The Plastic Nietzsche, Part III: A Serial Review of Ratner-Rosenhagen's American Nietzsche

Prior Entries: Part I, Part II

Reviewing the reviews of American Nietzsche continues to be a fruitful way to think about the book's contents as well as its strengths and weaknesses. The former is perhaps less systematic than one would want. But the latter helps us see the larger ideas with which American Nietzsche deals, and something of its place in the historiography.

After Posnock's review in The Nation, Thomas Meaney tackled American Nietzsche for The Wall Street Journal about six weeks later. Meaney opens his piece provocatively, asserting that Americans have a tendency to give Nietzsche a happy ending in the course of celebrating individualism and creativity. Unlike Nietzsche, we prioritize efficiency and equality in individuals over excellence. Meaney then praises Ratner-Rosenhagen's goal (as he sees it): to answer the question about what "our use and abuse of Nietzsche's thinking says about us?" Meaney praises the author's connection between Emerson and Nietzsche on the notion of self as "constantly becoming." We "generate meaning" for ourselves "through a continuous act of self-creation." Meaney then dwells on the fact that H.L. Mencken found inspiration in Nietzsche, and that "Mencken's columns put Nietzsche's name on the American cultural map." That stamp was diminished by the Leopold and Loeb trial, as well as because of the Nazis' appropriation of Nietzsche. But then there was a turn in Nietzsche's fate. Meaney asserts that Ratner-Rosenhagen's tracking of the influence of Walter Kaufman during the post-war period was the "best chapter of her book." And Meaney is right to reinforce the book's argument that "the Nietzsche we encounter in print today is largely Kaufmann's Nietzsche—mediated by his translations, collations and introductions."

Meaney critiques the book by arguing that "Ratner-Rosenhagen is not quite up-front about the story she is telling."
Meaney believes she privileges the Emersonian readings of Nietzsche by Harold Bloom, Stanley Cavell, and Richard Rorty offered at the end of American Nietzsche. Here I think Meaney has confused both the complexity of their reappropriations of Nietzsche, as well as the place of those three in the chronology of the twentieth century, with Ratner-Rosenhagen's intentions (i.e. Meaney has mistaken narration with valuation). I assert confusion by the reviewer because Ratner-Rosenhagen shows neither favor nor disapprobation of the Bloomian, Cavellian, and Rortian Nietzsches.

Bloom both used Nietzsche himself, in relation to his work on the anxiety of influence (American Nietzsche, 276-279), and used Nietzsche to critique deconstructionist thought (pp. 279-283). Ratner-Rosenhagen points out that Rorty was a foundationalist before embracing a Nietzschean pragmatism, or "pragmatist antifoundationalism" (p. 285-287). She notes that Rorty's Nietzsche led Rorty to a "no-man's land between public commitments and private longings that [Rorty's] pragmatist critics found so objectionable" (p. 293). Rorty could not reconcile pragmatic instrumentalism and democracy, and lost the "spirit of social hope." Ratner-Rosenhagen concludes that Rorty found "no way to philosophically justify America" (p. 295). That doesn't exactly make for an optimistic reading of Rorty's Nietzsche, or Rorty's Emerson. As for Cavell, Ratner-Rosenhagen is not critical of his use of Nietzsche via Emerson. Indeed, it's Cavell's knowledge of Emerson that intrigues the author (p. 297). Cavell helps Ratner-Rosenhagen bring her story full circle. Cavell also helps the author tackle the question of Nietzsche's significance to philosophers and in the history of philosophy (pp. 297-302). Ratner-Rosenhagen uses Cavell to reinforce part of the book's thesis:

If, as Nietzsche instructed, knowledge exxacts a mode of life, then the reverse is also true: a mode of life exacts a knowledge. In Emerson, antifoundationalism is that American way of life. Emersonian antifoundationalism is not a theory, it is a way of thinking and living in a world without foundations. ...From a European past America cannot domesticate, Emerson moves toward a New World of men (and women) thinking, finding their way everyday, the here and now, a culture ready to be "born again." ...Cavell achieved his Emerson by putting him in constant dialogue with Nietzsche. His Emerson and his Nietzsche finish each other's thoughts. (pp. 302-303).

Meaney rightly, then, pegs the Emerson anchor. But he misses the simple fact that this is how history played out---no matter that it fits nicely with the Ratner-Rosenhagen's goal. The only way to know whether the book's author manipulated the narrative is to explore Nietzsche's place in philosophy and intellectual history after the 1990s. But the author defers to the limits of hindsight when she only offers an Epilogue dealing with Allan Bloom's work through the 1980s, and Bloom did not write about Emerson's influence on Nietzsche.

Three weeks after Meaney's review and almost two months after Posnock's essay, the next prominent reivew of American Nietzsche came from Alexander Star. Star is a senior book review editor for The New York Times, and his piece appeared January 15, 2012. Star's review, using Ratner-Rosenhagen's findings, answers the question posed by Posnock: "Who got Nietzsche right?" Star's answer is everyone. Everyone got Nietzsche right because his answers, his aphorisms, were capacious enough for for almost every kind of philosophical question. This could only be the case, of course, if there were contradictions in Nietzsche's thought and in the thinking of his appropriators. When that is the case, adjudication simple does not pay for the scholar. Star concluded: "American Nietzsche is a sober work of intellectual history, but as Nietzsche insisted, all scholarship reflects the temperament of its creator, and it’s clear that Ratner-Rosenhagen finds neither the poststructuralist nor the conservative Nietzsche at all satisfying." 

