Bloom Beyond the Culture Wars, or How The Closing of the American Mind Changed My Life: a Testimonial

Guest post by Rivka Maizlish, University of Wisconsin-Madison

One of the things I most appreciated about the U.S. Intellectual History Conference's annual return to the CUNY Graduate Center was my faithful pilgrimage up the thirty blocks from the conference to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where I would sit before Jacques-Louis David's The Death of Socrates, and listen. People rarely walk by this painting in silence. Young students attempt to impress their parents by rehearsing lessons from history class about Socrates and Plato. Older visitors recall their education, uncovering buried memories of the Phaedo or the Apology and the philosopher's final words. Gazing at Socrates' hand over the cup, people often ask a companion, “remind me again why he was put to death?” It's always a “remind me,” as if the story was already within them, but lately lost somehow (in Plato's dialogue, the Meno, Socrates suggests that all learning is remembering). A few people stop at the painting just long enough to murmur “the unexamined life is not worth living,” while cantankerous philosophy students pass by shaking their heads, declaiming to their friends that Socrates need not have died, if only he hadn't been such a jerk to the jury that sentenced him. 

Sometimes, sitting in front of the painting, I overheard a question and offered an answer, starting a conversation about democracy or the soul. It seemed fitting to end an inspiring day at a conference about ideas in America by descending into the agora (or ascending the steps of the Met) to observe Americans confronted with philosophy-- at least in the form of David's painting, the story it tells, and the figure of Socrates. The dozens of visitors who stop and consider this painting experience a rare, if brief, interaction with the meaning of philosophy.

I made my first pilgrimage to visit Socrates after a conference panel discussion about Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind left me frustrated. Amid snickers and one whispered, “he was gay!” panel attendees mocked Bloom's description of his excitement when his college girlfriend explained that the University of Chicago clock-tower was a phallic symbol. This admittedly silly line is followed by a more serious declaration. “It was hard to tell whether the meaning of it all was that I was about to lose my virginity or penetrate the mysteries of being,” confesses Bloom. “An admirable confusion,” he adds. (1) The discrepancy between these two lines from Bloom's infamous best-seller— the goofy business about the clock-tower phallus on the one hand, and the embrace of a salutary confusion between sex and education on the other— illustrates the mistake historians have made in considering Bloom and the meaning of Closing. Jumping at the easy opportunity to ridicule this book, they have neglected its more compelling themes. 

Sure, much of Closing is absurd at best. Exhibit A: “Women,” Bloom asserts, “have no basis for claiming that men should share their desire for children or assume responsibility for them.” (2) This is one of the least sexist statements in Bloom's published works; his words about rape in Love and Friendship would have the RNC clamoring for his resignation, were he a Republican candidate. And let's not forget my favorite line in Closing: “Richard Nixon, with his unerring instinct for the high moral ground . . .” (3) Part of me still thinks this must be a joke. But all this is the Culture Wars Bloom, the only Bloom present when the conference panel attendees discussed and ridiculed Closing. Behind this Bloom is the Bloom that asks “Are we lovers anymore?” and then boldly declares, “this is my way of putting the educational question of our times.” (4) Without impugning the value of studying Closing in connection with the contest to direct American values in an anti-foundationalist world that became known as the “Culture Wars,” I submit that this book inhabits several other contexts, and that historians have much to gain—both personally and professionally—from considering Bloom beyond the Culture Wars.
My first encounter with Closing, in the middle of the last year of my undergraduate studies, was liberating. Naive and privileged, I had come to college convinced that I could change the world, and spent most of my time telling myself it would happen if I just kept doing useful things like knocking on doors, registering voters, and reminding my classmates how much money the U.S. government had spent in Iraq. Closing showed me that if I could follow Socrates' exhortation to “know thyself,” and encourage my peers to do the same by building intellectual community based on friendship and pursuit of truth (even unto its innermost parts), I would be doing more good than could ever come from my political work. Furthermore, Closing suggested that I had my whole life to conform to some external notion of justice. College education was about creatively challenging conventional ideas of the good, the just, the virtuous. And one did not have to do this alone. Past thinkers, from Homer to Nietzsche, could help my friends and me explore different ideas and re-imagine what was possible (“So this has existed once, at least—and is therefore a possibility, this way of life, this way of looking at the human scene,” wrote Nietzsche). (5) As a freshman I had been assigned Plato's Republic in an introduction to political theory course. I never opened it. I think I figured that something so old couldn't possible be of any use to me. Three years later, I was home for winter vacation when I finished Closing. The first thing I did after putting the book down was frantically search my parents' house for anything by Plato. Bloom wrote so lovingly about reading the ancient philosopher, I wanted to experience the pleasure myself. I found a copy of the Apology and have been hooked on Plato ever since. 

