The Fracas

As I mentioned in a recent post, I have been working through the historiography/theory section of my exam reading list.  I am on the home stretch -- finished Haskell and Wickberg yesterday, with only Megill and Klein to go.  I hope to turn the last page of Klein by the middle of next week, if not before.

What I am most enjoying about this section of my reading list, especially these texts published since the mid-80s, is the way historians routinely and collegially challenge each other's assumptions and interpretations.  Novick defines an objectivity that never existed and proceeds to objectively (for the most part) explore its fall from favor. Haskell takes Novick to task for confusing objectivity with neutrality.  Haskell takes White to task for (among other things) eschewing revolutions even as he calls for revolutionary historiography.  Wickberg takes Haskell to task for exploring the causes of the "humanitarian sensibility" without exploring the sensibility. 

This whole section of my list illustrates very well the dynamic that Haskell describes in some his essays on the professionalization of the academy, the emergence of disciplines, and the epistemological ground of academic freedom.  In Haskell's reading, the Peircean community of the competent is collegially competitive, a "miniature market":

It is a market in which people compete not for money, but for the affective currency of criticism: fame instead of disgrace; honor in place of shame; compliments, not complaints, about the technical worth of one's work. What each competitor strives to accumulate in this special "countervailing" market is not capital, but reputation, a stock of favorable impressions of himself and his work in the minds of his peers.  Since people do not necessarily lose self-esteem when they bestow praise on others, the competitors in this market are not playing a strictly zero-sum game, and the spirit of their competition is consequently often relaxed and friendly.  But esteem is not limitless in supply, and the deeply personal character of the productions and performances being criticized can charge the competition in this market with explosive emotional force.*

Collegiality is precisely what intensifies this "deeply personal" competition, while at the same time absorbing and channeling some of that intensity in ways that build camaraderie instead of undermining it. Says Haskell:

The community's achievement of "logical goodness" depends not only on conflict and competition but also on its members' adherence to such collegial values as honesty, a degree of tolerance (give one's own susceptibility to error), dedication to the resolution of conflicts, willingness to be persuaded by evidence, logic, and reason, and so on.**

Those "collegial values" presuppose professional standards, including the standards of membership:  who is and who is not part of the community of inquiry. These values are enforced and reinforced via the collective approval or opprobrium of the disciplinary community. 

Sometimes that defense of professional standards and values can prove problematic.  Both Haskell and Novick examine a few recent (for the 1980s) cases of community policing of professional standards:  the David Abraham case and the Sears workplace discrimination lawsuit.  Novick viewed the Abraham case as an example of professional gatekeeping run amok; for Haskell, the response of feminist historians to the testimony of Rosalind Rosenberg was a case of "intellectually indefensible"*** partisan advocacy.  It is worth noting -- and Novick and Haskell both mention the fact -- that both were "partisans" in these respective conflicts, which in some ways makes the incidents all the more suitable as examples of where the professional gets personal.

Overall, though, the discourse of the academic community is a fairly friendly fracas. Or so it appears to me now.  But the fracas may seem congenial to me only because I haven't really gotten scrappy yet.  I have yet put to forward an idea in the academy that I'm willing to fight for -- I mean, really fight.  And that's a good thing, because I'm not ready yet.  My idea isn't ready yet.  But it will be.  And part of getting myself ready for the intense competition of professional academic discourse involves a careful study of how intellectual historians argue, with perhaps the occasional sparring match on this blog.

All in good fun -- until it's My Awesome Idea on the line.

Nah, it'll still be fun.




__________________
*Thomas Haskell, "Professionalism versus Capitalism," Objectivity Is Not Neutrality: Explanatory Schemes in History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1998), 111.

**109.

***163

The Intellectual Development of African American Children

Yolande Du Bois

I am particularly interested in the intellectual development of individuals, including their childhoods and education. I have the subjective feeling that African American history, like historiography in general (except for the subfield of the History of the Family), is not very concerned with childhood. I offer just one bit of anecdotal proof--one of my dissertation committee members criticized me for including childhoods in my dissertation (particularly that of the students at the M Street/Dunbar High School in Washington DC).

In addition to lack of interest, I think one of the reason why there is less of an emphasis on childhood is simply a lack of evidence. Biographers do what they can with the evidence they have, but other historians start with adults.

Let me offer one counter-example from a different field-- I have a friend in the UK English Department, Nazera Wright, who is studying notions of African American girlhood in black print culture and her work seems eminently fresh and exciting to me. She, more than me, knows the work that has already been done on African American children.



