A Canon Canon

As I have described it in my Blogger profile, my dissertation will present "an intellectual history of an infamous, emblematic but still inadequately understood battle in the so-called Culture Wars of the 1980s: the 'Great Books' debate at Stanford University."

One of the major ideas I am/will be paying attention to is the idea of canonicity -- literary canons, cultural canons, disciplinary canons.  This is why both E.D. Hirsch and Allan Bloom, the Mutt and Jeff of cultural literacy during the 1980s, are on my reading list.  They are two among many primary sources that I will be using in order to sketch out the broader cultural landscape within which and/or against which the particular debate at Stanford took place.

At some point -- and I haven't quite identified that point yet -- the debate about canons and canonicity shifts from a historic moment that I am examining to a current critical discourse into which I am, as the argot of academe has it, "making an intervention."  This is one of the (many!) tricky methodological challenges of my dissertation.  In order to manage this move -- and I think it will be an oscillation, a move back and forth between what I might call "the historic debate" and "the current debate about the stakes of the debate" -- I need to develop my own canon (or, if I simply must abandon irony for the good of the collective, my own list) of works that address notions of canonicity and cultural value since the 1980s.*

So far, my list includes such authors as John Guillory, Evan Watkins, Walter Benn Michaels, Gerald Graff, and Henry Louis Gates. I should probably add Stanley Fish too.  Lawrence Levine fits here as well -- Highbrow/Lowbrow was published after the Stanford kerfuffle, though very close to it.  And the wonderful anthology edited by David Richter, Falling into Theory,  points toward a number of authors with whom I will need to be in conversation.

But I would be more than happy to hear from our readers (and my blog colleagues!) on this question.  If you can think of other works that ought to be on my radar screen, feel free to add them in the comments section below.
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*Now, my canon on the canon question before the 1980s is an entirely separate list.  So far it includes, among others, guys like Matthew Arnold, F.O. Matthiessen, Leslie Fiedler, Lionel Trilling.  And yes, they are all guys.

Tim's Light Reading (10/11/2012)

1 (of 5). Shocks v. Non-Shocks

At Notes From Ironbound, Werner Herzog's Bear posits that there are two categories among employed academics, "shocks" and "non-shocks." WHB then discusses the implications of their experience (i.e. "the experential divide") in the profession. What do you think? Does this divide exist, as described by WHB? How would you modify the story? What does this mean for intellectual historians?

2. Reading "The Great Books" Of Philosophy

Check out James Garvey's discussion and survey, at Talking Philosophy, of philosophers (and intellectual historians, if he only knew it) on which of "the great books" of philosophy they have actually been read cover-to-cover. For my part, I've read six. Although that seems low in relation to the list, my results match up well with a great many of those surveyed. How many have you read? And does the full reading of these works actually matter, for either philosophers or intellectual historians? Is there a philosophy canon? Should there be one?

3. Husserl in America

The "___X___ in America" meme has the potential to be endless and tiring, but I think this paper on "Husserl's Phenomenology in America," by Richard Lanigan, will be of interest to USIH readers. I've never seen a tracing of Husserl's influence on twentieth-century philosophy and intellectual life in the United States, and Lanigan's piece will perhaps start that line of literature. Which American philosopher or intellectual was most influenced by Husserl? Or are there any?

4. Hobsbawm Obits

In case you missed them, here are three that merit your reflection. And don't forget Andrew Hartman's reflections on Hobsbawm's influence on him (especially Genovese's review of Hobsbawm's Age of Extremes. Since that book introduced me to Hobsbawm, here's a passage on it from the Jacobin Obit:

Hobsbawm’s final addition to his ["Age of..."] series, The Age of Extremes (1994), on the “short twentieth century,” was written in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. As Perry Anderson noted, the bourgeoisie as such nearly altogether fell out of the picture in this volume. Instead, the big theme was that of Communism, by chastening bourgeois hegemony, saving Western states from the excesses of divisive capitalism. This, the defeat of Nazism, and the Soviet Union’s ultimate rationality in helping to keep the Cold War mostly cold, was for Hobsbawm the historic justification for Communism. As a positive alternative to capitalism, however, it had proven to be a dead end. Notoriously, however, he told an interviewer that had Stalinism proven to be the fount of a new, higher civilization, its body-count would have been justified.

5. Ratner-Rosenhagen at the Chicago Humanities Festival

Next week I plan to post my review of American Nietzsche. As a preview, or lead-in, you should know that Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen will be presenting on her book at the Chicadgo Humanities Festival on Saturday, November 10. Details here. Let me know (timothy.n.lacy-at-gmail.com) if you're thinking about going as I'm working on trying to attend.

Reflections on the "Books That Shaped America": Questions, Answers, and More Questions

The Library of Congress has fashioned an exhibit that will surely be of interest to intellectual historians. The exhibit, "Books That Shaped America," lists 88 works that the LOC calls "a starting point—a way to spark a national conversation on books and their importance in Americans’ lives, and, indeed, in shaping our nation."  They add (bolds mine):

The titles featured here (by American authors) have had a profound effect on American life, but they are by no means the only influential ones. And they are certainly not a list of the “best” American books, because that, again, is a matter of strong and diverse opinion. Curators and experts from throughout the Library of Congress contributed their choices, but there was much debate—even agony—in having to remove worthy titles from a much larger list in order to accommodate the physical constraints of this exhibition space.

Some of the titles on display have been the source of great controversy, even derision, yet they nevertheless shaped Americans’ views of their world and often the world’s view of the United States. As you go through this exhibition, we hope the books you see will inspire you to think of other “books that shaped America” and that you will share your choices for future lists at www.loc.gov/bookfest. Please tell us how you think your book shaped America.

This online survey adds to the exhibit by asking viewers a few questions, the first of which is as follows: "Which THREE of these books do you think shaped America the most profoundly?"


According to the Chicago Tribune article wherein I learned of the exhibit, it appears most of the press release above was authored by James H. Billington, the thirteenth Librarian of the United States Congress (sworn in September 1987). Billington was trained as a historian (PhD, Oxford Balliol) and taught at both Harvard and Princeton from 1957-1973.

With only a little reflection, the most surprising thing about the list is that it is ahistorical. The list does not specify whether we are to judge these "books that shaped America" based on America today or on the America affected by the book shortly after the publication of each. I assume they mean today---which makes the exercise exceedingly difficult for both the professional historian and the lay person. What intelligent thing(s) are we supposed to say about Uncle Tom's Cabin, written by Harriet Beecher Stowe and published in 1852, in relation to 2012?

All lists are controlled by space. That is one the things that makes them controversial. That limitation exacerbates perceived poor choices. Limitations give rise to complaints. As such, I wondered why the LOC stopped at 88 books? The press release above notes that "exhibition space controlled the size of their list. Fair enough. To show actual books, one must deal with the material size of the book, exhibit cases, room for text, and room for viewers to maneuver. So those factors probably explain the number 88. But those factors do not absolve one from poor selection criteria---for poor exhibit conception.

Because of these factors I looked at the online survey and threw up my hands in confusion. The selection criteria are not outlined in the obvious parts of the exhibit through which I surfed. Even so, I went ahead gave an answer to the first question in order to see the rest of the survey. I chose The Private Life of the late Benjamin Franklin  (more commonly called The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin---I have no idea why they chose to use the more obscure title), Thoreau's Walden, and Margaret Wise Brown's Goodnight Moon (for whimsy's sake).  