This, then, is the value of Closing. It can be read as a Culture War document. But Bloom intended it to be nothing less than a gateway drug to philosophy, literature and the examined life (plus a way to finance his Emma Bovary-esque spending habits). An appreciation of the book on this level can lead intellectual historians to do much more with it than they have by simply placing it in the context of the Culture Wars. Carrying Caroline Winterer's work into the second half of the twentieth-century, historians could examine Bloom's rhapsodic endorsement of Plato in terms of the reception and use of the Classics in America. One could fit Bloom into the postwar literary turn that Michael Kimmage describes, and examine him as one of several intellectuals, such as Vladimir Nabokov, Lionel Trilling, Edmund Wilson, and Peter Viereck, who found meaning in poetry and philosophy, as opposed to politics. Bloom also belongs in the anti-historicist tradition of his teacher, Leo Strauss. Writing that education is about satisfying erotic longing for completeness, Bloom complains in Closing that “the university does not see itself as ministering to such needs and does not believe the mummies on display in its museum can speak to the visitors or, horrors, go home to live with them.” (6) Here is the Bloom whose main concern is the tyranny of the living over the dead, and who belongs in an intellectual tradition that transcends the Culture Wars and the “Great Books” debates. 

In American Nietzsche, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen has demonstrated how historians could examine Bloom in new contexts. Placing him in an American intellectual tradition that far transcends the Culture Wars, she reveals Bloom “enacting an American way of knowing Nietzsche, or an Emersonian way of thinking.” (7) Indeed, in the tradition of Emerson, Closing contains fascinating thoughts on the fate of philosophy in America. “Contrary to the popular prejudice that America is the nation of unintellectual and anti-intellectual people, where ideas are at best means to ends,” Bloom argues, “America is actually nothing but a great stage on which theories have been played as tragedy and comedy.” “This is a regime,” he continues, “founded by philosophers and their students. All the recalcitrant matter of the historical is gave way here before the practical and philosophical ought to be, as the raw natural givens of this wild continent meekly submitted to the yoke of theoretical science.” (8) Bloom, therefore, is valuable to U.S. intellectual historians for his understanding of the relationship between ideas, intellectuals, and democratic society in America, as well as his views on the role of educational institutions, such as the university, and cultural institutions, such as music and the family, in negotiating this relationship. “This is the American moment in world history,” Bloom concludes his book, “the one for which we shall forever be judged. Just as in politics the responsibility for the fate of freedom in the world has devolved upon our regime, so the fate of philosophy in the word has devolved upon our universities, and the two are related as they have never been before.” (9)
Historians can, and should, criticize Closing. We can, and should, oppose Bloom's sexist conviction that women are bound by nature, while the purpose of education, for men, is to overcome nature. We can scrutinize his arguments in favor of a core curriculum founded upon the Western cannon. And, of course, we can bristle at his critique of pop music (I write this while listening to Exile on Main Street). But historians should not dismiss this book; nor should they reduce it to a Culture War document. In a recent article, David C. Engerman argues that historians should broaden the intellectual context of the Cold War, in order to understand certain figures as intellectuals in the Cold War, instead of “Cold War intellectuals,” whose work is reducible to reigning U.S. geopolitical concerns. Similarly, Closing may be a key document in the Culture Wars, but it is so much more than a “Culture War book.” We remain under the shadow of the Culture Wars until we can broaden Bloom's intellectual context and tap the full potential of this remarkable book.

After my first read of Closing, I sought out one of my professors, who had been a student of Bloom, to ask what the man was like, explaining that I was deeply moved by his best-seller. I will never forget my professor's response: “Hmm, so it still works,” he said simply, suggesting that Bloom's ability to inspire undergraduates to pursue the examined life— or at least to read literature and philosophy—survives him. When I left the U.S. Intellectual History Conference panel, where attendees went to court about Bloom's wisdom, and connected with visitors at the Met over the life and death of Socrates, I continued Bloom's true legacy. The Closing of the American Mind did not make me stop listening to the Stones, but it has inspired me to read Plato, Rousseau, Tolstoy, Stendhal, Flaubert, and Shakespeare, to connect with friends and strangers in pursuit of new ideas, and to think creatively about justice, virtue, the good life, and, indeed, about how historians conceive of intellectual context. 

