Hipsters, Existentialism, and the Uses of Intellectual History

Spy Magazine, March 1989

Yesterday morning, my Facebook feed was full of approving links to a New York Times op-ed by Christy Wampole, Assistant Professor of French at Princeton University, entitled "How to Live Without Irony." I was disappointed to discover that it didn't deserve the praise it received. Wampole blames "the hipster" and "ironic living" for a host of cultural woes and urges us to cultivate "sincerity, humility and self-effacement, and demot[e] the frivolous and the kitschy on our collective scale of values."  Others elsewhere on the interwebs have done a fine job pointing out some of the many ways in which Wampole's argument is incoherent.  In an effort to keep things short (and more or less relevant to this blog), I wanted to quickly emphasize a problem with Wampole's op-ed that particularly irritated me: its utter lack of historical awareness, either about its subject or its argument.

Actually, accusing Wampole of a lack of historical awareness lets her off too easily. Among other things, "How to Live Without Irony" tells an historical story. It's just not a terribly accurate one.  According to Wampole, the hipster and ironic living are products of our new millenium:

Born in 1977, at the tail end of Generation X, I came of age in the 1990s, a decade that, bracketed neatly by two architectural crumblings — of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the Twin Towers in 2001 — now seems relatively irony-free. The grunge movement was serious in its aesthetics and its attitude, with a combative stance against authority, which the punk movement had also embraced. In my perhaps over-nostalgic memory, feminism reached an unprecedented peak, environmentalist concerns gained widespread attention, questions of race were more openly addressed: all of these stirrings contained within them the same electricity and euphoria touching generations that witness a centennial or millennial changeover. 

But Y2K came and went without disaster. We were hopeful throughout the ’90s, but hope is such a vulnerable emotion; we needed a self-defense mechanism, for every generation has one. For Gen Xers, it was a kind of diligent apathy. We actively did not care. Our archetype was the slacker who slouched through life in plaid flannel, alone in his room, misunderstood. And when we were bored with not caring, we were vaguely angry and melancholic, eating anti-depressants like they were candy.

The notion that popular culture in the late 1980s and early 1990s was irony-free (or even "relatively irony-free") is, to put it mildly, laughable.  For those of you who don't remember the early 1990s (or just need a refresher course), here's the single most iconic cultural product of "the grunge movement," the video for Nirvana's 1991 smash hit "Smells Like Teen Spirit":

This is not an example of "relatively irony-free" culture.*

Moreover, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, there was already a lot of concern among public intellectuals about the inability of young people to take anything seriously.  College students' unwillingness to even entertain the "serious life" was one of the central themes of Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind.  The March 1989 issue of Spy Magazine featured a cover story by Paul Rudnick and Kurt Anderson on "The Irony Epidemic".**  And, a few years later, David Foster Wallace published a long essay on tv and the American novel the self-proclaimed thesis of which was that "irony and ridicule are entertaining and effective, and that at the same time they are agents of a great despair and stasis in U.S. culture."***

Of course, even in the 1980s, none of this was really new.  And some of the folks writing about it at the time went out of their way to note this.  The Spy story, for example, is built on an extended comparison between the (relatively admirable) Camp that Susan Sontag described in the mid-1960s and the empty "Camp Lite," Rudnick and Anderson's characterization of much of late 1980s culture.

But if you really wanted to trace this line of cultural critique back, you'd need to look at the Beats (and their supporters and discontents) in the '50s, the counterculture (and its supporters and discontents) in the 1960s, and all the various reactions to the Sixties counterculture (and their supporters and discontents) that bubbled up in the 1970s.  You'd need to read not only Sontag, but also Mailer and Goodman and, perhaps, Debord.  You'd need to take both punk and disco seriously (even if--or perhaps especially since--neither tended to take itself seriously).


And there really are two histories that need attending to here: the history of "the hipster" (real or imaginary...as well as his/her real or imaginary cultural antecedents) and the history of the critiques of these (real or imaginary) figures.  And somewhere in the heart of these absent histories lies existentialism and the idea of authenticity, which has an important and complicated relationship both to the role-playing of the hipster and the childlike sincerity advocated by Wampole.  Of the critics of "irony" from the eighties and beyond whom I've mentioned above, the one who deals at any length with existentialism is Bloom, who essentially sees existentialism as the nihilistic serpent in the modern American garden.  But one needn't see existentialism as evil to understand its centrality to the issues that Wampole fails to discuss.  And unlike Bloom, who argued (quite incorrectly, in my experience) that the only novel that students in the 1980s cared for was Camus's The Stranger, I think one of the most fascinating aspects of the continuing influence of existentialism in America is that, even in the 1980s, let alone today, existentialism itself had largely faded from memory (as Wampole's piece itself instantiates).
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*  It is, however, a pretty damn good song, a fact that was partially obscured through extreme overexposure two decades ago.

