New Inquiry Posts "Intellectual History for What?" Papers

The folks at The New Inquiry have posted the papers featured in the "Intellectual History for What?" session at the Third USIH conference, thanks to their astute editor, Sarah Leonard. Andrew sparked our own discussion not too long ago.

Weekend Bleg: Where Would You Go To Get a USIH PhD?

A colleague in the Honors College at the University of Oklahoma informed me on Friday that he had sent a student my way to ask me advice about graduate programs that he might apply to. Apparently he's interested in pursuing a PhD in either political theory or U.S. intellectual history (insert joke about "or unemployment" if you must).

As to political theory programs, I simply have no informed opinion (nor do I feel I should). And while I would have some advice to give about what programs are good for U.S. intellectual history, I fear my advice may be out of date. I will probably tell the student that our subfield is small enough that, with the exception of a handful of places, the choice ought really to be based on a consideration of the overall program in history, as well as a consideration of the particular person with whom one would be likely to write a PhD in intellectual history.

Most of my fellow bloggers are closer to the PhD (and the job market) than I am, so they might have a better sense of the graduate educational lay of the land these days. And I'd imagine many of our readers are at institutions with PhDs programs featuring a greater (or lesser) emphasis on intellectual history who can share some local knowledge about their own institutions.

FWIW, the University of Oklahoma has some fine intellectual historians, but has a graduate history program very much focused on Western, Native American, and environmental history. We also have a first-rate, stand-alone History of Science department.

So consider the comment thread below an open conversation about my colleague's student's question. And be warned that I might share whatever advice you give with him.

Tim's Light Reading (11/05/2010)

I offer the following as a break from our (excellent!) long posts reflecting on conference matters:

1 (of 5). The Problem of Political Philosophy: Only Links to Offer

Bookforum's excellent Omnivore blog held forth on "The Problem of Political Philosophy" in a post a few days ago. If you're not familiar with Omnivore, its posts are constructed as carnivalesque clouds of links on specific themes. Each link is usually a full story, opinion piece, or book review. My favorite link in this post is to a paper by Francesca Pasquali that brings together political theory, political philosophy, and public philosophy. The last has been a concern to me for some time because it links the work of Walter Lippmann and Mortimer J. Adler. Here's a provocative excerpt from Pasquali's abstract (bolds mine):

Public philosophy detects the shared values grounding political practices and employs them to develop criteria for guiding policy decisions. It is attentive to empirical data and constraints and it provides solutions that are effective in political terms. Political philosophy takes its distance from congiuntural facts and practically subscribed principles. While sensitive to practical problems, it does not aim at elaborating practically viable solutions: it is rather concerned with the theoretical adequacy of its principles. Public philosophy seems better equipped for developing proposals serviceable during hard times, when effective political responses are in need.

2. A Poll: "The Best Quality Journals in the History of Philosophy"

University of Chicago Law School professor (and philosopher) Brian Leiter, who runs Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog, recently conducted a poll that should be interest to all intellectual historians. Using CIVS (Condercet Internet Voting Service), he asked readers

X-post: Michael Kramer Reflects On The Third Annual USIH Conference

[First posted at Michael Kramer's weblog, Culture Rover, on Oct. 28, 2010, this essay reflects on the overall meaning of the Third Annual USIH Conference. Michael attended and presented a paper, and has subsequently contributed to the thread below on the event's final plenary. Michael works at Northwestern University.]
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Instituting Intellectual History: the ins and outs of academic intellectual history.


[Christopher Lasch]

No ideas but in things. — William Carlos Williams

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At the closing panel of the third annual U.S. Intellectual History conference, whose theme was “Intellectuals and Their Publics,” the ghost of Christopher Lasch very much haunted the halls. A number of former graduate students, and even Lasch’s own daughter, delivered eloquent, forceful talks in response to the question “Intellectual History for What?” They urged colleagues and students to work not only as specialized scholars, but also as cultural and social critics.

But a question from a younger colleague in the audience revealed an underlying tension at the conference. The question was along the lines of (I paraphrase):

What is postmodernity and how does it relate to the culture wars?