Notes

1. Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster Paperbacks), 1987, 136.

2. Bloom, 114

3. Bloom, 329.

4. Bloom, 133.

5. Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, Marianne Cowan, trans. (United States: Regnery Publishing, Inc.), 1962, 23-24.

6. Bloom, 136.

7. Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, American Nietzsche (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 2012, 312.

8. Bloom, 97.

9. Bloom, 382.

Gender and Intellectual History

by Brian M. Ingrassia

Recently I have been thinking about gender and intellectual history.  Without going into all the details, this reflection was prompted by Lauren Kientz Anderson’s post of October 31, in which she referred to her (perhaps) “infamous” post from last year on women in intellectual history. After rereading that 2011 piece—and the 47 comments it generated!—I started asking myself a few questions.  These are not necessarily new questions, but it might help to air them in one place and ponder their implications. First of all, why does it seem that relatively few women (compared to men) identify with the field? Second, is there something inherently “male” about the field? And a third, much bigger question: What is intellectual history, why do we do it, and what bearing might the answer to this question have upon the field’s ability to incorporate analysis of women and gender?

Regarding the first question, I posit a practical answer that at least one commentator has already suggested.  While there certainly are women historians who do intellectual history—especially the intellectual history of women, gender, or feminism—many (though not all) tend to identify, or be identified, as historians of women or gender. Of course, they use intellectual history methods primarily as a way to understand the place of women and gender in society more broadly, not necessarily as a way to understand only "intellectuals," whether male or female.  In addition, there are practical incentives for scholars (many of whom are women) who study the intellectual history of women or gender to identify as historians of those fields rather than as intellectual historians. Quite frankly, there are many fewer academic positions in intellectual history than there are in women’s and gender history.  In the current academic job market, a young scholar has little or no reason to identify as an intellectual historian when s/he could identify as a scholar of a more professionally viable field such as women’s or gender history.

Regarding the second question, I do not think that intellectual history is inherently a “male” field—nor is it simply a place where men who reject gender or race analysis go for affirmation. Speaking from personal experience, I am a male who embraces gender and race analysis, yet I still think that it is important to study intellectual history. Nevertheless, there may be a grain of truth to the perception that intellectual history is for men because it is about men. Consider the obvious: in many historical contexts, especially before the twentieth century, very few women were considered intellectuals. To study the intellectual history of many time periods, one must focus largely, if not exclusively, upon men who were in a position to construct and disseminate discourses that were perceived as “intellectual” in nature. For those interested in the history of women and gender—including many female historians—this may not seem to be a worthwhile project, since it is just reinforcing androcentric models rather than critiquing or challenging them.

This is where things get thornier, and where I start to ask that third question. What is intellectual history? A few days ago, one guest blogger noted that we analyze the “history of ideas.” That may be a good definition of what intellectual historians do, but I think it compels us to ask more questions. Which ideas—whose ideas—do we analyze? Do we merely seek to understand ideas that were consciously appreciated as ideas in the times and places in which they were created? Or should we seek to understand the ideas of a number of different groups or individuals—including women—even if they were not necessarily seen as intellectuals within their own historical context?

If we define intellectual history as the history of ideas that were perceived as part of an avowedly intellectualdiscourse in their time and place of creation, then in many cases we have to restrict our analyses to male subjects. But if we interpret the field more broadly, then the methodology of intellectual history can be applied in many different contexts.  I will never forget the day in 2002 when one of my professors at Illinois—a prominent practitioner of the “New Social History”—propped his feet up on his desk and told a first year graduate student interested in intellectual history (me) that someday a historian would find a way to write the intellectual history of sanitation workers (i.e., the ideas of “garbage men”). Ever since that day, I have found his suggestion to be a fascinating one, and if I could only find the primary sources I might write such a study!

I suspect, though, that at least some of us would be turned off by this idea, or would suggest a caveat: If we write the intellectual history of sanitation workers, then we would have less time or energy to devote to those individuals who were consciously focused on the life of the mind.  On a related note, I suspect that maybe a couple of folks might (quietly) say something similar about studying the intellectual history of women: it’s interesting and important, but it could take our energy away from studying those individuals who were considered intellectuals within their historical context and thus shaped the most prominent discourses of their time and place.

