Pulling a Thread: How Should Intellectual Historians Deal with Erroneous, Foolish, or Vicious Thought?

One of the recurring themes on this blog in recent months involves the question of how intellectual historians ought to deal with thought that is simply wrong...or worse.

Of course there's nothing very new about this problem, nor is it, at first glance, a matter of much controversy.  After all, many, many significant ideas from the past--from the ether to George Fitzhugh's defense of slavery--are both intellectually significant and, from the standpoint of the twenty-first century, deeply incorrect.  Yet we have no problem taking them seriously and writing about or teaching them.

But the issue is made  more vexed if the ideas in question are living ideas.  If--despite their being wrong or worse--they have advocates today.   And this is frequently the case when one studies contemporary intellectual history.

Here are just some of the instances in which this issue has come up on this blog in recent months: David's coverage of the dustup between Jill Lepore and Gordon Wood over how to treat the Teaparty's view of the American past; Andrew's discussion of the attack on ethnic studies in Arizona; Mike's consideration of Mike Huckabee's bizarre denial of British imperialism;  and the discussion of Andrew's post on Lisa Szefel's review of Dan Rodgers's Age of Fracture.

Second Annual Conference on Public Intellectuals at Harvard University

Check out the program for what looks like an exciting conference. If only I had more travel funds.

How should we as a nation mark the 150th anniversary of the Civil War?

Or, in some minds, will white Southerns use the occasion to herald the Confederacy and obliquely celebrate slavery and racism?

I really appreciate the way that the New York Times has been handling this question--through the column "Disunion" that regularly offers primary sources from the period to trace just how South and North divided. This week is about "The Minds of the South" so I thought of ya'll.

Explanation of "Disunion": One-hundred-and-fifty years ago, Americans went to war with themselves. Disunion revisits and reconsiders America’s most perilous period — using contemporary accounts, diaries, images and historical assessments to follow the Civil War as it unfolded.

Teaser for "The Minds of the South":  "Secession wasn’t evidence that the South didn’t have a reasoned intellectual life. In fact, it was the strongest evidence that it did."

One thing I would note is the use of "Southerner" to mean all Southerners, but really only whites--this happens a lot in contemporary popular discourse and ignores the very large numbers of Southerners who were black and anti-slavery.

The author, Cambridge University Professor Michael O'Brien, notes that the white Southern idea of secession arose out of a rational idea of the role of states in the union and that the fear of the end of slavery was at least in part a fear of the economic collapse that would follow the complete upheaval of the Southern economy. He argues that it was not a war of the wise North against the irrational South. Yet, no mention is made of the biggest reason that today we consider the South irrational--the massive abuse of human beings in the institution of slavery. It is possible to have rational discourse that upholds an abhorrent system (that may work perfectly rationally). My philosophy professor brother once argued that women shouldn't have the vote because every family should have one vote and it is divisive for the family structure if a husband and wife votes' cancel each other out. That is in some form rational, but I find it immoral. Sometimes we equate rationality with correctness, but they are not synonymous.

Szefel on Age of Fracture

I highly recommend Lisa Szefel's review of Daniel Rodgers, Age of Fracture, over at the History News Network.

Szefel makes two points in particular that I would like to call your attention to:

1) Szefel contends that Rodgers's analysis is constrained by his sole reliance on the methodology of intellectual history:

An intellectual historian who clearly delineates his methodology, Rodgers rarely ventures outside the realm of books and articles to explain how conceptions are formed, leading to some connections that ring hollow. In discussing the post-Fordist focus on the present, no mention is made of CNN, personal computers, or the ubiquity of media images. Ideas about race are dissected without analysis of the impact wielded by rap music, MTV, or films like Boyz n the Hood, giving the appearance that Charles Murray was primarily responsible for stereotypes that linked skin color to violence. Murray said little that Archie Bunker hadn’t already articulated more than a decade earlier and, while liberals were busy decrying the possessive investment in whiteness, ethnic Americans were denouncing the possessive investment in racism among the well-heeled. While lending sheen and coherence to a neat narrative about fracture, the methodology of intellectual history can skew analysis of issues and omit important developments.

