempt to fool the American public. Needless to say, nowhere do I suggest that Americans expected the “real” Brutus to reemerge. Or any similar outlandish ontological claim (although contemporaries did identify numerous American Brutuses, and especially American Catos, first and foremost among them George Washington). I am truly sorry that a reader could read my book and come out with such a mistaken understanding of my position. I will only say that none of the dozens of the critical readers (among them the most esteemed historians of early America of our generation) who read my work in its different iterations understood my argument in such a manner.

Further, nowhere in the book do I claim that the classics were, in the reviewer’s words, “the primary, let alone the only, inspirations for the revolutionary generation’s understanding of them.” Indeed, I consciously steered away from participating in such an unproductive contest or comparison of perceived importance; not only would such an unqualified claim about the classics be probably wrong, but such a mode of argumentation always struck me as an unproductive way to think about history. Hence, never would I, again in the reviewer’s words, assume that there were “no other ways of looking at the past…available to Americans in this period.” An academic book dedicated to the influence of the classics on Americans’ understanding of their newly created republic cannot, alas, focus on other political languages to prove its point. That does not mean however that the book claims that other modes of intellectual operation were unavailable to, or unimportant for, historical agents.

I disagree with other claims that the reviewer makes, but those are legitimate scholarly disagreements and I will not respond to them here. It is interesting however that he conclusively asserts that revolutionaries “called their achievement a novus ordo seclorum because that is what they believed it was. There is no reconciling that conviction with the notion that they were the second coming of Rome.” Here lies the heart of our differing understandings of the Revolution. My book’s contention is that such a rigid position as Mehta’s is seriously flawed: what is fascinating about the American Revolution is the deep tension contained in the simultaneous contemporary understandings of the newly created republic as a new order of the ages and in terms of a new Rome.

Book Review: Varad Mehta on Shalev's *Rome Reborn on Western Shores*

Review of Eran Shalev's Rome Reborn on Western Shores: Historical Imagination and the Creation of the American Republic (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009). ISBN 0-8139-2833-3. Pp. xiii, 311. $45.00.

Reviewed by Varad Mehta
Independent Scholar

Scratch an American of the Revolutionary era and underneath you’ll find a Roman. That impression has been long conveyed by a robust scholarship exploring the myriad influences of classical culture on eighteenth-century British North America and the Revolution of its inhabitants against their colonial mother.[1] Especially successful in scholarly circles has been the argument that the primary ideology of the Revolution was a strand of republicanism whose genealogy can be traced back to classical Greece and Rome by way of Machiavelli.[2] Eran Shalev unites the histories of the classics and republicanism in the revolutionary era in order to argue that classical antiquity “played a crucial role in articulating the revolutionaries’ quarrel and their coming to terms with history and time” (3). While Shalev does an excellent job explicating the influence of classical conceptions of time and history in this period, he is less successful in demonstrating that these were the primary, let alone the only, inspirations for the revolutionary generation’s understanding of them. The result is a book which, typical of those in the so-called republican paradigm, must make its case by ignoring the most important aspects of the Revolution, in particular the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

Shalev divides his study into six chapters, each exploring a specific aspect of his theme. The first introduces the pervasiveness of the classics and the various rhetorical uses to which each book or author was put. The second analyzes representations of Britain in the colonists’ rhetoric. Shalev shows how Britain, initially perceived as recreating the glory of republican Rome, underwent a process of “Nerofication.” Angry Americans, believing Britain was embarking upon a corrupt campaign to destroy their liberties, began to depict Britain as embodying all the worst excesses and tyranny of a decadent, imperial Rome. The third chapter was to me the most revealing and interesting. Shalev makes a provocative argument, compelling but not entirely convincing, that two conceptions of time and history prevailed in eighteenth-century America, one above and one below the Mason-Dixon Line. Southern conceptions of history were dominated by the cyclical mode of history. Southern patriots saw an America imperiled by the same forces of declension and disintegration to which all previous republics had succumbed. A product of history, America could not escape history’s pattern of youth, maturity, and decline in old age. Shalev does not say so, but this Southern version of history offers an apparent exception to American exceptionalism. North of the Mason-Dixon Line, however, cycles did not factor into the historical imagination. Here a mode of historical typology (i.e., progress) triumphed, with modern American exemplars being regarded as the fulfillment of classical archetypes. This kind of historical thinking was heavily influenced by Christian millennialism, which beholds history not as cyclical but as progressing unceasingly forward to the end of time. America would “escape the cycle that had plagued human societies through recorded time” by transcending it. This Northern mode of history was “exceptional” (87).