Here is question two: "Which ONE of these books had the most impact on YOU, personally, rather than America as a whole."  Here I chose Melville's Moby Dick.  Question three, on this same page, asks "Please describe how this book changed you." I answered in a brief fashion to move the survey along: "I first read this in high school and it opened my mind to the complexities possible in a novel, in one's private life, and in the process of chasing our goals."

Question four asks: "What book that is NOT on our list should be? (Title and author, please.)"

Can anyone predict my answer?  ... ... Again, I chose to have a little fun here:

Mortimer J. Adler's *How to Read a Book* (1940).

Question five asks: " Tell us why your nominee should be added to the list."  Here was my off-the-cuff, lightly edited answer (edited more here than there):

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After its publication in 1940, Adler's *How to Read a Book* set in motion a chain of events with no conclusion in sight. Indeed, this survey and the and the "Books That Shaped America" exhibit is a part of that historical chain. How? What are the events to which you are [I am] referring? Here's how---as briefly as possible: 

Adler's book laid out a plan to improve upon the population's basic literacy skills. He linked the need for improvement with an imperative for thoughtful citizenship. At the end of the book he provided a list of books (Western in nature) on which one should practice the skills he laid out in *How to Read a Book*. That list, known now as "The Great Books," inspired thousands of people in the 1940s---diverse in terms of wealth, gender, religion, and race---to set up Great Books reading groups. One of those readers was William Benton, who used his position (i.e. CEO) at Encyclopaedia Britannica to hire Adler (among others) to publish the *The Great Books of the Western World*. That set sold thousands of copies, but Great Books reading groups also proliferated due to the work of the Great Books Foundation (which also lists Adler as a founder). The great books idea has since inspired regular readers (young and old), as well as college students via their professors, to challenge themselves to read the very best books ever published. The great books idea has also undergone renovation. In the wake of a heightened awareness of American diversity that has occurred since the 1950s and 1960s, today the great books idea exists in the form of a plurality of lists about the best books. Even so, readers are still living with the challenge to read the very best books---to obtain the highest form of literacy possible in relation to being both the best thinker and citizen. And the great books idea lives on in college curricula and in library-sponsored reading groups for general citizens outside of education institutions.

I would argue that Adler's book inspired the creators of this very exhibit. We have been asking ourselves all through the twentieth century how we can navigate, in time with our limited energies and life span, the plethora of books in print. This exhibit and Adler's list(s) provide starting points for endless revision in relation to our changed historical circumstances.

This is why Adler's *How to Read a Book* should be on your list. It is "the book" which has challenged [people] since publication to choose the best books for close reading (and rereading). It is the book which linked excellence in reading with excellence in citizenship. 

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So my answer was not that brief. And with it I ended up taking the survey more seriously than I intended. As for the rest of the survey, questions six through eight asked demographic questions: What is your state and/or country? What is your age? What is your gender?

How about you? What are your thoughts on the exhibit? What of my nominations and answers to the survey questions? - TL

Earl Shorris and Popular Anti-Straussianism

Earl Shorris

Last week, author and educator Earl Shorris passed away at the age of 75 from non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. His New York Times obituary rightly focuses on his creation of the Clemente Course in the Humanities, the program he created in 1995 to bring a broad, liberal arts curriculum to the economically disadvantaged, which earned him a National Humanities Medal in 2000.

But the first thing I thought of when I heard of Shorris's passing was a piece that he wrote for Harper's, published in June, 2004, entitled "Ignoble Liars: Leo Strauss, George Bush, and the Philosophy of Mass Deception" (.pdf available here).  Shorris's piece was one of a series of popular works from the middle of the last decade that sought to blame Leo Strauss and his acolytes for all that had gone wrong during the Bush years.  In May, 2003, Seymour Hersh had argued in The New Yorker that a Straussian cabal was responsible for cooking U.S. intelligence on Iraq to bring about war, a charge echoed that same month by James Atlas in a New York Times op-ed.  This flurry of articles, in turn, inspired the actor Tim Robbins to write Embedded, a play that premiered in L.A. in July, 2003, which dramatized the notion that Leo Strauss was pulling the strings of the Iraq War from beyond the grave.  Shortly after Shorris's article appeared, in the fall of 2004, the documentarian Adam Curtis's The Power of Nightmares premiered on BBC television, arguing that Leo Strauss had not only been the intellectual font of neoconservatism, but had also inspired American policymakers to invent Al Qaeda.

How do these attempts to argue that Leo Strauss was the power behind the Bush throne hold up almost a decade later?  How does Shorris's piece fare among them?




My provisional answer is to the first question is that these articles, plays, and documentaries explained both too little and too much.  On the one hand, they were part of a much larger tendency to see the Bush Administration--especially post-9/11--as representing a much more radical break with the past than it in fact did.  The too-little-acknowledged continuities have become clearer now that we have had three years during which a Democratic administration has not, in fact, reversed many of the policies that critics found so appalling during the Bush years. Discovering a previously obscure, foreign, reactionary thinker as the secret cause of an administration's actions nicely fit the view of the Bush administration as a radical break from the past.  The focus on Strauss and his followers as the secret power behind the Bush administration tended to produce elaborate explanations for fairly historically common phenomena, like administrations' lying to the public about wars, while providing far too shallow critiques of other phenomena, such as long-standing problems with the national security state that had developed during the Cold War and lived on long after its end.  Stories of the trahison des Straussians also uncomfortably resembled a long tradition of anti-intellectual counter-subversive narratives, the most famous modern examples of which involved Communists during the Cold War.

All that being said, Straussians have played a smaller, but nonetheless important, role in modern American conservatism. The fact that some false conspiracy theories have been constructed about them no more makes them unimportant on the right than the falsity of most anti-Communist conspiracy theories means that Communists weren't important in the Old Left.

In the context of the popular anti-Straussian writings of the Bush years, Shorris's piece is measured and interesting, if nonetheless off-base in many typical ways.  Shorris makes his share of sloppy mistakes, some of them understandable and basically unimportant (e.g. identifying Strauss's hometown as "Kirchheim" rather than "Kirchhain") some of them significant and less defensible (e.g. identifying Grover Norquist as a Straussian).

To his credit, Shorris sets his critique in a world in which Leo Strauss did not invent public dishonesty:

It is safe to say that neither Ronald Reagan nor the Bushes have read Leo Strauss, and certainly no politician needs to be taught how to lie by a professor of philosophy.

Nevertheless, as Shorris notes in a footnote to this statement,

we need not be concerned with proving direct lines of influence. A brief summary of Straussian doctrine suffices to demonstrate its affinity with what one might call the "mind of the regime," whether any particular member of the Bush Administration has read Strauss or not.

But Shorris is sensibly uncomfortable at leaving the matter at merely identifying similarities between the behavior of the administration and (his understanding of) Strauss, so he continues in the main text of his article:

Perhaps William Kristol, while serving as Dan Quayle's chief of staff, tutored the vice president in the finer points of Platonic politics. But it is unlikely. The step from philosophy to action is almost always circuitous, Machiavelli being one of the rare exceptions. Strauss's ideas about ideas took the usual path, picked and poked and punched, mutating here, understood selectively there. At one time, Strauss wrote a sentence in which he opposed preventive war. How disappointed his followers in the Department of Defense would be to read it now in light of the wreckage they have made!  