So why do we do intellectual history? Is it so that we can understand how prominent individuals (academics, theologians, statesmen, cultural critics, and so on) shaped predominant discourses? Or is it so that we can understand how the ideas of diverse individuals or groups developed and changed over time?  We might frame this as an issue of canon—of whether or not we draw boundaries around the parameters of the field. Furthermore, how do we approach the history of ideas? Do we first strive to understand the inner logic of ideas and then place them in historical context, or do we strive to show how historical context has caused certain ideas (and not others) to emerge in a particular time and place?  The latter approach, I would note, is much friendlier to an analytical framework that consciously critiques categories such as gender, race, and/or class.

In short, is intellectual history a field that studies intellectuals, or is it a methodology that studies the history of ideas generated in many different cultural and social contexts?  In all honesty, I do not think that these are mutually exclusive categories—and many of us have probably pursued either at one time or another. Nevertheless, it is helpful to think about why we do what we do. And, admittedly, we should note that there are strengths and weaknesses to either approach. On the one hand, if intellectual history is a subject field that studies prominent idea creators (“intellectuals”), then it may be a more coherent field even though it will probably have less relevance for those scholars (especially women) who are interested in fields such as the history of women and gender. On the other hand, if intellectual history is primarily a methodology, then it may have larger utility to a wider variety of scholars even though its identity as a distinct, coherent field of study may be diminished.

These are just some thoughts, and I am sure I have said nothing new here.  But perhaps this will spark some interesting discussion about what we do and how that affects who identifies with this field.

___________

Brian M. Ingrassiateaches American history at Middle Tennessee State University.  He is the author of The Rise of Gridiron University: Higher Education’s Uneasy Alliance with Big-Time Football (University Press of Kansas, 2012), as well as the new series editor of the Sport and Popular Culture Series at the University of Tennessee Press.

President Obama and American Intellectual History

Guest post by Leo P. Ribuffo (a version of this essay was to have been presented at the S-USIH conference).

At some point late in his term President John Kennedy read and respected Listen, Yankee, C. Wright Mills's attempt to "present the voice" of the Cuban revolution.  A month before he died, JFK used a French journalist to send an oblique message to Fidel Castro about the prospect of improved relations.  Castro must understand that Kennedy was president of the United States "not some sociologist." (1)

In many respects it is odd to write about a president for the Society for United States Intellectual History (SUSIH), a group dedicated to the revival of intellectual history including the "history of ideas."  So let's start with a definition.  I'm not defining "intellectual" in Richard Hofstadter's ebullient sense as someone who lives for ideas, if any such person has existed since the day John Stuart Mill met Harriet Taylor.  Rather, in the Wright Millsian sense, my intellectuals are people who use ideas as elected officials, policy wonks, social critics, or ideologists. 

It is hard to measure the policy impact of intellectuals, even those who both espoused grand theories and held important offices.  President Harry Truman began containment before George Kennan coined the term.  The Alliance for Progress would have existed without Walt Rostow's modernization theory, though Rostow's silly historical comparison of Latin America in 1961 and the United States during a Jacksonian era economic "take off" contributed to the unwarranted optimism.  Economists have had the best luck.  Walter Heller convinced Kennedy to endorse a Keynesian deficit to stimulate the economy even though JFK had trouble distinguishing between fiscal and monetary policy.  In general, however, intellectuals exaggerate the influence of complex ideas and of intellectuals.

Complex ideas encountered in youth do seem to have influenced one major modern presidential decision.  Before pardoning Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford not only prayed and took Communion at Saint John's Episcopal Church across from the White House, but he also recalled lessons from his "legal realist" law professors at Yale who had taught that "public policy often took precedence over a rule of law." (2)

Certainly presidents are affected by what intellectual historians used to call the "climate of opinion"--which presidents also have significantly helped to shape since the early 1900s. The Enlightenment republicanism of the first six presidents, Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis as a rationale for imperialism and an explanation of the Great Depression, and the ubiquitous Munich analogy of the Cold War era stand out as cases in point.

But consider another case SUSIH members might think as odd as Jerry Ford legal realist:  Dwight Eisenhower's vision of the United States as a "middle of the road" corporate commonwealth. (3) During the "fifties" moderation was the dominant rhetorical theme (trope may be substituted if it makes readers feel smarter):  consensus history, pluralist social theory, neo-Freudian psychology, economic fine tuning, and if you went to the Rand Corporation, advice on how to fight a moderate nuclear war.  Eisenhower admired longshoreman philosopher Eric Hoffer's The True Believer, a social psychological critique of so-called extremism that overlapped with the jargony versions offered by Daniel Bell and Seymour Martin Lipset.