I am the new regularly scheduled Friday blogger, but since I’ll be on a plane to Boston tomorrow for the annual History of Education Society meeting, I’m going to jump the gun by a day. My post relates, I think, to the excellent ongoing discussion between Paul Murphy and Michael Kramer in the comments section of my earlier post on the “Intellectual History for What?” plenary from our recent conference. How can we speak to a public when no such public, singular, exists? I think it also relates to Ray Haberski’s intriguing post yesterday about how war seems to be the only thing to draw Americans together anymore, the only thing around which a civil religion still exists.

At the risk of beating a dead horse, I want to briefly answer the following two questions, or at least, get a discussion going: What is postmodernity? And how does it relate to the culture wars? These are really important questions that pertain to my thinking about the culture wars.

Brokaw and Bourne

While watching the reports about the mid-term elections, there was one person I looked forward to seeing. Not Jim Lehrer, or Chris Matthews, or even John Stewart; no, I looked forward to Tom Brokaw. Why? Because I thought he might bring up one issue that seemed forgotten—war! In an op-ed in the New York Times on October 17, Brokaw thumped his point: “The United States is now in its ninth year of fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, the longest wars in American history. Almost 5,000 men and women have been killed. More than 30,000 have been wounded, some so gravely they’re returning home to become, effectively, wards of their families and communities.” On Tuesday night, while the likes of Michelle Bachmann chanted about taxes and…taxes, Brokaw took a moment to remind his colleagues of the “blood and treasure” squandered by the wars on terror. But in the midst of a yet another round of the culture wars, real war got lost.

By calling attention to war, we might hope to have a vigorous debate about its costs, too. In the question and answer period that followed James Kloppenberg’s talk on Barack Obama as a pragmatist, Jackson Lears pointedly critiqued Obama’s handling of the war on terror. While we might find reason to admire or, at least, be sympathetic to Obama’s handling of the economy, health care, and education, his handling of the war on terror has been, Kloppenberg noted, deeply distressful. This exchange suggested that Obama’s failure might indicate a deficiency in his pragmatic thought. Might it also suggest a hole in our intellectual history? In other words, if the battles against Obama in the mid-terms illuminate the cultural wars, what does this failure to contend with real war reveal?

I asked this question knowing that we have intellectual histories of the culture wars, for an incisive treatment of this subject see the work of my USIH colleague Andrew Hartman. The significance of the culture wars, as Andrew writes in a blog posted earlier this year, is the “multiplication of mini-grand narratives.” We are awash in ways to explain the purpose of our age, our nation, and ourselves. The culture wars might not be good for politics but they do raise fundamental questions about the identity of the nation—this fractured, contested identity. Except, it seems, when we go to war. We dismiss each other’s view about art but, according to polls, agree on the heroism of American troops; we war over who gets to interpret the history of the nation but have faith that the nation, even when it is at war, is essentially good; and we wield religious views like weapons but find it entirely appropriate for our political leaders, in a time of war, to lead us in prayer. But in a dangerous twist, where the culture wars force us to recognize differences in ideas, wars tend to blur those differences until we become like Michelle Bachmann—in a trance, mouthing slogans.

Given my configuration above, what we have is an era of “multiplying mini-grand narratives” that has developed and continues to develop alongside and in some cases in relation to a grand narrative of war. The latter has an intellectual history, too. And we might investigate the irony of that history through the concept of civil religion.

The touchstone for thinking about contemporary versions of American civil religion remains Robert Bellah’s 1967 essay, “Civil Religion in America.” Reading Bellah in light of our recent wars, what struck me was not so much his defense of civil religion but the fact that civil religion seemed most relevant and apparent to Bellah in times of war. The heart of his argument relied on the significance of what he called “times of trial.” He concluded that the United States did not fight wars for higher ideals as much as find its ideals in the wars that it fought. In short, American civil religion was forged in war. Sacrifice in the war for independence made apparent a civil religious covenant among Americans. The Civil War incarnated that civil religion through a massive blood sacrifice (to summarize Harry Stout’s recent application of Bellah). World War II certified the promise of civil religion through heroic sacrifice on behalf of ideals embodied by the original American covenant.

The postwar period offered a new twist to the evolution of American civil religion. This was an era in which the notion that America was a force of good in the world went from functioning basically as an abstraction to a historical proof. Because the United States has been in an almost constant of war and because for the first time the abstract notion of the American promise had unprecedented American military power behind it, American civil religion grew exponentially more significant and more dangerous.