The career of Strauss's teachings is one of the wonders and the dangers of the book, as the master himself might have said, knowing that the long life of books, unlike newspapers or television, is bound up with history in a process of indirection. The ideas in books somehow manage to wiggle through the morass of individuals and information in large modern societies and become effective. The way is not clear, but the fact of it often gives surcease to the pains of laboring in obscurity.

Two things are notable about this passage. First, it shows a much subtler understanding of the actual ways that ideas affect society than the sometimes Dan Brownish intellectual conspiracy theories that have been written about the Straussians. Secondly, there's some suggestion that Shorris sees Strauss himself as similar to Prof. Rupert Cadell (Jimmy Stewart) in Alfred Hitchcock's Rope, whose Nietzschean ideas are transformed by a student into an act of murder.  In fact, around the time Shorris wrote his Harper's piece, a number of critics of the Straussians, including both Anne Norton and Mark Lilla, began to suggest that Strauss was not a Straussian and that the master should not be blamed for the sins of his acolytes.

Shorris himself, however, is not clear on this point. One of the striking things about his article is the poignancy of his (essentially negative) portrait of Leo Strauss.  Shorris has virtually nothing good to say about Strauss's writings (which he sees as intentionally impossible to decipher and largely dedicated to bad writing for bad writing's sake) or about his political commitments (which he sees as reactionary, hierarchical, and anti-democratic).  Yet he also sees Strauss as an essentially tragic figure, whose politics were almost entirely determined by his intellectual hero Heidegger's embrace of Nazism, and who seemed (somewhat like Stewart's Prof. Cadell) to have had little desire for the powers sought by his followers:

Without question he was a brilliant professor, a frightened man whose ideas, having been battered into hiding by historic events, were eccentric. He had produced some journal articles, delivered the Walgreen Lectures, never to my knowledge appeared in the "public press," made no radio or television appearances, and during his lifetime found but a small group of readers for his books. He died obscure and far from home.

Ultimately, Shorris's take on Strauss's life and ideas is overly reductive, though much of the blame no doubt lies with the format--a seven page magazine article--as well as the unavailability of decent secondary sources about Strauss: although the situation would change drastically over the next five years, at the time Shorris wrote, not a single scholarly biography of Strauss had been published in English, and there were still very few scholarly monographs dedicated to explicating his thought.

But perhaps the most interesting thing about Shorris's article on Strauss is something that goes unstated in it.  Early in the piece, Shorris notes that Strauss

had but one core idea: read old books carefully. It was a stroke of genius, and nothing more invigorating or enlightening could be said about education, but it was not news on a campus run by Robert Maynard Hutchins, one of the inventors of the Great Books curriculum.

What Shorris doesn't mention is that he himself was very much a product of that curriculum.  Shorris attended U of C in the late '40s and early '50s, arriving there as a thirteen year-old (Chicago was known for accepting very young undergraduates) within a year or two of Leo Strauss himself.  Though he left before receiving his degree, Shorris was deeply influenced by his university's commitment to the Great Books, as his creating of the Clemente Course some four decades later attests.  As Tim Lacy has written on this blog, there were many flavors of commitment to the Great Books at Chicago.  And Shorris, like Mortimer Adler, was deeply attached to great books liberalism. As the Clemente Course suggests, Shorris saw the Great Books as documents of democratic empowerment.  But he saw Strauss as attempting to wed these books to a doctrine of elitism and obscurantism.

Shorris's piece ends with a call to resist the "Nietzschean dreams of power" that he saw as regnant, thanks to Strauss, in the Bush administration.  He's largely silent--other than those passing words of praise in that last blockquote, which could incorrectly be read as ironic--on his own abiding commitment to the Great Books.  What is clear is that Shorris saw ideas as mattering and feared not so much a conspiratorial cabal (though his article is not entirely free of loose accusations about who were Straussians in the halls of power) as the potentially catastrophic effects of bad philosophy.  And this, too, was something he shared with Leo Strauss.

A Baker's Dozen Awe-Inspiring Cultural and Intellectual Histories

[Editor's Note: Today's guest post comes from George Cotkin, Professor of Postwar United States Intellectual and Cultural History, California Polytechnic State University. Enjoy! - TL]


How often are we both propelled and burdened by great works of cultural and intellectual history? They serve as our models; they sing with their insight, style, and grace.

On my desk I have arranged a lucky thirteen titles. They mock me often and they make me want to stop my own work and read them. They are books that I admire, that I wish I had written.

They all deal with topics in our field. Only one of them is a biography of a single figure. There are other titles, outside the field of intellectual history, I admire equally or that have influenced my life. E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class and Eugene Genovese’s Roll, Jordan, Roll, come to mind immediately.

Do these volumes share anything in common? I think that all of them escape the confines of the pedestrian or academic. Many of them fail but in a heroic manner. All of them ooze sophistication and deep learning. And all of them, in my view, are written with verve.

Here are my baker’s dozen of books that I hold in awe (alphabetically, by author):

Rachel Cohen, A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists, 1854-1967

Morris Dickstein, Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties

Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s

Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age

Paul Elie, The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage

Orlando Figes, Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia

Peter Gay, Education of the Senses: The Bourgeois Experience, Victoria to Freud

Alexandra Harris, Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper

David Lehman, The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets

Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America

Robert Richardson, Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire

Carl Schorske, Fin-de-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture

Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885-World War I

I am sure that you are bewitched by your own set of favorites. Care to share them?

Masscult and Midcult: Were Dwight Macdonald's anxieties prescient or misplaced?

Need a break from the monotony of grading? Read Jennifer Szalai's provocative review of the new collection of Dwight Macdonald's essays, edited by John Summers, Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain. The essay raises a number of important questions, such as the following few: Is it a worthwhile endeavor to create hierarchies of cultural taste? Now or ever? Can high culture be democratized without losing its Avant-Garde critical edge?

This last question is particularly important in the work of our very own Tim Lacy, who is writing a book on the history of the Great Books project championed by Mortimer Adler (Macdonald was a harsh critic of the Great Books, made clear in Szalai's review). As Tim argues, Adler and his cohort believed democracy and high culture, or scholasticism, should go well together. This was their intellectual rationale for the Great Books. But Tim also makes clear that, despite such noble impulses, the Great Books must be understood in terms of commerce. As such, he analyzes the ways in which the Great Books operated not only as an intellectual and democratizing project, but also as a moneymaking venture. Great Books salespeople frightened their customers into buying their product, playing on the status anxieties of parents who sought to raise successful children in a society that increasingly valued education as necessary cultural capital. So it seems Tim both agrees and disagrees with Macdonald, who saw the Great Books as hopelessly midcult. For those interested, Tim makes the case for Great Books Liberalism in one of his more memorable posts.

Szalai is ultimately very critical of Macdonald's analysis of taste. Here's a "taste" of her analysis:

So much of Macdonald’s critical system relies on distinctions of “taste” that it’s curious how uncritically he trusted the term, using it as shorthand whenever he made a tenuous claim he couldn’t argue his way out of. But taste is a slippery concept, one that is informed, arguably or inevitably, by wealth, birth and education. Taste is cultural capital, and making distinctions of what is in good taste and bad is a way for social classes to distinguish themselves from and compete with one another. Macdonald took his Marxist critique only so far; he could see how culture could be commodified and manufactured, and how the masses were buying cultural products they believed could hoist them up into the rarefied ranks of the elite, but he assumed that tastes were a given, which meant he sometimes wrote as if his own good taste were the inevitable result of, well, good taste. This circular reasoning is less a problem in his reviews of specific books or movies, where it was incumbent on him to explain why exactly he liked or disliked the work in question, but in a big essay like “Masscult and Midcult,” he could get swept away by the swell of generalization, as presumptuous of mass taste as he was of his own.