** Google Books hosts a free archive of the entire back catalog of Spy Magazine. "The Irony Epidemic" begins on p. 93.  While the digital archive of Spy is a treasure (seriously), it is also a powerful reminder of how healthy the magazine industry was in the late 1980s.  You have to flip through an awful lot of glossy advertising to get to the content!

*** David Foster Wallace, "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction," Review of Contemporary Fiction, 13:2 (1993: Summer), p. 171.

Does Biography Trump Ideas?

I am plowing my way through Robert Caro's fourth volume of his projected five volume biography of Lyndon Johnson. I bought the book after reading an excerpt of it in a recent New Yorker in which Caro relates the moments that unfolded immediately before and after the assassination of John Kennedy.  Caro's writing is crisp and confident and his mastery of details is awe-inspiring.  I have ambitions to write a biography and find my intentions sorely challenged when considering the research that went into this book.

Very early on in his six-hundred page tome, Caro hammers out his organizing principle.  He writes:

"[The book] tries most particularly to focus on and examine a specific, determinative aspect of that era--political power; to explore, through the life of its protagonist, the acquisition and use of various forms of that power during that half century of American history, and to ascertain also the fundamental realities of that power; to learn what lay, beneath power's trappings, at power's core."

Caro contends that in a moment of "deep crisis" such as the transition of the presidency because of tragedy, the power of the presidency "can be observed in all its facets."  Thus, power acts as a character in the book.  Almost independent of Johnson and the Kennedy brothers, power circulates through the Senate chamber, it's out on the campaign trail in 1958 in advance of the 1960 primaries, and it resides in the families of these men.  To say that Johnson and the Kennedys had to contend with power would be to miss the relationship they appeared to have with a spectral force that made them into historical actors.

And yet, it stuck me as curious that Caro's depiction of power seems nearly devoid of ideology and even, in a way, of politics.  Power is psychological, familial; it is fear-inducing, and confidence-building; but it is not liberal or conservative, radical or reactionary.  So Caro does not identify a relationship between power and ideology, at least through the 1960s primaries.  Johnson commands the Senate, he wheels and deals within Texas's corrupt political machines, and he hates, cajoles, and flip-flops his way toward the Democratic convention in 1960.  Caro's characterizations of the Kennedy brothers is similar in the faintness of ideology and prominence of psychological traits.

Is ideology, then, a casualty of biography?  In the index, among the largest entries under Johnson is one for "physical appearance of."  The terms "liberal" and "liberalism" do not get mentioned either under Johnson, Kennedy, or as stand-alone entries.  Has Caro revealed something about biography, that the closer we draw a historical actor the less their ideas matter to us?

This disconnection between ideas and biography resonates with the results of the recent Indiana primary.  Richard Lugar, the longest serving senator in Washington today, lost to Richard Mourdock, a Tea Party backed insurgent who has won three state-wide elections in the last five years.  The one major difference in the run-up to the primary vote was that I knew Lugar as a person--his elder statesman persona preceded him--and knew Mourdock primarily through his ideology.  Even though Lugar obviously has ideas that define his politics, his biography had displaced the public's perception of his ideology.  Mourdock is all ideology to most of us who voted on Tuesday, and his biography pales in significance to the public perception of what we think he stands for.  We know Lugar, thus his ideology fades; we don't know Mourdock, and so his ideology radiates.

Does it then stand to reason that when intellectual historians focus on ideas we lose the people behind them; but the reverse happens when we chose to write a biography?  Do intellectual biographies achieve what they aim to create--a marriage of ideas and person?  And if so, how?

Reading List: U.S. Intellectual and Cultural History

As I mentioned before, I am in the process of putting together my reading lists for qualifying exams.  My three fields are American Intellectual and Cultural History, American Literature, and Transatlantic History in the Long Nineteenth Century.  I am still working on my lists for the latter two fields, but my reading list for U.S. intellectual/cultural history is settled. 

