Neil's Occasional Quote

I came across this choice nugget in the Introduction to Richard Rorty's Philosophy and Social Hope, and have been chewing on it for the past day.

"The purpose of inquiry is to achieve agreement among human beings about what to do, to bring about consensus on the ends to be achieved and the means used to achieve those ends. Inquiry that does not achieve coordination of behavior is not inquiry but simply wordplay." (Philosophy and Social Hope, p. xxv)

Provocative and unsettling, I think, with a bit of a scientistic undercurrent. Is what intellectual historians do inquiry? If so, is "agreement... about what to do," or "consensus on the ends to be achieved," ever presupposed as the outcome of historical scholarship? Rorty often used Darwinian theory to describe philosophy as a social tool, but he appears to go further here and apply an instrumental calculus to all forms of inquiry. As he puts it, "for pragmatists there is no sharp break between natural science and social science, nor between social science and politics, nor between politics, philosophy and literature. All areas of culture are parts of the same endeavor to make life better."

Tim's Light Reading (12/7/2009)

1. The Top 15 Most Important, Post-WWII Anglophone Books of Philosophy, According To Google: Brian Leiter, of Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog fame, compiled a list derived from Google search results of the Top 15 (plus Top 10 runners-up) most important philosophy books of the last 50 years. To paraphrase a comment made by Mr. Leiter on his own post, I'm not sure these books tell us anything about philosophy, but they do say something about the accessibility and potential usefulness of philosophy to the general public. Several works and authors on the list familiar historians and many readers here include: Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions; John Rawls, A Theory of Justice; Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature; Karl Popper, Objective Knowledge; W.V.O. Quine, Word and Object; and maybe Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self. And this Wikipedia post will help you sort through some of the other players.

No Isaiah Berlin? Aside: Jurgen Habermas apparently floats on the edges of the analytic/anglophone tradition.

2. Evaluating Participation Grades: Bonnie M. Miller, in the latest issue of the AHA's Perspectives on History, asks whether and how we should grade class participation. The article is a useful revisitation of the philosophies, both pro and con, behind accounting for participation. Most of my conversations with colleagues on this topic have been informal. As such, it's nice to see a write-up. Of course the article also unintentionally underscores just how imperfect evaluation is on the whole. I like Miller's mid-term self-evaluation of participation idea.

3. A Cornel West Takedown---For His Own Good?: In a recent InsideHigherEd article written for potpourri posts like this one, Scott McLemee takes Cornel West to task for being less than McLemee thinks he can, or should, be. Others have commented on McLemee's story and West's book, but I want to take the conversation in another direction. Since I'm neither an enemy nor a fan of West---I'm a neutral, I have no personal dog in McLemee's fight with West's accounting of himself. But, I find the practice of thinking about public intellectuals---their place, role, and expectations of them---of interest. To recount the principles, the object of McLemee's ire is West's own autobiography, Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud: A Memoir. McLemee never uses this phrase, but you get the feeling that he sees Brother West as a This Is Spinal Tap version of West's autobiography. Let me tease you with two brief passages from McLemee's piece:

There is seldom much detail and never any depth [to West's reflections]. West makes a few references to academic mentors. He notes his intense interest in various philosophers or authors. Yet there is never a sustained effort to grapple with them as influences on his life and thinking. He mentions his own scholarly books on Marxism and pragmatism (for some odd reason forgetting that he also published one on African-American theology) but does not describe the process of thinking and writing that went into them.

...If sketchy in other regards, Brother West is never anything but expansive on how Cornel West feels about Cornel West. He is deeply committed to his committed-ness, and passionately passionate about being full of passion. Various works of art, literature, music, and philosophy remind West of himself. He finds Augustinian humility to be deeply meaningful. This is mentioned in one sentence. His taste for three-piece suits is full of subtle implications that require a couple of substantial paragraphs to elucidate.

To me, McLemee seems to be saying that once you have entered the public arena, you ~owe~ that same public---at some point---an authentic, sincere, applied remembrance of your life. I think I agree, but I'm not sure. And of course West still has some time to provide that narrative. But will he?