Star mildly critiques Ratner-Rosenhagen's work on two points. The first is a scholarly point with with two parts. Star asserts that American Nietzsche does not attend to Nietzsche's thoughts on Emerson's failings. Star argues that "she doesn't take into full account how Nietzsche thought his beloved Emerson was 'too much infatuated with life' or how he doubted most people could ever discover anything at all." The former, in relation to the knowledge of the author of this essay, is an argument between scholars. I cannot say whether Nietzsche's Emerson was correct on all points. But I can see how that might color one's appreciation for the deepest sources of personal liberation in American thought. Still, if thoughtful Americans were not precisely appropriating Emerson via Nietzsche on that topic, they were were appropriating Nietzsche as Walter Kaufman connected him to the existentialists. Nietzsche was going to find a home with most any American audience alieanated from the conformist aspects of middle-class culture. 

On Star's latter point about novelty, the structure of the sentence makes it unclear whether he was referring to Nietzsche or Emerson, so we'll have to let that scholarly point lie. But novelty does matter in that the Overman will likely need to find some way to oversome the limitations of his times. If tradition (i.e. God) is dead and unhelpful, how did Nietzsche see how a new paradigm could come into being? Nietzsche's answer seems to have been less about what would come into being and more about the fact that mankind had the inner resources to stand, to survive.

The second critique, not pressed by Star as a failing of the book, is that Ratner-Rosenhagen could have done more in relation to Nietzsche's "broader presence in culture." He wrote:

In 1933, the Hays Office forced the producers of the Barbara Stanwyck film “Baby Face” to remove “The Will to Power” from the hands of a German-American cobbler whose paeans to self-fulfillment inspire the Stanwyck character to become a prostitute. Nietzsche’s more bombastic utterances would later enter popular culture without hindrance. In every generation Nietzsche finds admirers who blur his message with that of Aleister Crowley, the Nietzsche-reading occultist who wrote, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law."

So, is Star saying that he wanted Ratner-Rosenhagen to catalag every unmediated presence of Nietzsche in American culture? I don't think so. But is he being fair to the limitations of her study---her focus on how Nietzsche was actively and intentionally used and appropriated? I don't think so. Wouldn't any historian prefer clear manisfestations of use (e.g. letters and publications) over speculating about how unnamed masses might have absorbed Nietzsche through popular culture "without hindrance"? This is not to say that Ratner-Rosenhagen could not have used those manifestations. And she could have perhaps provided more of a rationale for their exclusion (i.e. which unmediated appearances may have mattered or not). But the author notes that Nietzsche fads have occurred, but she never promised to explore the full circumstances of each. As Star himself notes, this is a "sober work of intellectual history." As such it is focused on the life of the mind where empirical evidence exists.

Star doesn't answer Posnock's question about "Who got Nietzsche right?" for Ratner-Rosenhagen, but Star does pose and answer another question. In the final paragraph of his review he queries: "If Nietzsche was terrible, was he also beneficial?" Star cites "Princeton philosopher Alexander Nehamas" (note the "credential dropping") to argue that Nietzsche's perspectivism does not argue that all beliefs are "equally valid," but rather that your beliefs are not necessarily true for everyone.  Since, as Ratner-Rosenhagen similarly noted in the context of Cavell, that beliefs are associated with a way of life, the fact that ways of life exist for individuals might imply that there is no one set of beliefs that can apply to us all. We should accept, then, that American individualism has always contained, and will likely always contain, some degree of antifoundationalism. Or, as Star puts it, we should be able to live with the fact that "our convictions are our own." This, he believes, would be a beneficial contribution from Nietzsche to America's culture---provided Americans took the true Nietzsche seriously, or really understood him.

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This concludes Part III of my serial review of American Nietzsche. Next week I will analyze the last of the reviews, and then enter into my own reading of the book's weaknesses and strengths---with an eye toward offering larger extensions and impressions.

The Plastic Nietzsche, Part II: A Review of Ratner-Rosenhagen's American Nietzsche

Prior entry: Part I.

Several positive reviews of American Nietzsche have already appeared. Indeed, though the book lists a publication date of 2012, reviews began appearing in November and December of 2011. Ridiculous as it may seem in relation to the present publication of my own review, I think I received my copy in early December of last year. (That's right. I've had this book for ten months before writing my review. In my defense, I did finish reading it in early April. All I can say is that sometimes life gets in the way of my scholarly work.) That aside, given the earlier accolades and critiques, what can be offered here that has not already been said? Let's review the reviews. Along with helping ensure that my analysis will be different, the reviews provide a chance to reflect on the contents of American Nietzsche---and whether the reviewers gave that content their full consideration.

Ross Posnock's November 21, 2011 essay, titled "American Idol," appeared in The Nation. Posnock offers both summary and critique. Like the book, he begins, rightly I believe, with Emerson---noting the similarities between him and Nietzsche. Posnock then offers some of Nietzsche's biography, reminding the reader of the latter's emergence as the antifoundational "enfant terrible of modernism." The review then transitions to one of Ratner-Rosenhagen's prominent theme: the notion of the "philosopher willing to go it alone without inherited faith, without institutional affiliation, without rock or refuge for his truth claims" (p. 17, of book). Next Posnock recalls, using the book, Nietzsche's call to overcome (i.e. the overman/Übermensch) and its disastrous appropriation by fascism. Most importantly, however, is the rectification of that misappropriation by Walter Kaufman. He connected, recovered really, Nietzsche's thought in relation to existentialism and the American tradition of rugged individualism. Posnock then backs up, moving his review chronologically toward the Nietzsche vogue of the early nineteenth century. The reviewer argues that one of Ratner-Rosenhagen's "striking findings" was the diverse appropriations of Nietzschean thought, which results in some "amusing, if inadvertent, juxtapositions," such as "Lionel Trilling and Huey Newton [being] discussed alongside Hugh Hefner...and Hitler." Like Posnock, I appreciated the fact that the range of thinkers presented in American Nietzsche makes it an intriguing read.