I thought it might be helpful for our blog readers who may be planning a field in U.S. intellectual history to see what my exam list looks like.  So I am posting it below.  First, though, I wanted to make a few prefatory remarks on the logic of the list.


My exam list is pragmatic, not canonical.  The 100 volumes on this list are not meant to represent, encompass, or constitute "the canon" of U.S. intellectual history.  This is not meant to be a comprehensive list. It does not represent all that one should read in the field; it does not represent all that I should read in the field.  It is a practical list whose purpose is to adequately prepare me to "think in the field" and have some overall sense of its contours.

Some books are on the list because they are established, classic works of scholarship that have been influential in defining questions in the field.  Others are included because they represent current trends in scholarship, and still others because they address the need for "coverage" of a particular body of thought.

By the same token, some texts that might customarily appear on a U.S. intellectual history list do not appear here because they will be on an exam list for one of my other fields.  So, for example, I will read Thoreau's Walden for my American Literature exam; Kloppenberg's Uncertain Victory will be on my Transatlantic History list.

Thus, while this list is designed to provide me with a broad, basic foundation for teaching and scholarship in U.S. intellectual history, it is constructed in dialog with my other fields.  Furthermore, this list is also inflected to address my specific research interests; I am preparing for my qualifying exams with my future dissertation firmly in mind.  For that reason, I'm heartily glad that I decided to change my dissertation topic before I started putting together my exam lists.  (What's my new dissertation topic?  A really good one.  Seriously.  But that's a post for another day.)

For heuristic purposes, I have divided the list below into three sections:  primary sources, secondary sources, and historiography/theory.  The primary sources are listed in the order of their publication.  The secondary sources are divided into a broad scheme of periodization.  Within these divisions, I've listed the works in (rough) historical order.  So, for example, within their section Amy Dru Stanley's From Bondage to Contract is listed before Jackson Lears's No Place of Grace.  The official version of this list -- the one I will hand in to my school with all the requisite signatures on all the requisite forms from my committee -- will be divided simply into primary and secondary sources.  Within those divisions, texts will be listed in alphabetical order by author's last name, with full bibliographic information.

So, without further ado, here's my reading list for my qualifying exam in U.S. Intellectual and Cultural History.


PRIMARY SOURCES

Reference sources for American thought:

The Bible
The Portable Enlightenment Reader, edited and with an introduction by Isaac Kramnick (1995)

Survey:

David Hollinger and Charles Capper, editors, The American Intellectual Tradition, Volume I: 1630-1865, sixth edition (2011)
______, The American Intellectual Tradition, Volume II: 1865 to the Present, sixth edition (2011).                                       
                                                   
Individual Authors / Texts:

Jonathan Edwards, Treatise on the Religious Affections (1746)
Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography (1784-88)
Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (1787)
James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay, The Federalist Papers (1788)
Benjamin Rush, Essays: Literary, Moral, and Philosophical (1798)
Horace Bushnell, Views of Christian Nurture, and of Subjects Adjacent Thereto (1847)
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays (1836 - 1844)
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845)
William James, Writings: 1878-1899
    Psychology, briefer course; The Will to Believe; Talks to Teachers and Students (Library of     America anthology)
William James, Writings: 1902-1910
    The Varieties of Religious Experience; Pragmatism; Essays (Library of America anthology)
W.E.B. DuBois, Souls of Black Folk (1903)
Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull House (1910)
Thorstein Veblen, The Higher Learning in America (1918)
John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (1927)
Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932)
Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture (1934)
Robert Maynard Hutchins, The Higher Learning in America (1936)
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., The Vital Center (1949)
Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination (1950)
William F. Buckley, Jr., God and Man at Yale (1951)
Students for a Democratic Society, "The Port Huron Statement" (1962)
Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)
Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (1963)
Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976)
Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (1987)
E.D. Hirsch, Jr., Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (1987)
Linda Nicholson, editor, The Second Wave: A Reader in Feminist Theory (1997)   
           
SECONDARY SOURCES

Colonial era to Constitution (more or less)

Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (1939)
Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness (1956)
Henry May, The Enlightenment in America (1976)
Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (1998)
Eric Slauter, The State as a Work of Art: The Cultural Origins of the Constitution (2011)
Lawrence Cremin, American Education: The Colonial Experience, 1607-1783 (1972)

