Niebuhr And Obama: Part Cinq

We've discussed Obama's connections to Reinhold Niebuhr here (Paul Murphy post), here (Andrew Hartman post), here (Hartman again), and here (David Sehat). Since we've left the discussion alone for almost two years, I thought I'd pick it up again at the instigation of this long CNN feature, titled: "How Obama's favorite theologian shaped his first year in office" and authored by John Blake. Questions:

1. Do we agree with the points of the feature?
2. Is Niebuhr Obama's favorite philosopher, theologian, or both? The article's title uses the term "theologian," but the text cites a "widely cited New York Times column" where "President Obama called Niebuhr his 'favorite philosopher.' " We've talked about a Dionne citation/column here (via TNR, although I couldn't find the exact Dionne piece in TNR?). But CNN is apparently referring to an earlier piece by David Brooks who they cite later in the column (though he's not explicitly attached to the prior NYT reference). Anyway, I wonder which of the specialties of knowledge precisely fits Obama's view of Niebuhr.

As a former Missourian, I can't resist noting the last section of the CNN piece in relation to Missouri's former three-term senator, John Danforth. Here's the excerpt:

"Niebuhr would have loved that [Oslo] speech," says John Danforth, an Episcopal priest and a former Republican senator who also admires Niebuhr.

"I was very impressed with that speech," Danforth says. "He said you need to deal with terrorists in a very hard-nosed, pragmatic way but hold to American standards."

Yet Danforth says there are critical differences between Obama and Niebuhr.

"I see in Obama's approach to politics, which is surprisingly partisan and ideological, a hubris that is not Niebuhrian," says Danforth, who is also a partner at the Bryan Cave law firm in St. Louis, Missouri.

But how true, or non-ideological, is that last statement? When Danforth makes those claims, which hat is he wearing: Episcopal priest? Former Republican? Bryan Cave law firm partner (a firm that specializes in corporate transactions)? Global Leadership Foundation member? Or just that of a regular concerned citizen?

BTW: Avoid the 120-plus CNN comments if you can. They're depressing in their obtuseness. - TL

Niebuhr And Obama: Part Cinq

We've discussed Obama's connections to Reinhold Niebuhr here (Paul Murphy post), here (Andrew Hartman post), here (Hartman again), and here (David Sehat). Since we've left the discussion alone for almost two years, I thought I'd pick it up again at the instigation of this long CNN feature, titled: "How Obama's favorite theologian shaped his first year in office" and authored by John Blake. Questions:

1. Do we agree with the points of the feature?
2. Is Niebuhr Obama's favorite philosopher, theologian, or both? The article's title uses the term "theologian," but the text cites a "widely cited New York Times column" where "President Obama called Niebuhr his 'favorite philosopher.' " We've talked about a Dionne citation/column here (via TNR, although I couldn't find the exact Dionne piece in TNR?). But CNN is apparently referring to an earlier piece by David Brooks who they cite later in the column (though he's not explicitly attached to the prior NYT reference). Anyway, I wonder which of the specialties of knowledge precisely fits Obama's view of Niebuhr.

As a former Missourian, I can't resist noting the last section of the CNN piece in relation to Missouri's former three-term senator, John Danforth. Here's the excerpt:

"Niebuhr would have loved that [Oslo] speech," says John Danforth, an Episcopal priest and a former Republican senator who also admires Niebuhr.

"I was very impressed with that speech," Danforth says. "He said you need to deal with terrorists in a very hard-nosed, pragmatic way but hold to American standards."

Yet Danforth says there are critical differences between Obama and Niebuhr.

"I see in Obama's approach to politics, which is surprisingly partisan and ideological, a hubris that is not Niebuhrian," says Danforth, who is also a partner at the Bryan Cave law firm in St. Louis, Missouri.

But how true, or non-ideological, is that last statement? When Danforth makes those claims, which hat is he wearing: Episcopal priest? Former Republican? Bryan Cave law firm partner (a firm that specializes in corporate transactions)? Global Leadership Foundation member? Or just that of a regular concerned citizen?

BTW: Avoid the 120-plus CNN comments if you can. They're depressing in their obtuseness. - TL

CFP: American Ideas In Context (University of Nottingham)

FYI: From Nick Witham, USIH participant in 2009.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CFP

American Ideas in Context

A Postgraduate and Early Career Conference

School of American and Canadian Studies, University of Nottingham

14 September 2010

Plenary Speaker: Professor Michael O'Brien, Cambridge University

Intellectual history, or the history of ideas, is a methodological approach too often downplayed in disciplinary discussions of American Studies. This belies the fact that the study of American ideas and their specific contexts is vital to a wide variety of work currently taking place within the field.

