George Nash's Conservative Intellectual Movement and Communities of Discourse

When I picked up a copy of George H. Nash's indispensable history of The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 at the local used book store, I got more than I bargained for.

Sure, I got a pretty good deal on the book itself:  I paid $9.99 for a near-perfect hardback copy of the 1996 edition.  The pages are tight and clean, there is almost no shelf-wear, and the dust jacket is just ever so slightly bumped at the corners.  It's a really nice copy.  This is because I haven't started reading it yet.  I am a tough, tactile reader of the books I own:  I double-dog-ear pages, and I write rapid-fire marginalia like nobody's business.  By the time I am done with George Nash, this book will look like cannon fodder -- or, I suppose, canon fodder, as I bring Nash's text into conversation with the other books on my reading list. 

What I didn't bargain for when I bought Nash's text was the window that this particular copy of the book would give me into a different kind of conversation taking place within and across distinct communities of discourse -- to borrow and use David Hollinger's apt and helpful mode of analysis.  I need to understand the relationship between the ideas Nash discusses and the way that Nash discusses them in the context of these overlapping discourse communities.  Thankfully, Dr. Nash himself was available to offer some insight via email, which I am glad to share with our readers.

Tucked inside the front cover of the copy that I purchased is what appears to be a hand-written note, along with a business card from Brent Tantillo, (erstwhile) Program Director for The Collegiate Network of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (founded, as our readers know, by William F. Buckley, about whom I have written here).  The ISI published the 1996 edition of Nash's text.*

The note is written on 3.5" x 4.5" pre-printed cardstock.  At the top of the card is the ISI logo and name.  At the bottom is a pre-printed generic message -- "This might interest you" -- over Tantillo's name.  The card, it seems, was designed to be inserted in complimentary copies of books.  Sure enough, in the blank space between the ISI logo and the pre-printed signature, Tantillo wrote, "Here is a book that I thought you would enjoy. Merry Christmas! Brent."

The fact that there's no addressee on the card leads me to believe that the diligent Mr. Tantillo probably hand wrote stacks of these cards to be inserted into ISI publications sent out as Christmas gifts.  But how many stacks of cards?  Which publications, besides this one? Which Christmas?  I don't know, and I haven't yet tried to find out.  I do know that Brent Tantillo is no longer with the ISI -- per this profile page, he left that institution to co-found The Democracy Project, to which Wilfred M. McClay is also a contributor.  A simple email to Mr. Tantillo might answer many of my questions, and I may yet send such a message.  So far, everyone to whom I have written regarding my research has been more than happy to assist me, and I doubt Tantillo would react any differently.

However, what I really wanted to know was what George Nash might think about the relationship between his scholarship and the ISI's mission.

So I asked him.

My colleague Andrew Hartman was kind enough to introduce me to Nash via email, and Dr. Nash very graciously agreed to answer my questions.

Here's what I asked:

I'm working on a piece for the USIH blog about how books -- the real, physical objects -- occupy a unique place in the study of intellectual history, because they simultaneously testify to the history of ideas, the social/cultural history of intellectuals, the material conditions of intellectual discourse, and the shifting boundaries of various discourse communities.

The occasion for my post is a felicitous find I made at the local Half Price Books store:  a hardback copy of The Conservative Intellectual Movement (1996 reprint by ISI).  Inside the book was a business card and a hand-written note from an ISI staffer indicating that this particular copy of the book had been sent out as a Christmas gift.  

So I'm interested in thinking about the material history of your crucially important and influential text (which of course is on my exam reading list for US intellectual and cultural history), and the ways that this publishing/circulation history is part of the intellectual history of the very movement whose developments you trace.  

Specifically, here are some things I'm wondering about:  

-your choice to reissue the book with ISI rather than with an academic press.  This is an unconventional move, it seems, and I'd like to understand what kinds of factors you weighed in making that decision.  In what ways was this decision aimed at finding a wider audience, and in what ways was it aimed at finding a different audience?  Did the choice of this press as opposed to a university press or academic publisher come under criticism from the academy?  Should it have?

-the fact that your book was distributed by ISI not just as a significant work of history but (presumably) as a text that would further the mission/goals of ISI.  I am guessing that your decision to publish with them was taken in large part out of agreement with the basic aims of the organization.  In this sense your scholarship is formally and explicitly a part of the story that your scholarship tells.  This strikes me as an interesting dynamic, and I'd like to hear your thoughts on it.

-your thoughts more generally on critically engaged history.  If you happen to follow the conversations on the USIH blog, you may have seen much recent discussion about the place of irony in history, the moral commitment of historians, etc.  Is publishing with ISI sufficiently indicative of your larger "moral commitment," and do you see that as promising or problematic or really irrelevant to the larger project of your scholarship? 

Here is George Nash's very helpful and informative reply, which he has granted me permission to share with our readers:

Regarding the publishing history of The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945: as you know, Basic Books published it in hard cover in 1976 and in paperback in 1979. Basic Books kept the volume in print until 1988 or so, when I was informed that the book was no longer selling enough to justify its continuance in print.  I think the publisher and I thought that twelve years was a pretty respectable run.  In any case, in 1988 Basic Books let the book go out of print, and publishing rights (except for Spanish translation) reverted to me. 

In the next few years I gave some thought to reissuing the book with a new publisher, but I was quite busy with my multivolume biography of Herbert Hoover and did not pursue the matter too actively.

Then, in 1994 (as I remember), I was approached by a representative  of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI).  He explained that ISI was establishing a book publishing division and would be honored to reprint my book as its first (or one of its first) offerings. I was already familiar with ISI, of course, since I had written about it in my book and had lectured a few times to academically oriented audiences under its auspices. 

The more I thought about this proposed publishing arrangement, the more fitting it seemed. First, ISI (founded in the 1950s) was an organization of long standing whose tone and clientele were broadly academic. As a prospective book publisher, it resembled my first publisher, Basic Books, in seeking to disseminate serious books aimed not only at a tiny coterie of specialists but at what my first editor at Basic Books called "the intellectually oriented general reader." (In ISI's case, these would mostly be college students.) Second, by the mid-1990s ISI had an expanding national network of thousands of affiliated professors, graduate students, and undergraduates.  It seemed to me that these were precisely the sort of people most likely, in the first instance, to read a new and updated edition of the book, nearly twenty years after its initial publication.  That is, the principal new readership of the book would probably be a rising generation of politically aware and intellectually curious college and graduate students of the kind ISI reached out to in its programs every year.  I suspected that ISI would produce a volume accessible to this emerging demographic (unlike many university presses that might be content to print just a small number of copies at a price well beyond the reach of most undergraduates or college course adoption.) 

I think my judgment proved to be correct.  In 1996 ISI Books published an attractive, reasonably priced, hardcover, new edition with updated material that I wrote for it.  In 1998 the paperback edition appeared.  In 2006 ISI Books published an updated "30th anniversary edition" in paperback.  During these years a growing number of politically minded students (and not just those who self-identified as conservative) discovered the book and found it pertinent to their interests. The book found its way onto reading lists for graduate and undergraduate study in the areas of American political and intellectual history and the rapidly developing field of "conservative studies."  Major political phenomena of recent times ( the "Reagan Revolution," the Tea Party, etc.) obviously have had much to do with the book's continuing relevance and circulation. During this period the book has also appealed to a number of people (Left and Right) in the journalistic/commentary community, as E. J. Dionne, among others, has publicly attested.  I am not aware of any criticism in the academy of my decision to permit ISI to republish the book. 