If, as he believed, taste was inviolable, then so much middlebrow striving was bound to be a sad little exercise in futility. Any attempt by the masses to edify themselves was like a children’s game—they were playing dress-up with clothes ten sizes too big. The Great Books project, midlist fiction, publications from the “Lucepapers” to Harper’s Magazine and The Atlantic Monthly: if it was aimed at a general audience, it was a candidate for his derision

The Stanford Debates And The Culture Wars

One week from tomorrow I'll be presenting a paper titled "The Rhetoric of Reactionaries: The Stanford Debates, the Great Books Idea, and the Culture Wars." This presentation will take place at the 51st annual meeting of the History of Education Society in Chicago. I'll be on a panel with Andrew Hartman and Christopher Hickman, chaired by Martha Biondi, titled "RETHINKING LEFT AND RIGHT IN THE EDUCATIONAL CULTURE WARS."

I've written the paper. Hopefully it'll go over well. I'm drawing your attention to it today because there two issues that came up in writing on which I'd like some feedback:

(1) Thanks to Andrew, we've discussed a definition of the "Culture Wars" here before (yes, I elect to capitalize the phrase). And there was at least one follow-up post. But, in the interest of being an independent thinker, I've decided to use a new one for my paper. Mine was inspired by a recent reading of Daniel Bell's 1992 Wilson Quarterly essay titled "The Cultural Wars: American Intellectual Life, 1965-1992." Here's my definition:

Beginning in the 1960s and continuing until the present, the Culture Wars are the sometimes public fights over the symbolism and meanings attached to cultural, social, political, and economic events by varieties of 'institutional' intellectuals—purposely and accidentally separated from each other—and non-intellectuals—the latter often using religion as their bridge back into cultural, social, political, philosophical, and economic terrain.

Thoughts? What have I left out? What's missing?

(2) In the course of reviewing the literature on the Stanford Debates I learned that there was neither a normalized term for the event---or series of events---nor a short-hand definition of those debates. So here's what I wrote on both topics:

What were the “Stanford Debates”? The phrase is short-hand for a series of discussions, both at Stanford University and beyond, about the nature, necessity, and required readings of a standardized, first-year course sequence called “Western Culture.” These discussions began in 1986 and culminated in a spring 1988 decision to replace “Western Culture” with something called “Culture, Institutions, and Values,” or CIV, in the fall of 1989. During the spring of 1988 those discussions reached a fever pitch. Secretary of Education William Bennett came to Stanford to debate the changes with President Donald Kennedy. There is no agreed upon name for this series of historical events; I have seen them called the “Stanford Debate” (singular), “Stanford Affair,” and “Stanford Canon Debate.” As I see it, however, those debates were about three things: (1) multiculturalism in education (diversity and/or rigor, or excellence); (2) the failings of curricula anchored in Western civilization or culture; and (3) the types of books used in those curricula (i.e. great, good, representative, etc.).

What do you think? What have I missed or neglected? - TL

What Constitutes a "Philosophical System"?

As a practicing intellectual historian with the good fortune of having an academic teaching post---with no summer teaching commitments---the last weeks of August can be wrenching in relation to one's summer work. I've spent large chunks the past three months reading, researching, and writing---essentially on one very difficult chapter of my manuscript. Letting that go to get ready for classes has been tough. Poor me, I know. But I'm quite grateful for the privilege. This was my first summer of that kind after many years in the academy.



This wrenching has been especially tough because my ambitions were high: I had hoped to revise two dissertation chapters for my book manuscript. I thought the revision of my prior work was going to be easier---go faster. But it didn't. So I'm trying to sort through the consequences, and make some hard decisions. What made the summer so tough?



My difficulty consisted of heavy background reading, drafting, redrafting, cutting, and parsing some tedious philosophical work. My human subject is Mortimer J. Adler [right], and I'm trying to understand a philosophical transition that took place in his life in the Sixties and early Seventies. This transition had important effects on how Adler viewed the role of the great books idea in society. My summer reading in his philosophical work from that period has presented a number problems, several of which I've been able to distill into a five-word question: What constitutes a philosophical system?



If you're somewhat familiar with Adler, you might be wondering what was so hard? You probably associate his name with Thomism, neo-Thomism, Aristotelianism, neo-Aristotelianism, Scholasticism, or neo-Scholasticism. Several historians and oppositional contemporaries also called him a Medievalist in philosophy. More advanced observers know that Adler had affinities for realism or common-sense realism. I discussed some of the details of the latter in four posts this summer (began here and continued through July 30). Education researchers often associate Adler's philosophy of education with a school of thought known as "perennialism." Most proponents of great books programs, including those at prominent great books school or schools possessing those kinds of programs (Honors, etc.), fall within the perennialist school of educational philosophy.



As I pondered Adler's thinking in the 1960s and 1970s, however, I found that the extensions of his common sense realism, or what Bennie R. Crockett called his "eclectic epistemology," branch well beyond education (perennialist adherents are, by definition, restricted to educational thinking). In addition to education, Adler extended tenets of his thought to personal ethics, political philosophy, human rights, economics, social institutions, war and peace, religion, and even futurology.



I use the phrase "great books liberalism" to capture some of this larger thinking in my manuscript. Though I'm happy with that in the context of my book project, I'm unhappy with it in relation to Adler's biography and his overall philosophical thinking. Indeed, I'm inclined to see the tenets of his thinking, his assumptions and applications, as the components of a larger system. For now I'm content to bounce between a number of shorthands---the "Adler Paradigm," the "Adlerian System," or the "Adlerian School"---for lack of any better, more lyrical, phraseology. "Adlerian School" probably has the most appeal, but I don't want to over-emphasize the well-known educational applications of his thought.



But this raises a number of larger questions: When does someone's philosophy, or philosophies, reach the quantitative and qualitative breaking point---holding forth sufficient complexity and multiple applications---where it transitions into a school of thought? Or, what constitutes a philosophical system? Must the creator designate her or his thought a system? Must one have followers who are practitioners? What if you build a school that few to no students attend? How much peer recognition must one have to be acknowledged a school of thought? Does eclecticism deny coherence? When can a historian declare the existence of a school?



I'm now convinced, in contrast with some other recent historians and observers, that Adler's thought had sufficient peer respect, breadth, complexity, and coherence to be called a school of thought. And I'll briefly argue for this in my manuscript, but I'm still interested in your thoughts. What's the tipping point between having a philosophy and authoring a system? - TL

They're Back!

Entering First-Year Students Perform the OU Chant at Convocation

The new school year at the University of Oklahoma started today.*  As Andrew's post below suggests, the thoughts of most USIHers are no doubt returning to the classroom.

For the third straight fall semester, I'm teaching my Honors colloquium on America in the Sixties. After another round of syllabus fiddling--some of it inspired by suggestions from the readership of this blog--I once again start the semester feeling that this course is better than it was in its last iteration.

One of the many ways in which I know this is no longer a new course is that I'm beginning to pare down the material on the syllabus.  I took out some things--including Doug Rossinow's The Politics of Authenticity, which I love, but undergrads seem to hate--and added others. But when the dust settled, the reading load is lighter than it was last time through. Among the new items I'm most looking forward to teaching is Frederick Wiseman's documentary High School (1968).  A clip (one of the few from the film available on YouTube):

My other class is new...at least to me:  the first half of a very traditional Great Books (of the Western Tradition)** course that we're starting to offer in the Honors College.  I borrowed the syllabus, with only minor changes, from my colleague Bob Lifset, who did his PhD at Columbia. Though he's an energy historian, Bob taught in CC, in many ways the mother of all American Great Books courses, and now among the last of that dying breed.