These last couple of weeks I've been working on reconstructing Yolande Du Bois's childhood, which also necessarily includes a lot about W.E.B. and Nina Du Bois as parents. Unlike the individuals one would usually be concerned with--i.e. figuring out the childhoods of extraordinary individuals--Yolande was on the whole pretty average, except for having one exceptional parent and for having opportunities almost no other child of her race had in her era. For instance, she spent two years at an English boarding school (and would have stayed longer except for the Great War which sent her and her classmates under their desks during zeppelin raids).

Yolande was a happy-go-lucky child eager to make friends and fit in. Her grades were marginal, which deeply discouraged both of her parents. Du Bois wrote a remarkable letter about her to the principal of the Bedales School in England, explaining who she was and the hopes he had for her education and her future. In particular, he wrote that he did not want her trained "just for breeding" but rather to have a profession that she was passionate about. Unfortunately for father and daughter, Yolande's deep passions tended towards boys, clothes, and social engagements. As Yolande grew, Du Bois's advice grew more and more strident and less sweet. He became very nervous when it seemed like a college boyfriend would divert her attention away from her studies (NO MRS. Degree for his daughter!). Speaking from a lifetime's worth of a passion-less marriage (tempered by many extra-marital affairs), Du Bois wrote his daughter, 

Making engagements and marriage are the light and accompaniments of life, and not its end and aim. Prepare first to live; get an education; know yourself; know the world as it is and was and may be. You have ability to write and draw—but these talents need long and painstaking cultivation. This work  need not in the end, interfere with a happy marriage—rather it will enhance its chances of success. Nothing is more disheartening and idiotic than to see two human beings, without cultivated tastes, without trained abilities and without power to earn a living, locking themselves together and trying to live on love. Love is a splendid, beautiful thing. Life without it is worse than death. But love does not come by calling or by imagining yourself infatuated for life, when the fact is only a temporary sex attraction.

It seems so tragic to me (for both father and daughter) that someone so intent on promoting education and a profession for his daughter would have a child more content with traditional gender norms. She worked very hard to live up to her father's expectations, but was fighting against her own inclinations. You can see the struggle in the following quote from her letter to her father in reply to the one above.

 I have been thinking about what I’m going to do when I graduate. I wish I was about 5 people because there are so many things I want to do. For example; I want to work to make some money; (did I hear you say it’s about time); I want to get an MA degree; I want to study journalism and commercial illustrating, and I want to get married because I despise old maids (most of them) and when I’m old I’ll want some children.

Earl Shorris and Popular Anti-Straussianism

Earl Shorris

Last week, author and educator Earl Shorris passed away at the age of 75 from non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. His New York Times obituary rightly focuses on his creation of the Clemente Course in the Humanities, the program he created in 1995 to bring a broad, liberal arts curriculum to the economically disadvantaged, which earned him a National Humanities Medal in 2000.

But the first thing I thought of when I heard of Shorris's passing was a piece that he wrote for Harper's, published in June, 2004, entitled "Ignoble Liars: Leo Strauss, George Bush, and the Philosophy of Mass Deception" (.pdf available here).  Shorris's piece was one of a series of popular works from the middle of the last decade that sought to blame Leo Strauss and his acolytes for all that had gone wrong during the Bush years.  In May, 2003, Seymour Hersh had argued in The New Yorker that a Straussian cabal was responsible for cooking U.S. intelligence on Iraq to bring about war, a charge echoed that same month by James Atlas in a New York Times op-ed.  This flurry of articles, in turn, inspired the actor Tim Robbins to write Embedded, a play that premiered in L.A. in July, 2003, which dramatized the notion that Leo Strauss was pulling the strings of the Iraq War from beyond the grave.  Shortly after Shorris's article appeared, in the fall of 2004, the documentarian Adam Curtis's The Power of Nightmares premiered on BBC television, arguing that Leo Strauss had not only been the intellectual font of neoconservatism, but had also inspired American policymakers to invent Al Qaeda.

How do these attempts to argue that Leo Strauss was the power behind the Bush throne hold up almost a decade later?  How does Shorris's piece fare among them?




My provisional answer is to the first question is that these articles, plays, and documentaries explained both too little and too much.  On the one hand, they were part of a much larger tendency to see the Bush Administration--especially post-9/11--as representing a much more radical break with the past than it in fact did.  The too-little-acknowledged continuities have become clearer now that we have had three years during which a Democratic administration has not, in fact, reversed many of the policies that critics found so appalling during the Bush years. Discovering a previously obscure, foreign, reactionary thinker as the secret cause of an administration's actions nicely fit the view of the Bush administration as a radical break from the past.  The focus on Strauss and his followers as the secret power behind the Bush administration tended to produce elaborate explanations for fairly historically common phenomena, like administrations' lying to the public about wars, while providing far too shallow critiques of other phenomena, such as long-standing problems with the national security state that had developed during the Cold War and lived on long after its end.  Stories of the trahison des Straussians also uncomfortably resembled a long tradition of anti-intellectual counter-subversive narratives, the most famous modern examples of which involved Communists during the Cold War.