Early Republic to Civil War (more or less)

David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 (1975, 1999)
Linda Kerber, Toward an Intellectual History of Women: Essays (1997)
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese, The Mind of the Master Class (2005)
Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (1999)
John L. Thomas, "Romantic Reform in America, 1815-1865," American Quarterly, Vol. 17, No. 4 (Winter, 1965), pp. 656-681.
Robert H. Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination (1994)
Daniel Walker Howe, Political Culture of the American Whigs (1984)
Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (1995)
Lawrence Cremin, American Education: The National Experience, 1783-1876 (1982)

Reconstruction to Interwar Years (more or less)

Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation (1998)
Robert Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877-1920 (1966)
David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2002)
Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club (2001)
Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (1992)
Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880 - 1920 (1994)
Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920 (2010)
Michael Kazin, A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan (2007)
James Livingston, Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, 1850-1940     (1994)
John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925 (1955)
Francesca Bordogna, William James at the Boundaries: Philosophy, Science and the Geography of Knowledge (2008)
Daniel Borus, Twentieth-Century Multiplicity (2012)
Rosalind Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres: Intellectual Roots of Modern Feminism (1983)
Julie Reuben, The Making of the Modern University (1996)
Brian M. Ingrassia, The Rise of Gridiron University: Higher Education's Uneasy Alliance with Big-Time Football (2012)
Lawrence Cremin, American Education: The Metropolitan Experience, 1876-1980 (1990)
Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform (1954)
Morton Gabriel White, Social Thought in America: The Revolt Against Formalism (1949)

Interwar years (more or less) to 1990s

Richard Pells, Radical Visions and American Dreams: Culture and Social Thought in the     Depression Years (2004)
Sarah Igo, The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public (2008)
Warren Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (2003)
Richard Pells, The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age: American Intellectuals in the 1940s and     1950s (1989)
Jason Stevens, God Fearing and Free: A Spiritual History of America's Cold War (2010)
George Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 (2nd. Ed. 2006)
George Cotkin, Existential America (2005)
Robert Genter, Late Modernism: Art, Culture and Politics in Cold War America (2010)
Richard King, Race, Culture, and the Intellectuals, 1940 - 1970 (2004)
Nikhil Singh, Black is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (2005)
Daniel T. Rodgers, Age of Fracture (2011)
James Livingston, The World Turned Inside Out: American Thought and Culture at the End of the 20th Century (2009)
Mary Jo Buhle, Feminism and Its Discontents:  A Century of Struggle with Psychoanalysis (2000)
James Kloppenberg, Reading Obama (2011)   

Longer-term studies / collections

John Higham, Hanging Together: Unity and Diversity in American Culture (2001)
Caroline Winterer, The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life, 1780-1910 (2004)
Caroline Winterer, The Mirror of Antiquity: American Women and the Classical Tradition, 1750-1900 (2009)
Paul Gutjahr, An American Bible: A History of the Good Book in the United States, 1777-1880 (2001)
George Fredrickson, The Black image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914 (1987)
Wilfred McClay, The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America (1994)
Jeffrey Sklansky, The Soul's Economy: Market Society and Selfhood in American Thought, 1820-1920 (2001)
Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas (2011)
Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (1991)
James Turner, Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America (1986)
                                                   
HISTORIOGRAPHY/THEORY/PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY

Arthur O. Lovejoy, Chapter 1, "Introduction: The Study of the History of  Ideas," The Great Chain of Being (1936)
R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (1946)
Louis O. Mink, “The Autonomy of Historical Understanding,” History and Theory, Vol. 5, No. 1 (1966),     pp. 24-47
Fritz Stern, editor, The Varieties of History: From Voltaire to the Present (1973)
John Higham and Paul Conkin, eds., New Directions in American Intellectual History (1980)
Joan W. Scott, "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis," The American Historical Review, Vol. 91, No. 5 (Dec., 1986), pp. 1053-1075.
Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (1987)
Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The 'Objectivity Question' and the American Historical Profession (1988)
Thomas Haskell, Objectivity is Not Neutrality: Explanatory Schemes in History (2000)
Allan Megill, Historical Knowledge, Historical Error: A Contemporary Guide to Practice (2007)
Daniel Wickberg, "What Is the History of Sensibilities? On Cultural Histories, Old and New," The American Historical Review, Vol. 112, No. 3 (June 2007), pp. 661-684
Kerwin Lee Klein, From History to Theory (2011)

Susan Pearson's Book Wins Merle Curti Award

The blogging staff of the USIH blog and the members of the S-USIH would like to extend our warmest congratulations to Susan J. Pearson, whose outstanding book The Rights of the Defenseless: Protecting Animals and Children in Gilded Age America (U. of Chicago, 2011) won the 2012 Merle Curti Award in Intellectual History.