Even preparing to teach this course has made me think a lot about the canon wars that framed the ongoing crisis of the academy when I was in college and graduate school in the 1980s and early 1990s.  But I'll save those thoughts for another day.

Back to prepping....

______________________________________
* Of course, for folks around here other than students and faculty, the year doesn't start until a week from Saturday:

** Scare quotes can be added to both capitalized terms if it makes you feel better.

Great Books Liberalism

Many USIH readers probably know by now that I am working on a book about the history of the Great Books idea in the United States, with a focus on the work of Mortimer J. Adler (right) and his intellectual community. As my project revisions deepen I am rereading material last studied during the 2000-2005 period. I am finding---with no small amount of pleasure---that my thinking has changed about the books and articles under consideration. My overall thesis holds, but I am seeing and finding more nuance within my chosen themes, as well as incorporating new themes.

Some of these changes in thinking are the result of my secondary readings. Over the past five years I've read many more histories, more closely, than I did as a graduate student. Back then, not surprisingly, I studied and merely ~read in~ books for classes and exams. Since graduation I have also been able to think more about philosophy, politics, and education theory.

But developments apart from reading have also enriched my view of the great books-Adler project. Indeed, the rise of the Tea Party within the conservative movement has, serendipitously, increased the strength of my arguments about Adler and great books supporters. I have long argued that the place of Adler and his community in the Culture Wars continuum has been skewed, by a fair number of academics and relevant cultural/intellectual/education historians, too far to the right.

There are a number of legitimate reasons for this. The biggest is the support of great books programs by cultural and intellectual reactionaries (e.g. Allan Bloom), as well as political conservatives (e.g. William Bennett). Religious education endeavors, moreover, have also colored the picture a political red. For instance, Catholic higher education institutions, such as Saint Thomas Aquinas College in California, use the great books idea as a signal for respect of traditional mores, norms, and ideas. There are also a number of Protestant colleges that use the great books to take a cultural stand.

That said, left-leaning academicians and critical historians have compounded this conservative perception by talking about the great books idea as static and unchanging. Even when they acknowledge change, they still associate the great books with hierarchical views of society, or stoke fears of an artificial, imposed ordering of the mind. Lawrence Levine acknowledged a changing history in his flawed but useful historical polemic, The Opening of the American Mind (1996). But he neglected to explore the fact that the great books idea can be used to forward a liberal or moderate mindset. All too often, many on the right (more so) and the left (still too frequently) believe that a course in the great books predetermines a conservative political teleology. Historical counterexamples exist. Savvy observers of literature and the great books (i.e. Margaret Soltan of University Diaries, May and Sept. 2006 posts) know that it can be adapted to left-leaning higher education environments, as is the case at St. John's College (in Annapolis, MD, and Sante Fe, NM). A cursory historical review of St. John's students and faculty, present and past, would dispel the great books-equals-conservatism myth.

Returning to Adler, his community of discourse, the Tea Party, and my book project, few understand---or have bothered to explore---the varieties of liberalism situated in the political make-up of the mid-twentieth-century great books supporters. And now that I have a better understanding of political liberalism, the rise of conservatism, and the present-day political situation, I too am occasionally surprised by the rationality, moderation, and good sense proposed by Adler and his community---when they were at their best. Adler was always something of a jack-ass personally, and he compounded this in the late 1980s and early 1980s because of rigidity, which I attribute to late-life senility. But he had his moments as a voice of reason.

For instance, I am currently rereading Adler's 1970 book, The Time of Our Lives: The Ethics of Common Sense (TOL).[1] If you can put aside, momentarily, your doubts about the notion of a 'common sense'---doubts I share, by the way---I've come to the conclusion that this book is the key to understanding Adler's vital center-ish, and somewhat paternalistic, liberalism. Despite its weaknesses, this liberalism matters because of Adler's long-term advocacy of the great books, its contrast to the associated politics outlined above, and finally because he retained this liberalism, both politically and socially, even into his senility. For some, indeed, this is what made him an enduring, attractive figure. If more conservatives today were knowledgeable of that liberalism, I am convinced there would be less enthusiasm for the great books idea by association (and perhaps more enthusiasm from moderate liberals for great books curricula). Adler put that liberalism on display all throughout TOL, even while he chastised and denigrated the counterculture, as well as youthful activists with far left political aspirations (read: revolutionaries).

The last quarter of TOL is dedicated to assessing "The Present Situation in Which We Find Ourselves" (Part IV). There is a chapter in that section titled "Is Ours a Good Society to be Alive In?" This is not an inconsequential question in 1970, a year where the populace---young and old---was still in the midst of the Vietnam War, as well as recovering from the shocking news of late 1969: the killings of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, the Altamont Speedway Free Festival disaster, the Manson murders, My Lai, etc. After acknowledging the difficulties of comparing the U.S. to other world societies, Adler concludes: "With all such considerations in mind, I still think it is fair to say that from the point of view of providing the external conditions of a good human life for a larger percentage of its citizens, the United States, is, on balance, as good as, if not better than, any other country in the world today, and vastly better than any state that ever existed in the past" (p. 219).

Taken out of the context of the reading, where Adler discussed what he called "the twentieth century revolution" in human affairs (e.g. the goods of Progress in terms of the Enlightenment project, broadly conceived for the world), this seems overly patriotic and perhaps jingoistic (p. 214).[2] It does not come across that way in the book. And of course the historian can, with some ease and the benefits of hindsight, judge him for underestimating the problems of Vietnam, racism, gender, and ethnocentrism.

Adler writes that this revolution "must go on" (p. 220). In so doing, he acknowledges the importance of social and political criticism within the United States. But what about the criticisms articulated, both directly and indirectly, by the counterculture and the youthful left? Adler writes that "we can dismiss the purely negative and nihilistic type of criticism that, failing to acknowledge the revolutionary accomplishments so far [in 20th-century America, broadly], does not propose carrying the revolution [read: reform] forward, but instead calls for the complete demolition of our institutions" (p. 220). In calling for the already ongoing twentieth-century revolution to continue, Adler spoke against the kind of revolution hoped for by the Weathermen and its successor the Weather Underground. At 68 years old, Adler could afford to speak of moderation and a long view since he was not targeted for the draft, as were the men who participated in groups like the Weathermen.

In discussing legitimate and illegitimate criticism of America, Adler supplies a long footnote on John W. Gardner's June 1968 commencement address at Cornell University. The title of Gardner's speech says a great deal: "Uncritical Lovers, Unloving Critics." While thinking about it this week, I have been screening The Weather Underground (2002) with my U.S. survey students. I've also been watching the news about the nation's budget with, probably, the rest of you. Gardner's address applies as much to radical Tea Party libertarians today as it did to 1960s student revolutionaries.[3] Here's the excerpt Adler provided TOL, as well as his gloss at the end (the underlines are Adler's):

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

Gardner [right] imagines a twenty-third-century scholar who, with retrospective insight, points out that "twentieth-century institutions were caught in a savage crossfire between uncritical lovers and unloving critics. On the one side, those who loved their institutions tended to smother them in an embrace of death, loving their rigidities more than their promise, shielding them from life-giving criticism. On the other side, there arose a breed of critics without love, skilled in demolition but untutored in the arts by which human institutions are nurtured and strengthened and made to flourish. …Where human institutions are concerned, love without criticism brings stagnation and criticism without love brings destruction. …The swifter the pace of change, the more lovingly men have to care for and criticize their institutions to keep them intact through turbulent passages. In short, men must be discriminating appraisers of their society, knowing coolly and precisely what it is about society that thwarts or limits them and therefore needs modification. […] To fit themselves for such tasks, they must be sufficiently serious to study their institutions, sufficiently expert in the art of modifying them."