ISI, as you probably know, has now been existence for sixty years.  Its motto is "To Educate for Liberty," and it conceives its mission as educational and intellectual in nature.  In addition to conducting an energetic program of academic and "public intellectual"--type book publishing (in association, I believe, with the University of Chicago Press), it publishes intellectually focused periodicals (notably Modern Age  and the Intercollegiate Review), awards fellowships to graduate students, facilitates undergraduate study clubs and summer institutes focused on the Great Books and themes of western civilization (among other subjects), and sponsors numerous public lectures a year by its affiliated scholars. It has been called an "alternative university," bringing to campuses ideas and perspectives that it finds too often underrepresented in American academic discourse.  I believe that approximately 60,000 to 80,000 faculty and students are in its network at present.

My own association with ISI consists of my being on its mailing list, writing occasionally for its journals, serving on the editorial advisory board for Modern Age, lecturing from time to time under ISI's auspices (most recently to an undergraduate political philosophy study group at the University of Wisconsin), and publishing two volumes with ISI Books.  My name also appears in the new online ISI Speakers Bureau, which was announced a week or so ago. Here are two links to this:

http://faculty.isi.org/speakers   

and 

http://faculty.isi.org/speakers/index/browse/theme_id/2

As you will see, ISI's affiliated academic lecturers include, besides myself, a number of persons probably familiar to the USIH blog, such as the historians Wilfred McClay and Brian Domitrovic.

Since it might be of interest to you, I also enclose a link to an interview I did for an ISI website a couple of years ago: 

http://faculty.isi.org/blog/post/view/id/303%20http://www.firstprinciplesjournal.com/articles.aspx?article=1803&loc=r

As you can infer from the above, I think well of ISI and have been pleased to contribute, when invited, to its educational programs (time permitting).  This has bought me into acquaintance with a number of studious and impressive undergraduates and graduate students throughout the United States--mostly (but not exclusively) conservatives eager to explore their intellectual roots and civilizational heritage in a rigorous way.  As an independent scholar or (as I sometimes put it) an academic without portfolio, I have always been free to say what I want at ISI forums. I am not an ISI employee and in fact lecture widely at non-ISI gatherings as well (such as academic conferences).  I do not know where all this may rank in the scale of "moral commitment," but as a historian of American conservatism (and other subjects) I have always aspired to write works that can be read with profit by people across the ideological spectrum, regardless of their opinion of the subject. In academia I am known as a conservative intellectual, and I willingly accept the designation. But this has not precluded my striving for fairness, balance, and objectivity in my professional work, both written and oral.  This has been part of my moral commitment as a historian. 

I am grateful for this thoughtful and thorough reply, and glad to share it with our readers.  The reply highlights some intersections and interconnections between distinct but overlapping communities of discourse -- critical scholarly inquiry and conservative cultural advocacy -- to which I will do well to pay attention as an American intellectual and cultural historian.  Further, it gives me a most welcome insight into the ethos of a particular, and particularly important, historian of this era in American intellectual history.  Finally, it serves to confirm my sense of the basic generosity and collegiality of the historical profession and of the academy more generally.

Without exception, all those to whom I have written in connection with my work, from the most junior scholars to the most eminent historians in the field, have been unfailingly gracious and generous in answering my questions and providing suggestions for further research.  In this sense, George Nash's specific response to my particular inquiry is broadly, hearteningly typical.  His answer not only says a great deal about his own sense of his subject matter and his own ethos as a historian; it also exemplifies the ethos of the academy as a hospitable home to scholars from distinct yet overlapping communities of discourse.  As communities of discourse go, the field of U.S. intellectual history suits me just fine; I like where I have landed.  And the intellectual generosity of scholars like George Nash in answering the pointed questions of this inquisitive grad student serves as yet another reminder of why I  think I am in such good company.

And just think:  all this insight has come my way before I have so much as turned to the first page of Nash's crucially important book.  There's no telling where that text itself will take me -- but I'll no doubt be able to retrace my steps, one margin-note and double-dog-eared page at a time.

______________

*In a follow-up email, Dr. Nash offered this helpful advice: "The 2006 edition, which I mentioned in my response, contains several new features: a new Preface, a new Conclusion, and a new Bibliographical Postscript.  Also, for the first time in the history of this book, its footnotes are placed at the bottom of the page--a feature I heartily approve. So you may want to take a look at the later edition at some point."  Sold! The footnotes alone would be enough to convince me.  

The Myth of Civil Religion

Does civil religion even exist?

For many scholars who have addressed this strange beast, the answer comes down to whether civil religion has empirical value; in short, whether civil religion acts like a set of laws, standing as a lodestar for generations of people who live under it.  The notion that civil religion functions in this way stems primarily (though somewhat mistakenly) from Robert Bellah's influential 1967 essay, "Civil Religion in America." In that essay, Bellah famously suggested that "American civil religion is not the worship of the American nation but an understanding of the American experience in the light of ultimate and universal reality." It should not be surprising, though, that throughout American history groups have vied to project a single or unified understanding of the American experience based on a particular interpretation of a transcendent faith. As Bellah acknowledged in his best book on American civil religion, The Broken Covenant, he had been too optimistic about the symbolic power of special moments--JFK's inaugural address, MLK's "I have a dream" speech--especially in light of the reality of the interminable Vietnam War and the nefarious activities of Richard Nixon.  Civil religion's moral value seemed utterly bankrupt as Nixon used language similar to Kennedy's while at the same time ordering his dirty tricks and widening the war in Southeast Asia.

And so scholarship on civil religion has tended, since the early 1970s, to follow Bellah's own disenchantment with the term, arguing that civil religion is little more than a dangerous pipe dream.  My S-USIH colleague David Sehat captured this sentiment in the conclusion of his fine book, The Myth of American Religious Freedom, asserting that versions of civil religion are a fantasy when they "share a belief in...a society gathered around a common religious center whose uniform and voluntary support makes possible a harmonious and socially integrated whole." That observation serves David's argument well as he seeks to demolish the idea that there exists a moral common ground that, historically, a moral establishment has attempted to affirm for the good of all Americans.  Rather, civil religion becomes cover for coercion deployed by a moral establishment that David argues has stifled dissent in order to maintain and expand political power.

Few scholars would disagree with David's specific dismissal of civil religion as a normative replacement for American religious conflict.  In fact, conflict has been at the heart of recent scholarship on civil religion.  Ronald Beiner makes clear that civil religion captures the fight within the history of political theory to make religion serve the ends of political authority.  Philip Gorski uses civil religion to chronicle the long-running battle over competing systems of truth and national understanding throughout American history. In this respect, Gorski has undertaken in a book-length study he is writing the most comprehensive reassessment of American civil religion to date.  Richard T. Hughes, a religious historian, calls civil religion a collection of "myths that America lives by."  Hughes writes succinctly that while national myths are those "by which we affirm the meaning of the United States," they are also myths that have been absolutized and thus "confuse the ideals of the creed with the realities of the present moment, and eliminate dissent."