All that being said, Straussians have played a smaller, but nonetheless important, role in modern American conservatism. The fact that some false conspiracy theories have been constructed about them no more makes them unimportant on the right than the falsity of most anti-Communist conspiracy theories means that Communists weren't important in the Old Left.

In the context of the popular anti-Straussian writings of the Bush years, Shorris's piece is measured and interesting, if nonetheless off-base in many typical ways.  Shorris makes his share of sloppy mistakes, some of them understandable and basically unimportant (e.g. identifying Strauss's hometown as "Kirchheim" rather than "Kirchhain") some of them significant and less defensible (e.g. identifying Grover Norquist as a Straussian).

To his credit, Shorris sets his critique in a world in which Leo Strauss did not invent public dishonesty:

It is safe to say that neither Ronald Reagan nor the Bushes have read Leo Strauss, and certainly no politician needs to be taught how to lie by a professor of philosophy.

Nevertheless, as Shorris notes in a footnote to this statement,

we need not be concerned with proving direct lines of influence. A brief summary of Straussian doctrine suffices to demonstrate its affinity with what one might call the "mind of the regime," whether any particular member of the Bush Administration has read Strauss or not.

But Shorris is sensibly uncomfortable at leaving the matter at merely identifying similarities between the behavior of the administration and (his understanding of) Strauss, so he continues in the main text of his article:

Perhaps William Kristol, while serving as Dan Quayle's chief of staff, tutored the vice president in the finer points of Platonic politics. But it is unlikely. The step from philosophy to action is almost always circuitous, Machiavelli being one of the rare exceptions. Strauss's ideas about ideas took the usual path, picked and poked and punched, mutating here, understood selectively there. At one time, Strauss wrote a sentence in which he opposed preventive war. How disappointed his followers in the Department of Defense would be to read it now in light of the wreckage they have made!  

The career of Strauss's teachings is one of the wonders and the dangers of the book, as the master himself might have said, knowing that the long life of books, unlike newspapers or television, is bound up with history in a process of indirection. The ideas in books somehow manage to wiggle through the morass of individuals and information in large modern societies and become effective. The way is not clear, but the fact of it often gives surcease to the pains of laboring in obscurity.

Two things are notable about this passage. First, it shows a much subtler understanding of the actual ways that ideas affect society than the sometimes Dan Brownish intellectual conspiracy theories that have been written about the Straussians. Secondly, there's some suggestion that Shorris sees Strauss himself as similar to Prof. Rupert Cadell (Jimmy Stewart) in Alfred Hitchcock's Rope, whose Nietzschean ideas are transformed by a student into an act of murder.  In fact, around the time Shorris wrote his Harper's piece, a number of critics of the Straussians, including both Anne Norton and Mark Lilla, began to suggest that Strauss was not a Straussian and that the master should not be blamed for the sins of his acolytes.

Shorris himself, however, is not clear on this point. One of the striking things about his article is the poignancy of his (essentially negative) portrait of Leo Strauss.  Shorris has virtually nothing good to say about Strauss's writings (which he sees as intentionally impossible to decipher and largely dedicated to bad writing for bad writing's sake) or about his political commitments (which he sees as reactionary, hierarchical, and anti-democratic).  Yet he also sees Strauss as an essentially tragic figure, whose politics were almost entirely determined by his intellectual hero Heidegger's embrace of Nazism, and who seemed (somewhat like Stewart's Prof. Cadell) to have had little desire for the powers sought by his followers:

Without question he was a brilliant professor, a frightened man whose ideas, having been battered into hiding by historic events, were eccentric. He had produced some journal articles, delivered the Walgreen Lectures, never to my knowledge appeared in the "public press," made no radio or television appearances, and during his lifetime found but a small group of readers for his books. He died obscure and far from home.

Ultimately, Shorris's take on Strauss's life and ideas is overly reductive, though much of the blame no doubt lies with the format--a seven page magazine article--as well as the unavailability of decent secondary sources about Strauss: although the situation would change drastically over the next five years, at the time Shorris wrote, not a single scholarly biography of Strauss had been published in English, and there were still very few scholarly monographs dedicated to explicating his thought.

But perhaps the most interesting thing about Shorris's article on Strauss is something that goes unstated in it.  Early in the piece, Shorris notes that Strauss

had but one core idea: read old books carefully. It was a stroke of genius, and nothing more invigorating or enlightening could be said about education, but it was not news on a campus run by Robert Maynard Hutchins, one of the inventors of the Great Books curriculum.