Bellah wrote his original essay in light of Vietnam, a war, he argued, that did not disprove the idea that the nation could still be a force for good in the world. Out of the depths of one of the most divisive periods in American history, Bellah offered one of the most attractive versions of American civil religion as a historical proof, arguing that “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.” In short, Americans not only had a common creed that unified them but they also had a tradition of using that creed to evaluate their nation's actions. In parlance that became popular following World War II, the United States was a nation “under God,” meaning, as Bellah explained, “the will of the people is not itself the criterion of right and wrong. There is a higher criterion in terms of which this will can be judged; it is possible that the people may be wrong. The president’s obligation extends to the higher criterion.”[1]

Bellah suggested a way to claim moral authority in a time of moral tragedy by making adjustments in light of that higher authority. However, Ben Alpers, another colleague of mine at USIH, reminds us in a recent post that Randolph Bourne’s admonition regarding war haunts us. Bourne’s critique of pragmatist support for war included things familiar to us today: the cost of war in treasure and blood; the misguided expectation of a “gallant” war; and the contradictory logic that if a “war is too strong for you to prevent, how is it going to be weak enough for you to control and mould to your liberal purposes?” But perhaps Bourne’s most incisive observation was his lament that pragmatists led by John Dewey believed they could calibrate the techniques of war to the advancement of democratic values. In other words, winning a war made it possible for a philosophy of the good to flourish.

Yet, as Bourne so succinctly put it: “war always undermines values.” Indeed, calibrating values to technique in a time of war invites tragedy. And Bourne’s insight is devastating given our current predicament. Contemporary America is dangerously well-equipped to experiment with technique and tragically uninterested in contending with the psychic damage war has on its values. While our planners fiddle with troop levels, drone attacks, and secret-ops, thousands of soldiers stand to lose their lives for a war of almost no consequence. And while our electorate consumed its politics like so much tea, the wars have consumed at bit more of the national soul. Bourne castigated the young intelligentsia of his day for its infatuation with the technocratic side of war; in organizing for war they had forgotten to give much attention to reasons for fighting it. As our conversation about the role of intellectual history continues, is there a way to theorize war as we have the culture wars? Is there way to answer the call of Randolph Bourne and, of course, Tom Brokaw?

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[1] Robert Bellah, http://www.robertbellah.com/articles_5.htm.

Be on the lookout for Livingston's response

James Livingston gave a shout-out to my review of his book, The World Turned Inside Out: American Thought and Culture at the End of the 20th Century, on his blog Politics and Letters. Livingston will be responding to my review here shortly. So be on the lookout for that!

Great Conversation about Andrew's earlier post

I wanted to draw attention to the great conversation going on in the comments section of Andrew's earlier post. Teeing off Andrew's summary of the final plenary at the late USIH conference, the commenters have been analyzing many of the issues with a degree of clarity and intellectual engagement that is rare given the vexed problems that plenary speakers sought to address.

A Quote for Tuesday

"The body of knowledge keeps increasing at incredible speed, but the literature of nonknowledge grows even faster. Books multiply like mushrooms, or rather like toadstools--mildew would be still more precise--and even those who read books come perforce to depend more and more on knowledge about books, writers, and, if at all possible--for this is the intellectual, or rather the nonintellectual, equivalent of a bargain--movements. As long as one knows about existentialism, one can talk about a large number of authors without having actually read their books."

Walter Kaufmann, "Editor's Introduction" to Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals (New York: Vintage, 1989), 6-7.

Steven K. Green, The Second Disestablishment

David Sehat

I've just finished reading Steven K. Green's The Second Disestablishment, which is a most useful book for anyone interested in the history of religion and law in United States. Many historians have argued that disestablishment, the removal of state support for religious institutions that occurred from 1776-1833, separated church and state in the United States. Green makes a different and much more compelling argument. Rather than seeing disestablishment as a singular and once-and-for-all event, Green argues that disestablishment occurred in three distinct phases. The first happened when states stopped paying churches and removed civil disabilities for non-Protestants and non-Christians. He calls this political disestablishment. The second disestablishment, which his book focuses on, occurred from 1840-1900 with the removal of legal protections for Christianity. He calls this legal disestablishment. The third disestablishment occurred from 1947-1968, as the mid-twentieth-century Supreme Court sought to remove all vestiges of Christian control over American society and culture. He calls this cultural disestablishment.