Art Remillard, a historian of the New South, mulled over such trends in civil religion when he produced his book Southern Civil Religions.  Art explains in a recent blog post  that he came to use civil religion to contextualize "the realities of American many-ness."  Again, the emphasis is on the conflict rather than the potential unity that civil religion portends.  What Art discovered in his research on the post-Reconstruction South (or the New South) was a series of civil religions competing with each other to redefine the future "good society" that would follow the sea change wrought by the Civil War.  Moral visions conflicted and overlapped and canceled each other out; but the language and structure of those visions shared enough in common to act like civil religions.  I know that Art continues to think about his use of civil religion and I would like to know more about why the visions of these disparate groups seemed to share similar rhetorical structures.  I think this is where Phil Gorski's future book will be a great help.  His bold claim appears to be that civil religion is normative because has been forged about of certain rhetorical traditions and competing systems of belief.

If, though, there is one reason why civil religion seems a long-suffering term, the reason lies in its popular understanding--or lack thereof.  Intellectual historian Wilfred McClay points out civil religion is very much a "scholar's term...even though it describes a phenomenon at has existed very since the first organized human communities." Thus, importantly, civil religion does not have the popular cache of a term like the "culture wars."  Even though recent scholarship on the civil religion addresses conflicts and structures very much involved in various culture wars, civil religion has been saddled with the limited understanding attached to Bellah's initial essay.  Whereas the Culture Wars clearly defines the sense of conflict that many Americans believe they have been living through for the last forty years, civil religion, when it has been considered at all, has not really risen above the notion of being either a silly myth or a lost chance.

Obviously, I think there is reason to change that perception.  Next week I will propose how.

Now What? Reflections On Historicizing American "Conservatism"

I spent the better part of my allotted USIH reading time the past few weeks immersed in a round table, published in the December 2011 Journal of American History, titled "Conservatism: A State of the Field." Because the New Right has been an ongoing (to say the least) topic of concern here, since our January 2007 founding, there may be no better place than USIH for reflecting on the JAH round table. As such I expect other USIH contributors will chime in, either here or with additional posts.

My first thought on completing the round table was: now what? What are we going to discuss here, on this topic, now that Kim Phillips-Fein et al have so ably summarized the state of the historiography? It truly is a comprehensive collection. A graduate student could spend her entire education mining the essays, footnotes, and prominent books. And that student would be rewarded well for her effort. Because of its comprehensiveness, I beseech your advance forgiveness for not covering your favorite topics, authors, or passages from the round table.

Since I'm still processing the contents, and hence have neither a complementary nor a counter narrative to offer, I'm going to reflect on the essays as they were presented---beginning and ending with Phillips-Fein.

Phillips-Fein's Introduction


This 20-page essay is clearly the heart of the round table. It's Phillips-Fein's show, and she doesn't disappoint. As such, this piece receives the greatest attention in this post. (Note: I'm going to shorten her name to KPF for the rest of this post.)

KPF [right] praises much of the new scholarship on conservatism and, as expected, notes its tendencies. She posits for the reader some of the now-familiar central themes for the growth of the New Right (not to be confused with just conservatism): anti-communism, opposition to the Civil Rights Movement, reactions to labor unions and their power, and "changing sexual norms" (p. 724). KPF recounts the impoverished psychological accounts of conservatism from consensus historians (think Hofstadter and Daniel Bell), to George Nash's The Conservative Intellectual Tradition since 1945 (which she calls "the most influential synthesis of the subject"---discussed here by Andrew Hartman) and Alan Brinkley's important 1994 AHR article, "The Problem of American Conservatism." Jennifer Burns's recent account of Ayn Rand is covered (also discussed here by Mike O'Connor). Our very own Paul Murphy gets a shout-out for his influential account of the veritable road-not-taken by conservatives as offered by southern agrarians (i.e. criticism of capitalism).* Other topics addressed by KPF include suburban conservatism, the sun belt, Christian conservatism, affluence and middle-class conservatism (not merely backlash or populist varieties). There are so many books covered in KPF's essay that my list above is scanty in comparison.

What of the issues KPF raises? She advocates for more work on "the connections between racial and sexual politics and conservative economic ideas." She also believes that can be written on mass media, local party organizations, "antifeminism and opposition to gay rights," "anti-immigrant and nativist sentiment," "war, nationalism, and patriotism"---the last inclusive of groups like veteran's organizations and the American Legion (p. 735-736). KPF spends a paragraph discussing the need for more work on recent conservative "extremists" (something Wilfred McClay takes issue with in his lead-off response, titled "Less Boilerplate, More Symmetry").

KPF notes the problem of periodization: Does New Right conservatism begin in the 1920s, 1930s (wherein Leo Ribuffo gets a shout out on p. 737), or after World War II? She fairly consistently argues that that 1945 is the legitimate starting point. KPF also reminds readers of the "long exception" argument on liberalism made by Jefferson Cowie and and Nick Salvatore in an essay that first appeared in International Labor and Working-Class History (74, Fall 2008).

The 1970s and 1980s receive special attention at the end of KPF's introductory essay. She notes that recent scholars covering this period are undermining "the 'whiggish' tendency to read conservatism's successes backward through postwar history" (p. 739). KPF argues that recent studies on these decades reveal something of the "fragility" of the conservative movement--that its success may have more to do with the fracturing of liberalism than has been previously discussed. Jefferson Cowie's recent book, Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (whose book has come up in four posts here) is mentioned, as well as neoliberalism via David Harvey and---wait...for...it---the much-discussed-at-USIH "instant classic" by Daniel Rodgers, Age of Fracture.

Near the end KPF acknowledges the need for more work "looking at conservatism from an international perspective...analyzing the ways that the movement drew from intellectual and organizational sources outside the United States" (p. 742-743).

And here's KPF's conclusion: "The real project is to see conservatism with a new perspective---to understand its tenacity through the liberal years, its longstanding relationship to the state and to economic elites, and how its history is intertwined with that of liberalism, as well as the ways its ascendance reflected not only its own political dynamism but also broader changes in American society" (p. 743).

"Less Boilerplate, More Symmetry" by Wilfred M. McClay (pp. 744–47)

I already mentioned one main point from McClay above. I will bring up another below---a useful metaphor. [Aside: For regular USIH commenter Varad Mehta, per your comment on my last post, Herbert Butterfield's The Whig Interpretation of History gets a nod at the end of McClay's piece.]

"Conservatism as a Growing Field of Scholarship" by Alan Brinkley (pp. 748–51)

This piece rehashes and praises many of the points made by KPF. Otherwise, Brinkley meditates on how the post-war movement managed to unify in the face of internal contradictions and paradoxes within (e.g. pro and anti-containment foreign policy). He is also fascinated with how the movement has drawn in new constituencies and used new media. He ends by discussing the problem of neoconservatism within the movement.