Unlike Ike, Obama is a Hofstadterish intellectual who takes ideas very seriously as a person if not necessarily in his day job.  While trying to figure out the world and his place in it as a young man, he read widely, including the works of African-American writers male and female, Friedrich Nietzsche, T. S. Eliot and Peter Drucker.  Certainly he knows that C. Wright Mills wasn't just "some sociologist."  At age 34 Obama published a powerful, stylized account of his education in the Henry Adams sense, Dreams from My Father.  He is obviously very smart which, given the centuries of stereotypes about African-Americans, is absolutely wonderful though a source of added animosity on the Right.

Yet Obama is not a uniquely intellectual modern president.  Professor presidents Woodrow Wilson and William Howard Taft wrote books on American government that are still worth reading.  So did Herbert Hoover.  Some of Theodore Roosevelt's speeches on government and society merit attention too, and a colleague specializing in the topic tells me that TR's naval history of the War of 1812 holds up well.

Exemplifying pack journalism Jonathan Alter dubbed Obama "professor-in-chief." (4) What "professorial" means in the news media stereotype is that Obama is more thoughtful than the typical national political reporter and feels uncomfortable with emotional appeals beyond the obligatory "hopey-changey thing," as Sarah Palin described Obama's inspirational side in the best quip of her career.

Although journalists have uncovered an enormous amount of information about Obama's early life, no one seems to have paid much attention to what sort of intellectual he was like as a teacher at the University of Chicago.  Judging from his pre-presidential and early presidential speeches, he is at his best mulling over ethical issues with policy implications.  Some of these were very good, especially the Reverend Wright speech, Cairo speech, and Nobel Prize speech.

But explanation of policy, with all of the inevitable simplifications, isn't Obama's strong suit.  Having worked at a business information company before becoming a community organizer, he surely knows the difference between fiscal and monetary policy.  Indeed, Paul Volcker credits Obama with the best understanding of economics of any president he has met. Yet Obama has never used this knowledge to explain the virtues of Keynesianism during the Great Recession as cogently as Kennedy (and his speech writers) did amid the relative prosperity of 1962.  Nor would he dare to join JFK in decrying the "myth" that government is "big and bad--and steadily getting bigger and worse." (5) Times have changed.  What was once an arguable economic theory briefly in the ascendant among liberal politicians has become at most a hidden heresy. (6)

Undoubtedly there are psychological factors affecting Obama's incessant moderation and repeated calls for cooperation in "one United States of America" without blue states and red states long after congressional Republicans rejected cooperation.  Recognizing that hostility to government is "as American as apple pie," as Obama said after the 2010 elections, perhaps he also sees no point to picking fights he will lose in a historically conservative country at least a third of which is even more economically conservative than usual (relative to the existing spectrum) at the moment.

Psychology and politics aside, Obama's incessant moderation intersects with part of the prevailing climate of opinion, not with the thunder on the Right but with the partly sunny day with a chance of showers forecast by the Center-Left.  We encounter moderate punditry from E. J. Dionne, moderate Keynesianism from Lawrence Summers, moderate social philosophy from Michael Sandel, and, at the Center for a New American Security, advice on how to fight a moderate drone war.  Trendy buzz words like "civil society" and "communitarianism" should not obscure historical continuities.  Somewhere Daniel Bell and Seymour Martin Lipset are smiling.

What about those conservative and Right-wing thunderstorms?   I have written often about the American Right, the chronically obtuse liberal and radical response to it since the 1930s, and the limitations of the historical profession's recent belated discovery that there are lots of conservatives in the United States and most of them believe in God. (7) So I will restrict my comments here to four points.

I will begin with just about the only thing Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., wrote that I agreed with until he opposed the second Iraq War.  In 1955 during the first post-World War II discovery of conservatism by liberals and radicals, Schlesinger wrote:  "What matters  . . . is not the conservatism of the professors  but the conservatism of the industrialists, bankers, and politicians." (8) When I first read this passage four decades ago, I thought Schlesinger should have added the clergy.  Now, with all due respect to intellectual historians highlighting Richard Weaver or Leo Strauss, I would in addition emphasize war veterans, gun owners, popular novelists (some of whom are clergy) and--here too--economists (even if they double as professors).