Chapter 4 focuses on what Shalev calls Americans’ “performance” of classical antiquity. A main issue is whether Joseph Warren wore a toga when delivering the annual memorial oration on the Boston Massacre in 1775. Warren’s wife, Mercy Otis Warren, wrote several closet dramas about the imperial tensions inflaming Boston in which the setting and the characters are all given classical names, some thinly disguised ones, that indicate what she thought of them. Boston becomes “Servia” and Governor Thomas Hutchinson is renamed “Rapatio.” Shalev argues that by re-imaging the conflict as taking place on a classical stage, Warren transformed it into an episode in classical history. By “taking the toga” (the chapter’s title), revolutionary Americans collapsed the distance between classical times and their own and re-enacted their history as part of Rome’s.

In the fifth chapter, Shalev investigates the uses of classical pseudonyms during the ratification debate on the Constitution. Such pseudonyms allowed authors to adopt classical personae to indicate their views of the Constitution and to claim history for their side. Thus “Cato” once more opposed “Caesar” and “Brutus” emerged again to thwart tyranny. In chapter 6, Shalev analyzes classical themes in histories of the Revolution written in its immediate aftermath. He concludes that compared to the Roman drama of the Revolution, with its great heroes and battles, the post-revolutionary period felt like a disappointment. Being once more submerged in history, the Revolution felt as far away as Roman times, a distancing which historians such as David Ramsay, David Humphreys, and Mercy Warren perpetuated at the very moment they tried to explain the Revolution. In the epilogue, Shalev traces two classical tropes through the rest of American history, those of the Roman patriot Cincinnatus and the tyrant Caesar.

Shalev’s study makes several valuable contributions to the scholarship on the classics’ influence on the American Revolution, and his colleagues will likely be answering his contention that they shaped Americans’ conceptions of time and history for some time to come. It is intriguing and provocative. But it is not persuasive. It is unpersuasive not because it claims Americans had a particular historical consciousness, which is undoubtedly true.[3] It is unpersuasive because we must believe that it was mostly an ahistorical one, that literate Americans of this age thought not only that they could emulate Brutus, but that the “American Brutus” would actually be the Brutus, resurrected 1,800 years later. Moreover, this ahistorical consciousness requires the Americans to have no sense of their own place in time, and to be utterly unaware of “[t]he inventions in mechanic arts, the discoveries in natural philosophy, navigation, and commerce, and the advancement of civilization and humanity,” which John Adams, in the prologue of Defence of the Constitutions of the United States (1787), posits have completely changed the world since ancient times.[4] We might number among these such epochal transformations as the rise of Christianity, the Reformation, the discovery of the Americas, and the invention of printing, events of which the Americans were surely cognizant. Shalev also ignores basic philosophical issues about how and why people think about and use the past as they do.[5] The lack of a theoretical perspective is a significant shortcoming, one which if rectified would have placed the book on a more solid foundation. The numerous typos (“Canae” becomes “Cane” [95], Benedict Arnold crosses “Canadia’s Alpnie hills” [101], etc.) are also quite irritating, but do not compromise Shalev’s interpretive framework.

