Machinations of Religious Liberty

In 1965, a relatively young Catholic layman and University of Notre Dame law professor named John T. Noonan, Jr. published a much anticipated study of the Catholic Church's history with the issue of contraception. I call your attention to the term "history" because it was that aspect of Noonan's work that was at the center of an emerging debate. In John T. McGreevy's excellent and nearly classic text, Catholicism and American Freedom, he situates the reception of Noonan's book within a debate among heavyweight Catholic theologians over the relationship between church doctrine and the acids of history. McGreevy writes: "Noonan...traced a twisting doctrinal path, stressing that any fair reading of the history could not 'look at doctrinal development as an automatic unfolding of the divine will.'" (241) At issue was whether the Catholic Church could accept a reality of its present--Catholic women and American Catholics in general were using contraception and no longer seemed concerned about the church's ban on it.

Tim's Light Reading (2-9-2012): History as Philosophical Method, the Philosophy of History, Defending the Liberal Arts, and New Research of Interest

1 (of 7). The History of Philosophy?

The history of philosophy is, strangely to historians, both a subject and a method. As historians (i.e. USIH folks) we only engage the first. Philosophy and philosophers are objects of study, especially to the non-history of ideas crowd in the general category of intellectual history. I've noticed that history of ideas folks are more willing to see themselves as philosophers, at least those who work closest to the Lovejovian tradition. A great many philosophers, however, use history as a means toward understanding present-day philosophical problems. This is particularly prominent in the Aristotelian and Thomistic traditions. Points 2 and 4 of this recent NEW APPS post by Eric Schliesser go toward my point about history-of-philosophy as method. Here's a reaction to Schliesser from Mohan Matthen.


2. The Philosophy of History

Baffler Returns

Baffler #19 (cover art to your left), the first from editor in chief John Summers, features original salvos by founding editor Thomas Frank, Rick Perlstein, Barbara Ehrenreich, and David Graeber ("Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit"); fiction by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya and Kim Stanley Robinson; poetry by Geoffrey Hill, Laura Riding, Charles Bernstein, and Peter Gizzi; satirical art by Peter Arkle, Mark Dancey, Steve Brodner; and a new column by senior editor Chris Lehmann, The Dollar Debauch. To top it off, the issue offers the first look in seventy-six years of the original Fortune article that James Agee wrote on tenant farmers in Alabama. The article, written in 1936, has never been published before (announced last fall in the Times' letter section, here.)

Subscriptions are available here.

"Only Paradoxes to Offer" in a USIH course

Yesterday I offered my USIH class some thoughts about Jane Addams. This was the first time I had had an opportunity to study her in any kind of depth and I, unsurprisingly, found her fascinating.

One theme that popped up a couple of times in the articles I read* was that Jane Addams expanded the boundaries of the domestic sphere rather than challenging its existence. (My attempt to check out books was foiled when the library catalog died. Yes, I could have looked up the books in another university's catalog, but I didn't think of that till I'd already left. I was hoping to get Louise Knight's book, based on her comment on this thread.)

Reception History: Lists, Lists, Lists!

I recently read Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen’s brilliantly argued, exquisitely written, long awaited book, American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas. Since I’m reviewing it elsewhere, and since Tim plans to give it the “Lacy treatment” here at the blog, I won’t go into much detail about the book, other than to say it should be required reading for all intellectual historians. Instead, I would like to use this space to ask you, dear reader, to help me generate a list of reception histories. I’m interested in such a list for at least four reasons:

1) I find reception history fascinating, for reasons Ratner-Rosenhagen makes clear when she “seeks to demonstrate that reception history can be more ambitious than simply enumerating the varieties of uses of a thinker or a body of thought in a new national context.” For example, she instead “argues that confrontations with Nietzsche laid bare a fundamental concern driving modern American thought: namely, the question of the grounds, or foundations, for modern American thought and culture itself.” In other words, her book “is not a history of American ‘Nietzscheans.’ It is a history of American readers making their way to their views of themselves and their modern America by thinking through, against, and around Nietzsche’s stark challenges.” Lovely.

Dudziak, War Time

Mary Dudziak's new book, War Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences, is now published. USIH readers first got a taste of her argument in her compelling contribution to the Age of Fracture roundtable I put together for the last USIH conference. Dudziak's discussion of time in relation to history generated a fascinating conversation in the comments section.

Dudziak's book is already generating some buzz. Eric Posner reviews it unfavorably at The New Republic.

Dudziak responds to Posner here.

The New Inquiry

I've plugged The New Inquiry before. I would like to do so again in the wake of their recent upgrade. Not only does The New Inquiry now feature a magazine that readers can subscribe to for $2/month. They have also upgraded their blog by swallowing up some of my favorite bloggers, including Aaron Bady of Zunguzungu blog fame, and Rob Horning, author of Marginal Utility.