The School of American and Canadian Studies at the University of Nottingham has historically provided a unique institutional context for the development of scholarship in American intellectual history. This one-day conference seeks to build on this expertise in order to highlight and promote the existence of a nation-wide community of postgraduates and early career researchers whose study of the interdisciplinary history of American ideas ranges from history and political theory to literature, art history and cultural studies. Proposing a broad definition of intellectual history, "American Ideas in Context" not only invites papers that cover traditional ground by stressing the importance of certain key intellectuals or abstract ideas. It also encourages presentations that highlight the origins of American ideas in social and political movements. This approach seeks to widen the classification of intellectual 'institutions' to encompass cultural as well as strictly academic sites of knowledge production (visual cultures and the press, for example). Contributions exploring the function of global, transnational and comparative linguistic factors in the formation of American thought will also be encouraged.

Overall, it is hoped that the conference will contribute to a wider understanding of the multiple historical, political and social contexts in which American ideas have been forged.

Subjects might include:

- Republicanism
- Liberalism
- Pragmatism
- Historiography
- Social Science
- The Old and New Lefts
- Conservatism
- Race Thinking
- Feminism
- Environmentalism
- Globalisation
- Identity Politics

If you are a postgraduate student or have completed a PhD since 2005 and wish to give a paper, please send a proposal of no more than 300 words along with a short CV to the contact details below. Papers should be of 20 minutes duration. There will be a number of travel bursaries available for postgraduate presenters, and information about accommodation options will be available shortly.

DEADLINE: 1 May 2010

Email: Nick Witham, american.ideas-at-gmail.com
Here's a link to the conference blog.

CFP: American Ideas In Context (University of Nottingham)

FYI: From Nick Witham, USIH participant in 2009.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CFP

American Ideas in Context

A Postgraduate and Early Career Conference

School of American and Canadian Studies, University of Nottingham

14 September 2010

Plenary Speaker: Professor Michael O'Brien, Cambridge University

Intellectual history, or the history of ideas, is a methodological approach too often downplayed in disciplinary discussions of American Studies. This belies the fact that the study of American ideas and their specific contexts is vital to a wide variety of work currently taking place within the field.

The School of American and Canadian Studies at the University of Nottingham has historically provided a unique institutional context for the development of scholarship in American intellectual history. This one-day conference seeks to build on this expertise in order to highlight and promote the existence of a nation-wide community of postgraduates and early career researchers whose study of the interdisciplinary history of American ideas ranges from history and political theory to literature, art history and cultural studies. Proposing a broad definition of intellectual history, "American Ideas in Context" not only invites papers that cover traditional ground by stressing the importance of certain key intellectuals or abstract ideas. It also encourages presentations that highlight the origins of American ideas in social and political movements. This approach seeks to widen the classification of intellectual 'institutions' to encompass cultural as well as strictly academic sites of knowledge production (visual cultures and the press, for example). Contributions exploring the function of global, transnational and comparative linguistic factors in the formation of American thought will also be encouraged.

Overall, it is hoped that the conference will contribute to a wider understanding of the multiple historical, political and social contexts in which American ideas have been forged.

Subjects might include:

- Republicanism
- Liberalism
- Pragmatism
- Historiography
- Social Science
- The Old and New Lefts
- Conservatism
- Race Thinking
- Feminism
- Environmentalism
- Globalisation
- Identity Politics

If you are a postgraduate student or have completed a PhD since 2005 and wish to give a paper, please send a proposal of no more than 300 words along with a short CV to the contact details below. Papers should be of 20 minutes duration. There will be a number of travel bursaries available for postgraduate presenters, and information about accommodation options will be available shortly.

DEADLINE: 1 May 2010

Email: Nick Witham, american.ideas-at-gmail.com
Here's a link to the conference blog.

Tim's Light Reading (02/3/2010)

1. Studying Reading Reception: The Reception Study Society and its associated annual, Reception: Texts, Readers, Audiences, History, should be of interest to practicing U.S. Intellectual historians. Why? It seems to me that every single community of discourse that ever existed in U.S. history worked, in some way, around the production and reception of some kind of text. Practitioners of reception history studying recent times have recourse to oral histories. This is an exciting development. In the past, however, reception was studied only through personal or institutional papers, and published accounts. On the last, I believe that book reviews are an understudied and under-explored resource for intellectual historians. While I fully understand the weaknesses of this source (e.g. word limitations, written for money, notoriety, for spite, etc.), the problems in assessing authorial motivations in reviews are no different than for any other publication. In other words, we can correct for those limitations, or publicly acknowledge them, and still pick out relevant nuggets of thought from reviews. Of course there are limits: How do we assess the audiences of reviews? That seems to throw us back into the archives to examine personal papers, diaries, etc.