Shalev operates according to the rules of what John Pocock, in defending his controversial work on republicanism, described as “tunnel history.” Shalev, that is, tunnels through one particular issue or problem to the ignorance of all others.[6] In other words, for us to believe him we must assume that no other ways of looking at the past were available to Americans in this period. It is true that classical pseudonyms were plentiful in the ratification debate. To make that claim and stop, however, is to ignore the fact that the debate was about ratifying a Constitution whose authors had spent their four months in Philadelphia deciding that history had very little to tell them and that if they were going to get anywhere the first thing they’d have to do was go their own way. The most famous classical pseudonym of them all deals a severe blow to Shalev. So we find “Publius” (aka James Madison) declaring in The Federalist No. 14 that the source of the American people’s greatness is their not having “suffered a blind veneration for antiquity, for custom, or for names, to overrule the suggestions of their own good sense, the knowledge of their own situation, and the lessons of their own experience.” Indeed, if they had taken no steps for which no precedent could be found, they would still be stuck in the miserable situation from which they had spilled so much blood and treasure to escape. Classical pseudonyms abounded, but they did so in a debate about a Constitution antithetical to the wisdom of the ancients. There is no turning this into a fulfillment of antiquity however hard one tries.

Shalev’s scheme has no place in it for Thomas Jefferson, that great optimist and evangelist of America. Jefferson can never be considered a pessimistic Southerner fearful of America’s eventual decline.[7] Not the Jefferson who avowed that the Earth belongs to the living, or that laws should be rewritten every nineteen years,[8] or that he preferred the dreams of the future to the history of the past,[9] or that his epoch was a new one.[10] No classical historical paradigm can make room for such anomalies. Shalev, therefore, mostly ignores Jefferson.[11] Just as he ignores the other historical sources to which the revolutionaries could turn, not least the history of their mother country, Britain.[12]

What Shalev really misses, then, is any real sense of the Americans’ understanding of themselves. That they looked to the past is indubitable. But they looked to it not to recreate or relive it, but to understand their present and, especially, to shape their future. No reader would have believed, as Shalev implies, that the essays issued over the name of “Publius” had actually “been written by the founder of the Roman republic.” Even to suggest that is to make fools and dupes out of the Americans, who knew perfectly well that such a possibility was nonsense. Of course that prospect was a “false pretense,” and it also makes Hamilton, Madison, and Jay look like fools for believing they could trick their readers into believing it (177). The Americans knew perfectly well what they were, and that was not neo-Romans. This reality was expressed by John Stephens. In taking the name “Americanus” for his essays, he adopted the classical form to convey a substance beyond the ancients’ imagination. His message was one that ultimately all his countrymen heeded: “it is principally from our own experience that we can derive just notions” of the foundations of liberty.[13] Their own experience, and none other.

The Americans called their achievement a novus ordo seclorum because that is what they believed it was. There is no reconciling that conviction with the notion that they were the second coming of Rome. Rome was not reborn on Western shores. What was born there was something new under the sun.

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[1] The classic study remains Meyer Reinhold, Classica Americana: The Greek and Roman Heritage in the United States (Detroit, 1984). More recent works include Carl J. Richard The Founders and the Classics: Greece, Rome, and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge, Mass., 1994); idem, The Golden Age of the Classics in America: Greece, Rome, and the Antebellum United States (Cambridge, Mass., 2009); Caroline Winterer, The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life, 1780-1910 (Baltimore, 2002).

[2] Fittingly, the republican interpretation is dominated by a triumvirate: Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967; Cambridge, Mass, 1992); Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (1969; Chapel Hill, 1998); J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (1975; Princeton, 2003). All three discuss the influence of the classics on republican thought. A recent overview of the debate about the place of classical republicanism in the American Revolution is Alan Gibson, Understanding the Founding: The Crucial Questions (Lawrence, KS, 2007), 130-64.

[3] The subject has not received all the attention it warrants, but those who have noticed its importance include Trevor Colbourn, The Lamp of Experience: Whig History and the Intellectual Origins of the American Revolution (1965; Indianapolis, 1998); Ruth H. Bloch, Visionary Republic: Millennial Themes in American Thought, 1756-1800 (Cambridge, 1988); Michael Lienesch, New Order of the Ages: Time, the Constitution, and the Making of Modern American Political Thought (Princeton, 1988). For the nineteenth century see Dorothy Ross, “Historical Consciousness in Nineteenth-Century America,” American Historical Review 89 (1984): 909-28; Thomas M. Allen, A Republic in Time: Temporality and Social Imagination in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill, 2007).

