An Interview with David Hollinger

David Hollinger, the S-USIH 2012 Conference keynote speaker, is the Preston Hotchkis Professor at the University of California, Berkeley.  He will be retiring from teaching following the 2012-2013 academic year.  Professor Hollinger kindly consented to be interviewed by me via email for our conference newsletter.  I have reprinted his interview below.

Alas, as our readers know, this year's conference was canceled due to the catastrophic effects of Hurricane Sandy. However, a .pdf of the conference newsletter will be available for download at the S-USIH website.  In the meantime, you can view and download the entire newsletter through my public Dropbox folder using this link. The 8-page newsletter features a piece by David Sehat highlighting and exploring the themes of the conference he planned so thoughtfully and well, an article by S-USIH President Paul Murphy discussing the possibilities of starting a print journal, a note from Allison Perlman about our plans for next year's conference, news and notes from our members, and other key information. It would have been my great pleasure and a real privilege to help distribute this newsletter in person at our conference. Next time.

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An Interview with David Hollinger

by L.D. Burnett

Q: The theme of this year's S-USIH conference, "Communities of Discourse," acknowledges and celebrates the enormous influence and usefulness of your conception of the field of intellectual history, a conception that is arguably "paradigmatic" in the Kuhnian sense of the word.  As you argued in the paper you delivered at the Wingspread conference, the notion of a "community of discourse" is a capacious one, able to accommodate a far broader range of subjects and subject matter than might be suggested by narrow definitions of what the term "intellectual" in "intellectual history" stands for.  In thinking about how this paradigm has functioned to frame the field of inquiry over the past four decades, do you find it still capacious enough as a way of conceptualizing intellectual history?  Are there ways of understanding intellectual history that this paradigm is strained to accommodate? 

A: I would not want to claim too much for the notion of “communities of discourse,” and prefer to see it mostly as a heuristic, not as a charter for the field. It is a heuristic in that it can help some good projects find themselves, but good projects are certainly not limited to those that operate within its scope. I am very glad that the notion continues to help colleagues design and defend their projects, but I pushed the notion more for reasons of the politics of the profession than for strictly methodological reasons. Of course the two are connected, but my big concern was to get the profession to acknowledge that the features of human life studied by intellectual historians left material tracings every bit as real as the material tracings left by elections, wars, social movements, demographic transformations, economic booms and busts, and other features of human life that historians took for granted.

This simple point was worth making because of the incessant chatter, even by people who should have known better, about the “relation of ideas to reality,” or “the relation of the interior of the mind to external life,” as if intellectual history was a series of speculations rather than an interpretation of documentary evidence comparable to that scrutinized by historians of other subfields. The vivid positivity, the concrete substantiality of our major subject matter—discourse as carried out by socially embedded human beings who left evidence of their doings in the form of letters, essays, diaries, books, etc.-- needed to be affirmed. Second, I wanted to remind colleagues of the value of the kind of history that focused on the questions thinkers are trying to answer and on how various individual thinkers answered one another’s questions and thereby participated in a community of sorts. This, too, seemed obvious to anyone like me who was raised professionally on Collingwood, but some social historians at the time seemed not to know that this was what most intellectual historians did. Indeed, I wrote the essay in a kind of fury in the fall of 1977 when I read the Wingspread draft of Larry Veysey’s paper, which I thought misrepresented the methodological issues in the study of intellectual history, repeated the worst of contemporary social history’s libels against intellectual history, and threatened to undermine the credibility of a professional practice that I believed to be sound. I had told John Higham, who organized the Wingspread conference, that I would write about Kuhn’s influence on intellectual history, but when I saw what Larry had written in his pre-conference draft (I had yet to send mine in) I scraped my own draft, and while still drawing some inspiration from Kuhn, wrote in a hurry a very different paper.

But the notion of communities of discourse proved of value to many scholars long after Veysey’s formulations were forgotten, and I suppose it was just as well that I dealt with Larry indirectly, never mentioning his name, because that better enabled the essay I wrote to have a life even after the proximate cause  for its composition had largely disappeared. I spent most of the essay citing examples of existing scholarship, to guard against the idea that I was inventing anything new: I was trying to provide a set of terms that I thought might have efficacy in the politics of the profession to describe and defend a well-established practice. Delighted as I am to see this set of terms still functional, I am pleased with this chance to underscore that I was not trying to “define” intellectual history, but only to vindicate a primary form of its practice.

Q: Your recent "state of the field" essay in the MIH forum touched on the connection between pedagogy and scholarly inquiry.  In what ways has pedagogy at both the graduate and undergraduate level shaped your own scholarly inquiry?  Do you see the possibility for "new directions in intellectual history" arising out of the discourse community of the classroom?