2. The Weight Of Tradition In Publishing: A Berkeley study, summarized in the Chronicle of Higher Education, unsurprisingly reports that tradition weighs heavily on authors in considering publication options. This paragraph sums up the situation:

Although the seven fields surveyed have very different cultures, which are explored at length in the 733-page report, the executive summary points to the persistence of doing scholarly business as usual. "Experiments in new genres of scholarship and dissemination are occurring in every field, but they are taking place within the context of relatively conservative value and reward systems that have the practice of peer review at their core," the report states. It found that young scholars "can be particularly conservative" in their behavior, perhaps because they have more to lose than senior scholars, who "can afford to be the most innovative with regard to dissemination practices."

[The report's authors] identified five key needs of faculty members in regard to scholarly communication. Those include developing "more nuanced tenure and promotion practices that do not rely exclusively on the imprimatur of the publication or easily gamed citation metrics," and reassessing "the locus, mechanisms, timing, and meaning of peer review."

Here are the report's findings on its "History Case Study" (p. 388-503).

3. The Effects Of Catholic Higher Education On Catholics: Positive, Negative, Or In-Between?: Some relatively conservative American Catholic organizations criticize Catholic colleges and universities on the historical grounds that Catholics who attend Catholic institutions come out less Catholic (intellectually, socially, theologically) than when they entered. I have not seen a precise starting date put on this trend by critics. In his comprehensive history of American Catholic higher education, titled Contending With Modernity, Philip Gleason identified a turning point as the 1967 Land O' Lakes Conference held in the Wisconsin town of the same name. Here is the famous statement produced at the conference. Conservative critics pointed back to Land O' Lakes during last year's debates about Obama's Notre Dame address. But a new study, underscored by this InsideHigherEd article, forwards that while Catholics do indeed lose ground on specific Catholic teachings, they gain ground on others at Catholic colleges. In sum, the broad claim by some that Catholic colleges are really not functioning as such is questionable at best. It is more the case that Catholic colleges are not doing exactly what the conservative critics want.

4. Book of Interest: Williams, Zachery R., In Search of the Talented Tenth: Howard University Public Intellectuals and the Dilemmas of Race, 1926–1970. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2009. xiv, 250 pp. $39.95, isbn 978-0-8262-1862-9.)

5. Workshop of Interest: This Harvard University gathering will be of interest to some of our readers:

International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World, 1500-1825 (Bernard Bailyn, Director)

Workshop---Intellectual History: New Findings, New Approaches, in the Study of Religion, Science, and Cultural Identity

April 10, 2010

This Workshop will concentrate on current innovations in the study of the intellectual history of the Atlantic world, the flow of ideas between Europe and the Americas, from José de Acosta to Jonathan Edwards – new findings on Biblicism, alchemy, science, architecture, critiques of idolatry, and approaches to the Enlightenment. The intention is not to present descriptive summaries of these subjects but for leading authorities to identify, from work in progress, innovative points of inquiry and to indicate profitable lines for future study. ... To register, and for additional information, please see our Web site or contact the Atlantic History Seminar [Emerson Hall 4th Floor, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138; Phone: 617-496-3066; Fax: 617-496-8869; e-mail elebaron-at-fas.harvard.edu].

Tim's Light Reading (02/3/2010)

1. Studying Reading Reception: The Reception Study Society and its associated annual, Reception: Texts, Readers, Audiences, History, should be of interest to practicing U.S. Intellectual historians. Why? It seems to me that every single community of discourse that ever existed in U.S. history worked, in some way, around the production and reception of some kind of text. Practitioners of reception history studying recent times have recourse to oral histories. This is an exciting development. In the past, however, reception was studied only through personal or institutional papers, and published accounts. On the last, I believe that book reviews are an understudied and under-explored resource for intellectual historians. While I fully understand the weaknesses of this source (e.g. word limitations, written for money, notoriety, for spite, etc.), the problems in assessing authorial motivations in reviews are no different than for any other publication. In other words, we can correct for those limitations, or publicly acknowledge them, and still pick out relevant nuggets of thought from reviews. Of course there are limits: How do we assess the audiences of reviews? That seems to throw us back into the archives to examine personal papers, diaries, etc.