4. Political Correctness and Identity Politics in the Academy, Soberly Assessed: Stanley Fish considers political correctness as an object of study as presented in new books from both "liberal" and "conservative" angles. Fish finds the "conservative" study, which consists of a compilation of essays published by the American Enterprise Institute, to be intriguing---even convincing. He relays that the following from that study:

The call for intellectual diversity is, as the volume’s authors acknowledge, less philosophical than strategic; it is designed to embarrass liberal academics who are dedicated to what Peter Wood calls the “diversity regime” in academia. ...The answer [to the problem] is that it would be better if all sides acknowledged that “diversity” is a word that has lost whatever usefulness it may have had and has become an umbrella rationale for importing political criteria into the process of academic decision-making. We should be done with it.

Fish concludes: No one...will agree with everything these two books say, but reading them together, and in counterpoint, is a genuinely educational experience. Rather than merely cheering for your side and booing at the other, you actually learn something.

5. A New Penn Press Series: The Arts and Intellectual Life in Modern America: This new series, edited by Casey Nelson Blake, consists thus far of the following hardbacks:
---Iain Anderson's This Is Our Music: Free Jazz, the Sixties, and American Culture;
---Casey Nelson Blake's The Arts of Democracy: Art, Public Culture, and the State;
---Cándida Smith's The Modern Moves West: California Artists and Democratic Culture in the Twentieth Century;
---Steven Conn's Do Museums Still Need Objects?;
---April F. Masten's Art Work: Women Artists and Democracy in Mid-Nineteenth-Century New York; and
---A. Joan Saab's For the Millions: American Art and Culture Between the Wars.

6. Teaching Early Modern Philosophy: Dana McCourt over at The Edge of the American West, claiming an unintended provocation by provoked by Crooked Timber's John Holbo, discusses alternative teaching strategies for the Early Modern period of philosophy. I love Dana's suggestion of using female philosophers, at the very least, as critics of the Big Guys who dominate this period: Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, Hume, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant. Here's the book she recommends to that end. The issue of how to approach this period is no small consideration for someone attempting to teach a "History of Philosophy in America" course that honestly deals with the colonial period.

7. The Armageddon Imperative: This CFP will be of interest to those who work on the Cold War in the late twentieth century. I see a great many intellectual history intersections in the invited topics subsection.

8. We've Tried NeoLiberalism Before in the Modern West: Tony Judt explains here how it didn't work. I wonder what future historian will write the book titled: "The Myth and Reality of Government Inefficiency: How The New Right Won the Late Twentieth-Century Culture Wars in America, 1980 - __2008? 2012?*__ - TL

History of knowledge and history of ideas

In history of science, my home field, we speak of knowledge: production, dissemination, transformation of knowledge; knowledge in context, geographies of knowledge, knowledge in transit, socially constructed knowledge, tacit knowledge, embodied knowledge, situated knowledge, indigenous knowledge. Random titles of history of science publications include "Cultivating knowledge in nineteenth-century English gardens" "Worthless knowledge: Science at the fringes of credibility" "Oxford Realism: Knowledge and Perception II" "Marketing knowledge for the general reader: Victorian popularizers of science." Searching this blog, I found few posts with the word knowledge in the title and interestingly two of them had something to do with science: "Alice O’Connor’s Poverty Knowledge: Intellectual History in Action" (social sciences), "Workshop: "Knowledge and Science in Francophone Atlantic World" circa 1500-1800." (The other two were "Blogging Academic Knowledge Part I & II".)

However, my impression is that, and please correct me if I am wrong and excuse my grand generalizations, intellectual historians more often use terms like "ideas" rather than "knowledge." I wonder if there is any significance to this? I am not sure. One possible difference which would lead to emphasis of knowledge is that histories of science often highlight communities, either scientific or lay, rather than individuals. Another possibility is that science is often analyzed as practice, often involving manipulation of images, instruments, and networks of many kinds. Maybe in such contexts speaking of knowledge more generally, is preferable to just speaking about ideas, beliefs and thoughts. Yet another explanations could be that history of science itself is an intertwining of intellectual, cultural, and social histories--all around the notion of the production of knowledge. Of course, historians of science use the notion of ideas as much as intellectual historians use the notion of knowledge, and neither seems very concerned with specifying what exactly is meant by those concepts. Nonetheless, there seems to be a perceptible difference in emphasis. I wonder what is a difference between history of knowledge and history of ideas?