What Shorris doesn't mention is that he himself was very much a product of that curriculum.  Shorris attended U of C in the late '40s and early '50s, arriving there as a thirteen year-old (Chicago was known for accepting very young undergraduates) within a year or two of Leo Strauss himself.  Though he left before receiving his degree, Shorris was deeply influenced by his university's commitment to the Great Books, as his creating of the Clemente Course some four decades later attests.  As Tim Lacy has written on this blog, there were many flavors of commitment to the Great Books at Chicago.  And Shorris, like Mortimer Adler, was deeply attached to great books liberalism. As the Clemente Course suggests, Shorris saw the Great Books as documents of democratic empowerment.  But he saw Strauss as attempting to wed these books to a doctrine of elitism and obscurantism.

Shorris's piece ends with a call to resist the "Nietzschean dreams of power" that he saw as regnant, thanks to Strauss, in the Bush administration.  He's largely silent--other than those passing words of praise in that last blockquote, which could incorrectly be read as ironic--on his own abiding commitment to the Great Books.  What is clear is that Shorris saw ideas as mattering and feared not so much a conspiratorial cabal (though his article is not entirely free of loose accusations about who were Straussians in the halls of power) as the potentially catastrophic effects of bad philosophy.  And this, too, was something he shared with Leo Strauss.

Kevin Mattson's Many Books

Kevin Mattson is probably one of the most prolific U.S. intellectual historians of his generation. He’s also one of the few whose work likely gets read by a larger public. And yet, we don’t discuss Mattson very often here at this blog. This is somewhat surprising given that his interests—postwar political culture—overlap with many of ours. (It’s also surprising since one of our regulars, Ray Haberski, and one of our longtime friends, Julian Nemeth of PhD Octopus fame, both studied with Mattson.)

Why is this? I think it’s because his books, though written with verve, tend to bring intellectual history to bear on contemporary political concerns rather than offer new historiographical insights. This is not a critique. By focusing more on political relevance than on scholarly discourse, Mattson seems to have achieved what many of us claim to want: the elusive general audience. But it might explain why Mattson is unlikely to appear on any comp lists.

The first Mattson book I read, ‪Intellectuals in Action: ‪The Origins of the New Left and Radical Liberalism, 1945-1970 (2002), remains my favorite. In it Mattson examines four of the American intellectuals I find most interesting—William Appleman Williams, C. Wright Mills, Paul Goodman, and Arnold Kauffman—arguing that their thought, and actions, helped give rise to the New Left. I like it more than Mattson’s other books because the research and argument seemed fresh and because he seemed less interested in scoring political points. The book hinted at such politicization. His argument that those four intellectuals, though radical enough to be New Leftists, were at their core American liberals, was a defense of an expansive definition of liberalism. But, as I remember it, such politicization was hardly the driving force of the book.

The same perhaps cannot be said for Mattson’s next book, When America Was Great: The Fighting Faith of Liberalism in Post-War America (2004). This book also sketches out the thought of major intellectuals, including Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., John Kenneth Galbraith, and Reinhold Niebuhr, this time in order to defend American liberalism from its detractors on both left and right. In what almost seems like an update of Schlesinger’s Vital Center for the War on Terror, Mattson wants his readers to think of liberalism as both tough and pragmatic, as capable of negotiating the rocky shoals between the ideological left and right. In this, When America Was Great seems like a companion to Peter Beinart’s shameful, The Good Fight: Why Liberals—and Only Liberals—Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again (2004), a longer version of his (in)famous New Republic article, “A Fighting Faith.” This comparison is probably unfair. Mattson, unlike Beinart, did not use the history of liberalism to support the war in Iraq. But, that the two books seem like companions likely speaks to the dangers of historical relevance. Mattson gained a large readership, no doubt, but When America Was Great, unlike Intellectuals in Action, already seems dated a mere eight years after its publication.

Most recently, sticking with the liberal theme, Mattson co-authored with Eric Alterman the gigantic book, The Cause: The Fight for American Liberalism from Franklin Roosevelt to Barack Obama. I have not yet had the pleasure to read The Cause, though it is sitting on my desk as I write this. My guess is there will be much to like in it, and that I’ll agree with some if not all of the history and politics. But I also suspect the book will be more about the 2012 election than the 1932 election, even in the FDR chapters. So The Cause will be widely read and reviewed in places most of us can only dream of being reviewed in—The New York Times, for example. But it won’t be on any graduate comp lists.

Mattson has written several other books that I won’t discuss in this post. Like I said, he’s über-prolific. The one book I would like to briefly discuss is Rebels All! A Short History of the Conservative Mind in Postwar America (2008). This book was published by the Rutgers University Press series, “Ideas in Action: Thought and Culture in the United States Since 1945,” edited by our good friend George Cotkin. Ray’s new book, God and War: American Civil Religion Since 1945, is coming out this summer as part of that excellent series. (I love the series description: “Ideas In Action allows established historians to consider broad and important issues pertaining to cultural and intellectual life in the United States since 1945. The books, based for the most part on secondary literature surrounding a topic, will highlight and dissect compelling controversies related to large cultural questions as they change over time. The series provides authors with an opportunity to interpret, to speculate, and to ‘think out loud,’ while furthering critical debate. Books deal not in abstractions but anchor ideas firmly in the context of politics, culture, and society. They are written in a style that is accessible to a wide range of readers and that captures the author’s personality and point of view.”)

