The Revenge of the Eustonians; or Benda It Like Berman

This Sunday, the New York Times Book Review featured a glowing assessment by Anthony Julius of Paul Berman's new book, The Flight of the Intellectuals, which angrily accuses Western left-wing intellectuals of embracing the Oxford University Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan while failing to come to the defense of the Somali-Dutch refugee and American Enterprise Institute Resident Fellow Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Ramadan, according to Berman, is a slippery character whose opposition to Islamic radicalism is more ambivalent than is often said; while Hirsi Ali is a brave secularist who has devoted her career to truly opposing Islamic extremism in the name of Enlightenment values. But Berman and Julius seem more interested in their opponents on the Western intellectual left, who, they argue, have betrayed their vocation and their intellectual heritage through (in Julius's words):

the false identification of liberal values with an oppressive West, and of political Islamism with an oppressed third world; an unreflective, unqualified opposition to every exercise of American power; a certain blindness regarding, or even tenderness toward, contemporary expressions of anti-Semitism.

For Julius, Berman's book is an impressive entry in a genre that includes Richard Wolin's Seduction of Unreason: the Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism and the many books devoted to Martin Heidegger's Nazism, works which call intellectuals to account for monstrous political failings. As Julius notes, the urtext of this genre is Julien Benda's La Trahison des Clerc (The Betrayal of the Intellectuals) (1927), which attacked intellectuals who abandoned dispassionate reason in favor of nationalism, racism, and militarism.

"Berman," writes Julius, "has a fair claim to being regarded as the Benda of our time. In The Flight of the Intellectuals he continues his work of redeeming the good name of intellectuals by exposing the corrupt among them."

Berman's book has also been lavishly praised by Ron Rosenbaum in Slate, who had personally encouraged Berman to expand an already extensive 2007 New Republic piece attacking Tariq Ramadan.

What links Berman, Julius, and Rosenbaum, is that each is strongly connected to the self-described Decent Left that emerged following 9/11. And the elephant in the room of their discussion of left intellectuals and Tariq Ramadan is the Decent Left's signal project, the War on Iraq.

Paul Berman, in particular, has been an unusually committed and dogged proponent of that war, seeing it as the first necessary step in a long war against "Muslim totalitarianism."* Along with Berman, Anthony Julius was an early signatory to the Euston Manifesto, a 2006 British document that excoriated the anti-war left and has been the chief institutional manifestation of the pro-war left in the UK.

Ron Rosenbaum, for his part, was ambivalent about the upcoming Iraq War in October 2002, but he knew what he didn't like--the anti-war movement. How dare leftist academics attack George W. Bush and John Ashcroft, Rosenbaum wrote, when they had yet to atone for the crimes of Josef Stalin and Pol Pot:

Goodbye to the brilliant thinkers of the Left who believe it’s the very height of wit to make fun of George W. Bush’s intelligence—thereby establishing, of course, how very, very smart they are. Mr. Bush may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer (I think he’s more ill-informed and lazy than dumb). But they are guilty of a historical stupidity on a far greater scale, in their blind spot about Marxist genocides. It’s a failure of self-knowledge and intellectual responsibility that far outweighs Bush’s, because they’re supposed to be so very smart.

"I guess today," Rosenbaum concluded dramatically, "Left means never having to say you're sorry."

Say what you will about the Eustonian "leftists," they certainly seem to have adopted Rosenbaum's accusatory credo as their own when it comes to the Iraq War.

There have been many more appalling crimes in the last bloody century of the world's history, but in this young millennium, the War on Iraq stands as one of the greatest wastes of human life and national treasure. It helped destabilize a region. It ushered in new threats to civil liberties in two of the world's great democracies. It placed the United States in the company of the world's open torturers. And unlike Stalin's and Pol Pot's genocides, this one is our responsibility as Americans and Brits. And special responsibility lies with the war's unrepentant cheerleaders.

So while I don't have a studied opinion about Tariq Ramadan, I do know that Paul Berman, Anthony Julius, and Ron Rosenbaum are pretty much the last people who ought to be lecturing us about the trahison des clercs.**
________________________________________
* Berman's view of the war is on fine display in the Slate forum entitled "Liberal Hawks Reconsider the Iraq War" (in Berman's case, not very much).