[4] John Adams, A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, 3 vols. (London, 1787), vol. 1., Preface. Online here.

[5] Issues like those David Lowenthal plumbs in The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge, 1985)

[6] J. G. A. Pocock, “The Machiavellian Moment Revisited: A Study in History and Ideology,” Journal of Modern History 53 (1981): 53.

[7] “It is this rejection of the past as a repository of wisdom that constitutes the most important element in the ideology of the victorious Jeffersonian Republicans.” Joyce Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s (New York and London, 1984), 79. See also eadem, “What is Still American in Jefferson’s Political Philosophy?,” in Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), 291-319.

[8] He makes both assertions in a letter to James Madison dated 6 September 1789, which can be found in Jefferson, Writings, ed. Merrill Peterson (New York, 1984), 959-64.

[9] Jefferson to John Adams, 1 August 1816, in Lester J. Cappon, ed., The Adams-Jefferson Letters (Chapel Hill, 1959), 485.

[10] Jefferson to Joseph Priestley, 12 March 1801, in Writings, 1086.

[11] What is true of this book is not necessarily true of Shalev himself. In an essay published only this month (and which I consequently have yet to read), Shalev perhaps fills this lacuna. See “Jefferson’s Classical Silence, 1774-76: Historical Consciousness and Roman History in the Revolutionary South,” in Peter Onuf and Nicholas Cole, eds., Thomas Jefferson and the Classics (Charlottesville, 2011). Jefferson always evinced a pronounced skepticism about the (mis)application of classical exempla to America, notably in Query XIII of his Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), where he lambastes attempts by the Virginia legislature to institue a Roman-style dictatorship during the Revolution.

[12] This dimension of the Americans’ historical outlook is discussed in Colbourn, Lamp of Experience, 3-68.

[13] [John Stephens, Jr.], “Americanus” VI, Daily Advertiser (New York), 12 January 1788, in Bernard Bailyn, ed., The Debate on the Constitution, 2 vols. (New York, 1993), 1:788.

The Metaphysical Club: Popular History?

I really should have read Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America a long time ago. It's probably the most talked about work in U.S. intellectual history in decades. But it was published while I was in grad school, none of my professors assigned it, and then I moved onto a dissertation, which turned into my first book, and then after that a second book project. Both my published book and my book-in-progress are on different eras than that covered by Menand. (The Metaphysical Club covers the Civil War through WWI—my books cover the early cold war and post-1960s America, respectively). But over this winter break, I've had a little extra time, including jury duty, which allowed me many hours of reading. So I finally got around to reading it.

To be honest, another reason it took me so long to open Menand's book is because I was skeptical of it, due solely to its popularity and celebrity. I tend to instinctively avoid popular history books. I suppose I'm pessimistic that popular history books, or popular non-fiction books more generally, have much to offer other than appeals to the lowest common denominator, which, lets face it, is pretty low. I don't think I'm elitist. I enjoy all kinds of lowbrow movies (The Hangover being a recent example). I just don't like to waste my time reading crappy books, which I think tends to define most bestsellers. Most are closer to Sarah Palin's ghostwritten book Going Rogue, currently atop the New York Times bestseller list, than anything serious or smart. (Reviews of such books, on the other hand, can be quite enjoyable to read—check out Jonathan Raban's excellent one of Going Rogue in the recent New York Review of Books.)

The Metaphysical Club reached the bestseller lists. And it won the Pulitzer. It thus easily qualifies as popular history. And yet, most scholars have had nice things to say about it. For good reason. It's fantastic! Some critics have pointed out that Menard probably puts too much stock in the power of biography. He implies that Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., William James, and John Dewey—the central characters of a large and compelling cast of intellectuals—were uniquely capable of adjusting the nation's social thought to the post-Civil War, modernizing world. But Menard is convincing, even in making the case for the driving force of personality, because he is such a subtle chronicler of changing intellectual contexts. The way he connects the tissue of pragmatism to modernism, Darwinism, and most importantly, to the post-Civil War need to conceptualize authority without force, is skillfully done.