Rebels All! lives up to the series description. It’s a broad, speculative interpretation of extant historiography. Mattson’s main point is that modern American conservatism should best be understood as “populist aggression.” In this, he argues that American conservatives are the true heirs to sixties radicals. Conservatives are the ones who have carried on the sixties legacy of anti-establishment utopianism.

I find Mattson’s argument that conservatives are the legatees of sixties radicalism very problematic. Conservatives are rowdy anti-establishmentarians in style. So what? In the first place, sixties radicals were hardly the first Americans to evince such a style. But more importantly, style should not always be conflated with substance, especially in this case. Sixties radicals were anti-establishment because they were against the war, racism, and sexism they thought endemic to the establishment. Obviously, the same cannot be said about conservatism.

I am currently writing a chapter on neoconservatism for my culture wars book, so I took particular interest in Mattson’s analysis of that persuasion. Mattson correctly points out that neocons helped the larger conservative movement by bringing less moralistic social science techniques to conservative arguments and by making an otherwise Protestant and Catholic movement more diverse. But he also argues that the neocons were often out of touch relative to the larger conservative movement. For instance, whereas neocons like Irving Kristol conceptualized religion in “small r” republican terms as a source of stability, conservative American Christians, in Mattson’s view, were populist dissidents who spread disorder. (This divide seems to speak to Ray’s work on civil religion.) More specifically, Mattson believes that, because neocons like Kristol hated populism, which he called an “antinomian impulse,” a “Jacobin contempt” for “law and order and civility,” they were somewhat irrelevant.

Relating this to the campus protests of the sixties, Mattson contrasts the neocons with conservatives like Russell Kirk, who enjoyed the campus protests of the sixties because of the pain it caused the liberal establishment. Mattson uses a famous Russell Kirk quote from 1969, where Kirk takes pleasure in campus protests, as an illustrative epigraph:

“Having been for two decades a mordant critic of what is foolishly called the higher learning in America, I confess to relishing somewhat… the fulfillment of my predictions and the present plight of the educationist Establishment. I even own to a sneaking sympathy, after a fashion, with the campus revolutionaries.”

Arguing that neoconservatism arose, in part, as a reaction to campus protest is true insofar as it goes. But contrasting that with Kirk’s schadenfreude does not quite paint a full picture. I argue that the neoconservative reaction against sixties radicalism was, in fact, internalized by American conservatism more broadly, antinomian style of the larger movement notwithstanding. The sixties protests, it must be remembered, were sopped up by the academy, among other liberal institutions, especially the identity power movements. In this way, conservative antipathy to the academy owes more to the neoconservative reaction than to “populist aggression,” however conservatives style themselves.


I'm still trying to figure out if and how Mattson's take on conservatism relates to goal of politically relevant scholarship.

From Rome with Love IV

by Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn

My experience in Rome this semester has taught me or made me realize anew just how narrow are the contours of the academic specializations and institutional arrangements we have inherited. Not only are they embarrassingly limited, but they are limiting.

My brief exposure to Italian intellectual life here has brought into my view everything from particular writers whose works I did not know before to movements, approaches, events, ideas, places, institutions, and much more. After a couple of decades in the historical profession in the U.S., I don't think it is too much of a stretch to say many American historians today are unaware of intellectual currents in Italy and beyond. Why? That is for another post. Here I'll just pass on some observations about one of the events here that I found inspiring.

Last post I wrote about the Fulbright seminar on food and sustainability at the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenzo, which had ramifications well beyond that topic. Also worthy of your attention, I believe, is an annual conference, organized by the U.S.- Italy Fulbright Commission, the Italian Association for North American Studies (Associazione Italiana di Studi Nord-Americani or AISNA), and Rome's Center for American Studies (Centro Studi Americani), where the conference takes place. As a Fulbright Scholar this year, I was invited to deliver three talks throughout the week at this year's conference, "Turning in and Out of the American Century," which took place from May 7-11. The program is available here.