Patriotism is love of one's country and its institutions, but the only kind of patriotism that can be recommended is the kind Gardner has described---the patriotism of 'critical lovers'. Patriotism thus conceived is neither blind to faults, as parental love usually is, nor is it given to an over-estimation of virtues, as romantic love usually is. It is like mature, conjugal love---the love for a spouse which, while fully cognizant of all defects, would still wish to have no other. That is, perhaps, the reason why it is futile to expect the young of this or any other generation to be patriots in the true sense, rather than 'uncritical lovers' or 'unloving critics,' as most of them are. (pp. 336n6-337)

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

As you can see, Adler's (vital, paternalistic) liberalism---as expressed in conjunction with Gardner---pushed for a critical spirit. That spirit was based on an updated Aristotelian logic and ethics that prioritized public philosophy in a democracy---meaning the infusion of the public square with dialectic principles rooted in a secular hierarchy of goods. That spirit, furthermore, found educational grounding in the public goods that Adler and his community saw in the great books idea.

At this point, meaning 1970, the canon had not yet been widely targeted for challenge. Even so, Adler and his community (Mortimer J. Adler, the Van Dorens, Clifton Fadiman, William Benton, Arthur Rubin, Jacques Barzun, Otto Bird, etc.) had already argued for the intellectual diversity within the Western tradition. He also liked to remind people that "there is much more error in the great books than there is truth." [4] In other words, to Adler the Enlightenment project in America, evident in the ongoing revolution of Western political, economic, and social conditions---coming to fruition "as the technologically advanced, democratic, welfare state"---was buttressed by a great books-based liberalism (pp. 217-218). This great books liberalism celebrated reason, rationality, criticism, and the careful maintenance of existing, working institutions. Supporters of the great books saw a flexible, vigorous culture center that could hold in the midst of fracture and disintegration.

As a coda, I can't help but wonder whether the Tea Party, were it more in touch with the (positive) historical development of the Western liberal tradition in terms of state-building, would be so eager to atomize individuals by working against the "general welfare" ideals articulated in the U.S. Constitution's Preamble? Haven't they read the great documents that some have called "The American Testament"? You can bet that great books liberals have. - TL

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

[1] Adler, The Time of Our Lives: The Ethics of Common Sense. Introduction by Deal W. Hudson (New York: Fordham University Press, 1996). The politics of the author to this introduction speak to the efforts by right-wing Catholic political activists to appropriate and hold onto the great books legacy in the face of overwhelming evidence against the GB idea supporting conservative political endeavors.

[2] And from TOL, chapter 20 passim.

[3] My students love watching this.

[4] Adler, A Second Look in the Rearview Mirror (New York: Macmillan, 1992), 144.

Great Books Liberalism

Many USIH readers probably know by now that I am working on a book about the history of the Great Books idea in the United States, with a focus on the work of Mortimer J. Adler (right) and his intellectual community. As my project revisions deepen I am rereading material last studied during the 2000-2005 period. I am finding---with no small amount of pleasure---that my thinking has changed about the books and articles under consideration. My overall thesis holds, but I am seeing and finding more nuance within my chosen themes, as well as incorporating new themes.

Some of these changes in thinking are the result of my secondary readings. Over the past five years I've read many more histories, more closely, than I did as a graduate student. Back then, not surprisingly, I studied and merely ~read in~ books for classes and exams. Since graduation I have also been able to think more about philosophy, politics, and education theory.

But developments apart from reading have also enriched my view of the great books-Adler project. Indeed, the rise of the Tea Party within the conservative movement has, serendipitously, increased the strength of my arguments about Adler and great books supporters. I have long argued that the place of Adler and his community in the Culture Wars continuum has been skewed, by a fair number of academics and relevant cultural/intellectual/education historians, too far to the right.

There are a number of legitimate reasons for this. The biggest is the support of great books programs by cultural and intellectual reactionaries (e.g. Allan Bloom), as well as political conservatives (e.g. William Bennett). Religious education endeavors, moreover, have also colored the picture a political red. For instance, Catholic higher education institutions, such as Saint Thomas Aquinas College in California, use the great books idea as a signal for respect of traditional mores, norms, and ideas. There are also a number of Protestant colleges that use the great books to take a cultural stand.

That said, left-leaning academicians and critical historians have compounded this conservative perception by talking about the great books idea as static and unchanging. Even when they acknowledge change, they still associate the great books with hierarchical views of society, or stoke fears of an artificial, imposed ordering of the mind. Lawrence Levine acknowledged a changing history in his flawed but useful historical polemic, The Opening of the American Mind (1996). But he neglected to explore the fact that the great books idea can be used to forward a liberal or moderate mindset. All too often, many on the right (more so) and the left (still too frequently) believe that a course in the great books predetermines a conservative political teleology. Historical counterexamples exist. Savvy observers of literature and the great books (i.e. Margaret Soltan of University Diaries, May and Sept. 2006 posts) know that it can be adapted to left-leaning higher education environments, as is the case at St. John's College (in Annapolis, MD, and Sante Fe, NM). A cursory historical review of St. John's students and faculty, present and past, would dispel the great books-equals-conservatism myth.

Returning to Adler, his community of discourse, the Tea Party, and my book project, few understand---or have bothered to explore---the varieties of liberalism situated in the political make-up of the mid-twentieth-century great books supporters. And now that I have a better understanding of political liberalism, the rise of conservatism, and the present-day political situation, I too am occasionally surprised by the rationality, moderation, and good sense proposed by Adler and his community---when they were at their best. Adler was always something of a jack-ass personally, and he compounded this in the late 1980s and early 1980s because of rigidity, which I attribute to late-life senility. But he had his moments as a voice of reason.

For instance, I am currently rereading Adler's 1970 book, The Time of Our Lives: The Ethics of Common Sense (TOL).[1] If you can put aside, momentarily, your doubts about the notion of a 'common sense'---doubts I share, by the way---I've come to the conclusion that this book is the key to understanding Adler's vital center-ish, and somewhat paternalistic, liberalism. Despite its weaknesses, this liberalism matters because of Adler's long-term advocacy of the great books, its contrast to the associated politics outlined above, and finally because he retained this liberalism, both politically and socially, even into his senility. For some, indeed, this is what made him an enduring, attractive figure. If more conservatives today were knowledgeable of that liberalism, I am convinced there would be less enthusiasm for the great books idea by association (and perhaps more enthusiasm from moderate liberals for great books curricula). Adler put that liberalism on display all throughout TOL, even while he chastised and denigrated the counterculture, as well as youthful activists with far left political aspirations (read: revolutionaries).