** For an alternate view on Tariq Ramadan, see this recent Andrew March piece from The American Prospect.

The Revenge of the Eustonians; or Benda It Like Berman

This Sunday, the New York Times Book Review featured a glowing assessment by Anthony Julius of Paul Berman's new book, The Flight of the Intellectuals, which angrily accuses Western left-wing intellectuals of embracing the Oxford University Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan while failing to come to the defense of the Somali-Dutch refugee and American Enterprise Institute Resident Fellow Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Ramadan, according to Berman, is a slippery character whose opposition to Islamic radicalism is more ambivalent than is often said; while Hirsi Ali is a brave secularist who has devoted her career to truly opposing Islamic extremism in the name of Enlightenment values. But Berman and Julius seem more interested in their opponents on the Western intellectual left, who, they argue, have betrayed their vocation and their intellectual heritage through (in Julius's words):

the false identification of liberal values with an oppressive West, and of political Islamism with an oppressed third world; an unreflective, unqualified opposition to every exercise of American power; a certain blindness regarding, or even tenderness toward, contemporary expressions of anti-Semitism.

For Julius, Berman's book is an impressive entry in a genre that includes Richard Wolin's Seduction of Unreason: the Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism and the many books devoted to Martin Heidegger's Nazism, works which call intellectuals to account for monstrous political failings. As Julius notes, the urtext of this genre is Julien Benda's La Trahison des Clerc (The Betrayal of the Intellectuals) (1927), which attacked intellectuals who abandoned dispassionate reason in favor of nationalism, racism, and militarism.

"Berman," writes Julius, "has a fair claim to being regarded as the Benda of our time. In The Flight of the Intellectuals he continues his work of redeeming the good name of intellectuals by exposing the corrupt among them."

Berman's book has also been lavishly praised by Ron Rosenbaum in Slate, who had personally encouraged Berman to expand an already extensive 2007 New Republic piece attacking Tariq Ramadan.

What links Berman, Julius, and Rosenbaum, is that each is strongly connected to the self-described Decent Left that emerged following 9/11. And the elephant in the room of their discussion of left intellectuals and Tariq Ramadan is the Decent Left's signal project, the War on Iraq.

Paul Berman, in particular, has been an unusually committed and dogged proponent of that war, seeing it as the first necessary step in a long war against "Muslim totalitarianism."* Along with Berman, Anthony Julius was an early signatory to the Euston Manifesto, a 2006 British document that excoriated the anti-war left and has been the chief institutional manifestation of the pro-war left in the UK.

Ron Rosenbaum, for his part, was ambivalent about the upcoming Iraq War in October 2002, but he knew what he didn't like--the anti-war movement. How dare leftist academics attack George W. Bush and John Ashcroft, Rosenbaum wrote, when they had yet to atone for the crimes of Josef Stalin and Pol Pot:

Goodbye to the brilliant thinkers of the Left who believe it’s the very height of wit to make fun of George W. Bush’s intelligence—thereby establishing, of course, how very, very smart they are. Mr. Bush may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer (I think he’s more ill-informed and lazy than dumb). But they are guilty of a historical stupidity on a far greater scale, in their blind spot about Marxist genocides. It’s a failure of self-knowledge and intellectual responsibility that far outweighs Bush’s, because they’re supposed to be so very smart.

"I guess today," Rosenbaum concluded dramatically, "Left means never having to say you're sorry."

Say what you will about the Eustonian "leftists," they certainly seem to have adopted Rosenbaum's accusatory credo as their own when it comes to the Iraq War.

There have been many more appalling crimes in the last bloody century of the world's history, but in this young millennium, the War on Iraq stands as one of the greatest wastes of human life and national treasure. It helped destabilize a region. It ushered in new threats to civil liberties in two of the world's great democracies. It placed the United States in the company of the world's open torturers. And unlike Stalin's and Pol Pot's genocides, this one is our responsibility as Americans and Brits. And special responsibility lies with the war's unrepentant cheerleaders.