Second, much of the Right's assault on Obama is consistent with its perennial mistaken belief that ideas have more consequences than they do. One prominent example of this bad intellectual history is Dinesh D'Souza's charge that Obama as a teenager absorbed his ostensibly radical views from his maternal grandfather's Communist drinking buddy Frank Marshall Davis.

Third, we need to consider the possibility that the Right broadly conceived has changed more than the Left broadly conceived since their respective contemporary origins during the 1930s.

Fourth, we need to think about the unthinkable, that the United States for roughly a century has been in complex ways a conservative country. 

For more detail beyond these points, come to a session I organized at the American Historical Association convention in January called Studying the American Right, Center, and Left--All at the Same Time!

In the meantime, keep in mind that Barack Obama is President of the United States not some intellectual historian.

--------

Notes

1. C. Wright Mills:  Listen, Yankee: The Revolution in Cuba (New York:  Ballantine,, 1960), 8.  The Kennedy anecdote comes from Norman Birnbaum, "The Half-Forgotten Prophet:  C. Wright Mills," Nation, March 20, 2009.

2. Gerald R. Ford, A Time to Heal:  The Autobiography of Gerald R. Ford (New York:  Harper and Row, 1979), 173-175.

3. See the classic essay by Robert Griffith, "Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Corporate Commonwealth," American Historical Review, February 1982.

4. Jonathan Alter, The Promise:  President Obama, Year One (New York:  Simon and Schuster, 1980), 267.

5. Kennedy omitted the term Keynesian economics, probably out of prudence, but his address at the June 1962 Yale commencement included something even more heretical by current standards, an explicit acknowledgement that the United States could learn lessons from Western Europe about effective government and economic policy.

6. My admiration for Kennedy's effort to popularize complicated and counterintuitive economic ideas should not be taken as general enthusiasm for his presidency.  His civil rights actions were sluggish even if we apply standards appropriate for a president rather than some sociologist.  Many of his foreign policies were so risky that relatively few Americans now have any real sense just how dangerous these were.  Collective memory of the U.S. public "victory" in the Cuban missile crisis stands out as the prime example.  This obliviousness to the continued relevance of  the Cold War extends to some of President Obama's closest foreign policy advisers, a disposition amply documented--and misconstrued as wisdom--in James Mann, The Obamians: The Struggle Inside the White House to Redefine American Power(New York:  Viking, 2012).

 7. For a quick summary see Leo P. Ribuffo, "Twenty Suggestions for Studying the Right Now that Studying the Right isTrendy," Historically Speaking, January 2011.

8. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Politics of Hope (Boston:  Houghton Mifflin, 1962), 80.

Professional Societies in an Age of Academic Transformation

The following post is Society for U.S. Intellectual History President Paul Murphy's "President's Column" for the Fall 2012 issue of the S-USIH Notes, the Society's newsletter.  In addition to being President of S-USIH, Paul is Professor of History at Grand Valley State University and is the author of The Rebuke of History: the Southern Agrarians and American Conservative Thought (University of North Carolina, 2001) and The New Era: American Thought and Culture in the 1920s (Rowman & Littlefield, 2012).  He was also a founding member of this blog.

We have been in a national conversation about the future of education at all levels for a number of years now.  For those in higher education, this has meant wrenching debates about the professoriate, the future of public education, and the nature of a university education itself.  We who are professors may have reached a peak of discomfort with the latest round of high-tech start-ups in online university education, garbed as they are with the democratic promise of universally available quality education although bearing, too, the promise that the key to efficiencies and cost savings in higher education may finally be in the grasp of knowledge industry executives.  We begin to feel like E. P. Thompson’s weavers, confronted with the grim logic of technological innovation and needful again of the advice of the Assistant Commissioner for the West Riding, delivered in 1840:  “…warn them to flee from the trade, and to beware of leading their children into it, as they would beware the commission of the most atrocious of crimes.”[1]  Computerization and the internet revolution drive this conversation in part, but the roots of the debate are deeper, relating to globalization, the eclipse of public commitments to education, and, ultimately, what amounts to a new stage in the industrialization of education.  If we can replace the hardcover book with an interactive, multimedia digital data file, why not do the same with the professor?