(Full disclosure: in my dissertation I argue against using the concepts of "ideas" and "beliefs" in analyzing formation of scientific communities. However, my argument is idiosyncratic and does not reflect the wider community of historians of science, yet :)

Hollinger’s “Affiliation by Revocable Consent”: From Postdiscipline to Postethnic to Obama

By Andrew Hartman

At our most recent U.S. Intellectual History Conference, the final panel was also the most anticipated: “Assessing the Legacy of the 1977 Wingspread Conference.” The panelists were Dorothy Ross, Thomas Bender, David Hall, and David Hollinger. I would like to address one of Hollinger’s central contentions, which has lead me to reexamine his most famous work, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (1995).

In reiterating a point he made in the recent Historically Speaking forum on the state of U.S. Intellectual History (which the USIH blog analyzed extensively—see posts by me, Paul Murphy, and not 1, not 2, but 3 by Tim Lacy), Hollinger argued that intellectual historians should guard against ghettoization. Rather than follow the path of the diplomatic historians, who have formed their own society (SHAFR) so as to largely avoid the mainstream societies (AHA and OAH), Hollinger would like to see intellectual history as analogous to political and social history, which are pervasive within the historical discipline writ large.

Some might say Hollinger’s advice is sound only insofar as it speaks to professionalism. In fact, the tone of the entire Wingspread panel was hyper-professional. On the one hand, this is helpful to younger scholars seeking tenured employment in a horrible job market. But, on the other hand, it’s also depressing—the job scene is such that many of us would probably rather the panelists had focused on something more exciting or uplifting. From my perspective, I would have been more interested in what they might have had to say about the workings of intellectual history in the broader public and political culture—past, present, and future.

But the more I thought about Hollinger’s warnings, the more familiar his postdisciplinary approach seemed. In other words, something other than professionalism seems to be driving his thinking. I vaguely recalled that a similar framework guided his theorizing about race and ethnicity in Postethnic, which I first read over a decade ago, before graduate school. I’ve been meaning to return to this book in researching the culture wars, since it speaks to the debates over multiculturalism that rocked the academy and beyond in the 1980s and 90s.

Sure enough, re-reading Postethnic confirmed my suspicions. Not to make too much of the comparison, especially since Hollinger’s discussion of racial and ethnic boundaries is much better theorized, not to mention more important than his discussion of disciplinary boundaries, but the two arguments do seem somewhat parallel. In both cases, Hollinger is suspicious of prescribed boundaries.

The key principal of Postethnic is “affiliation by revocable consent.” In other words, in the context of ethnic and racial identities, “blood” should not determine affiliations of solidarity. Affiliations should be voluntary. This is not to say that Hollinger is against the use of racial categories in political matters. For instance, since black Americans, by their color, and by their history, cannot easily overcome the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow, they are entitled to legal and political remedies in the form of affirmative action, a temporary and imperfect solution. But politics in this form should be decoupled from culture. A black American might need and deserve affirmative action, but he or she should not be obliged to remain tied to the cultural identity of “black America.” Such cultural rigidity drove the identity politics of the 1980s and 90s, which in turn made it more difficult to expand the circle of the American “we” to include, say, poor black Americans living in the urban ghettoes.

To the extent that Hollinger wants to expand the circle of “we” to more Americans, he is unapologetically a liberal nationalist. He assumes, correctly in my view, that the best way to make our society more egalitarian is to build upon our commonalities as Americans. He writes: “A stronger national solidarity enhances the possibility of social and economic justice within the United States. This is a simple point, but an extremely important one. Any society that cannot see its diverse members as somehow ‘in it together’ is going to have trouble distributing its resources with even a modicum of equity.” Along this line, Hollinger is quick to blame economic inequality for the tribalism of identity politics. The type of nationalism he supports is close to the fallen social democratic thinking outlined in Tony Judt’s recent New York Review of Books essay, “What is Living and What is Dead in Social Democracy?”