First, a word on this location. Go see this incredible place if you can. After seeing it, I think we should seek out such centers wherever we go. The Centro Studi Americani is located in a spectacular 17th-century building on one of the most charming cobblestone streets in Rome. When I finally found my way to the Center (this was before I knew a street address and a map without every street, however tiny and un-street-like, does not get one very far in Rome), I walked through a courtyard with statuary, up gracious steps, and through a wrought iron gate (I was buzzed in after announcing myself). The helpful library staff gave me a tour of the serene reading room, the seminar and lecture rooms, and the floor to ceiling bookcases everywhere (it has a library begun at the start of the 20th-century), broken only by huge windows that let in soft natural light. It's a great place to work--or daydream. Stunning murals glow from the ceilings. When we came to the end of the tour of one room leading to yet another charming room, with high ceilings balanced by cozy, gratifyingly old-school reading/conversation nooks, I was shown the lecture hall in which I would speak. Here it is, from the Center's website:

Just seeing this room made me bring a whole new kind of energy, and even content, to my little triad of papers. What is so often missing in American academic settings for the presentation and reception of work like ours, I see now by contrast with the parts of the Italian practices to which I have been exposed, is a certain quality difficult to put into words but having to do with respect for and appreciation of the intellectual arts. A valuing of this work in the larger scheme of things. An unwillingness to trivialize it. A sense of its beauty and importance and allure.

Of course, the building could be a fluke. In Italy, the combination of the disastrous economic situation generally and the factors of recent decades in the tragic decline in the humanities have starved in familiar fashion history and closely related disciplines like literature and philosophy. But at this event, and others like it today, there were signs that long traditions of inquiry are stronger than the current obstacles they face. It seems to me this is what we are saying by practicing what we do even when financial and other practicalities and priorities are arrayed against us. It helped to be in a room and a building that silently spoke volumes about the vital importance of the study of culture.

The setting would have rung hollow, of course, without the voices of the particular people involved in the "Seminario"; the Fulbright fellows, of course, but also those from Italy who set the tone of the whole event. For one, the current president of AISNA, Professor Andrea Mariani, who teaches in the Dipartimento di Studi Comparati e Comunicazione Interculturale at the Università “G. D’Annunzio” di Chieti-Pescara. He welcomed us with rare wit and warmth. He embodies that perfect blend of intellectual seriousness and conviviality so rare in modern academe, except in oases like USIH. He told me about AISNA's journal, which we should know about since we study its themes. (I noticed the submission deadline is June 15 of each year, so if you have something of immediate interest, you should check out submission guidelines and see the contact information on the website.)

Besides other organizers and hosts were the faculty members and graduate students who attended from all over Italy. Although for many English was their second language, many were clearly eager to be challenged with new perspectives at the highest level. Many were literary scholars, though others came from political science, history, and even in at least one case from translation studies, another field that should be more closely entwined with ours. Though aware of postmodernism, many were interested in supposedly old-fashioned approaches--those still based on text and context, not theory unmoored, or worse, mere intellectual politics. From talking at considerable length with some of these students, this radical interest in the written word made them truer contrarians, as in genuinely going against the grain, as USIH clearly is. Their interest in the resurgent conversation about just the kinds of themes we study was manifest. This commonality (not just with Italians but with those throughout the world the neglect of whose serious interest in American intellectual history impoverishes us) could be the basis for an infusion of new blood in the form of collaboration and exchange, the most meaningful kind of support for what we--and they--do.

One more detail I find indicative that there are exciting possibilities for connections between USIH and Italian scholars is that the keynote speaker for this wonderful event was none other than our own T.J. Jackson Lears of No Place of Grace and Raritan fame, among his many other stellar accomplishments. His talk, "Animal Spirits Revisted: American Capitalism and Emotional Life," was a brilliant tour--for me a parallel, in a way, to the tour I received through the beautiful Center from one room to the other until ending up in the engulfing heart of a room in which we met--through era after era of economic and cultural history as major developments affected the warp and woof of Americans' emotional lives.

On a personal note, finally getting to meet this scholar I had looked up to for many years had a surreal quality to it. Or maybe the conversation we had in Rome--along with this ideal seminar of students and faculty members, the elegant room in which the conference took place, our host's genuinely gentlemanly demeanor, and the rest--was too good to be true. These things might help broaden the contours of what is possible in our conversations and scholarship, helping us continue imagining new kinds of events and experiences, or maybe they were just idealized images painted somehow within the isolated chamber of my own mind. Maybe it is just my mind's own ceiling murals casting everything in a warm glow. As I said, the Center is a great place to work--or daydream.

Civil Religion: The Revival of a Slippery Term

I recently received the first copy of my new book, God and War: American Civil Religion Since 1945 (Rutgers UP) and in an attempt both to shamelessly promote it and to place it in some context, I am going to write a few posts related to the resurgence of civil religion in recent books.