Posnock then poses the rhetorical question of "Who got Nietzsche right?"
A worthy question. In Posnock's hands it serves as a transition to discuss how Ratner-Rosenhagen avoids the adjudication of claims about the philosopher in favor of listening to those who received and used Nietzsche's works (p. 24, of text). The judgment is beside the point. Posnock does not directly say whether he approves of the approach, but he most certainly does not condemn it. In discussing the reception of Nietzsche in America, Posnock notes the personal letters from unknown figures sent to Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche. Apart from these lesser known figures, Ratner-Rosenhagen also covers public figures and intellectuals who responded to and used Nietzsche: Josiah Royce, Judith Butler, Stanley Cavell, Harold Bloom, and Richard Rorty. For all these figures, Posnock rightly identifies that the dualism, the dichotomy, used in American Nietzsche underlying their thinking is 'foundationalism' v. 'antifoundationalism'. Posnock notes that "in the final two pages of the concluding chapter, each term appears no fewer than ten times."

Here the review turns toward criticism---though less of Ratner-Rosenhagen and more of the method behind the text (i.e. reception history). Posnock begins this line of critique by noting that the author "is a superb listener, but a consequence of her withholding judgment is that Nietzsche’s ideas—and Emerson’s, for that matter—tend to be rendered in broad, formulaic strokes, the principal one being the antithesis of foundationalism and antifoundationalism." This, in Posnock's view, results in a deeper, theoretical problem with the book: "From the outset...antifoundationalism is ubiquitous but only hurriedly defined—'the denial of universal truth'—and never reflected upon critically." Posnock continued, ultimately linking the problem back to an observation by Emerson:

American Nietzsche also seems to misunderstand the nature of the antifoundationalist claim, which, as the literary theorist and legal scholar Stanley Fish rightly noted years ago, is a “thesis about how foundations emerge” and refutes the metaphysical assumption that “foundations do not emerge but simply are, anchoring the universe and thought from a point above history and culture.” ...There is a basic logical problem here that Emerson identifies in “Circles”: “Yet this incessant movement and progression, which all things partake, could never become sensible to us, but by contrast to some principle of fixture or stability in the soul. While the eternal generation of circles proceeds, the eternal generator abides.”

In other words, in Posnock's view, because Ratner-Rosenhagen merely listens and does not adjudicate, one can finish the text thinking that one can actually "function in a world of constant flux, without foundations." Here, I think, Posnock's critique misses the mark. Is it the historian's job to adjudicate? Perhaps. But the nature of the author's study necessitates a minimization of that analytical path. Further, she gets antifoundationalism right in the text. Ratner-Rosenhagen may not reflect on this point extensively, but she most certainly observes that Nietzsche saw foundations as rooted in "history and culture." It is noted in the book's passages about Wilbur Urban's encounter with Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals (pp. 29-31). And, like it or not, we know Nietzsche's solution: the Ubermensch. Did contemporaries and enthusiasts offer wild interpretations of Nietzsche's solution? Absolutely. But must we, as historical thinkers, attend only to those wrong-headed enthusiasms? Ratner-Rosenhagen rightly notes the ambiguity of Nietzsche's Ubermensch in Thus Spake Zarathustra. The figure, taken as an exemplar, could root the reader-follower in a vision of transcendant man who overcame. The Ubermensch, then, is a kind of Enlightenment figure of secular progress written on the earthbound individual (p. 110-111). This is Nietzsche's proposed foundation for man: a kind of Emersonian self-reliance.

If there is any problem in American thought as it has appropriated Nietzsche's thought, it's that those historical figures have forgotten Posnock's, Fish's, and Emerson's point. The Ubermensch is not a weak-minded fascist conformist, but a strong individualist unafraid of the future. As Ratner-Rosenhagen notes, some interpreters saw in the Ubermensch a "self-sovereign...[who] had found his natural habitat in [America's] culture of possessive individualism" (p. 111). Problems with rugged individualism and prot-Libertarianism notwithstanding, this was a part of the new foundation of American culture. This was the American Nietzsche. Posnock may not like it, and perhaps neither does Ratner-Rosenhagen. But it's good to look hard and clearly at the historical Nietzsche without fascist-colored glasses.

It seems, then, that Posnock wanted another book, something more prescriptive and assertive. But a presentist study, of that type anyway, was never the goal of American Nietzsche. Ratner-Rosenhagen's historicism could never satisfy Posnock's not-so-rhetorical question: "Who got Nietzsche right?" The book asserts, in essence, that this question can't be answered. Nietzsche's thought was plastic; it could be transformed in the heat of one's passions and imagination. Nietzsche's writings are too vague to give solid ground, to provide transcendence. This will never satisfy philosophers, historians, and earnest readers who seek ultimate truths. Then again, mere historical thinking never really satisfies those who put history solely in the service of the present.