The publisher's website offers a brief summary of this brilliantly-conceived text, and includes a few of the many well-deserved accolades the book garnered from early reviewers.  Here, for example, is Dan Wickberg's early assessment of  Pearson's important work:

The Rights of the Defenseless is much more than an examination of the development of specific policies by humane societies, more than a case study of the emergence of Progressive era reform as it applied to the protection of children and animals.  Rather, Susan Pearson uses the very specific concern with these two forms of dependency to explore the definition of rights in liberal discourse; the boundary between person and animal in modern thought and practice; the symbolic configuration of self and society in nineteenth-century political culture; the emergence of a modern mode of linking feeling to reason to action. I do not think it is too much to say that this book will redefine the understanding of the humanitarian sensibility and its place in modern American culture. This is history as an act of the moral imagination in the very best sense.

Pearson's history is pathbreaking indeed, and we are all pleased that the 2012 Merle Curti Award Committee recognized her truly outstanding achievement. 

Susan was not able to accept this honor in person at the 2012 OAH meeting in Milwaukee. She was busy with another outstanding achievement:  she was having a baby.  So double congratulations to Susan and her lovely family, including especially her husband, Michael Kramer, a frequent, smart, savvy commenter on this blog.  I believe they have set the bar for the Best Week Ever for intellectual historians.

Where Am I?

In the last paragraph of his essay on "The Present and Future of Intellectual History," Daniel Wickberg observes, "We have yet to have a really good history of American intellectual history, one that explains how we got where we are, how much our approaches are indebted to those of the past and the assumptions they made, and how much we have departed from them."  

What I find most interesting about this statement is not the claim it makes about the need for a history of the field, but the way that it frames an epistemic problem in spatial terms.  We need to understand where we are.  Our methodological and theoretical commitments are approaches, and they may retrace older routes to knowledge or depart from them.  

Similarly, in his reflection on the role this blog might play in the future of intellectual history, Ray Haberski writes, "This is a place where intellectual historians (emerging and emerged) offer a body of work to be discussed by graduate students and senior scholars without pretense that they serve as an official organ for the field" (emphasis mine).

I draw attention to this language not because it is jarring, but because it is utterly unremarkable. 

It is seems perfectly natural to conceptualize thinking and knowing in spatial terms.  Indeed, the sense of space is implicit in the idea of a "field" -- it is a conceptual territory with contested boundaries that allow us to define what is a proper subject of inquiry, and who is properly authorized to make such inquiries.  

This is the dual purpose of field exams in a PhD program -- mapping the terrain and vetting its custodians.  Professors may joke that there is an element of hazing involved in the process, but I'm afraid they're also telling the truth.  I'll find out for myself next year when I take my qualifying exams.  I am not looking forward to it.  

To "look forward" to the future is to conceive of the temporal in particularly linear directional terms.  Indeed, this way of thinking about time is the conceptual foundation for both whiggish history and its dour doppelgänger, the narrative of declension.  It is, I suppose, the conceptual foundation for the Western idea of history, period.  

And what is a "conceptual foundation," but a metaphor for knowledge-as-edifice?   Like the concept of a "field," the concept of knowledge as something that is "built" has proved a serviceable metaphor for understanding this scholarly enterprise in which professional historians are engaged.   In That Noble Dream, Peter Novick characterizes the beginnings of professional history in America as an era of "brick-making," an image borrowed from the public writing and private correspondence of J. Franklin Jameson, the founding editor of the American Historical Review.  Novick writes, 

This conception of the historian's task -- the patient manufacture of four-square factualist bricks to be fitted together in the ultimate objective history -- had enormous professional advantages.  It offered an almost tangible image of steady, cumulative progress.  Although creating a grand synthesis might require an architectonic vision, almost anyone, properly trained, could mold a brick: worthwhile employment in making a contribution to the edifice was thus guaranteed to those of the most modest endowments.*

The historian as a brick-maker tasked with converting the (presumed) raw material of the past into useable pieces of "objective" knowledge to be fitted together in a collective building enterprise has mostly been discarded, at least in theory.  Instead, thanks to Theory, we have a way of stepping back from this enterprise and thinking of historical knowledge (and any other kind, for that matter) less as a given structure than as a posited construct. 