While the touchstone for most discussions of *American* civil religion is Robert Bellah's famous 1967 essay in Daedelus entitled, "Civil Religion in America," the foundation for the philosophical understanding of civil religion is Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Social Contract Book IV, chapter 8.  Recently, the political theorist Ronald Beiner wrote a book length study of the term through the political philosophy of four dominant traditions: the original proposal of domesticating religion through a civil-religion in Machiavelli, Hobbs, and Rousseau; the liberal tradition from Spinoza to Rawls; the modern theocratic tradition represented by de Maistre and Schmidt; and the postmodern theism of Nietzsche and Heidegger.  As I read through Beiner's well-explicated treatment of civil religion, I was struck time and again by the clarity of Beiner's definition of the term and the ambiguity of what the term has implied over time.  For example, Beiner notes very early on that all the thinkers he profiles while contributing to the "radical secularization of modern politics," have expressed "not a little sympathy for some manner of theocracy."  The twist here, of course, what kind of "theocracy"?  Certainly not Christian or Muslim or Jewish but civil religious.  Giants of western modern western philosophy have all pondered how best to appropriate religion by politics for their own purposes.  As Beiner explains: "Civil religion is the empowerment of religion, not for the sake of religion, but for the sake of enhanced citizenship--of making members of the political community better citizens, in accordance with whatever conception one holds of what constitutes being a good citizen."(2)

Rousseau believed, as Beiner establishes forcefully, "a state has never been founded without religion serving as its base."  But to what end?  After all, "the religion that dominates Western political communities is in radical tension with the needs of political authority," Beiner argues, "yet religious profession of some kind is indispensable for a sound political order."  To Beiner, it is Rousseau's inability to resolve this tension between politics and religion that demonstrates both the philosophical allure of civil religion and the many unsatisfying versions of it. The tension is unresolvable and therefore the term, while relatively easy to define, is frustratingly impossible to realize in practice.  In Rousseau's mind, a "real" civil religion would require the practical application of a transcendent politics. Beiner points out the obvious contradiction--"we are left with two unhappy alternatives of a morally true religion that is in its essence subversive to politics, and a sound civil religion that is both morally unattractive and, historically, an anachronism."(14)

The alternative to Rousseau's unresolved contradiction is Machiavelli's paganization of Christianity.  Beiner writes: "What Machiavelli is saying to us is that it remains open to us as a civilization (or to some enterprising innovator within our civilization) to reinterpret Christianity in such a way that is secures the political advantages that the Romans were so adept at exploiting through a judicious manipulation of religious beliefs and practices."(20)  Rousseau and Machiavelli represent the two most widely understood versions of civil religion--neither is acceptable to true believers of religion and yet neither can be realized without some version of belief in religion.  Robert Bellah's innovation was to couple a Rousseauian version of civil religion with Durkheim's milder version of Machiavelli's faith in ritual over abstract belief.

I have done very limited justice to Beiner's expansive reading of the civil religion discourse, but would like to conclude this particular post with a nod to an ongoing conversation at this blog.  I have suggested in the past that the debate over American civil religion can be fruitfully understood in conjunction with (if not as an alternative) to the culture wars of the last 40 years.  Beiner points out that Machiavelli proposed a civil religion for his own period of culture wars.  In Machiavelli's Discourses, Beiner relates that a central theme is the contrast between founding and refounding or "how one restores a set of institutions to their original principles over against the inescapable process of decay and decrepitude to which earthly institutions are subject."(21)  Indeed, in my work on American civil religion, the use of real war (in Machiavelli's design, priests and philosophers as well as warriors and generals) attempted to refound the nation in successive generations.  As the American version of the culture wars were being waged over the role of women, the limits of marriage, the definition of art, etc., there were wars of sacrifice that consistently revealed how both armed and unarmed prophets (both warriors and pacifists) pushed refoundings of the nation.  And just like the culture wars, the key to the longevity of the debate over the refounding of the nation lie in the realization Rousseau made regarding civil religion--it is, as Beiner concludes, "a paradox rather than a proposal."(18)

The Conference Rejection Pile

As our readers are probably aware, today is the deadline for submitting proposals for the 2012 S-USIH conference (see the CFP here). 

I am not in any way connected with the conference committee, nor will I be part of the selection process for this year's conference.  I did sign on to participate in a panel proposed by another scholar, so I will wait along with everyone else to find out if I'll have a place on the program this year. 

It's not a sure thing.  The committee will no doubt receive far more proposals than there are slots available, and some very strong proposals will be declined simply for want of time and room.  That reason, or some variant of it, is a common but accurate explanation for why perfectly good proposals don't find their way onto a conference program.  When a conference committee "regrets to inform you" that they could not include your excellent proposal in their conference, they are telling the truth. 

But, as they say, the truth hurts.

How do I know this?  Because last year I proposed a paper that was not accepted for the conference.  It was not a question of whether or not the topic or my approach was interesting or worthy of discussion; it was simply a matter of finding a place for my particular paper on the overall program.