"Rethinking American Conservatism: Toward a New Narrative" by Donald T. Critchlow (pp. 752–55)

Critchlow [right] agrees with KPF's assessment of Nash's The Conservative Intellectual Tradition, saying it "remains unchallenged." Critchlow notes problems with the definition of "conservative" and, strange as it may seem, refers to the work of a medieval historian, Robert Stacey, on the concept of limited government. Also, interestingly, Critchlow proposes "a little counterfactual thought experiment" wherein he argues that the notion of "modern liberalism is the ideological anomaly of the twentieth century" (p. 754). Sound familiar? It echoes the Cowie/Salvatore argument mentioned above from 2008. Critchlow concludes as follows: "The story of conservatism in postwar America is one of ideological contradiction, political opportunism, electoral triumph, and of deeply held beliefs about the nature of the individual and the good society."

"On American Conservatism and Kim Phillips-Fein’s Survey of the Field" by Martin Durham (pp. 756–59)

Durham's essay praises KPF's introduction. He argues for closely studying the conservative magazine, National Review, as a unifying force in the history of the New Right. Correspondingly, on the temporal diversity of the movement, he writes that "it would...seem wise to describe conservatism since 1954 as modern conservatism"--acknowledging that libertarianism and anticommunism existed earlier (p. 759).

"Political History beyond the Red-Blue Divide" by Matthew D. Lassiter (pp. 760–64)

Lassiter's thesis seems to be the following: "The new political history has inadvertently replicated some of the blind spots of the liberal consensus school that it supplanted, especially through a linear declension/ascension narrative that has conflated the fate of the New Deal with the political triumph of the New Right. ...The interpretations of political history have tracked too closely to the red-blue binaries of journalism and punditry; ...the literature has taken the contradictions and fragmentation of liberalism as given but smoothed over similar weaknesses and fissures within conservatism" (p. 760).

Lassiter [right] wants us to distinguish between the history of conservatism and broader political history. He also wants us to recognize "the times and places in which liberalism and conservatism have overlapped." And this move "requires a reconsideration of the polarization thesis that has animated the scholarship on the New Right. ...[This] thesis has evolved into a hegemonic framework" (p. 762). Lassiter wants a better periodization of the various conservative elements. He also sees a problem with the lumping of unconnected currents of change with Reagan's election.

Finally, I wondered whether Lassiter had read Rodgers when he wrote (bolds mine): "The phrase 'free market' describes a principled ideological position, if not a concrete reality. It seems more useful to evaluate the rhetoric of 'anti-government' and 'free enterprise' conservatism as a political and cultural construct, a discursive fiction wielded as a form of power in the struggle to shape the nation's political culture and its political economy" (p. 764). It's not an assertion of a "contagion of metaphors," but it goes to Rodgers' point about the changed nature of discourse since the 1970s.

"Now That Historians Know So Much about the Right, How Should We Best Approach the Study of Conservatism?" by Lisa McGirr (pp. 765–70)

The title sort of says it all, or at least articulates something of McGirr's main theme. Like other round table contributors, McGirr admires KPF's "thoughtful survey" (p. 765). While recounting and restating many of KPF's points, she adds several points: (1) We need to study more deeply the "secular shifts in global capitalism" (p. 767). (2) We would do well to study better "the arguably important institutional areanas where conservatives have long held substantial sway," such as in Congress (p. 768). (3) McGirr echoes KPF's call for more study of transnational networks and "the roots of ideas"/origins (pp. 768-769). (4) McGirr is also generally an advocate for looking at conservatism after World War II as a distinct, more cohesive kind of conservatism--an entity "constructed afresh from a new constellation of ideas" (p. 770).

McGirr [right] pushes readers to look again at the demise of Progressivism for some hints at what occurs later. She then makes an artful, relatively concise statement about the stakes of those potential connections: "In no small part due to the traumatic experience of national prohibition in the 1920s, modern liberals drew a thicker line between private behavior and government regulation than had early twentieth-century reformers. Indeed, liberals' increasing emphasis on personal rights and freedoms opened up space after World War II for conservative claims to being the champions of 'moral virtue'" (p. 770).

Finally, McGirr comes out as a proponent of Cowie and Salvatore's "long exception" thesis. The period from the New Deal through the Great Society was unusual---a highpoint for American liberalism as we think of it today.

"A Response" by Kim Phillips-Fein (pp. 771–73)

I have already referenced KPF's final response above, and will do so again below. For now I just want to say that she addressed concerns raised in nearly every round table piece. I found this passage particularly intriguing and enlightening (underlines mine):

While recognizing the divide between ideology and policy, it remains important to think about how economic ideas matter. While conservatives have not limited the growth of the state in the ways that their rhetoric might suggest, their opposition to the welfare state has significantly shaped their approaches to public policy. Alan Brinkley raises the question of how to think about the attraction of conservatism to people who are, as he puts it, perched precariously in the middle class. The recent rise of economic inequality, he suggests, may actually have led to the embrace of an antigovernment, antitax politics by middle-class and working-class people, who, facing stagnation of their incomes and living standards, have grown frustrated with a state that seems increasingly incapable of aiding them. The erosion of government...has not led to a call for more government, but rather to a sense of the impotence of the state and a deep pessimism about the possibilities of government activism, and a feeling of resentment about rising tax burdens that yield few tangible benefits (pp. 772-773).

Excellent.

Conclusions

Returning to my original question: What now? Where do we---as a USIH community---go from here? KPF herself, on page one of the round table (p. 723 in JAH) states: "Historians might be forgiven for asking whether there is anything left to study in the history of the Right." I certainly felt that way immediately (but only immediately) after reading the round table.

For her part, KPF synthesized the round table contributions by laying out "three subjects" she believes "will be at the heart of moving the interpretive project forward: [1] the question of origins, [2] the relationship between the radical and moderate parts of the conservative movement, and [3] the role of economic ideas in conservatism" (p. 771). I like [1] and [2], but think that [3] is already well under way---or implicit in many works already done. I like to think that USIH (the field, the society, and this blog) will be integral moving [1] forward.

Corey Robin's The Reactionary Mind obviously helps move the project forward in relation to the "question of origins."** Robin's book was not included in the round table, which is a shame, but most likely due to its recent publication date. Robin [right] goes toward what Brinkley suggests in his round table contribution: namely, synthesis. Robin also addresses something KPF calls for in her final "Response": the need for more work on "deep currents" (p. 771). Robin's book also goes toward KPF's call for internationalizing the conservative movement. Finally, both Brinkley and KPF seem to suggest there is a need for more lumping (though not "über-lumping"!) and less splitting. Robin's book does that too.

But other post-hole, or "splitter" if you prefer, studies are open for exploration. Hartman's work on the Culture Wars will be a welcome addition to the historiography (many of these USIH posts are his), as will Ben Alpers's forthcoming book on the Straussians (several Alpers pieces on that topic have been posted here) and Ray Haberski's forthcoming book on the problem of war in the post-war period (latest installment here). I think my work on Adler and "Great Books Liberalism" (and more) will contribute to delineating some of the intellectual boundaries of the liberal-conservative divide. In other words, several USIH blog contributors are, and will be, at the heart of furthering the historiography on conservatism and liberalism in the near future.