So while I don't have a studied opinion about Tariq Ramadan, I do know that Paul Berman, Anthony Julius, and Ron Rosenbaum are pretty much the last people who ought to be lecturing us about the trahison des clercs.**
________________________________________
* Berman's view of the war is on fine display in the Slate forum entitled "Liberal Hawks Reconsider the Iraq War" (in Berman's case, not very much).

** For an alternate view on Tariq Ramadan, see this recent Andrew March piece from The American Prospect.

CFP: “Intellectuals and Their Publics”

Third Annual U.S. Intellectual History Conference
Sponsored by USIH and the Center for the Humanities
The Graduate Center, CUNY
New York City
October 21-22, 2010

Paper and panel proposals are welcome for the Third Annual U.S. Intellectual History Conference to be held on October 21-22, 2010 in New York City. The Conference is being organized by the editors of the U.S. Intellectual History (USIH) blog in coordination with the City University of New York's Center for the Humanities (The Graduate Center). Founded in 2007, USIH promotes discussion of American intellectual history and fosters connections between scholars from any discipline sharing this interest. Visit our site: http://us-intellectual-history.blogspot.com/

This year’s theme is “Intellectuals and Their Publics.” We seek papers and panels reflecting upon the social, political, and cultural impact of intellectuals and their varied relationships to a diversity of publics, such as ethnic or racial groups, professionals, scholars, artists, politicians, or civil rights organizations. Intellectuals have always worked in relationship to their audience. In what ways have intellectuals defined, or been defined by, their audiences? In the pluralistic public culture of the United States, have audience divisions shaped distinctive intellectual traditions or supplemented a common public culture? In general, how have intellectuals—whether scientists or theologians, philosophers or authors, artists or policymakers—sought broader public relevance, as social critics, “public intellectuals,” or in other ways? In what ways have academic intellectuals breached disciplinary boundaries and/or reached non-academic audiences? Have the responsibilities pressed upon, and accepted by, Black, Latino/a, Native American, and Asian-American intellectuals been different from those expected of Euro-Americans? While we solicit papers on these and related issues, we welcome papers and panels on other aspects of U.S. intellectual history as well.

In addition to individual papers, we also encourage submissions of full panels and applications from those who would be interested in moderating a session. Please submit electronic abstracts for papers, panels, or both by Tuesday, June 15, 2010. Proposals should be approximately 200 words and include a concise curriculum vitae for each participant. Be sure to include your postal and e-mail addresses, as well as a phone number. Those interested in chairing a session or commenting should send a CV indicating areas of expertise and interests. Panels will feature three papers, no longer than 20 minutes each. Sessions will last 120 minutes.

Please address all inquiries and abstracts to:

Andrew Hartman
ahartma@ilstu.edu

CFP: “Intellectuals and Their Publics”

Third Annual U.S. Intellectual History Conference
Sponsored by USIH and the Center for the Humanities
The Graduate Center, CUNY
New York City
October 21-22, 2010

Paper and panel proposals are welcome for the Third Annual U.S. Intellectual History Conference to be held on October 21-22, 2010 in New York City. The Conference is being organized by the editors of the U.S. Intellectual History (USIH) blog in coordination with the City University of New York's Center for the Humanities (The Graduate Center). Founded in 2007, USIH promotes discussion of American intellectual history and fosters connections between scholars from any discipline sharing this interest. Visit our site: http://us-intellectual-history.blogspot.com/

This year’s theme is “Intellectuals and Their Publics.” We seek papers and panels reflecting upon the social, political, and cultural impact of intellectuals and their varied relationships to a diversity of publics, such as ethnic or racial groups, professionals, scholars, artists, politicians, or civil rights organizations. Intellectuals have always worked in relationship to their audience. In what ways have intellectuals defined, or been defined by, their audiences? In the pluralistic public culture of the United States, have audience divisions shaped distinctive intellectual traditions or supplemented a common public culture? In general, how have intellectuals—whether scientists or theologians, philosophers or authors, artists or policymakers—sought broader public relevance, as social critics, “public intellectuals,” or in other ways? In what ways have academic intellectuals breached disciplinary boundaries and/or reached non-academic audiences? Have the responsibilities pressed upon, and accepted by, Black, Latino/a, Native American, and Asian-American intellectuals been different from those expected of Euro-Americans? While we solicit papers on these and related issues, we welcome papers and panels on other aspects of U.S. intellectual history as well.