Other critics have argued that Menard's book is derivative. But even if it's true that the book is synthetic, this is hardly a serious complaint and smacks of professional jealousy. Just because Historians A and B first made original, disparate arguments doesn't mean that Historian C can't bring the two arguments together. Sometimes it's the synthesis that is the breakthrough. At the very least, Menard's beautifully lucid prose makes old analysis seem fresh, or it makes concrete the post-Cold War return to thinking about pragmatism.

I suppose my enjoyment of Menard should compel me to rethink my anti-popular history stance. It's not like I haven't enjoyed bestsellers or award winners in the past. Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, often criticized by academic historians for simplifying complex processes, or by judging history solely through a moralistic lens, convinced me that I wanted to be a historian (or teacher or activist) when I first read it 15 years ago. And it has sold over two million copies. And I absolutely love Martin Sherwin and Kai Bird's biography, American Prometheus: The Truth and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, which has sold many copies and won the Pulitzer and various other awards. Plus, if one of my books ever becomes a bestseller, I certainly won’t complain.

I have another thought with regards to popular history. Is Menand's book as widely read as it is sold? Is it really popular history? I suspect that, rather, it is one of those intellectually fashionable books that people who want to be seen as intellectually fashionable buy but don't read, at least not cover-to-cover. Why do I suspect this? Mostly because, although Menand's writing is superb and clear, the material is complex, and the subject matter is not likely as riveting to the multitudes as it is to those of us who practice intellectual history. As an example, when Menand describes how statistics-driven thinking on probability helped shape the instrumentalist, process approach of pragmatism, the narrative does not exactly excite most, I imagine, to the same degree as a Stephen Ambrose description of storming Normandy, or some other heroic feat of war. To this extent, I place The Metaphysical Club alongside Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, which millions purchased, yet which millions can't have read cover-to-cover. The masses might have been drawn to Bloom's motif about how moral relativism is destroying knowledge—especially conservatives who enjoyed having their preconceptions confirmed by a famous University of Chicago philosopher—but I seriously doubt many Bloom fans actually delved into his close readings of Nietzsche, which even my most impressive students find obtuse.

In sum, has The Metaphysical Club joined The Closing of the American Mind in its propensity to collect dust on bookshelves across America? Am I crazy? My friend Varad Mehta, a European intellectual historian, pointed out to me that there is a difference between popular history as such, and rigorous, scholarly history that becomes popular. This is a good point, and if this distinction holds, Menand clearly falls into the latter category. Varad also historicized the problem by arguing that what we now consider serious intellectual work was once popular history—Gibbon and Hume, for example. Thus, in his eyes, it is us, professional historians, who have changed, and as such, it is we who are to blame for the gulf between popular and professional history. I agree with Varad’s historical point, but would argue that changed contexts mean different paradigms. Prior to the carving out of institutional space for the study of history, there was no distinction between popular and professional historical writing. There was just plain history. And Hume and Gibbon hardly wrote for the masses to the degree that Sarah Palin’s ghostwriter does.

I’m mostly interested in reader responses: Is The Metaphysical Club popular history? And if so, what does this mean?

The Metaphysical Club: Popular History?

I really should have read Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America a long time ago. It's probably the most talked about work in U.S. intellectual history in decades. But it was published while I was in grad school, none of my professors assigned it, and then I moved onto a dissertation, which turned into my first book, and then after that a second book project. Both my published book and my book-in-progress are on different eras than that covered by Menand. (The Metaphysical Club covers the Civil War through WWI—my books cover the early cold war and post-1960s America, respectively). But over this winter break, I've had a little extra time, including jury duty, which allowed me many hours of reading. So I finally got around to reading it.

To be honest, another reason it took me so long to open Menand's book is because I was skeptical of it, due solely to its popularity and celebrity. I tend to instinctively avoid popular history books. I suppose I'm pessimistic that popular history books, or popular non-fiction books more generally, have much to offer other than appeals to the lowest common denominator, which, lets face it, is pretty low. I don't think I'm elitist. I enjoy all kinds of lowbrow movies (The Hangover being a recent example). I just don't like to waste my time reading crappy books, which I think tends to define most bestsellers. Most are closer to Sarah Palin's ghostwritten book Going Rogue, currently atop the New York Times bestseller list, than anything serious or smart. (Reviews of such books, on the other hand, can be quite enjoyable to read—check out Jonathan Raban's excellent one of Going Rogue in the recent New York Review of Books.)