Pardon the self promotion that follows, but two problems noted by several round table authors have been broached here before by me. First, to build on KPF's point about "extremists" (p. 736) and McClay's response to that topic, we need emotional histories of American conservatism. I wrote about this in an April 2011 post titled "The Emotional Panoply of American Conservatism, 1964-Present." In that post I argued that "the array of emotional states covered by recent American conservatism suggests a necessary, renewable source of power behind the ideas and ideology of movement." Or, in the words of Alexander Pope via Nicole Eustace, "passion is the gale." Corey Robin's Fear: A History of a Political Idea also goes to this point.

Second, several round table authors argued that we need more and better histories mid-century liberalism (KPF, pp. 727, 773; McClay, pp. 744-745; Brinkley, p. 750; Critchlow, p. 754; Lassiter, ALL; and McGirr, pp. 766, 770). Around this time last year I suggested (here and here) that our discussions of conservatism would be incomplete so long as we didn't understand better the boundaries between it and liberalism---what mid-century liberalism really was. In his round table contribution McClay called this dialectical tension "the reciprocating engine." He implored us to remember that these "ideological dispositions" are "mutable" (p. 745). I agree.

Although I have not discussed this topic explicitly at USIH, I would suggest that anti-globalism is another splitter line of study worthy of exploration. This was not suggested by KPF in her long list of a dozen or so worthies (pp. 735-736). I've studied this only partially in relation to Hutchins's and Adler's advocacy for world federal government, and reactions to their positions---most notably by Birchers in the 1950s and 1960s. But the Birchers' response was more about nativism (maybe?) than recent fears of global markets (think 1999, Seattle, and the WTO), concerns about the value of labor, conspiracy theories about one-world government (think Limbaugh, Beck, etc.), and fiscal austerity (the Ron Paul position). These later formulations of anti-globalism could be better analyzed.

Whatever we do, we need to fight the kind of garbage offered up by pundits-turned-historians, like this piece by Robert Reich blaming our situation on the Civil War and white southerners---not that any USIH folks would ever produce anything that simplistic.

What are your thoughts? What of the round table---overall or by piece? And what do you think is left to do? - TL

--------------------------------------------
* We've covered so much ground on the New Right and conservatism at USIH that I was mildly surprised to see no citations of either our blog posts or book reviews. Perhaps we don't cite enough JAH articles around here? Just kidding, but our work has most certainly contributed to the scholarly conversation. This may be the ultimate argument for creating an S-USIH journal.

** I'm wondering if Robin's book won't also become something of an instant classic. I say this because you don't attract high-profile ire from the likes of Mark Lilla unless you hit a nerve.

Andrew's Compulsory Reading

(I title today's post with tongue firmly in cheek, partly as a playful attempt to tease Tim about his "light reading" series, and partly because some of the "compulsory" reading is my own writing, the height of shameless self-promotion.)

1. Occupy Wall Street: A New Culture War?, by Andrew Hartman, Chronicle of Higher Education

My thinking in this article comes from my October 18 blog post. That post got thousands of hits thanks to a plug by Andrew Sullivan (who also linked to Ben's post the day before on the ubiquity of being labled a Straussian--the common ingredient: we were both critical of Matt Yglesias).

2. Our Age of Fracture Roundtable.

This link is to the excellent response by Dan Rodgers--which carries links to the entire roundtable, including reviews by me, Jim Livingston, Lisa Szefel, and Mary Dudziak. They all made it a wonderful roundtable, both in person at our conference, and in "print" here at the blog.

3. 2011 Cliopatria Nominations for best historical blogging.

Make your nominations. And enjoy reading some of the best in historical blogging.

4. "America's Superman," Adam Kirsch, Prospect Magazine.

This marks the second positive review of Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen's book, American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas--and her book has only been on shelves for a few weeks!

5. "The Mythologian," By Perry Anderson, New Left Review.

Unfortunately, this lovely review of Patrick Wilcken's new biography, Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory, which sounds like a marvelous book, is behind a pay wall. Boo. I'll paste the final paragraph of the review for flavor:

The final verdict of Wilcken’s delicate and moving book is impeccable. ‘In a world of ever more specialized areas of knowledge, there may never again be a body of work of such exhilarating reach and ambition’, but though ‘there was great breadth and scope to Lévi-Strauss’s ideas’, they were ultimately fitted into an ‘intellectually claustrophobic space’—a ‘one-man enterprise that became so utterly idiosyncratic that it was impossible to build on.’ As a system, ‘structuralism implied depth, but with its interplay of referentless signs, often felt more like skidding along polished glass.’ Yet ‘what gave life to Lévi-Strauss’s output, and introduced the lyricism that baffled his Anglo-Saxon critics, was a profound interest in aesthetic expression and appreciation that ran in tandem with the cognitive side of his work.’ The anthropologist saw himself as an artist manqué. But Lévi-Strauss was not only a great collector and weaver of narratives—‘myths are very beautiful objects’, he remarked, ‘and one never tires of contemplating them, manipulating them’. The second verb tells its own story. He was also a great writer, in the art, no minor one, of rhetoric.

6. BOOK FORUM: The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism by Daniel Bell, Hedgehog Review.

Unfortunately, the contents of this forum, with contributions by Wilfred McClay, David Courtwright, and Krishan Kumar, are not even available online. So if your institutional library carries Hedgehog, check out this neat little forum on a book crucial to 1970s social thought.

7. Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South, by Andrew Zimmerman.

I am currently reading this book with my graduate students. It's fascinating--in both empirical and methodological terms. Zimmerman applies the cultural theory that informs so much micro-history to the macro-history of capitalism and imperialism.

Love Letters to Limbaugh

The legendary right-wing radio jockey Rush Limbaugh never lacks for attention. But it’s rare for him to be the center of intellectual history discourse. And it’s even less common for him to be the subject of a sonnet written by a respected intellectual historian. But that’s what happened this week when Wilfred McClay, the SunTrust Bank Chair of Excellence in Humanities at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, friend of USIH, and author of the award winning The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America, offered up an unqualified defense of the (in)famous radio jockey in this month’s edition of Commentary. McClay’s essay, “How to Understand Rush Limbaugh,” has gained wide attention among liberal intellectuals thanks to Jonathan Chait’s response over at The New Republic, where he charges McClay with ignoring inconvenient facts that might complicate his “ode to the goodness of Rush Limbaugh.”

Although I largely agree with Chait’s rather harsh assessment, let me begin with where I think McClay is right. He argues that liberal intellectuals schizophrenically charge Limbaugh with being a conservative puppet master and with being a drug-addled “big fat idiot.” I think McClay is right here. Most liberals don’t get Limbaugh’s appeal, in part because they never listen to him and generally lack curiosity about him. As someone who listens to Limbaugh’s radio program semi-regularly, I understand why he’s the most popular radio host in the nation. Limbaugh is a comedian who doubles as a political judo master in that he almost always successfully turns the tables on his liberal detractors. Take last year when the Obama administration thought it strategically wise, not to mention subtly comedic, to use Limbaugh as its whipping boy, to tie Obama’s congressional opponents to the polemical radio host, as if Limbaugh would act as an albatross on the Republican Party. Well, as Limbaugh might ask, who’s laughing now?