The last quarter of TOL is dedicated to assessing "The Present Situation in Which We Find Ourselves" (Part IV). There is a chapter in that section titled "Is Ours a Good Society to be Alive In?" This is not an inconsequential question in 1970, a year where the populace---young and old---was still in the midst of the Vietnam War, as well as recovering from the shocking news of late 1969: the killings of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, the Altamont Speedway Free Festival disaster, the Manson murders, My Lai, etc. After acknowledging the difficulties of comparing the U.S. to other world societies, Adler concludes: "With all such considerations in mind, I still think it is fair to say that from the point of view of providing the external conditions of a good human life for a larger percentage of its citizens, the United States, is, on balance, as good as, if not better than, any other country in the world today, and vastly better than any state that ever existed in the past" (p. 219).

Taken out of the context of the reading, where Adler discussed what he called "the twentieth century revolution" in human affairs (e.g. the goods of Progress in terms of the Enlightenment project, broadly conceived for the world), this seems overly patriotic and perhaps jingoistic (p. 214).[2] It does not come across that way in the book. And of course the historian can, with some ease and the benefits of hindsight, judge him for underestimating the problems of Vietnam, racism, gender, and ethnocentrism.

Adler writes that this revolution "must go on" (p. 220). In so doing, he acknowledges the importance of social and political criticism within the United States. But what about the criticisms articulated, both directly and indirectly, by the counterculture and the youthful left? Adler writes that "we can dismiss the purely negative and nihilistic type of criticism that, failing to acknowledge the revolutionary accomplishments so far [in 20th-century America, broadly], does not propose carrying the revolution [read: reform] forward, but instead calls for the complete demolition of our institutions" (p. 220). In calling for the already ongoing twentieth-century revolution to continue, Adler spoke against the kind of revolution hoped for by the Weathermen and its successor the Weather Underground. At 68 years old, Adler could afford to speak of moderation and a long view since he was not targeted for the draft, as were the men who participated in groups like the Weathermen.

In discussing legitimate and illegitimate criticism of America, Adler supplies a long footnote on John W. Gardner's June 1968 commencement address at Cornell University. The title of Gardner's speech says a great deal: "Uncritical Lovers, Unloving Critics." While thinking about it this week, I have been screening The Weather Underground (2002) with my U.S. survey students. I've also been watching the news about the nation's budget with, probably, the rest of you. Gardner's address applies as much to radical Tea Party libertarians today as it did to 1960s student revolutionaries.[3] Here's the excerpt Adler provided TOL, as well as his gloss at the end (the underlines are Adler's):

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

Gardner [right] imagines a twenty-third-century scholar who, with retrospective insight, points out that "twentieth-century institutions were caught in a savage crossfire between uncritical lovers and unloving critics. On the one side, those who loved their institutions tended to smother them in an embrace of death, loving their rigidities more than their promise, shielding them from life-giving criticism. On the other side, there arose a breed of critics without love, skilled in demolition but untutored in the arts by which human institutions are nurtured and strengthened and made to flourish. …Where human institutions are concerned, love without criticism brings stagnation and criticism without love brings destruction. …The swifter the pace of change, the more lovingly men have to care for and criticize their institutions to keep them intact through turbulent passages. In short, men must be discriminating appraisers of their society, knowing coolly and precisely what it is about society that thwarts or limits them and therefore needs modification. […] To fit themselves for such tasks, they must be sufficiently serious to study their institutions, sufficiently expert in the art of modifying them."

Patriotism is love of one's country and its institutions, but the only kind of patriotism that can be recommended is the kind Gardner has described---the patriotism of 'critical lovers'. Patriotism thus conceived is neither blind to faults, as parental love usually is, nor is it given to an over-estimation of virtues, as romantic love usually is. It is like mature, conjugal love---the love for a spouse which, while fully cognizant of all defects, would still wish to have no other. That is, perhaps, the reason why it is futile to expect the young of this or any other generation to be patriots in the true sense, rather than 'uncritical lovers' or 'unloving critics,' as most of them are. (pp. 336n6-337)

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

As you can see, Adler's (vital, paternalistic) liberalism---as expressed in conjunction with Gardner---pushed for a critical spirit. That spirit was based on an updated Aristotelian logic and ethics that prioritized public philosophy in a democracy---meaning the infusion of the public square with dialectic principles rooted in a secular hierarchy of goods. That spirit, furthermore, found educational grounding in the public goods that Adler and his community saw in the great books idea.

At this point, meaning 1970, the canon had not yet been widely targeted for challenge. Even so, Adler and his community (Mortimer J. Adler, the Van Dorens, Clifton Fadiman, William Benton, Arthur Rubin, Jacques Barzun, Otto Bird, etc.) had already argued for the intellectual diversity within the Western tradition. He also liked to remind people that "there is much more error in the great books than there is truth." [4] In other words, to Adler the Enlightenment project in America, evident in the ongoing revolution of Western political, economic, and social conditions---coming to fruition "as the technologically advanced, democratic, welfare state"---was buttressed by a great books-based liberalism (pp. 217-218). This great books liberalism celebrated reason, rationality, criticism, and the careful maintenance of existing, working institutions. Supporters of the great books saw a flexible, vigorous culture center that could hold in the midst of fracture and disintegration.

As a coda, I can't help but wonder whether the Tea Party, were it more in touch with the (positive) historical development of the Western liberal tradition in terms of state-building, would be so eager to atomize individuals by working against the "general welfare" ideals articulated in the U.S. Constitution's Preamble? Haven't they read the great documents that some have called "The American Testament"? You can bet that great books liberals have. - TL

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

[1] Adler, The Time of Our Lives: The Ethics of Common Sense. Introduction by Deal W. Hudson (New York: Fordham University Press, 1996). The politics of the author to this introduction speak to the efforts by right-wing Catholic political activists to appropriate and hold onto the great books legacy in the face of overwhelming evidence against the GB idea supporting conservative political endeavors.

[2] And from TOL, chapter 20 passim.

[3] My students love watching this.

[4] Adler, A Second Look in the Rearview Mirror (New York: Macmillan, 1992), 144.

Tim's Light Reading (12/17/2009)

1. What Today's Philosophers Think: Although I understand some of the questions given here by The PhilPapers Surveys, another subset are beyond me---at least as of today. The authors of the quiz concede that they framed many of the questions within the analytic tradition, and my strengths (the few I possess) do not lie in the history of that era, or in its terminology, so my ignorance should not have surprised me. Still, I'm intrigued by what I do know of the issues. The demographics portion of the survey included a question (at the bottom) about the non-living philosophers with which today's group identified. Notice Foucault garnered only 11 votes, and Adorno only 6. I was shocked to see Hume at the top, as well as Aristotle---one of my favorites---still holding at #2. My other favorite is Aquinas, who came in at #24 with 69 votes. Dewey, Sellars, and Peirce came in at 29, 30, and 31 with 31, 30, and 28 votes, respectively. James entered at 34 with 22 votes. Based on my more recent, less historical observations of Catholic thought and the analytical framework of the questions, I'm somewhat surprised to see neither this guy nor this movement on the lists. I figured one or the other would get the 5 minimum nods to be counted.

2. Livingston At HNN: Here's a partial reprise of James Livingston's USIH address, which is also an excerpt from his new book, The World Turned Inside Out: American Thought and Culture at the End of the 20th Century. And here's his new blog address. There he takes on the criticisms of Eric Alterman given during the conference, and reveals---at the end of the post---that he told a (white) lie to Alterman and the rest of us during Q&A.