For a recent sample of the type of writing we can expect from The New Inquiry, check out Bady's remarkable review of David Graeber's remarkable book, Debt: the First 5,000 Years. Enjoy.

The Last Twentieth-Century Ideology Standing?

"In the end, what is striking about this book is the great difference between the 20th-century world it describes and the present. Totalitarianism has disappeared, except in a few small countries like Cuba and North Korea; a risen Asia represents as much a cultural as an ideological challenge; religion has made a political comeback everywhere. The undergraduate students I teach were all born after the fall of the Berlin Wall; for them, the huge ideological battles among Communism, fascism and liberalism are neither meaningful nor interesting. They are fortunate not to live in a world where ideas could be translated into monstrous projects for the transformation of society, and where being an intellectual could often mean complicity in enormous crimes. Documenting this 20th century, then, is an important achievement of a scholar and intellectual whose premature passing we should all regret." 

Francis Fukuyama reviewing Tony Judt's Thinking the Twentieth Century

New York Times Book Review, February 5, 2012
(emphasis mine)

I toyed with the idea of simply posting alongside this quotation a selection of pictures: of the Foxconn plant in China, of Fallujah, perhaps, or Misrata, or Gaza City, of the wreckage of the Union Carbide Plant in Bhopal, or the improvised monument to the thousands of recent homicide victims in Ciudad Juárez.

But I think this quotation deserves a little more than such visual snark.

To begin with, especially when compared to many of his neoconservative brethren, Fukuyama is a fairly measured, if somewhat one-note, thinker.  He was one of the first of his political tribe to criticize the war on Iraq.  And the passage I quoted comes at the end of a fairly celebratory review of the life of a scholar who Fukuyama profoundly disagreed with and a book that, as Fukuyama notes, attacks him in in its pages.*  Given the tendency of others who disagreed with Judt, especially on Israel, to utterly denigrate him, Fukuyama deserves credit for looking past his disagreements with him and for finding value in his work.**

The Good Book

During MSNBC's coverage of the Republican response to President Obama's State of the Union address this past January 24, Rachel Maddow took issue with Gov. Mitch Daniels's description of America as  the "shining city on the hill."  She was irked by what she sees as a spurious addition to John Winthrop's famous metaphor from his 1630 sermon aboard the Arabella:  "...for wee must Consider that wee shall  be as a Citty upon a Hill, the eies of all people are uppon us."*

What bothered Maddow was the presence of the word "shining," a word that does not appear in Winthrop's phrasing. 

"We are going take a quick break," Maddow said at the end of her segment with Chris Matthews. "The city on the hill will not be shining when we come back. It doesn't need to shine. John Winthrop just talked about it being up there, in the eyes of the world upon it. That was it. Shining thing was a late addition. I'm sorry. Bugs me. Up next, we'll be talking with Valerie Jarrett, senior adviser to President Obama. We'll be right back. It's not shining. It's not."

That "late addition" to which Maddow referred is found in Ronald Reagan's deployment of the "city on a hill" metaphor at the end of his November 1979 speech announcing his intent to seek the Republican nomination.  In his closing remarks, Reagan invoked Winthrop's address aboard the Arabella and repurposed the metaphor for his own candidacy as a "rendezvous with destiny":

We who are privileged to be Americans have had a rendezvous with destiny since the moment in 1630 when John Winthrop, standing on the deck of the tiny Arabella off the coast of Massachusetts, told the little band of pilgrims, “We shall be as a city upon a hill.  The eyes of all people are upon us so that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword throughout the world.” 

A troubled and afflicted mankind looks to us, pleading for us to keep our rendezvous with destiny; that we will uphold the principles of self-reliance, self-discipline, morality, and—above all—responsible liberty for every individual that we will become that shining city on a hill.

For her part, Maddow seemed to be piqued that Reagan's "shining city on a hill," a go-to metaphor for Republican politicians ever since, represents not merely an addition to Winthrop's phrasing but also a distortion of Winthrop's meaning.

Clearly, Rachel Maddow does not know her Bible.

Time and Again

In Indiana this week, we went back to the future. Governor Mitch Daniels signed legislation making Indiana the first right-to-work (RTW) state in the midwest. A victory Republicans have been fighting for since the late 1960s. At almost the same moment, the state senate approved a bill that would allow creationism to be taught in science classes. Was the passage of these two measures mere coincidence or is the state of Indiana, my home for the past eleven years, returning to the 1880s?

Who are the ten most influential American intellectuals of the 20th century?

Dear readers: Below is a guest post/query from Christian Olaf Christiansen and Astrid Louise Nonbo Andersen, intellectual historians at University of Aarhus, Denmark.