I would even go so far as to say that Hollinger speaks the language of civil religion (as outlined below in Ray Haberski’s compelling analysis of Obama’s civil religious rhetoric). Hollinger is much more nuanced and qualified in his critique of identity politics and his defense of a national community than, say, a Christopher Lasch or a Robert Bellah. Hollinger links the postethnic together with cosmopolitanism, which negotiates the terrain between pluralism and Kantian universalism on the one hand, and between identity politics and communitarian nationalism on the other. But despite such carefulness, I would put Hollinger in the civil religion category. In this light, my re-reading of Hollinger has compelled me to rethink how I might conclude my book-in-progress on the culture wars—the concluding chapter is to be a reflection on the age of Obama in relation to the culture wars.

In Postethnic, Hollinger sees three distinct constituencies in relation to the U.S. nation-state, circa 1995: 1) the business elite who saw little need for the nation in an era of multinational capitalism (except to enforce their interests around the world); 2) members of the various diasporas who saw the nation “more as a site for transnational affiliations than as an affiliation of its own”; and 3) the “great variety of Middle Americans, evangelical Christians, advocates of family values, and supporters of Newt Gingrich and of Rush Limbaugh… suspicious of the state except as an enforcer of personal morality, but [who] claim the nation as, in effect, their own ethnic group.”

Hollinger’s formulation is clever, and mostly correct in the context of the 90s. Constituencies two and three battled it out in the culture wars as constituency one made out like bandits. But I would add a fourth constituency, one that has waxed and waned in its influence: those Americans who claim the nation for social justice. Such a strain might include everything from populism to Popular Frontism to racial liberalism to communitarianism to, I would add, postethnic thinkers like Hollinger. This social justice variant was overwhelmed during the culture wars. Hollinger’s major achievement in Postethnic is to revitalize such a strain for those sensitive to the needs of ethnic and racial minorities.

It is hard not to read Postethnic through the lens of Obama’s electoral victory. In fact, Hollinger has written about such a connection. In an article titled “Obama, the Instability of Color Lines, and the Promise of a Postethnic Future,” Hollinger contends that the major significance of Obama’s victory is to make clear that race, formulated as class and historical legacy, is more constraining, in the twenty-first century, than race, formulated as color. This separates slavery and Jim Crow’s descendents from black immigrants, African or Caribbean. Hollinger writes: “The African-American descendants of slavery and Jim Crow are the only population group in the United States with a multicentury legacy of group-specific enslavement and institutionalized debasement, including hypo-descent racialization (“one drop of blood” makes a person black) and antimiscegenation laws (black-white marriages were against the law in most states with large black populations until 1967), carried out under constitutional authority. Neither Obama nor any other African-American of immigrant background is a member of this population group. The success of Obama in becoming [president] is, like the success of other black immigrants in other domains, an indication that something other than color-prejudice in the eye of empowered white people is at the root of structural inequality in the United States.”

Although this point is valid and significant, for my purposes, Obama represents something different. As alluded to by Haberski, Obama taps into the fourth strain of thinking in relation to the American nation. Call it civil religion or liberal nationalism. Furthermore, Obama’s victory is a watershed moment, not only because he is the first black president, but because he has given common cause to constituencies number two, those who have viewed the American nation as a meeting place of various diasporas, and four. In short, black nationalists have inched closer to American liberal nationalism. Obama implicitly makes these connections in his writings and in his speeches. That said, the degree to which this “community” is real or lasting is debatable, especially since, in practice, the Obama administration has seemingly favored constituency number one (the business elite) by co-opting numbers two and four. Number three simply thinks he’s un-American.