revisionist history from Mike Huckabee

The liberal blogosphere is all atwitter (ha!) about Mike Huckabee's claim that President Obama grew up in Kenya. (Huckabee has since issued an implausible disavowal of the statement.) No, Obama did not grow up in Kenya, and yes, that's a stupid thing for a major political figure to say. But what is of far greater interest to me are the historical presumptions that underwrite Huckabee's rehashing of Dinesh D'Souza's claim that the president's intellectual worldview is centrally motivated by an anti-colonialism inherited from his Kenyan father.

Mike Huckabee, from his website

On a conservative radio show, Huckabee raised the point about Obama's childhood in order to express concern that the president's agenda, and its attendant philosophy, is entirely foreign to the worldview of the average American. "And one thing that I do know is his having grown up in Kenya--his view of the Brits, for example, [is] very different from [that of] the average American. When he gave the bust [of Winston Churchill] back to [the British, this was] a great insult to the British. But...his perspective growing up in Kenya with a Kenyan father and grandfather--their view of the Mau Mau Revolution is very different from ours, because he probably grew up hearing that the British were a bunch of imperialists who persecuted his grandfather."

I want to put aside several items of concern with Huckabee's statement: the notions that most contemporary Americans have the same attitude toward the Mau Mau uprising (or, for that matter, any view of it at all); that the viewpoint on this subject of someone with Kenyan heritage might not, in fact, be richer or better-informed that that of someone without that background; and that it's important and valuable that no one deviate from the consensus opinion. Instead, as an historian, I am interested in the claim that Obama's "view...is very different from ours because he probably grew up hearing that the British were a bunch of imperialists."

I've got to admit that I grew up in Indiana hearing pretty much the same thing. And, well, isn't it true? Weren't the British a bunch of imperialists? If the British Empire does not represent the very pinnacle of imperialism, then I guess I need to have Mandy Patinkin explain to me what the word actually means.

I claim no expertise on the UK, and this blog focuses on the United States, but Huckabee's implicit point strikes me as the worst kind of Orwellian historical revisionism. Is he actually suggesting that the British Empire was not an imperialist project? I have a hard time imagining any reasonable person would take such a position. But I also cannot see any other way to read his comment.

A Minimalist Offering: Check Out This Book

With this post I'm succumbing to the diseases sweeping academia this month: the mid-term blues and spring break virus. So I offer this minimalist bit of information about a new book of interest (courtesy of my PhilPapers feed, bolds mine):
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Robert S. Taylor (2011). Reconstructing Rawls: The Kantian Foundations of Justice as Fairness. Penn State University Press.

With the publication of A Theory of Justice in 1971, John Rawls not only rejuvenated contemporary political philosophy but also defended a Kantian form of Enlightenment liberalism called “justice as fairness.” Enlightenment liberalism stresses the development and exercise of our capacity for autonomy, while Reformation liberalism emphasizes diversity and the toleration that encourages it. These two strands of liberalism are often mutually supporting, but they conflict in a surprising number of cases, whether over the accommodation of group difference, the design of civic education, or the promotion of liberal values internationally. During the 1980’s, however, Rawls began to jettison key Kantian characteristics of his theory, a process culminating in the 1993 release of Political Liberalism and completing the transformation of justice as fairness into a Reformation liberalism. Reconstructing Rawls argues that this transformation was a tragic mistake because it jeopardized the most important features of his theory, viz. the lexical priorities of right, liberty, and fair equality of opportunity as well as the difference principle. Controversially, this book contends that Rawls’s so-called “political turn,” motivated by a newfound interest in diversity and the accommodation of difference, has been unhealthy for autonomy-based liberalism and has pushed liberalism more broadly towards cultural relativism, be it in the guise of liberal multiculturalism or critiques of cosmopolitan distributive-justice theories. The book then demonstrates that the central elements of justice as fairness can only be defended within the context of a Kantian Enlightenment liberalism and that Rawls’s hope for a more pluralistic grounding for his theory, endorsed by a wide variety of belief systems present in modern democratic societies, is illusory. Reconstructing Rawls is the first book to systematically compare Rawls’s and Kant’s theories and the first to offer an internal critique and reconstruction of justice as fairness, reconceiving it as a comprehensive, universalistic Kantian liberalism. By doing so, it gives us both the vision of a liberal world order—“a republicanism of all states, together and separately,” as Kant put it—and a mode of justification addressed to all men and women, not as members of particular nations, races, and faiths, but as human beings, as citizens of the world. In short, it reclaims Rawls for the Enlightenment.
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Color me intrigued. - TL