The next installments of this serialized essay will address other reviews, and then my own impressions, critiques, and extensions. - TL

The Plastic Nietzsche, Part I: A Review of Ratner-Rosenhagen's American Nietzsche

Review of Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen's American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). ISBN: 978-0-226-70581-1. 452 pages.

Reviewed by Tim Lacy
Loyola University Chicago


As is probably the case with many Midwesterners who grew up in small towns and rural areas of the American Heartland, my first encounters with the acolytes and intellectual followers of Friedrich Nietzsche came in college. As an undergraduate at the University of Missouri, I was introduced to several iterations of what Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen calls the American Nietzsche. Because I had never heard of Nietzsche, let alone read any of his work, these introductions were mostly superficial. My memory is imperfect, but I think I have encountered at least three Nietzsches during the (overly) long receiving end of my educational career.

It was Christianity, strangely enough, that introduced me to Nietzsche. My involvement with the Mizzou chapter of Campus Crusade for Christ brought me into contact with an ethereal, evil Nietzsche---a specter that haunts the dreams of those active campus evangelizers. To them Nietzsche was a formidable, seductive, and roguish character who was also, not surprisingly, the sworn enemy of Christianity. This was Nietzsche as the irreligious (nay evil) philosopher archetype who denounced religion as superstition. This figure was symbolic of the cultural and moral drift---the decay---of Western life. He was a clever, sinister foreigner indirectly degraded America's Christian civilization. It was symbolically fitting, to Crusaders, that this sexually profligate man was downed by syphilis, the disease that, in the judgment of some heartless Crusaders, purposely rid the earth of unscrupulous characters like Al Capone. This sad end enabled Crusaders to build a comical caricature, a straw man, of Nietzsche that was easy for budding Christian evangelists to knock down. I am pretty sure that this portrait was painted, in part, by the writings of C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, and other lesser Fundamentalist-type writers of the early twentieth century. It was  probably around this time that I first heard of the work of Allan Bloom and his relentless criticism of Nietzsche-inspired, late-twentieth-century moral relativity.


The second incarnation of Nietzsche I enountered, also at Mizzou, was similar to the Crusade Nietzsche but more personal and confrontational. This occurred shortly after graduation when I obtained a job interviewing victims of the 1993 Missouri River floods. I was part of a team consisting of older undergraduates, new twenty-something graduates like myself, and graduate students who fanned out across central Missouri, invading small river towns, to ascertain how flood victims dealt with the tragedy, then and after. A member of my interview group was a graduate philosophy student who openly embraced (is there any other way?) a Nietzschean perspective on life. In his interpretation that meant being a rebel philosopher---a provocateur who both challenged foundations and brusquely criticized one's lack of ballast in thinking. The young man had neatly trimmed facial hair, so he did not fit the familiar aesthetic of a wildly bearded, hirsute, intense Nietzsche---an iteration documented Ratner-Rosehagen in American Nietzsche. Still, the young man's constant challenges made him something of a rogue---and a pain in my ass. I might have grown to admire his relentless intelligence if he had not blocked my advances on an attractive young colleague. When I learned he slept with her, it just reinforced my Crusade-informed vision of the profligate rogue Nietzsche.

After my Crusade and Rogue Nietzsches, the last academic-related impression of him occurred during graduate school. This Nietzsche is probably most familiar to USIH readers so I will keep my recollections brief, and more personal. Like many historians-in-training, I became familiar with this Academic Nietzsche courtesy of courses where professors relayed the thought of deconstructionists and feminist theorists. Once again, I found myself uncomfortable. The Academic Nietzsche was unnerving, annoying, and, to my taste, wrong-headed. I saw Nietzsche as did Allan Bloom---as the inspiration for much that was wrong with the academy. That said, I had to know this Nietzsche. This iteration was neither comical nor merely provocative; utilizing caricatures would not do. I knew that some study of him and his intellectual descendants would be absolutely necessary. Even so, I managed to limit my direct contact with Nietzsche himself. Upon attainment of the PhD, I had managed to read only brief snippets of his works and had only a kind of advanced E.D. Hirschian sense of Nietzsche's biography.

There is something familiar and unfamiliar, silly and serious, in each of these iterations. As such they introduce a dominant theme of American Nietzsche: the plasticity of the man and his thought in relation to American intellectual life. Each of my encounters, or at least a variation of each, is covered in Ratner-Rosenhagen's powerful study. But American Nietzsche offers a much more. The thesis of her study is that Nietzsche's philosophical thinking is connected to the United States in two ways. First, his philosophy is inextricably rooted in the work of a single American thinker: Ralph Waldo Emerson. The book details this debt, particularly in its Prologue and Introduction (pp. 1-27). Inasmuch as Emerson is a characteristic and canonical American thinker, American Nietzsche argues, successfully I believe, that Nietzsche shares that stage. This was a revelation to me, and it will bother those with only a superficial knowledge of Nietzsche. This half of the book's thesis undercuts the exoticism and foreignness that both attracted and repelled segments of America.

This brings us to the second mode of Nietzsche's connections to America. These links begin with the ongoing, two-way traffic between Germany and America---enabled and mediated by his sister, Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche---that occurred after the author's death. This connection waxed and waned all through the twentieth century, but consisted of the reception of Nietzsche's works and person in the United States. This portion of Ratner-Rosenhagen's thesis is multifaceted, dealing with popular culture, religious figures (i.e. appropriations and rejections), cultural criticism, intellectual life, and, in the end, the Culture Wars. These topics come together, as purposed by Ratner-Rosenhagen and otherwise, to argue for the importance of Nietzsche's thought in relation to democracy and democratic culture in the United States (pp. 23-24, 26). Our reception of Nietzsche, over various time periods, measures our receptiveness to the contradictions, problems, and possibilities of democracy.