3. Culture Wars at "The Great Books College of Chicago": As an observer and student of trends in the history of the great books idea, I can't resist bringing to your attention a story out of Chicago. The gist is this: Some faculty and and students at Shimer College are worried that the administration, headed by President Thomas K. Lindsay, is engineering a conservative take over of the institution. A bit of background is necessary. Shimer began as a small liberal arts college in Illinois, originally located in Mount Carroll, that took on a great books curriculum in the 1950s. That curriculum derived from the thinking of Robert Maynard Hutchins, former University of Chicago president, and probably Mortimer J. Adler, Hutchins's friend and intellectual advisor. The college's great books list originally looked a lot like the one comprising Britannica's 1952 Great Books set, but evolved to something more liberal and inclusive as time passed. With regard to its staff, faculty, and students, Shimer became known, especially in the 1970s, for its liberal social and cultural atmosphere. This was evident not just in behavior (which hearsay has probably amplified) during the "Me Decade," but also---and more importantly---in Shimer's radically democratic shared governance scheme, the "Assembly," discussed in the first link above. While some comments to the article express dismay at the culture wars overlay in the piece, saying this is an administrative issue only, there does appear to be a right-ward trend in relation to new Board of Trustees members. This weblog is documenting student, faculty, and staff resistance to the changes. There's a lot to say about this story, but my biggest surprise is that this political-social tug-of-war is only just now hitting Shimer. I'm shocked it didn't happen in the 1980s or 1990s, well before its move to Chicago.

4. The Great Books College of C.S. Lewis: Thanks to John Fea, I have learned that a C.S. Lewis-inspired, ecumenically Christian college is opening in Northfield, MA. The curriculum is, of course, to be based on the great books idea. John didn't say which version of the great books idea they'd be utilizing, but I can imagine a Britannica connection. I'd have to explore their website to learn more. I'll wait on that project, however, until they actually open and host a first class.

5. So you read the Encyclopedia Britannica?: Continuing the great books/Britannica subtheme of today's entries, A.J. Jacobs reflects on the proportion of things-remembered to things-learned after having read the Encyclopedia Britannica near the beginning of this decade. He recorded much of that endeavor in his 2004 book, The Know-It-All. Two parts from the Youtube clip caught my attention. Jacobs emphatically declares that he's forgotten "a huge amount" right off the bat-- about 97-98 percent he thinks. But he also reflects, around the 55 second mark, on the fact that he's gained a deeper, more useful-than-trivia kind of knowledge from that reading. For instance, he cited a justified, affirming optimism about humanity's ability to adapt and grow (my words) that has resulted from his survey of the accomplishments of human civilization.

6. Midsouth Philosophy Conference: I bring this to your attention because of the openness of the call---meaning historians of the Lovejovian variety might be welcome: "The thirty-fourth annual Midsouth Philosophy Conference is scheduled for Friday afternoon and Saturday, March 5-6, at The University of Memphis. Papers in any area are welcome. There will be a $25 registration fee, payable by cash or check at the conference (but not by credit or debit card). Alastair Norcross (University of Colorado at Boulder) will deliver the keynote address."

Tim's Light Reading (12/17/2009)

1. What Today's Philosophers Think: Although I understand some of the questions given here by The PhilPapers Surveys, another subset are beyond me---at least as of today. The authors of the quiz concede that they framed many of the questions within the analytic tradition, and my strengths (the few I possess) do not lie in the history of that era, or in its terminology, so my ignorance should not have surprised me. Still, I'm intrigued by what I do know of the issues. The demographics portion of the survey included a question (at the bottom) about the non-living philosophers with which today's group identified. Notice Foucault garnered only 11 votes, and Adorno only 6. I was shocked to see Hume at the top, as well as Aristotle---one of my favorites---still holding at #2. My other favorite is Aquinas, who came in at #24 with 69 votes. Dewey, Sellars, and Peirce came in at 29, 30, and 31 with 31, 30, and 28 votes, respectively. James entered at 34 with 22 votes. Based on my more recent, less historical observations of Catholic thought and the analytical framework of the questions, I'm somewhat surprised to see neither this guy nor this movement on the lists. I figured one or the other would get the 5 minimum nods to be counted.

2. Livingston At HNN: Here's a partial reprise of James Livingston's USIH address, which is also an excerpt from his new book, The World Turned Inside Out: American Thought and Culture at the End of the 20th Century. And here's his new blog address. There he takes on the criticisms of Eric Alterman given during the conference, and reveals---at the end of the post---that he told a (white) lie to Alterman and the rest of us during Q&A.

3. Culture Wars at "The Great Books College of Chicago": As an observer and student of trends in the history of the great books idea, I can't resist bringing to your attention a story out of Chicago. The gist is this: Some faculty and and students at Shimer College are worried that the administration, headed by President Thomas K. Lindsay, is engineering a conservative take over of the institution. A bit of background is necessary. Shimer began as a small liberal arts college in Illinois, originally located in Mount Carroll, that took on a great books curriculum in the 1950s. That curriculum derived from the thinking of Robert Maynard Hutchins, former University of Chicago president, and probably Mortimer J. Adler, Hutchins's friend and intellectual advisor. The college's great books list originally looked a lot like the one comprising Britannica's 1952 Great Books set, but evolved to something more liberal and inclusive as time passed. With regard to its staff, faculty, and students, Shimer became known, especially in the 1970s, for its liberal social and cultural atmosphere. This was evident not just in behavior (which hearsay has probably amplified) during the "Me Decade," but also---and more importantly---in Shimer's radically democratic shared governance scheme, the "Assembly," discussed in the first link above. While some comments to the article express dismay at the culture wars overlay in the piece, saying this is an administrative issue only, there does appear to be a right-ward trend in relation to new Board of Trustees members. This weblog is documenting student, faculty, and staff resistance to the changes. There's a lot to say about this story, but my biggest surprise is that this political-social tug-of-war is only just now hitting Shimer. I'm shocked it didn't happen in the 1980s or 1990s, well before its move to Chicago.

4. The Great Books College of C.S. Lewis: Thanks to John Fea, I have learned that a C.S. Lewis-inspired, ecumenically Christian college is opening in Northfield, MA. The curriculum is, of course, to be based on the great books idea. John didn't say which version of the great books idea they'd be utilizing, but I can imagine a Britannica connection. I'd have to explore their website to learn more. I'll wait on that project, however, until they actually open and host a first class.

5. So you read the Encyclopedia Britannica?: Continuing the great books/Britannica subtheme of today's entries, A.J. Jacobs reflects on the proportion of things-remembered to things-learned after having read the Encyclopedia Britannica near the beginning of this decade. He recorded much of that endeavor in his 2004 book, The Know-It-All. Two parts from the Youtube clip caught my attention. Jacobs emphatically declares that he's forgotten "a huge amount" right off the bat-- about 97-98 percent he thinks. But he also reflects, around the 55 second mark, on the fact that he's gained a deeper, more useful-than-trivia kind of knowledge from that reading. For instance, he cited a justified, affirming optimism about humanity's ability to adapt and grow (my words) that has resulted from his survey of the accomplishments of human civilization.

6. Midsouth Philosophy Conference: I bring this to your attention because of the openness of the call---meaning historians of the Lovejovian variety might be welcome: "The thirty-fourth annual Midsouth Philosophy Conference is scheduled for Friday afternoon and Saturday, March 5-6, at The University of Memphis. Papers in any area are welcome. There will be a $25 registration fee, payable by cash or check at the conference (but not by credit or debit card). Alastair Norcross (University of Colorado at Boulder) will deliver the keynote address."