Bill Fine on Tim Lacy on George Cotkin

Tim Lacy's recent thought-provoking review of George Cotkin's book Morality's Muddy Waters has elicited an interesting series of comments from Bill Fine. As I am home sick with a sick kid, I will defer to a conversation that is taking place on a post that certainly serves up more food for thought. Please see Tim's original review here and Bill's comments here. You will need to scroll down just a bit to find Bill's comments.

Bleg: Request For Article Suggestions

Speaking of Professor Cotkin, here's a special request from him:

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I am going to be teaching a reading seminar for M.A. students in U.S. Intellectual and Cultural History in the fall. Are there articles in the field that you think are must reads for the graduate students? If so, please let me know. Thank you for your help.
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Thoughts? John Higham was an outstanding essayist. I would think something by him would float to the top. Also, David Hollinger's collection, In the American Province, seems like it would hold forth possibilities. -TL

A Quote for Tuesday

"In my case, every kind of reading belongs among my recreations--hence among things that liberate me from myself, that allow me to walk about in strange sciences and souls--that I no longer take seriously. Reading is precisely my recreation from my own seriousness. During periods when I am hard at work you will not find me surrounded by books: I'd beware of letting anyone near me talk, much less think. And that is what reading would mean."

Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann (1908; New York: Vintage, 1967), 242.

Editors and Editing

Over at the Historical Society blog, Randall Stephens recently posted on editors and editing. For some time now, changes in the publishing industry have made it difficult for editors to actually edit. They spend their time in meetings, running budget numbers and performing a variety of tasks that make them more like product managers than editors. Even though the problem seems to lie in the structural and financial changes in publishing houses, editors themselves can sometimes be defensive about these changes. After all, I imagine that they did not get into the business so that they can be product managers that handle intellectual content. When I was shopping around my book manuscript, I once asked an editor (who shall remain nameless) whether it was true that editors no longer edit. He responded tetchily (I'm paraphrasing here, but this is pretty close to what he said), "When am I supposed to edit? I don't have time, and I can't really be expected to sacrifice my entire life to read every book I publish." I don't really want to focus on these changes, which we can't reverse and neither can the editors (but if you want to read about some of the structural shifts, especially as they affect trade houses, check out this piece by Richard Curtis). I want, instead, to talk about the editors who, in spite of these adverse conditions, continue to edit. My editor on The Myth of American Religious Freedom, Theo Calderara, was the platonic ideal of an editor, giving my entire book a close line edit and walking me through the entire process. There are others who continue to find time to edit. I'm told that Susan Ferber of OUP and Joyce Seltzer of HUP provide careful, developmental editing. Chuck Grench at UNC Press does an "editorial report" for the author that makes macro-level suggestions for changing and developing the manuscript before it goes to the copy editor. I'd be curious about other editors that provide substantial editorial help. Note that this is not the place for complaints about an editor, many of whom do the best they can with limited resources. But given these changes in the publishing industry, who continues to edit?