But though McClay accurately analyzes liberal myopia regarding Limbaugh, his understanding of Limbaugh’s place in the larger political and cultural context is equally myopic. Here’s a taste:

Without Limbaugh’s influence, talk radio might well have become a dreary medium of loud voices, relentless anger, and seething resentment, the sort of thing that the New York screamer Joe Pyne had pioneered in the 50s and 60s—“go gargle with razor blades,” he liked to tell his callers as he hung up on them—and that one can still see pop up in some of Limbaugh’s lesser epigones. Or it might have descended to the sometimes amusing but corrosive nonstop vulgarity of a Howard Stern. Limbaugh himself can be edgy, though almost always within PG-rated boundaries. But what he gave talk radio was a sense of sheer fun, of lightness, humor, and wit, whether indulging in his self-parodying Muhammad Ali–like braggadocio, drawing on his vast array of American pop-cultural reference points, or, in moving impromptu mini-sermons, reminding his listeners of the need to stay hopeful, work hard, and count their blessings as Americans. In such moments, and in many other moments besides, he reminds one of the affirmative spirit of Ronald Reagan and, like Reagan, reminds his listeners of the better angels of their nature. He transmutes the anger and frustration of millions of Americans into something more constructive.

More constructive? Chait documents some of the ways in which Limbaugh has been less than constructive, such as hyping up conspiracies that Obama is a foreigner out to destroy the United States from within:

All right, little Barry is back in Indonesia, and they're all happy over there. Little Barry Soetoro is back and they're all happy over there in Indonesia. In fact, he was someplace in India, he was introduced by somebody from Kenya, and the woman says, “As a fellow Kenyan, Mr. President,” of course everybody looked the other way, “What do you mean fellow Kenyan, we don't want to hear this,” and now little Barry is back.

Chait also addresses Limbaugh’s very real record of race baiting, of stroking the egos and stoking the anxieties of whites in the manner of George Wallace. This has been an easy sell with a black man occupying the Oval Office. A recent tidbit:

You put your kids on a school bus, you expect safety but in Obama's America the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering, “Yay, right on, right on, right on, right on,” and, of course, everybody says the white kid deserved it, he was born a racist, he's white.

By ignoring Limbaugh’s less than constructive provocations, McClay’s Commentary article positions him as a conservative culture warrior, rather than a dispassionate, scholarly chronicler. Which is fine for several reasons. First, I’m not one of those rah-rah objectivity types. Objectivity is overrated. Second, McClay obviously brackets off his serious scholarship, on display in his books and at the most recent USIH conference, from his political commentary (or, at least, I bracket them off in my mind). And third, I would not begrudge McClay the larger audience he will gain by writing for Commentary, or from being “heartily” endorsed by Limbaugh over the air (which he was).

That said, some intellectual contradictions need exploration. McClay concludes his Commentary essay as follows:

The critics may be correct that the flourishing of talk radio is a sign of something wrong in our culture. But they mistake the effect for the cause. Talk radio is not the cause, but the corrective. In our own time, and in the person of Rush Limbaugh, along with others of his talk-radio brethren, a problem of long-standing in our culture has reached a critical stage: the growing loss of confidence in our elite cultural institutions, including the media, universities, and the agencies of government. The posture and policies of the Obama presidency, using temporary majorities and legislative trickery to shove through massive unread bills that will likely damage the nation and may subvert the Constitution, have brought this distrust to a higher level. The medium of talk radio has played a critical role in giving articulate shape and force to the resistance. If it is at times a crude and bumptious medium, it sometimes has to be, to disarm the false pieties and self-righteous gravitas in which our current elites too often clothe themselves. Genuinely democratic speech tends to be just that way, in case we have forgotten.

McClay thus thinks of Limbaugh as a champion of those who would take on the despised “new class,” putting McClay in the same camp of neoconservative thinkers such as Daniel Bell (“new class” thought is discussed here, here, and here). Let’s return to Rush. Here’s what he had to say on his program in 1994 during the dust-up over the National History Standards, in part authored by UCLA historian Gary Nash, who defended interpretation and exploration as the goals of history education:

What? History is an exploration? Let me tell you something folks. History is real simple. You know what history is? It’s what happened. It’s no more. The problem you get into is when guys like Gary Nash try to skew history by saying, "Well, let's interpret what happened because maybe we don’t find the truth in the facts, or at least we don’t like the truth as it’s presented. So let’s change the interpretation a little bit so that it will be the way we wished it were." Well, that's not what history is. History is what happened, and history ought to be nothing more than the quest to find out what happened.

McClay obviously can’t endorse such simplistic anti-intellectualism. (Hell, if Limbaugh were honest, he wouldn’t endorse his own diatribe, since he’s constantly exploring and interpreting the past.) So I conclude with a question for readers: How do neoconservative intellectuals who lambaste the “new class” reconcile what appears to be anti-intellectualism with the fact that they are intellectuals? (I ask this question fully recognizing its unfairness, given that we’re all riddled with contradiction, especially when we enter the political realm.)

Love Letters to Limbaugh

The legendary right-wing radio jockey Rush Limbaugh never lacks for attention. But it’s rare for him to be the center of intellectual history discourse. And it’s even less common for him to be the subject of a sonnet written by a respected intellectual historian. But that’s what happened this week when Wilfred McClay, the SunTrust Bank Chair of Excellence in Humanities at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, friend of USIH, and author of the award winning The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America, offered up an unqualified defense of the (in)famous radio jockey in this month’s edition of Commentary. McClay’s essay, “How to Understand Rush Limbaugh,” has gained wide attention among liberal intellectuals thanks to Jonathan Chait’s response over at The New Republic, where he charges McClay with ignoring inconvenient facts that might complicate his “ode to the goodness of Rush Limbaugh.”

Although I largely agree with Chait’s rather harsh assessment, let me begin with where I think McClay is right. He argues that liberal intellectuals schizophrenically charge Limbaugh with being a conservative puppet master and with being a drug-addled “big fat idiot.” I think McClay is right here. Most liberals don’t get Limbaugh’s appeal, in part because they never listen to him and generally lack curiosity about him. As someone who listens to Limbaugh’s radio program semi-regularly, I understand why he’s the most popular radio host in the nation. Limbaugh is a comedian who doubles as a political judo master in that he almost always successfully turns the tables on his liberal detractors. Take last year when the Obama administration thought it strategically wise, not to mention subtly comedic, to use Limbaugh as its whipping boy, to tie Obama’s congressional opponents to the polemical radio host, as if Limbaugh would act as an albatross on the Republican Party. Well, as Limbaugh might ask, who’s laughing now?

But though McClay accurately analyzes liberal myopia regarding Limbaugh, his understanding of Limbaugh’s place in the larger political and cultural context is equally myopic. Here’s a taste:

Without Limbaugh’s influence, talk radio might well have become a dreary medium of loud voices, relentless anger, and seething resentment, the sort of thing that the New York screamer Joe Pyne had pioneered in the 50s and 60s—“go gargle with razor blades,” he liked to tell his callers as he hung up on them—and that one can still see pop up in some of Limbaugh’s lesser epigones. Or it might have descended to the sometimes amusing but corrosive nonstop vulgarity of a Howard Stern. Limbaugh himself can be edgy, though almost always within PG-rated boundaries. But what he gave talk radio was a sense of sheer fun, of lightness, humor, and wit, whether indulging in his self-parodying Muhammad Ali–like braggadocio, drawing on his vast array of American pop-cultural reference points, or, in moving impromptu mini-sermons, reminding his listeners of the need to stay hopeful, work hard, and count their blessings as Americans. In such moments, and in many other moments besides, he reminds one of the affirmative spirit of Ronald Reagan and, like Reagan, reminds his listeners of the better angels of their nature. He transmutes the anger and frustration of millions of Americans into something more constructive.