Ratner-Rosenhagen's thesis and coverage of the relationship between Nietzsche and the United States makes American Nietzsche, I believe, an indispensable companion for intellectual historians who need to think through their works' relationships to Nietzsche's life and writings. It is not exhaustive or perfect, as I will relay, but it is an exemplary work of reception history and transnational history.

This concludes the first part of my review of American Nietzsche. This serialization will continue in the next weeks, wherein I will underscore parts of the book's contents, and offer my impressions, praise, and criticisms (quibbles, really). - TL

The Silverman Machzor and the Culture of Mid-Twentieth-Century American Judaism

We are now in the middle of the Jewish High Holidays:  Rosh Hashanah began last Thursday at sundown; Yom Kippur begins this Friday at sundown.*  Since coming to University of Oklahoma in 1998, I have davened on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur with a traditional minyan that a few OU professors put together for the occasion.**  It's a bit of a catch-as-catch can affair.  We have access to a spare Torah from Emanuel Synagogue in OKC, which also lets us use a portable ark of theirs.  And the machzorim (High Holiday prayerbooks) that we use are hand-me-downs that were once used by OU Hillel, and which they got (apparently) from a synagogue in Pittsburgh, PA.  These machzorim are the 1951 edition of what's usually called the "Silverman Machzor" (after its editor Rabbi Morris Silverman), a prayerbook first published in 1939, which was the official High Holiday prayerbook of Conservative Judaism in this country for the next three decades.***

Perhaps it shouldn't be surprising that a prayerbook assembled in 1939 shows its age, though the 1951 edition has clearly been changed substantially from the original (the Holocaust, yet to occur in 1939, has been added to the Yom Kippur martyrology, for example).  But for just this reason, I find our 1950s prayerbooks a fascinating glimpse into mid-twentieth-century American Judaism.****

Like most machzorim, the Silverman primarily consists of the liturgy itself, in Hebrew on the right and in English translation on the left.  Occasionally editorial commentary is inserted in the form of notes or footnotes. And occasionally passages from the Hebrew are left untranslated.

I'm sure there's a lot to be said about the choices of what to include and not to include in the liturgy and particular translation choices that lie far beyond my extraordinarily limited Hebrew (and my basically non-existent Aramaic).  But in this post I just want to point to a few things in the Silverman that strike me as interesting and potentially suggestive of larger questions in American Jewish culture.

The first is a long footnote appended to the Torah reading for the first day of Rosh Hashanah, Genesis 21, which includes the story of the birth of Isaac and the banishment of Hagar and Ishmael. When Sarah asks Abraham to send away Hagar, the Silverman Machzor appends a footnote to its English translation of the text:

Judged by present-day moral standards, the banishment of Hagar and Ishmael seems an unusually severe act. It must be understood in light of primitive social standards, according to which the child of a concubine enjoyed a lower social status, and had no claim to the same rights and privileges as the son of the wife.

The footnote then goes on to offer some more standard rabbinical understandings of the justice of Ishmael's banishment.  But there's obviously some tension between seeing Ishmael's banishment as just and seeing it as an artifact of "primitive social standards."

Interestingly, no such concerns are expressed about the reading for the second day of Rosh Hashanah, Genesis 22, the binding of Isaac.  While the Silverman Machzor devotes a page-and-a-half to explicating the theological significance of God's decision to "stay the hand of Abraham" and substitute a ram for his son, there's no attempt to grapple with the very disturbing quality of God's initial demand.

The final interesting feature of the Silverman I want to mention involves the Avodah service of Yom Kippur, which recalls the actions performed by the High Priest in the Temple on Yom Kippur.*****  At the core of the temple ritual were a series of sacrifices.  The Avodah service carefully describes these, as well as the way that the High Priest would sprinkle the blood before the Holy of Holies.  All of this is preserved in the Hebrew in the Silverman Machzor. But the English translation methodically avoids mentioning any of the sacrificial aspects of the ritual.  And the extensive notes on the Avodah service don't say anything about the sacrifices, either.

As a congregant, this decision has always bothered me.  The Temple services on Yom Kippur (and other holidays as well) involved copious animal sacrifices. And there's something basically dishonest about avoiding this fact.  Reform Machzorim often eliminate the Avodah service entirely, which I've never liked, but which at least seems a tad more honest than having everyone listen to vivid recitations of slaughter and blood-sprinkling in Hebrew while reading English "translations" that say nothing of them. 

But as an historian, I think these editorial decisions--to apologize for Hagar and Ishmael's banishment, to simply accept God's call to sacrifice Isaac, and to avoid and paper over the sacrificial facts of the Temple rituals--suggest really interesting things about the way leading lights of the American Jewish community in the mid-20th-century were thinking about Jewish religion in a modern age.

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* Gamar chatima tova!

** Religiously speaking, I am largely what used to be described disparagingly in Germany as a Drei-Tage-Jude (Three-Day Jew), that is a Jew who is only religious on the two days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur...except I celebrate only one day of Rosh Hashanah, which I supposed makes me a Zwei-Tage-Jude.  However, as a good American Jew, I also do Hannukah and Passover.  

***Most of the High Holiday services I went to before coming to OU used the successor to the Silverman, the Harlow Machzor, which was the official Conservative High Holiday prayerbook from the early 1970s until 2009.  Though the Silverman has always looked familiar to me, so I suspect that somewhere along the line I had used it before coming to Oklahoma.