The Metaphysical Club reached the bestseller lists. And it won the Pulitzer. It thus easily qualifies as popular history. And yet, most scholars have had nice things to say about it. For good reason. It's fantastic! Some critics have pointed out that Menard probably puts too much stock in the power of biography. He implies that Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., William James, and John Dewey—the central characters of a large and compelling cast of intellectuals—were uniquely capable of adjusting the nation's social thought to the post-Civil War, modernizing world. But Menard is convincing, even in making the case for the driving force of personality, because he is such a subtle chronicler of changing intellectual contexts. The way he connects the tissue of pragmatism to modernism, Darwinism, and most importantly, to the post-Civil War need to conceptualize authority without force, is skillfully done.

Other critics have argued that Menard's book is derivative. But even if it's true that the book is synthetic, this is hardly a serious complaint and smacks of professional jealousy. Just because Historians A and B first made original, disparate arguments doesn't mean that Historian C can't bring the two arguments together. Sometimes it's the synthesis that is the breakthrough. At the very least, Menard's beautifully lucid prose makes old analysis seem fresh, or it makes concrete the post-Cold War return to thinking about pragmatism.

I suppose my enjoyment of Menard should compel me to rethink my anti-popular history stance. It's not like I haven't enjoyed bestsellers or award winners in the past. Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, often criticized by academic historians for simplifying complex processes, or by judging history solely through a moralistic lens, convinced me that I wanted to be a historian (or teacher or activist) when I first read it 15 years ago. And it has sold over two million copies. And I absolutely love Martin Sherwin and Kai Bird's biography, American Prometheus: The Truth and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, which has sold many copies and won the Pulitzer and various other awards. Plus, if one of my books ever becomes a bestseller, I certainly won’t complain.

I have another thought with regards to popular history. Is Menand's book as widely read as it is sold? Is it really popular history? I suspect that, rather, it is one of those intellectually fashionable books that people who want to be seen as intellectually fashionable buy but don't read, at least not cover-to-cover. Why do I suspect this? Mostly because, although Menand's writing is superb and clear, the material is complex, and the subject matter is not likely as riveting to the multitudes as it is to those of us who practice intellectual history. As an example, when Menand describes how statistics-driven thinking on probability helped shape the instrumentalist, process approach of pragmatism, the narrative does not exactly excite most, I imagine, to the same degree as a Stephen Ambrose description of storming Normandy, or some other heroic feat of war. To this extent, I place The Metaphysical Club alongside Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, which millions purchased, yet which millions can't have read cover-to-cover. The masses might have been drawn to Bloom's motif about how moral relativism is destroying knowledge—especially conservatives who enjoyed having their preconceptions confirmed by a famous University of Chicago philosopher—but I seriously doubt many Bloom fans actually delved into his close readings of Nietzsche, which even my most impressive students find obtuse.

In sum, has The Metaphysical Club joined The Closing of the American Mind in its propensity to collect dust on bookshelves across America? Am I crazy? My friend Varad Mehta, a European intellectual historian, pointed out to me that there is a difference between popular history as such, and rigorous, scholarly history that becomes popular. This is a good point, and if this distinction holds, Menand clearly falls into the latter category. Varad also historicized the problem by arguing that what we now consider serious intellectual work was once popular history—Gibbon and Hume, for example. Thus, in his eyes, it is us, professional historians, who have changed, and as such, it is we who are to blame for the gulf between popular and professional history. I agree with Varad’s historical point, but would argue that changed contexts mean different paradigms. Prior to the carving out of institutional space for the study of history, there was no distinction between popular and professional historical writing. There was just plain history. And Hume and Gibbon hardly wrote for the masses to the degree that Sarah Palin’s ghostwriter does.

I’m mostly interested in reader responses: Is The Metaphysical Club popular history? And if so, what does this mean?