In addition to individual papers, we also encourage submissions of full panels and applications from those who would be interested in moderating a session. Please submit electronic abstracts for papers, panels, or both by Tuesday, June 15, 2010. Proposals should be approximately 200 words and include a concise curriculum vitae for each participant. Be sure to include your postal and e-mail addresses, as well as a phone number. Those interested in chairing a session or commenting should send a CV indicating areas of expertise and interests. Panels will feature three papers, no longer than 20 minutes each. Sessions will last 120 minutes.

Please address all inquiries and abstracts to:

Andrew Hartman
ahartma@ilstu.edu

USIH 3.0: Keynote and Plenary Sessions

[Updated: 5/14/2010]

The program for the third annual U.S. Intellectual History Conference (USIH3) will be highlighted by the following keynote speaker and plenary sessions:

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Keynote: James Kloppenberg, the Charles Warren Professor of American History at Harvard University.
Friday, Oct. 22, 1:30-3:00 p.m.

Professor Kloppenberg specializes in American and European intellectual history. For his keynote, Kloppenberg will be presenting from his book on the thought of Barack Obama, forthcoming from Princeton University Press.He has written about the rise and fall of social democracy in Europe and America; eighteenth-century American politics and ideas; the career of the American philosophy of pragmatism from the late nineteenth to the twenty-first century; European interpretations of American culture from Tocqueville through Weber; and the relation between contemporary critical theory and historical writing.

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

Plenary: Intellectual History for What?
Friday, Oct. 22, 7-9 p.m.

George Cotkin
Rochelle Gurstein
Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn
Wilfred McClay
David Steigerwald
Casey Nelson Blake

This plenary session will raise a number of questions involving the relationship between intellectual history and less specialized audiences and genres of expression, including: intellectual history and social/cultural criticism; intellectual history as a resource for moral reflection and edification; writing for, teaching, and speaking to generalist audiences; and the ambiguous position of intellectual history within the research university.

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

Plenary: Renewing Black Intellectual History
Thursday, Oct 21, 6-8 p.m.

The following four speakers are confirmed:

Adolph Reed, Jr.
Kenneth W. Warren
Dean E. Robinson
Touré F. Reed

This plenary that will consist of several contributors to an exciting new anthology, Renewing Black Intellectual History: The Ideological and Material Foundations of African American Thought. "This book maps the changing conditions of black political practice and experience from Emancipation to Obama with excursions into the Jim Crow era, Black Power radicalism, and the Reagan revolt. Here are essays, classic and new, that define historically and conceptually discrete problems affecting black Americans as these problems have been shaped by both politics and scholarly fashion. A key goal of the book is to come to terms with the changing terrain of American life in view of major Civil Rights court decisions and legislation."

USIH 3.0: Keynote and Plenary Sessions

[Updated: 5/14/2010]

The program for the third annual U.S. Intellectual History Conference (USIH3) will be highlighted by the following keynote speaker and plenary sessions:

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

Keynote: James Kloppenberg, the Charles Warren Professor of American History at Harvard University.
Friday, Oct. 22, 1:30-3:00 p.m.

Professor Kloppenberg specializes in American and European intellectual history. For his keynote, Kloppenberg will be presenting from his book on the thought of Barack Obama, forthcoming from Princeton University Press.He has written about the rise and fall of social democracy in Europe and America; eighteenth-century American politics and ideas; the career of the American philosophy of pragmatism from the late nineteenth to the twenty-first century; European interpretations of American culture from Tocqueville through Weber; and the relation between contemporary critical theory and historical writing.

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

Plenary: Intellectual History for What?
Friday, Oct. 22, 7-9 p.m.

George Cotkin
Rochelle Gurstein
Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn
Wilfred McClay
David Steigerwald
Casey Nelson Blake

This plenary session will raise a number of questions involving the relationship between intellectual history and less specialized audiences and genres of expression, including: intellectual history and social/cultural criticism; intellectual history as a resource for moral reflection and edification; writing for, teaching, and speaking to generalist audiences; and the ambiguous position of intellectual history within the research university.