A growing interest in US politics, culture and history can be seen in Denmark these days, where people watch The Daily Show regularly and follow the primary elections with great interest. Intellectal history as an academic discipline in Denmark, however, has only recently begun to move its area of interest outside Europe. Whereas a lot of work is available to the wider public on e.g. French and German intellectuals, there is not much work available on American intellectual history in the Danish language. This is why we want to write and edit an anthology whose title is 'American Intellectuals in the Twentieth Century'. Such a book is going to be limited in space, however, and will only include introductions to about ten American intellectuals.

And how does this concern members of the S-USIH or readers of the S-USIH blog? Well, we thought it would only be appropirate to ask you natives before we foreigners begin to decide who are your most influential intellectuals. We are aware of the fact that making a list of 10 people seems bound to raise endless discussions. But still, inviting more people to voice their opinions on the topic is surely better than omitting it altogether. So, if you dont have anything else important to do today, you can help us set the record straight, and help foster a growing interest in US intellectual history outside US.

It is important to stress that we by 'intellectuals' here are mainly interested in people that actively engaged in US society and politics - not necessarily as politicians, of course, but as someone who contributed to important debates. We have found much inspiration in vol. 2 of Hollinger and Capper's sourcebook, The American Intellectual Tradition, but as said we only have limited space in our planned anthology.

1. There are some names which we are very sure of at the moment (but we still need to cut down these lists):
Dewey, Rorty, Chomsky, Walzer, Rawls

2. ...And some names we are quite sure of:
Arendt, Bell, C.W. Mills, Niebuhr/Strauss, Fukuyama/Huntington, Butler, W.E.B. du Bois/M.Luther King, I. Wallerstein.

3. ...And a few other names we haven't left out yet:
Nozick, Veblen, S. Fish, Paul de Man, W. James, G. Myrdahl, R. Dahl, T. Parsons.

Finally, we have considered making the anthology more 'school', 'theme', or 'movement' based, with chapters on e.g. 'pragmatism', 'New School of Social Research', 'Afro-American intellectuals', The Chicago School'. This would allow us to include much more material and intellectuals, but we havent been able quite to work out an organizing principle yet, and some key intellectuals might not fit into any of these categories.

Any thoughts on the matter are most welcome, both concerning names we have forgotten, names you think should definetely be part of such a book, and names you think should definetely not be on the list.

Christian Olaf Christiansen and Astrid Louise Nonbo Andersen,intellectual historians at University of Aarhus, Denmark

What are you waiting for?

If you're a regular reader of this blog, or are interested in attending our Fifth Annual U.S. Intellectual History Conference, join S-USIH now! (You can find the registration form here.)

Speaking of our conference, Julian, one of our good friends at PhD Octopus, nicely plugged it here.

Gay life in Rural America

I went to a talk last Friday by Mary Gray in the Speaker Series "Place Matters" called "There are No Gay People Here: Expounding the Boundaries of Queer Youth Visibility in Rural Kentucky." I gave extra credit to my USIH class to go because I said that it was about ideas in action.

The talk was advertised by this paragraph:

Drawing on her experiences working in rural parts of Kentucky, Gray will map out how lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and questioning (LGBTQ) youth and their allies make use of digital media and local resources to combat the marginalization they contend with in their own communities as well as the erasure they face in popular representations of gay and lesbian life and the agendas of national gay and lesbian advocacy groups. This talk will explore how youth suture together high schools, public libraries, Wal-Mart, and the web to construct spaces for fashioning their emerging LGBTQ identities.

Her argument was that queer senses of self aren't (just) discovered--they work through boundaries: places, times, politics--and are always mediated.

Call for Papers: U.S. Intellectual History

Communities of Discourse

Fifth Annual Conference and Annual Meeting of the Society for U.S. Intellectual History
Co-sponsored and hosted by the Center for the Humanities,
The Graduate Center of the City University of New York
New York City
November 1-2, 2012
Submission deadline: June 1, 2012

The Society for U.S. Intellectual History (S-USIH) invites panel proposals for its fifth annual conference to be held at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York on November 1-2, 2012. S-USIH is very pleased to announce that the keynote address will be delivered by David A. Hollinger, Preston Hotchkis Professor of American History at the University of California-Berkeley.

Socialism is the Name of Our Desire

Last week I presented to about 60 secondary history teachers, alongside two of my colleagues at our lab school, University High, on the topic: “Teaching Socialism in American History.” I argued that including the history of socialism in the secondary U.S. history survey was important because, in the all important quest to make history more interesting for young students—since polls regularly show that high school students consider history the most boring subject—the history of socialism would give students space to imagine a different world. Counterfactual thinking is important to the development of historical imagination. It helps students think about the differences between history, in its constructedness, and the past, in its finiteness. Counterfactuals highlight historical contingency in ways that make the study of history more compelling than the Whiggish, even teleological narratives spun by textbooks. Werner Sombert’s crucial question—“Why no socialism in America?”— which has helped shaped a century of American historiography, is just the type of counterfactual question that we should ask our young history students.