**** I should say, at this point, that the history of American Jewish prayerbooks is very far from my area of scholarly expertise. But my effort to find out more about the history of the Silverman Machzor was a nearly total failure.  JSTOR contains not a single reference to it.  There seems to be something of a literature on the history of American Jewish liturgy, but I don't know my way around it at all.  So consider this an apology for not knowing this literature...and a bleg if any of the readers of this blog  know of scholarship that addresses the issues I discuss in this post.

***** Most of the rituals of Yom Kippur as described in the Hebrew Bible involved services performed in the Temple which became impossible to do following its destruction.  The Avodah is just a particular example of the more general strategy of Rabbinical Judaism to essentially substitute prayers for the Temple services.

The Problem Of American Liberalism

With apologies to H.J. McCloskey, who in 1965 had an article published in The Review of Metaphysics (Vol. 19, no. 2) titled "The Problem of Liberalism," I propose we renew discussion of liberalism for historians today.

McCloskey wrote in what we might view as the height of the era, and in relation to philosophy. It's the 'might' in my prior sentence, however, that has stimulated me to propose the issue for debate here. I want to discuss the problem of liberalism in relation to historians---intellectual historians in particular---studying twentieth-century America.

My proposition is this: Understanding American liberalism in the twentieth century is the single most important issue facing U.S. intellectual historians today.

Why?

Liberalism touches on a daunting array of issues and topics important to studying thought in the century: politics, economics, religion, war, civil rights, individualism, communitarianism, the Progressive Era, the Cold War, the Culture Wars, the New Deal, Reaganism, and the list goes on and on.

Liberalism has also been a side---and sometimes direct---topic of many USIH posts (see here and here and here for recent examples). The topic has of course been covered in all three conferences. But we've never tackled it head on at USIH (until today) as an historiographical problem.

Despite this web of reference, citation, and relevance, I find only cobwebs surrounding the issue both in popular discussion and in the profession. I propose the following questions for debate:

- When did American liberalism begin? What was its apex? Is it over--is the "liberal project" in America dead?
- What is peculiar about American liberalism in terms of what Max Lerner called the "battlefields of liberalism"?
- Why is liberalism both loved and loathed?
- What is liberalism's relationship to the academy?
- What is liberalism's relationship with American modernity?
- What is philosophy's relationship with liberalism?
- Who are the most articulate proponents of liberalism in philosophy? Rawls? Dewey? Habermas? Walzer?
- Why is liberalism, in a very confusing turn of events, sometimes confused with socialism/communism?
- What is liberalism's relationship with the Left?
- What is liberalism's relationship with the Arts?
- Who are exemplars of U.S. political liberalism? Franklin Delano Roosevelt?
- Could Ronald Reagan be classified as an exemplar of Republican liberalism? Or is Eisenhower a better example?
- How does liberalism cross party lines?
- What is liberalism's relationship to the common terms of liberal and conservative?
- What is liberalism in American economic terms?
- What is the relationship between class (economic) and liberalism?
- If liberalism has been instrumental in the construction of something of a "welfare state" in America, why is liberalism reviled by those on the far Left?
- Why is religion's relationship---whether Christian or otherwise---with liberalism troubled?
- Are secularism and liberalism basically synonymous?
- What is liberalism's relationship with multiculturalism? What of pluralism?
- What is postmodernism's relationship with liberalism?
- With all this potential confusion, who are "liberals"?
- Why is liberalism prone to the anarchy of license, "absolute liberty," and laissez-faire?
- Can equality exist without liberalism?

To catalyze debate in relation to answering some of these questions, I offer the following:

A. A definition of liberalism (from The American Heritage College Dictionary, Third Edition, 1997):

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1. The state or quality of being liberal.
2.a. A political theory favoring civil and political liberties, government by law with the consent of the governed, and protection from arbitrary authority.
2.b. The tenets or policies of a Liberal party.
3. An economic theory in favor of laissez-faire, the free market, and the gold standard.
4.a. A 19th-century Protestant movement that favored free intellectual inquiry, stressed the ethical and humanitarian content of Christianity, and de-emphasized dogmatic theology.
4.b. A 19th-century Roman Catholic movement that favored political democracy and ecclesiastical reform.
-----------------------------------------

B. Liberalism as denoted in my thesaurus (Webster's New World/Roget's A-Z Thesaurus, Wiley, 1999):
-----------------------------------------
Synonyms: broad-mindedness, liberality, free-thinking, freedom, radicalism, humanitarianism, humanism, free thought, progressivism, universality, forward view, breadth of mind, latitudinarianism
-----------------------------------------

C. Liberalism according to Wikipedia.

I don't like this article, in part because it uses the term "liberals" loosely in the second line of the piece. I realize that liberals can be used broadly as supporters of "liberalism," but the term has too many present-day negative connotations to be read fairly by non-specialist readers of the entry. ...Then again, a fair reader (rare) would see that "liberals" could apply to wide parts of both currently dominant American political parties. It is probably the case that Wikipedia's entry for "social liberalism" best encapsulates twentieth-century American liberalism as discussed by historians. But that entry is long, and this post is getting too long.

D. Liberalism according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (circa 1996, authored by Gerald Gaus and Shane Courtland.