More constructive? Chait documents some of the ways in which Limbaugh has been less than constructive, such as hyping up conspiracies that Obama is a foreigner out to destroy the United States from within:

All right, little Barry is back in Indonesia, and they're all happy over there. Little Barry Soetoro is back and they're all happy over there in Indonesia. In fact, he was someplace in India, he was introduced by somebody from Kenya, and the woman says, “As a fellow Kenyan, Mr. President,” of course everybody looked the other way, “What do you mean fellow Kenyan, we don't want to hear this,” and now little Barry is back.

Chait also addresses Limbaugh’s very real record of race baiting, of stroking the egos and stoking the anxieties of whites in the manner of George Wallace. This has been an easy sell with a black man occupying the Oval Office. A recent tidbit:

You put your kids on a school bus, you expect safety but in Obama's America the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering, “Yay, right on, right on, right on, right on,” and, of course, everybody says the white kid deserved it, he was born a racist, he's white.

By ignoring Limbaugh’s less than constructive provocations, McClay’s Commentary article positions him as a conservative culture warrior, rather than a dispassionate, scholarly chronicler. Which is fine for several reasons. First, I’m not one of those rah-rah objectivity types. Objectivity is overrated. Second, McClay obviously brackets off his serious scholarship, on display in his books and at the most recent USIH conference, from his political commentary (or, at least, I bracket them off in my mind). And third, I would not begrudge McClay the larger audience he will gain by writing for Commentary, or from being “heartily” endorsed by Limbaugh over the air (which he was).

That said, some intellectual contradictions need exploration. McClay concludes his Commentary essay as follows:

The critics may be correct that the flourishing of talk radio is a sign of something wrong in our culture. But they mistake the effect for the cause. Talk radio is not the cause, but the corrective. In our own time, and in the person of Rush Limbaugh, along with others of his talk-radio brethren, a problem of long-standing in our culture has reached a critical stage: the growing loss of confidence in our elite cultural institutions, including the media, universities, and the agencies of government. The posture and policies of the Obama presidency, using temporary majorities and legislative trickery to shove through massive unread bills that will likely damage the nation and may subvert the Constitution, have brought this distrust to a higher level. The medium of talk radio has played a critical role in giving articulate shape and force to the resistance. If it is at times a crude and bumptious medium, it sometimes has to be, to disarm the false pieties and self-righteous gravitas in which our current elites too often clothe themselves. Genuinely democratic speech tends to be just that way, in case we have forgotten.

McClay thus thinks of Limbaugh as a champion of those who would take on the despised “new class,” putting McClay in the same camp of neoconservative thinkers such as Daniel Bell (“new class” thought is discussed here, here, and here). Let’s return to Rush. Here’s what he had to say on his program in 1994 during the dust-up over the National History Standards, in part authored by UCLA historian Gary Nash, who defended interpretation and exploration as the goals of history education:

What? History is an exploration? Let me tell you something folks. History is real simple. You know what history is? It’s what happened. It’s no more. The problem you get into is when guys like Gary Nash try to skew history by saying, "Well, let's interpret what happened because maybe we don’t find the truth in the facts, or at least we don’t like the truth as it’s presented. So let’s change the interpretation a little bit so that it will be the way we wished it were." Well, that's not what history is. History is what happened, and history ought to be nothing more than the quest to find out what happened.

McClay obviously can’t endorse such simplistic anti-intellectualism. (Hell, if Limbaugh were honest, he wouldn’t endorse his own diatribe, since he’s constantly exploring and interpreting the past.) So I conclude with a question for readers: How do neoconservative intellectuals who lambaste the “new class” reconcile what appears to be anti-intellectualism with the fact that they are intellectuals? (I ask this question fully recognizing its unfairness, given that we’re all riddled with contradiction, especially when we enter the political realm.)

"Intellectual History for What?” Laschian Analysis for the Soul

It is time to reflect on the Third Annual U.S. Intellectual History Conference, another successful meeting. One of the more memorable moments for me was the final plenary, which grappled with the question, “Intellectual History for What?” The six panelists contended with this question in a variety of ways.

George Cotkin answered by way of a moving, intimate look into his fine career as a writer of intellectual history that despite, or even because of, its setbacks, has nourished his soul. Rochelle Gurstein argued that intellectual historians need to write for “serious, engaged readers,” in order to recreate or reinvent a “public,” singular. The conference theme “Intellectuals and Their Publics,” plural, did not resonate with her.

Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, pulling no punches, advised that U.S. intellectual historians not stoop to the level of our colleagues in other fields, in terms of perpetual self-examination or self-flagellation. She also wished that we would be more cosmopolitan, read more continental theory, learn more languages. In general, she and the others lamented the technocratic, careerist, anti-intellectual culture that pervades academia and elsewhere.

Bill McClay, although pessimistic about our place as intellectual historians in the larger profession, pointed out that all historians do intellectual history when they do historiography. He pointed to the example of the great 1985 debate, in the pages of the American Historical Review, between Thomas Haskell and David Brion Davis about the problem of slavery and capitalism (the debate was later published as a book). This, for McClay, is intellectual history at its finest, even if nobody called it by its name.

David Steigerwald argued that intellectual history is inherently expansive and that we should be shameless trespassers. This spoke to me, as the type of intellectual history I write invades and occupies political, cultural, and educational history. In reflecting upon the wide variety of papers given, it seems to me that U.S. intellectual history, as practiced at our conference, has invaded American Studies, perhaps changing or altering it in productive ways, by putting expressive culture into conversation with more formal systems of ideas.

Casey Nelson Blake, who organized the plenary, concluded by arguing that one of the most important things we as intellectual historians can do is offer contextual maps to intellectuals, activists, and citizens engaged in daily work or struggle. He gave the example of artists who ask him, as an art historian, to help them put their work in a broader contextual framework.

The one theme that remained constant during this plenary session is the despair that humanistic values cannot live in a culture dominated by technocratic or vulgar utilitarian purposes. Humanistic study, including intellectual history, is not long for such a world. To this extent, Christopher Lasch was the not-so-subtle backdrop. Three of the panelists (Gurstein, Steigerwald, Blake) studied with Lasch at Rochester. And, of course, another is his daughter. Blake makes clear in a Commonweal review of a new biography of Lasch (requires subscription to access) how highly he thinks of his mentor. He concludes his essay, “What Emerson wrote of Thoreau holds true for Christopher Lasch: ‘wherever there is knowledge, wherever there is virtue, wherever there is beauty, he will find a home.’”

The questions I pose to readers: Is the fate of intellectual history so closely tied to the fate of the humanities? Is there, then, reason for despair? More specifically, to those in attendance Friday night: What did you think of the plenary?