Yet behind and beneath these two seemingly different ideas stands the same basic metaphor:  knowledge is something we build together.  

But where?

Peter Novick ends That Noble Dream with a chapter titled, "There was no king in Israel."  This phrase is lifted from the last verse of the biblical Book of Judges:  

In those days there was no king in Israel: every man did that which was right in his own eyes.

This verse serves for Novick as a fitting epigraph for the discordant and chaotic practice of history in a post-consensus, post-objectivity era.  But quoting this verse from Judges is also a cunning, punning invocation of Carl Becker's 1931 AHA Presidential address, "Everyman His Own Historian."  Becker was talking about "Mr. Everyman," not "every man."  As the AHA website notes, Becker's call for a pragmatic, pluralistic (or, for some, relativistic) approach to history has been interpreted by some as a call for "greater modesty in interpretation" of the past.  Nevertheless, that call for modesty was anything but modest in its bold swipe at the foundations of the brick-making, brick-laying enterprise of professional history.  It must have sounded positively destructive to some.

Similarly, some read Novick's book as a narrative of declension, and perhaps Novick himself viewed the story he was telling in that light.  But the "present" moment Novick described in 1988 -- a moment of cacophonous dissensus -- was also a moment of disciplinary creativity.  Look at the Bancroft winners for the decade following the publication of Novick's masterpiece, and all the Bancroft winers since.**  This is the scholarship that came from or came of age amidst that age of fracture, that babel of voices.

Perhaps, then, I might be excused for imaginatively situating the field -- or, perhaps, the construction site -- of U.S. intellectual history not in the land of Canaan during the time of Judges, nor in the land of Egypt during the years of bondage, but on the broad plains of Mesopatamia in the mythic age between Noah and Abraham.    Though the gods have already come down once or twice to confound our speech, there is no guarantee that they will not come again.  And the more we sound alike, the more we speak the same language -- or believe that we do -- the more nervous we ought to be.  

So, between Daniel Wickberg and James Livingston and Daniel Rodgers and David Hollinger and Andrew Hartman and Bill Fine and Ray Haberski and David Sehat and Charles Capper -- not to mention, as David Hall wryly notes in his MIH essay, "the occasional woman"*** -- I think we're good...for now.

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

*Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge UP, 1988), 56.

**Never mind Bellesiles.

***David D. Hall, "Backwards to the Future: The Cultural Turn and the Wisdom of Intellectual History," Modern Intellectual History, Vol. 9, No. 1 (2012), 176.

Department of Self-Promotion...and a Stray Comment

As most of the contributors and key editors of the blog are conferencing in the City of the Big Shoulders, I thought I would hijack the blog for a bit of shameless self-promotion, namely announcing the publication of The New Era: American Thought and Culture in the 1920s, a book no library should be without.

On a less self-interested note, I read with interest "When Ideas Had Consequences--Or, Whatever Happened to Intellectual History?" by Drew Maciag, author of a forthcoming book on "The Americanization of Edmund Burke," which appeared in the December 2011 issue of Reviews in American History (available through Project Muse). Maciag makes the excellent point that the halcyon days of American intellectual history in the mid-twentieth century were rooted in the particular predilections of modernist intellectualism, specifically the conviction that ideas impelled human action and thus explained historical change, the tendency to reify cultural discourses as the American or modern "mind," the privileging of elites over the masses, and a faith in the power of reason to guide social and political development.

Maciag's reflections touch on one of the key preoccupations of this blog--the "crisis" of our subfield--although he offers cold comfort. He is a declinist, likening the "plight" of intellectual history to that of poetry. Signs of revitalization in poetry (more readings, creative writing programs, published poets) are deceiving, not having arrested poetry's "relative decline as a component of broader American culture." "So too, the appearance of a new journal, blog, or conference on intellectual history is no accurate indicator of the weight it carries outside its own circle." (Ouch)