That was the fourth time I had proposed a paper for an academic conference, but it was only the first time one of my proposals had been rejected.  So it really took me by surprise -- my past experience, limited as it was, had led me to expect nothing but one fabulous success after another.  When I got the polite email informing me of the committee's regrets, I did not feel very successful.  I felt awful, and my profs and my colleagues who knew about my project felt awful for me.  I really began to doubt myself as a scholar and an academic. 

It was a tough experience.  I wanted to take part in that conference almost more than I can say.  I was bitterly disappointed not to have a place on the program, and I could not possibly justify the expense of traveling to New York just to attend the conference, though I surely would have enjoyed it.  Eventually, though, I got over my disappointment and was able to put the experience in perspective:  Welcome to academe.

So why am I writing this post today?  Well, for a few reasons.  But before I tell you what my reasons are, let me tell you what they aren't.  I'm not trying to tip the scales of selection in my favor.  First of all, I don't need to.  The proposal with which I am associated will stand or fall on its own merits.  Secondly, even if I were tacky enough to try to do something like that, it wouldn't work.  Now that I have participated in planning, organizing and hosting a conference, I am all the more aware of the complex dynamics and considerations that go into putting even the simplest program together.  These decisions require cooperation and consensus, and once such consensus has been achieved, it is not recklessly abandoned for the sake of one hopeful participant.  In other words, one person's whinging would not a difference make.

Instead, I hope this post can make a difference for readers who may be getting -- or may have already gotten -- unwelcome news from a conference to which they have submitted or will submit a proposal. 

I want to encourage you to not take the decision personally.  A conference committee's decision is not a sweeping verdict on you as a scholar or on your place or plans in academe.  It is a highly contextual decision, a judgment call about one possibility for one small piece of the overall shape of that particular conference program.  If you receive an email regretfully informing you that your paper or your panel was not accepted, this does not mean that you are not doing good work or interesting work.  It does not mean that you are unacceptable as a scholar.  It just means that it wasn't a good fit for this conference, this time.

So, do not take it personally. By the same token, do not take your disappointment out personally on the conference committee.  For the sake of your own equanimity, if not for the sake of professional collegiality, resist the urge to put on your own little off-Broadway production of "The Fox and the Grapes."  No, the people who decided that your proposal wouldn't work aren't clueless.  No, they aren't out of touch with what is happening in the field.  No, they aren't trying to stand in the way of your success.  They are just doing the best they can with the information they have so that they can put together a good conference.

Do not take it personally, do not take your disappointment out on others, and do not give up.  Use the experience as an opportunity to learn.  Go over your rejected proposal and your plans for your paper with a colleague or a mentor and see if you can find a new way to frame the work or perhaps a more suitable venue or opportunity through which to present it.  A rejected conference proposal might turn into a collaborative writing project or a re-envisioned dissertation topic.  In the case of my paper proposal from last year, both of those things might turn out to be true.

The toughest thing to do is to take the risk and put in the effort and put together another proposal for another conference, especially if you're still working on (roughly) the same topic.  That can be scary.  And if you're the one putting the whole proposal together, it's not just your place on the program that's at risk.  All of your colleagues and would-be co-presenters are also counting on you to help them get their work out to a wider audience.   It can be very intimidating to think about facing the possibility of rejection all over again.  If your revised and re-envisioned work gets turned down for another conference, what does it mean?

I don't know.  I'm still trying to figure it out.  I put together a very strong panel for a very big conference, found a well-known and well-regarded commenter and chair, got it all together, sent it off, and waited for the news.  And the news came today, and it. was. not. good.

I'm not tempted for a moment to take my disappointment out on others, but I would forgive my co-panelists if they were tempted to take their disappointment out on me.  I feel so badly for them.  I know it's not my fault; it was our proposal, and we all worked on it together.  But it was my responsibility to shepherd the idea through the proposal process, and nobody regrets the outcome more than I do.

But I'm not ready to give up on my topic or my approach.  Even if I question my own judgment as a scholar (and I frequently do!), I trust the judgment of the historians who have seen my work or heard about my project and have offered their encouragement.  I may feel like I don't know what I'm talking about, but they do.  And they help me remember that I have work to do -- it's important work, it's good work, and I need to see it through.

Even though this blog post started with  me preaching to the choir, it is ending -- as they often do -- with me preaching to myself.  But my guess is that I am not the only reader of this blog who has received or will receive a "we regret to inform you" email from a conference program committee.  And those emails are especially daunting and discouraging for junior scholars.

If you happened to get one of those emails recently, I want to encourage you:  don't take it personally, don't get bitter, don't give up.  Keep working, keep writing, and keep in touch with people who can remind you -- in case you temporarily forget -- of the value that you and others have found in your scholarship.  If it was worth doing before you got the rejection notice, it's worth doing now.

So I preach, and so I believe.