I love the opening closing paragraphs (bolds mine):

As soon as one examines it, ‘liberalism’ fractures into a variety of types and competing visions. In this entry we focus on debates within the liberal tradition. We begin by (1) examining different interpretations of liberalism's core commitment — liberty. We then consider (2) the longstanding debate between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ liberalism. In section (3) we turn to the more recent controversy about whether liberalism is a ‘comprehensive’ or a ‘political’ doctrine. We close in (4) by considering disagreements as to ‘the reach’ of liberalism — does it apply to all humankind, and must all political communities be liberal? ...

Given that liberalism fractures on so many issues — the nature of liberty, the place of property and democracy in a just society, the comprehensiveness and the reach of the liberal ideal — one might wonder whether there is any point in talking of ‘liberalism’ at all. It is not, though, an unimportant or trivial thing that all these theories take liberty to be the grounding political value. Radical democrats assert the overriding value of equality, communitarians maintain that the demands of belongingness trump freedom, and conservatives complain that the liberal devotion to freedom undermines traditional values and virtues and so social order itself. Intramural disputes aside, liberals join in rejecting these conceptions of political right.*

*I have no idea what this last line means.

E. Liberalism according to the Encyclopedia Britannica (circa 1960 as defined by Max Lerner).

Here are the opening lines of that essay:
-----------------------------------------
.Liberalism is the creed, philosophy and movement which is committed to freedom as a method and policy in government, as an organizing principle in society and as a way of life for the individual and community. As a term it took its origins from the "Liberales," a Spanish political party in the early 19th century, but received its widest currency in the English language. As an idea and philosophy it predates its use as a term, and can be traced back to the Judaeo-Christian-Greek intellectual world, along with the idea of liberty itself with which it is closely linked.

Confusion of Terms.--Some of the confusions about liberalism arise from the various stages of meaning through which the term passed during a history of several centuries, and from the wide diversity of uses to which it has been put. There were in the second half of the 20th century a number of political parties, in Great Britain, Italy, Germany and elsewhere, called by the name of the "Liberal party" or some variant of it; there was a party of the same name active in the politics of New York state; and even a Liberal International which served as a clearinghouse for liberal political movements throughout the world. But while these parties expressed the liberal outlook, that outlook was not limited to them.
-----------------------------------------

There is much to recommend in this essay, particularly it's last section ("Liberalism in the Second Half of the 20th Century"), but notice how "Confusion of Terms" opens the second paragraph---not surprisingly.

I think we can see here how liberalism, as used in discussions about twentieth-century America, could be confusing. That said, in terms of a dictionary definition, I believe that 2.a. gets closest to the core of what I want to discuss in relation to every other topic outlined in the questions above.

With this breadth of associations and terminology, how are we---as writers and readers of history---to discuss "liberalism" with any clarity? Indeed, what is "liberalism" in twentieth-century America? It should be clear with this post that, at the very least, any historical narrative using this term without careful definition exposes itself to equivocation.

To be continued...- TL

PS (11:30 CST, 12/23): If possible, in discussion I would ask that we not use the term 'liberalism' to designate the political, social, and culture desires of 'liberals' (i.e the perceived 'Left' in America). In other words, I want to go against the common usage of the term liberalism in relation to the world of pundits and social commentators. I want to use liberalism in its most philosophical sense.

The Problem Of American Liberalism

With apologies to H.J. McCloskey, who in 1965 had an article published in The Review of Metaphysics (Vol. 19, no. 2) titled "The Problem of Liberalism," I propose we renew discussion of liberalism for historians today.

McCloskey wrote in what we might view as the height of the era, and in relation to philosophy. It's the 'might' in my prior sentence, however, that has stimulated me to propose the issue for debate here. I want to discuss the problem of liberalism in relation to historians---intellectual historians in particular---studying twentieth-century America.

My proposition is this: Understanding American liberalism in the twentieth century is the single most important issue facing U.S. intellectual historians today.

Why?

Liberalism touches on a daunting array of issues and topics important to studying thought in the century: politics, economics, religion, war, civil rights, individualism, communitarianism, the Progressive Era, the Cold War, the Culture Wars, the New Deal, Reaganism, and the list goes on and on.

Liberalism has also been a side---and sometimes direct---topic of many USIH posts (see here and here and here for recent examples). The topic has of course been covered in all three conferences. But we've never tackled it head on at USIH (until today) as an historiographical problem.

Despite this web of reference, citation, and relevance, I find only cobwebs surrounding the issue both in popular discussion and in the profession. I propose the following questions for debate:

- When did American liberalism begin? What was its apex? Is it over--is the "liberal project" in America dead?
- What is peculiar about American liberalism in terms of what Max Lerner called the "battlefields of liberalism"?
- Why is liberalism both loved and loathed?
- What is liberalism's relationship to the academy?
- What is liberalism's relationship with American modernity?
- What is philosophy's relationship with liberalism?
- Who are the most articulate proponents of liberalism in philosophy? Rawls? Dewey? Habermas? Walzer?
- Why is liberalism, in a very confusing turn of events, sometimes confused with socialism/communism?
- What is liberalism's relationship with the Left?
- What is liberalism's relationship with the Arts?
- Who are exemplars of U.S. political liberalism? Franklin Delano Roosevelt?
- Could Ronald Reagan be classified as an exemplar of Republican liberalism? Or is Eisenhower a better example?
- How does liberalism cross party lines?
- What is liberalism's relationship to the common terms of liberal and conservative?
- What is liberalism in American economic terms?
- What is the relationship between class (economic) and liberalism?
- If liberalism has been instrumental in the construction of something of a "welfare state" in America, why is liberalism reviled by those on the far Left?
- Why is religion's relationship---whether Christian or otherwise---with liberalism troubled?
- Are secularism and liberalism basically synonymous?
- What is liberalism's relationship with multiculturalism? What of pluralism?
- What is postmodernism's relationship with liberalism?
- With all this potential confusion, who are "liberals"?
- Why is liberalism prone to the anarchy of license, "absolute liberty," and laissez-faire?
- Can equality exist without liberalism?