A: In my own case, there has often been a connection between my undergraduate lecture course and my scholarly writings. Several of my articles, most fully “Ethnic Diversity, Cosmopolitanism, and the Emergence of the American Liberal Intelligentsia” (1975) and “How Wide the Circle of the We” (1993) began as undergraduate lectures. I’d have a sense that this or that topic was important to the field that the course was supposed to cover, but the monographic literature seemed not right on point. Lacking a literature to harvest for my lectures, I would work up what seemed to me a sensible and sound take on the topic based on my own reading of what I took to be the most relevant sources. Then if it seemed that what I’d worked up for the students might even contribute to the scholarly conversation, I’d sharpen the lecture to the point that I could deliver it as a paper at the OAH (as I did for “Ethnic Diversity”) or the AHA (as I did for “Circle of the We”), and then, depending on the reception it got from colleagues, publish it. Undergraduate teaching has the splendid effect of forcing one to address large questions, and if the scholarly literature does not go after those large questions you have to do it yourself, and doing so can, in turn, blow back into the professional literature. Graduate teaching is something that I have enjoyed equally, but in my own case it has not had remotely as direct an effect on what I write as a scholar. Graduate students I see as fully part of the community of professional scholars, but undergraduates function more as a surrogate for the educated public at large and therefore they provide a different type of stimuli. 

Q: The Society for U.S. Intellectual History and the annual conference have their beginnings in the discourse community -- or one of the discourse communities -- of the blogosphere.  Because this medium of communication/interaction is technologically new, it is tempting to see the community constituted through it as also somehow new or fundamentally different from previous communities of intellectual inquirers.  But in what ways might the S-USIH exemplify continuity with a broader and older tradition of intellectual/academic communities?  What aspects of that longer tradition do you hope the S-USIH will carry forward?

A: I am not sure that blogs create “new or fundamentally different” kinds of learned communities (perhaps they do, in ways that I do not discern?), but they surely help bring into the conversation of a specialized field a number of individuals who might otherwise not be as fully part of it as they should be. I am probably not a good person to explore this question, however, because I am lucky enough to be based on a campus where I cannot walk down the hallway from my office without running into someone with whom I can have an informed and animated conversation about the latest book or article. If I were not at one of these big campuses, with large faculties and a steady stream of bright, energetic graduate students passing through, I suppose blogs would mean more to me. Blogs enable a lot of folks who would otherwise not be in regular and direct communication to be in touch with each other whenever they feel like it, and surely that is a good thing. I’m also in the habit of treating print journals and books as somehow prior to blogs, as if blogs were something to go to once you’d finished (which I seem never to manage) reading all the other stuff. I don’t defend this attitude, but I do confess to it. I’m for blogs, just not very active in them.

Q: You published your first scholarly paper in 1968 and have announced your retirement from teaching in 2013; what changes in the field over that span of four-and-a-half decades are most striking to you?

A: In 1968 American intellectual history was very close to American Studies, and the ASA’s journal, American Quarterly, was a favorite place for intellectual historians to publish. That remained true through Bruce Kuklick’s editorship in the 1970s, but by the end of the 1980s that journal had narrowed its focus methodologically and chronologically. By the 1990s it was almost entirely a “cultural studies” journal focused on the period since World War II, and largely since the 1960s. I had published in AQ three times, had read it eagerly, and had even won one of the ASA’s prizes, but I have long since quit the ASA (as have most historians I know who used to be in it). The decline (at least from my point of view) of ASA and AQ has helped make space for the creation in 2004 of Modern Intellectual History and the simultaneous rejuvenation of  The Journal of the History of Ideas, both of which turn out to be much better for us than AQ for several reasons, one of which is that they comfortably integrate American intellectual history into the intellectual history of the North Atlantic West instead of tying it, as ASA and AQ did, to more narrowly Americo-centric concerns. So, while I long lamented the transformation of the ASA and AQ, I finally came around to realizing that the liberation of American intellectual history from American Studies was a blessing in disguise. The youngest cohort of US intellectual historians is much more likely than my generation to be fluent in German and/or French, and more and more of these younger scholars are engaged in trans-Atlantic projects. This cohort, moreover, is reclaiming the study of philosophy, theology, social theory, and social science that the American Studies movement at its best had engaged, too, but then largely dropped.

The closer ties between US intellectual history and European intellectual history encourage attention to aspects of American intellectual history to which the projects that have flown under the flag of “cultural history” have been less attentive. Cultural history has done a lot of great things for us, and deserves to be celebrated, but the anti-elitist strain within cultural history limited its scope. At the risk of appearing to ignore some other really good recent stuff, I want to mention the three 2012 imprints devoted to my main field of the 20th century to have hit my desk the most recently: Angus Burgin’s The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets Since the Depression, Joel Isaac’s Working Knowledge: Making the Human Sciences from Parsons to Kuhn, and Andrew Jewett’s Science, Democracy and the American University: From the Civil War to the Cold War. These three ambitious, rigorously argued, sophisticated monographs illustrate how, looking now only at the last couple of months of twentieth century studies, the cohort to which I refer is making the field of American intellectual history more vibrant than ever. 

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.

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*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.