I have various disagreements with Green that mostly stem from the Whig quality of his narrative, but the book still remains powerful and useful. For Green, the initial political disestablishment destabilized the entire system of establishment so that the second and third disestablishment were, if not inevitable, then perhaps unexpected, even if they took a long time to work out. This focus on the internal logic of disestablishment works well with his internalist focus on the operations of the law and is, in many ways, designed to be immediately useful for legal advocacy (Green is a lawyer who specializes in the religion clauses of the First Amendment and has significant litigation experience). I would have liked a broader focus on the process of this transformation in the wider culture and the cultural contestations that it relied upon and provoked. This also would have created a less teleological narrative. But the research is deep and powerful and his useful distinction between the kinds of establishment/disestablishment is critical to our understanding the multiple ways in which religion and the state were connected in the past. By temporalizing this process and by conceiving of disestablishment as a process as such, Green allows legal advocates a way to acknowledge the Christian control of law in the past while not supporting the renewal of that control in law today.

Hartman on Livingston

Review of James Livingston, The World Turned Inside Out: American Thought and Culture at the End of the 20th Century (New York: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2010). ISBN-13: 978-0-7425-3541-1. 179 pages.

Review by Andrew Hartman
Illinois State University
November 2010

“Keep arguing.” James Livingston, 2010

Professor Livingston needn’t worry. His new book will keep people arguing. For The World Turned Inside Out is nothing if not maddeningly counterintuitive. Some of my friends and colleagues who have read it inform me that they agree with nothing in it. Of course, these same friends and colleagues also tell me they have never agreed with a single word Livingston has written. And yet, they keep reading. And they keep arguing.

In his first major contribution to intellectual history, Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, 1850-1940 (1994), Livingston argued against historians who made the Populists out to be history’s tragic, if fallen heroes, celebrated for their resistance to the corporate order. In contrast, Livingston marveled at the material surpluses offered by the new corporate order and, furthermore, contended that the emergence of corporations merited intellectual innovation in the eyes of pragmatists, especially John Dewey. “In the narrative form of pragmatism,” Livingston wrote, “the decline of proprietary capitalism loses its pathos, and the triumph of corporate capitalism appears as the first act of an unfinished comedy, not the residue of tragedy” (1994; xvi). Livingston thus inverted the historical trajectory posited by Christopher Lasch in his 1991 The True and Only Heaven: whereas Lasch understood “progress” to be mere ideological cover for the bureaucratic and technocratic constraints of the corporate order, Livingston pointed to the newfound freedoms made possible by that order. Unfortunately for us all, Lasch died in 1994, unable to respond to Livingston’s provocations.

Twilight of the Idols

As Andrew and Tim have already noted, our recently concluded conference featured two sharply different views of Barack Obama. Thursday's plenary panel featured, among others, Adolph Reed, Jr., whose book The Perils of Obamamania (Verso, 2009 forthcoming [h/t Andrew Hartman in comments!]) elaborates a critique of our current president that he first formulated when Barack Obama was just a candidate for the Illinois State Senate. James Kloppenberg's Friday keynote address focused on his latest book, Reading Obama (Princeton, 2011), which offers a rich and sympathetic portrait of the President. (You can find a recording of the plenary panel with Reed--which focused on his recent co-edited volume, Renewing Black Intellectual History (Paradigm, 2010)--here. Kloppenberg's keynote is available here.)

Like many others, I was impressed by the portrait of Obama that Kloppenberg drew. Impressed, that is, both by the care with which Kloppenberg analyzed the President's habits of mind and by the picture of Obama that emerged from the analysis. Obama, according to Kloppenberg, is a true philosophical pragmatist, a man with a deep and subtle understanding of the American past, who tries to make his political practice match a set of admirable intellectual commitments. Like Kloppenberg, I find myself substantially to the left of this President...but I would be substantially to the left of anyone likely to be elected president. But like Kloppenberg, too, I am deeply attracted to Obama, or at least to the man described in Kloppenberg's talk (and book, which I look forward to reading). Short of someone who truly shares my politics (which is pretty much an impossibility), a brilliant, philosophical pragmatist with a rich sense of U.S. history sounds like an almost ideal president.