This conversation ought to be of intense interest to the Society for U.S. Intellectual History because the transformation of the modes and manners of academic life is of necessity the transformation of American intellectual life as well, given the extent to which intellectuals are ensconced in academia.  Are we contemplating the digitization of intellectuals, as well?  More directly, as the university potentially becomes transformed into something new and quite different, becoming less and less a center for social scientific and humanistic inquiry (a theme of the concluding plenary session at the Third Annual U.S. Intellectual History Conference in 2010, entitled “Intellectual History for What?”), what is the fate of the ancillary features of academic life, such as professional societies?[2]  What is the role for a new Society such as our own at a time of such convulsive change?

            In one sense, S-USIH is a product of this transformation, born out of a listserv discussion, defined by an award-winning blog, present on social media (Facebook, Twitter), and existing organizationally, in many ways, because of the internet as a mode of communication.  S-USIH embodies the new-fangled means of connectivity.  One of our major efforts has been creating a new web portal for the Society ( http://s-usih.org/), a project that Secretary Ray Haberski has been shepherding to completion.  The new site will incorporate the existing U.S. Intellectual History blog and allow for a new range of connections and opportunities.  Our conferences have been organized and publicized via electronic forms of communication and publication.  This reflects one of the Society’s founding principles:  “Using all forms of media to reach broad audiences and engender vital debate and exchange of ideas.”

            At the same time, one of the key questions confronting our membership today (which should be over 100 members by the time you read this column) is the degree to which S-USIH should be defined by an academic “industry” in the midst of internal transition and at a historical moment when “academic” work (or “knowledge production,” scientific and otherwise) is shifting to new and proliferating venues—including the laboratories and campuses of technology companies, free-standing centers and think tanks of all sorts, and various online sites.  Is academia breaking down, and will (and ought) professional societies do the same?  The question is particularly acute as we consider another big agenda item:  Ought the Society to create a new academic journal devoted to U.S. intellectual history, and should it appear in print and be produced by an academic press along the lines of previous such journals?

            The answer may be entwined with another question:  Will S-USIH breathe new life into an old form, or ought it to be something else entirely?  In seeking to “advance the historical study of American thought among academic and non-academic scholars,” we need to think seriously about the degree to which twenty-first-century internet and digital communications, the further industrialization of higher education, and the de-funding of public education might actually be disintegrating the academy as we know it.  The fact that many of those who have created S-USIH have been unable to find stable academic jobs adds poignancy and urgency to the inquiry.  Are organizations like S-USIH going to become the places where intellectual life takes root?

            As a reflexive and obdurate traditionalist in many ways (who has spent part of my academic career studying even more cranky versions of this type), I find it puzzling to be in the position of advocating a move away from the red-brick, ivy-covered college of my imagination.  I can see, however, that I neither work in such a setting nor do I imagine that it exists in many places anymore.  Though I will clutter my home with cloth- and paperbound books to my dying day, we need to think of how we preserve the essential goals of academic professional societies of the past for the future:  Creating communities of scholars that are real and durable and fostering scholarship based on respectful but rigorous standards of self-criticism.  We think we are doing this by leveraging the internet in a way that brings us together as scholars in conferences, by fostering a widely read blog that reaches beyond academia, and, now, too, by creating such things at the Annual Book Award (the first of which will be awarded next year) that allow us to celebrate accomplished scholarship.  We have further goals, to embrace the full diversity of intellectual life in our past and broaden and make more inclusive the dialogue about that past in the present.  In this, we try to do what professional societies of the past have done.  However, professional societies have also served as adjuncts to the universities, helping in the credentialing process, designing and erecting barriers to entry into the field, laying out norms, channeling discussions into academic forums, and patrolling the borders of what is legitimate (and, in this way, achieving legitimacy for a specific field).  Are these latter tasks fruitful any longer?

            We continue as an organization devoted to revitalizing the subfield of U.S. intellectual history in the broader field of American history and in the discipline as whole.  We are, however, a nimble and creative newcomer to this task, arriving at a moment when internet portals, such as we are creating, may become the more democratic, more accessible, and dynamic sites for scholarship about the American past.  It may well be that our first task will be to salvage the discipline and its attendant community and traditions from the increasingly crisis-ridden and compromised academic system in which they have heretofore been nurtured. 

---

[1]E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York:  Vintage, 1966), 301.

[2]See Sarah Leonard, “Intellectual History for What?” The New Inquiry, Nov. 9, 2010 http://thenewinquiry.com/features/intellectual-history-for-what/.