2. The Weight Of Tradition In Publishing: A Berkeley study, summarized in the Chronicle of Higher Education, unsurprisingly reports that tradition weighs heavily on authors in considering publication options. This paragraph sums up the situation:

Although the seven fields surveyed have very different cultures, which are explored at length in the 733-page report, the executive summary points to the persistence of doing scholarly business as usual. "Experiments in new genres of scholarship and dissemination are occurring in every field, but they are taking place within the context of relatively conservative value and reward systems that have the practice of peer review at their core," the report states. It found that young scholars "can be particularly conservative" in their behavior, perhaps because they have more to lose than senior scholars, who "can afford to be the most innovative with regard to dissemination practices."

[The report's authors] identified five key needs of faculty members in regard to scholarly communication. Those include developing "more nuanced tenure and promotion practices that do not rely exclusively on the imprimatur of the publication or easily gamed citation metrics," and reassessing "the locus, mechanisms, timing, and meaning of peer review."

Here are the report's findings on its "History Case Study" (p. 388-503).

3. The Effects Of Catholic Higher Education On Catholics: Positive, Negative, Or In-Between?: Some relatively conservative American Catholic organizations criticize Catholic colleges and universities on the historical grounds that Catholics who attend Catholic institutions come out less Catholic (intellectually, socially, theologically) than when they entered. I have not seen a precise starting date put on this trend by critics. In his comprehensive history of American Catholic higher education, titled Contending With Modernity, Philip Gleason identified a turning point as the 1967 Land O' Lakes Conference held in the Wisconsin town of the same name. Here is the famous statement produced at the conference. Conservative critics pointed back to Land O' Lakes during last year's debates about Obama's Notre Dame address. But a new study, underscored by this InsideHigherEd article, forwards that while Catholics do indeed lose ground on specific Catholic teachings, they gain ground on others at Catholic colleges. In sum, the broad claim by some that Catholic colleges are really not functioning as such is questionable at best. It is more the case that Catholic colleges are not doing exactly what the conservative critics want.

4. Book of Interest: Williams, Zachery R., In Search of the Talented Tenth: Howard University Public Intellectuals and the Dilemmas of Race, 1926–1970. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2009. xiv, 250 pp. $39.95, isbn 978-0-8262-1862-9.)

5. Workshop of Interest: This Harvard University gathering will be of interest to some of our readers:

International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World, 1500-1825 (Bernard Bailyn, Director)

Workshop---Intellectual History: New Findings, New Approaches, in the Study of Religion, Science, and Cultural Identity

April 10, 2010

This Workshop will concentrate on current innovations in the study of the intellectual history of the Atlantic world, the flow of ideas between Europe and the Americas, from José de Acosta to Jonathan Edwards – new findings on Biblicism, alchemy, science, architecture, critiques of idolatry, and approaches to the Enlightenment. The intention is not to present descriptive summaries of these subjects but for leading authorities to identify, from work in progress, innovative points of inquiry and to indicate profitable lines for future study. ... To register, and for additional information, please see our Web site or contact the Atlantic History Seminar [Emerson Hall 4th Floor, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138; Phone: 617-496-3066; Fax: 617-496-8869; e-mail elebaron-at-fas.harvard.edu].

Peter Gordon on What Is Intellectual History

Recently I found an essay by Peter Gordon titled “What Is Intellectual History? A Frankly Partisan Introduction to a Frequently Misunderstood Field.” Gordon answers this question by comparing intellectual history to other disciplines: history of ideas, philosophy, political theory, cultural history, and various aspects of sociology. His main point seems to be that intellectual history draws on multitude of methodologies and often overlaps with other disciplines (and he sees this as a good thing). Intellectual history is distinct because as its primary goal is takes the study of ideas and intellectual life. Also, intellectual historians find this study intrinsically interesting. For example, evaluating the relationship between cultural and intellectual history, Gordon writes: “Cultural historians pay attention to ideas mainly because they are seeking evidence for larger patterns of culture; intellectual historians pay attention to ideas for their cultural significance but also because they find the ideas themselves of interest.”

I found the essay interesting for two reasons. First, it reminded me of the discussion on this blog about what is U.S. intellectual history. Second, it increased my understanding of the field of intellectual history. Since my training was in the history of science department, I bring different assumptions and different understanding of what is intellectual history than many of this blog's other contributors and readers. Consequently, I often lack the knowledge which is assumed by others. For example, after reading Gordon’s essay, I finally understand something that always puzzled me: the source of intellectual history’s heavy focus on political thought.

I am curious what others think of Gordon’s assessment of intellectual history? Also, Gordon, who studies European history himself, draws on examples from European intellectual history. I wonder if his essay would be different if Americanist perspectives were included.