And yet. As the question and answer session suggested--I'm sure to nobody's surprise--this room full of people to whom this portrait of Obama as philosophical pragmatist doubtless appealed expressed deep frustration with the Obama administration so far. On war and peace, on transparency, on executive power, on Fourth Amendment rights, on education (among other areas), this president has disappointed. And though I think we'd all agree that Obama has come to office in politically extremely challenging times, many of the perceived failures have involved matters that the President hasn't had to run through Congress.

I left Kloppenberg's keynote feeling if anything a little more depressed about our politics. Not because I wasn't convinced by Kloppenberg, but rather because I largely was. If this administration is what one gets from a philosophical pragmatist as president, that suggested to me that I might have to reevaluate some of my commitments to philosophical pragmatism, at least in the political realm.

Needless to say, I wouldn't be the first person to make such a journey. I immediately thought of Randolph Bourne's scathing attack on John Dewey's support for U.S. involvement in World War I, "Twilight of the Idols" (1917). As readers of this blog probably know, rather than seeing that support simply as a betrayal of Dewey's pragmatism, Bourne suggested that pragmatists' support for the war effort reflected deep problems with that philosophy in practice:

To those of us who have taken Dewey's philosophy almost as our American religion, it never occurred that values could be subordinated to technique. We were instrumentalists, but we had our private utopias so clearly before our minds that the means fell always into its place as contributory. And Dewey, of course, always meant his philosophy, when taken as a philosophy of life, to start with values. But there was always that unhappy ambiguity in his doctrine as to just how values were created, and it became easier and easier to assume that just any growth was justified and almost any activity valuable so long as it achieved ends. The American, in living out this philosophy, has habitually confused results with product, and been content with getting somewhere without asking too closely whether it was the desirable place to get. It is now bumming plain that unless you start with the vividest kind of poetic vision, your instrumentalism is likely to land you just where it has landed this younger intelligentsia which is so happily and busily engaged in the national enterprise of war. You must have your vision and you must have your technique. The practical effect of Dewey's philosophy has evidently been to develop the sense of the latter at the expense of the former. . . . The trouble with our situation is not only that values have been generally ignored in favor of technique, but that those who have struggled to keep values foremost, have been too bloodless and too near-sighted in their vision. The defect of any philosophy of "adaptation" or "adjustment," even when it means adjustment to changing, living experience, is that there is no provision for thought or experience getting beyond itself. If your ideal is to be adjustment to your situation, in radiant cooperation with reality, then your success is likely to be just that and no more. You never transcend anything. You grow, but your spirit never jumps out of your skin to go on wild adventures. If your policy as a publicist reformer is to take what you can get, you are likely to find that you get something less than you should be willing to take. Italy in the settlement is said to be demanding one hundred in order to get twenty, and this machiavellian principle might well be adopted by the radical. Vision must constantly outshoot technique, opportunist efforts usually achieve less even than what seemed obviously possible. An impossibilist elan that appeals to desire will often carry further. A philosophy of adjustment will not even make for adjustment. If you try merely to "meet" situations as they come, you will not even meet them. Instead you will only pile up behind you deficits and arrears that will some day bankrupt you.

The wartime context has tended to dominate many readings of "Twilight of the Idols" over the decades, in large measure because we continue to get involved in wars which many self-described liberals and progressives support, much to the dismay of other liberals and progressives. Alongside his unfinished essay on "The State" (1918), Bourne's "Twilight of the Idols" is a classic portrait of how war distorts democratic life. And to be fair to Bourne, he never quite abandons pragmatism as such in "Twilight." The essay is haunted by the ghost of William James, who Bourne hopes would have drawn different conclusions from Dewey.

But much in "Twilight" might help fill in the interpretive gap between Kloppenberg's Obama and the frequently disappointing performance of this White House. I'll close this already too-long post with a final quote from the essay that, I think, helps us do that:

We are in the war because an American Government practiced a philosophy of adjustment, and an instrumentalism for minor ends, instead of creating new values and setting at once a large standard to which the nations might repair. An intellectual attitude of mere adjustment, of mere use of the creative intelligence to make your progress, must end in caution, regression, and a virtual failure to effect even that change which you so clear-sightedly and desirously see. This is the root of our dissatisfaction with much of the current political and social realism that is preached to us.