"Intellectual History for What?” Laschian Analysis for the Soul

It is time to reflect on the Third Annual U.S. Intellectual History Conference, another successful meeting. One of the more memorable moments for me was the final plenary, which grappled with the question, “Intellectual History for What?” The six panelists contended with this question in a variety of ways.

George Cotkin answered by way of a moving, intimate look into his fine career as a writer of intellectual history that despite, or even because of, its setbacks, has nourished his soul. Rochelle Gurstein argued that intellectual historians need to write for “serious, engaged readers,” in order to recreate or reinvent a “public,” singular. The conference theme “Intellectuals and Their Publics,” plural, did not resonate with her.

Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, pulling no punches, advised that U.S. intellectual historians not stoop to the level of our colleagues in other fields, in terms of perpetual self-examination or self-flagellation. She also wished that we would be more cosmopolitan, read more continental theory, learn more languages. In general, she and the others lamented the technocratic, careerist, anti-intellectual culture that pervades academia and elsewhere.

Bill McClay, although pessimistic about our place as intellectual historians in the larger profession, pointed out that all historians do intellectual history when they do historiography. He pointed to the example of the great 1985 debate, in the pages of the American Historical Review, between Thomas Haskell and David Brion Davis about the problem of slavery and capitalism (the debate was later published as a book). This, for McClay, is intellectual history at its finest, even if nobody called it by its name.

David Steigerwald argued that intellectual history is inherently expansive and that we should be shameless trespassers. This spoke to me, as the type of intellectual history I write invades and occupies political, cultural, and educational history. In reflecting upon the wide variety of papers given, it seems to me that U.S. intellectual history, as practiced at our conference, has invaded American Studies, perhaps changing or altering it in productive ways, by putting expressive culture into conversation with more formal systems of ideas.

Casey Nelson Blake, who organized the plenary, concluded by arguing that one of the most important things we as intellectual historians can do is offer contextual maps to intellectuals, activists, and citizens engaged in daily work or struggle. He gave the example of artists who ask him, as an art historian, to help them put their work in a broader contextual framework.

The one theme that remained constant during this plenary session is the despair that humanistic values cannot live in a culture dominated by technocratic or vulgar utilitarian purposes. Humanistic study, including intellectual history, is not long for such a world. To this extent, Christopher Lasch was the not-so-subtle backdrop. Three of the panelists (Gurstein, Steigerwald, Blake) studied with Lasch at Rochester. And, of course, another is his daughter. Blake makes clear in a Commonweal review of a new biography of Lasch (requires subscription to access) how highly he thinks of his mentor. He concludes his essay, “What Emerson wrote of Thoreau holds true for Christopher Lasch: ‘wherever there is knowledge, wherever there is virtue, wherever there is beauty, he will find a home.’”

The questions I pose to readers: Is the fate of intellectual history so closely tied to the fate of the humanities? Is there, then, reason for despair? More specifically, to those in attendance Friday night: What did you think of the plenary?

USIH 3.0: Keynote and Plenary Sessions

[Updated: 5/14/2010]

The program for the third annual U.S. Intellectual History Conference (USIH3) will be highlighted by the following keynote speaker and plenary sessions:

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

Keynote: James Kloppenberg, the Charles Warren Professor of American History at Harvard University.
Friday, Oct. 22, 1:30-3:00 p.m.

Professor Kloppenberg specializes in American and European intellectual history. For his keynote, Kloppenberg will be presenting from his book on the thought of Barack Obama, forthcoming from Princeton University Press.He has written about the rise and fall of social democracy in Europe and America; eighteenth-century American politics and ideas; the career of the American philosophy of pragmatism from the late nineteenth to the twenty-first century; European interpretations of American culture from Tocqueville through Weber; and the relation between contemporary critical theory and historical writing.

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

Plenary: Intellectual History for What?
Friday, Oct. 22, 7-9 p.m.

George Cotkin
Rochelle Gurstein
Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn
Wilfred McClay
David Steigerwald
Casey Nelson Blake

This plenary session will raise a number of questions involving the relationship between intellectual history and less specialized audiences and genres of expression, including: intellectual history and social/cultural criticism; intellectual history as a resource for moral reflection and edification; writing for, teaching, and speaking to generalist audiences; and the ambiguous position of intellectual history within the research university.

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

Plenary: Renewing Black Intellectual History
Thursday, Oct 21, 6-8 p.m.

The following four speakers are confirmed:

Adolph Reed, Jr.
Kenneth W. Warren
Dean E. Robinson
Touré F. Reed

This plenary that will consist of several contributors to an exciting new anthology, Renewing Black Intellectual History: The Ideological and Material Foundations of African American Thought. "This book maps the changing conditions of black political practice and experience from Emancipation to Obama with excursions into the Jim Crow era, Black Power radicalism, and the Reagan revolt. Here are essays, classic and new, that define historically and conceptually discrete problems affecting black Americans as these problems have been shaped by both politics and scholarly fashion. A key goal of the book is to come to terms with the changing terrain of American life in view of major Civil Rights court decisions and legislation."

USIH 3.0: Keynote and Plenary Sessions

[Updated: 5/14/2010]

The program for the third annual U.S. Intellectual History Conference (USIH3) will be highlighted by the following keynote speaker and plenary sessions:

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

Keynote: James Kloppenberg, the Charles Warren Professor of American History at Harvard University.
Friday, Oct. 22, 1:30-3:00 p.m.

Professor Kloppenberg specializes in American and European intellectual history. For his keynote, Kloppenberg will be presenting from his book on the thought of Barack Obama, forthcoming from Princeton University Press.He has written about the rise and fall of social democracy in Europe and America; eighteenth-century American politics and ideas; the career of the American philosophy of pragmatism from the late nineteenth to the twenty-first century; European interpretations of American culture from Tocqueville through Weber; and the relation between contemporary critical theory and historical writing.

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

Plenary: Intellectual History for What?
Friday, Oct. 22, 7-9 p.m.

George Cotkin
Rochelle Gurstein
Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn
Wilfred McClay
David Steigerwald
Casey Nelson Blake

This plenary session will raise a number of questions involving the relationship between intellectual history and less specialized audiences and genres of expression, including: intellectual history and social/cultural criticism; intellectual history as a resource for moral reflection and edification; writing for, teaching, and speaking to generalist audiences; and the ambiguous position of intellectual history within the research university.

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

Plenary: Renewing Black Intellectual History
Thursday, Oct 21, 6-8 p.m.

The following four speakers are confirmed:

Adolph Reed, Jr.
Kenneth W. Warren
Dean E. Robinson
Touré F. Reed

This plenary that will consist of several contributors to an exciting new anthology, Renewing Black Intellectual History: The Ideological and Material Foundations of African American Thought. "This book maps the changing conditions of black political practice and experience from Emancipation to Obama with excursions into the Jim Crow era, Black Power radicalism, and the Reagan revolt. Here are essays, classic and new, that define historically and conceptually discrete problems affecting black Americans as these problems have been shaped by both politics and scholarly fashion. A key goal of the book is to come to terms with the changing terrain of American life in view of major Civil Rights court decisions and legislation."