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

Plenary: Renewing Black Intellectual History
Thursday, Oct 21, 6-8 p.m.

The following four speakers are confirmed:

Adolph Reed, Jr.
Kenneth W. Warren
Dean E. Robinson
Touré F. Reed

This plenary that will consist of several contributors to an exciting new anthology, Renewing Black Intellectual History: The Ideological and Material Foundations of African American Thought. "This book maps the changing conditions of black political practice and experience from Emancipation to Obama with excursions into the Jim Crow era, Black Power radicalism, and the Reagan revolt. Here are essays, classic and new, that define historically and conceptually discrete problems affecting black Americans as these problems have been shaped by both politics and scholarly fashion. A key goal of the book is to come to terms with the changing terrain of American life in view of major Civil Rights court decisions and legislation."

Doing the backwards Kuhn

Interesting thoughts about historical methodology and theory from Adolph Reed in 1997 (I highlighted the Kuhn reference I mention in my title):

9: It is natural enough--given the primacy of racial subordination and oppression--that Afro-American thinking has been so thoroughly dominated by issues of racial strategy. What Myrdal overlooked, however, is that even the narrowest, most 'provincial' lines of debate derive from and are structured by a normatively significant language of politics, a discourse bound by shared 'values, beliefs, perceptions, and concepts.' In their various critiques Fontaine, Reddick, Thorpe, and Frazier in effect were calling for black intellectuals to adopt a more critically reflective stance vis-a-vis the foundations of prevailing patterns of black social and political discourse."

10: "Under these influences, Afro-Americanist scholarship congealed around an intellectual core characterized by naivete concerning both the historical autonomy of political thought and the theoretical and epistemic foundations of its own enterprise. As a consequence, research has been largely blind to the regions of deeper normative meanings that are tacit within expressly pragmatic black political debates; for penetrating those regions requires reconstructing the historically specific intellectuals conventions that set the terms of episodic controversy. Not having access to the conventional groundings of black discourse, furthermore, undermines the project of commenting other than trivially on the durable features and self-driving characteristics of Afro-American thought. Instead, such commentary has tended to depict either a perennial chase after platitudinous symbols--'freedom,' 'equality,' even 'struggle'--or a Whiggish saga of the linear unfolding of a grand idea.

11: For students of Afro-American thought the call for critical reflectiveness is therefore most importantly a call for making the normative underpinnings of black thought accessible. Thus we must examine texts as historical artifacts of specific discursive communities. This is in turn entails a need for greater theoretical self-consciousness about two discrete aspects of our approach to our subject matter; one bearing on the relation between the Afro-Americanist and Americanist fields, and the other more generally on the history of ideas. First, to the extent that black thought takes shape within a broader American language of politics, credible recovery of the normative principles tacit in black discourse requires accounting for that constitutive grammar of political debate. ... The study of Afro-American thought can be enriched by rigorous study of American thought and should be so informed.

This methodological innocence--a function of the prevailing naivete about historical contextuality--has left Afro-Americanists without a basis for discussing either interpretive standards or purposive orientations to research. This point should not be taken to suggest a call for a research 'paradigm.' Such an effort hints of solipsism and would deploy scholarly resources most inefficiently. Besides, exercises in paradigm building very likely invert their Kuhnian inspiration anyway. By forgetting that paradigms--when and where they exist--are born, not made, efforts to call them into existence commit a version of the well-known error of confounding the history of science and its summary reconstruction as a sequential logic in the philosophy of science. In this area Hegel's dictum holds: 'The way is the long way around'; one might add, 'if there is any way at all.' Rather, what I am suggesting is simply that we inform our work with the insights--and the ambiguities--generated by hermeneutical and otherwise procedural discussions throughout the broader history of ideas (and, for that matter, literary criticism).

Proper attentiveness to historical contextuality requires breaking the thrall of presentism and similar forms of interpretive naivete, which in turn requires cultivating an attitude of humility and cautious self-doubt in approach to texts. These qualities can be enhanced by making the field's reigning assumptions and procedures objects of scrutiny and by considering Afro-American thought to be a 'relatively autonomous' subset of American thought in general and the history of ideas writ large.