To catalyze debate in relation to answering some of these questions, I offer the following:

A. A definition of liberalism (from The American Heritage College Dictionary, Third Edition, 1997):

-----------------------------------------
1. The state or quality of being liberal.
2.a. A political theory favoring civil and political liberties, government by law with the consent of the governed, and protection from arbitrary authority.
2.b. The tenets or policies of a Liberal party.
3. An economic theory in favor of laissez-faire, the free market, and the gold standard.
4.a. A 19th-century Protestant movement that favored free intellectual inquiry, stressed the ethical and humanitarian content of Christianity, and de-emphasized dogmatic theology.
4.b. A 19th-century Roman Catholic movement that favored political democracy and ecclesiastical reform.
-----------------------------------------

B. Liberalism as denoted in my thesaurus (Webster's New World/Roget's A-Z Thesaurus, Wiley, 1999):
-----------------------------------------
Synonyms: broad-mindedness, liberality, free-thinking, freedom, radicalism, humanitarianism, humanism, free thought, progressivism, universality, forward view, breadth of mind, latitudinarianism
-----------------------------------------

C. Liberalism according to Wikipedia.

I don't like this article, in part because it uses the term "liberals" loosely in the second line of the piece. I realize that liberals can be used broadly as supporters of "liberalism," but the term has too many present-day negative connotations to be read fairly by non-specialist readers of the entry. ...Then again, a fair reader (rare) would see that "liberals" could apply to wide parts of both currently dominant American political parties. It is probably the case that Wikipedia's entry for "social liberalism" best encapsulates twentieth-century American liberalism as discussed by historians. But that entry is long, and this post is getting too long.

D. Liberalism according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (circa 1996, authored by Gerald Gaus and Shane Courtland.

I love the opening closing paragraphs (bolds mine):

As soon as one examines it, ‘liberalism’ fractures into a variety of types and competing visions. In this entry we focus on debates within the liberal tradition. We begin by (1) examining different interpretations of liberalism's core commitment — liberty. We then consider (2) the longstanding debate between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ liberalism. In section (3) we turn to the more recent controversy about whether liberalism is a ‘comprehensive’ or a ‘political’ doctrine. We close in (4) by considering disagreements as to ‘the reach’ of liberalism — does it apply to all humankind, and must all political communities be liberal? ...

Given that liberalism fractures on so many issues — the nature of liberty, the place of property and democracy in a just society, the comprehensiveness and the reach of the liberal ideal — one might wonder whether there is any point in talking of ‘liberalism’ at all. It is not, though, an unimportant or trivial thing that all these theories take liberty to be the grounding political value. Radical democrats assert the overriding value of equality, communitarians maintain that the demands of belongingness trump freedom, and conservatives complain that the liberal devotion to freedom undermines traditional values and virtues and so social order itself. Intramural disputes aside, liberals join in rejecting these conceptions of political right.*

*I have no idea what this last line means.

E. Liberalism according to the Encyclopedia Britannica (circa 1960 as defined by Max Lerner).

Here are the opening lines of that essay:
-----------------------------------------
.Liberalism is the creed, philosophy and movement which is committed to freedom as a method and policy in government, as an organizing principle in society and as a way of life for the individual and community. As a term it took its origins from the "Liberales," a Spanish political party in the early 19th century, but received its widest currency in the English language. As an idea and philosophy it predates its use as a term, and can be traced back to the Judaeo-Christian-Greek intellectual world, along with the idea of liberty itself with which it is closely linked.

Confusion of Terms.--Some of the confusions about liberalism arise from the various stages of meaning through which the term passed during a history of several centuries, and from the wide diversity of uses to which it has been put. There were in the second half of the 20th century a number of political parties, in Great Britain, Italy, Germany and elsewhere, called by the name of the "Liberal party" or some variant of it; there was a party of the same name active in the politics of New York state; and even a Liberal International which served as a clearinghouse for liberal political movements throughout the world. But while these parties expressed the liberal outlook, that outlook was not limited to them.
-----------------------------------------

There is much to recommend in this essay, particularly it's last section ("Liberalism in the Second Half of the 20th Century"), but notice how "Confusion of Terms" opens the second paragraph---not surprisingly.

I think we can see here how liberalism, as used in discussions about twentieth-century America, could be confusing. That said, in terms of a dictionary definition, I believe that 2.a. gets closest to the core of what I want to discuss in relation to every other topic outlined in the questions above.

With this breadth of associations and terminology, how are we---as writers and readers of history---to discuss "liberalism" with any clarity? Indeed, what is "liberalism" in twentieth-century America? It should be clear with this post that, at the very least, any historical narrative using this term without careful definition exposes itself to equivocation.

To be continued...- TL

PS (11:30 CST, 12/23): If possible, in discussion I would ask that we not use the term 'liberalism' to designate the political, social, and culture desires of 'liberals' (i.e the perceived 'Left' in America). In other words, I want to go against the common usage of the term liberalism in relation to the world of pundits and social commentators. I want to use liberalism in its most philosophical sense.