Now, to conclude by way of returning to Hollinger’s postdisciplinary framework: this is pure speculation—not to mention intellectual gymnastics—but perhaps Hollinger views the relationship of U.S. intellectual history to the larger historical discipline as he views the relationship of, say, Chicano nationalism to the American nation. Chicano nationalism might be necessary in specific contexts, to improve the legal and political position of Latinos vis-à-vis the American nation. But the American nation is the ultimate guarantor of justice to those Chicanos who reside in the United States. I think Hollinger has come around to the view that our endeavors, via the blog and conference, have been necessary to improving our position vis-à-vis the larger historical discipline. He seemed enthusiastic about the conference. But allowing ourselves to be ghettoized would be, in his eyes, the academic equivalent of identity politics. “Affiliation by revocable consent.”

Ben's Light Shaming

I was going to put up a short post about this very funny thread on Crooked Timber about Scott McLemee's very funny (and smart) review of Cornel West's latest book (like the kids say, read the whole thing....the review, not the book), when, to my great surprise, I found that the Crooked Timber thread began to discuss this blog and McLemee's slapdown of me over my use of the word "Trotskyite" in our comment section. I'll let interested visitors of this blog surf over to Crooked Timber and examine the gory details for themselves.

Obama's Civil Religion

Last night, December 1, 2009, Barack Obama claimed ownership of the war in Afghanistan. Of course, the moment he won the presidency Obama inherited this war. But he embraced the war morally this evening. He made clear in his speech that he sees the war in Afghanistan as a "a time of great trial." He hopes to rally Americans behind his military strategy by reminding them that "when this war began, we were united – bound together by the fresh memory of a horrific attack, and by the determination to defend our homeland and the values we hold dear." That unity remains vital to the success of his war policy. "I refuse to accept the notion that we cannot summon that unity again," he declared. "I believe with every fiber of my being that we – as Americans – can still come together behind a common purpose."

Would Robert Bellah be pleased with this address? Bellah's 1967 essay "Civil Religion in America" written amidst another divisive war, reminded Americans that they possessed a common heritage that they might call upon, as he said, in times of trial. He argued that this "American civil religion is not the worship of the American nation but an understanding of the American experience in the light of ultimate and universal reality." Thus Americans had a common creed that unified them but that also provided a means to evaluate causes to which soldiers might give their last full measure of devotion to their nation.

Last night, Obama worked within the civil religious tradition when he called upon Americans to unify around a common understanding of American ideals and to reassert a claim to moral authority in the world.

But is it all hogwash? Many of us are well versed in the abstract dimensions of the strange beast that is civil religion--it can mean almost anything to anyone at anytime. As a cross between nationalism and biblical religion, civil religion has an intellectual flexibility that is intoxicating because it is so evocative, elastic, and deceptively complex. It seems to explain the intersection between religion and politics, faith and civic obligation in a way that allows one to imagine a healthy, almost liberating mixing of truth claims without manipulation. As if the president doesn't play upon the religious faith of his audience and the people don't mythologize the meaning of their nation.

And yet, listening to Obama, I was struck yet again by the way he seemed to become more earnest, almost more genuine once he moved away from the actual military strategy he has proposed to the ideals on which he bases that strategy. As he said, "We will go forward with the confidence that right makes might." That neatly captures the promise and dilemma of civil religion: we presume to know what is right and we act with our considerable might based on those presumptions.

Obama spoke to a public that nine years ago gave considerable consent to another president for this same war. Since that time, this public has, if we can take something from opinion polls, thoroughly picked apart the nature of that consent. Americans no longer believe in democracy promotion, state building, or preemptive war. They fear the loss of prestige among their allies and the degrading image of the United States around the world. But most of all, Americans have largely lost confidence in their civil leadership (especially Congress) to be effective agents for American ideals.

The one institution that has grown in popularity among the American people is the military. While that might seem ironic, it makes sense and it might be part of the reason Obama spoke at West Point. In poll after poll, Americans have indicated that the military has done its duty to the nation better than any other institution--whether that be the office of the president, Congress, or, the new villain of the hour, Wall Street. These polls suggest that Americans believe the military represents the common good because soldiers sacrifice for values all other institutions profess to support but seem to undermine.

Thus when Obama spoke to the cadets at West Point, he did so understanding that they carry a double burden: they are the soldiers who will fight his war and they are symbols of a civil religion that is real enough to many Americans to die for.