"Almost Always Polemical": Common Sense, Mortimer Adler, and Late Twentieth-Century Liberalism (Part II)

In my last post here on common sense in American history, I promised to connect the serious intellectual foundations of common sense with the philosophy of Mortimer J. Adler and his mid-twentieth-century community of discourse. In today's post I will show _why_ Adler moved in the direction of using and promoting common sense as an antidote for 1960s political troubles in the United States. This involves a short study of his motivations for writing two different (but related) books, as well as a look, counter-intuitively, at their reception. In next week's third and last post on this topic, I will discuss and analyze _how_ Adler articulated, defined, and applied the idea of common sense in both books. In other words, I hope to arrive at an explanation of his "common sense liberalism."

By the late 1960s Adler [right] had spent many years trying to bridge the gap between philosophy as an abstract study of argument and distinctions, and philosophy as a usable, accessible entity that could aid society in overcoming its troubles. My argument is that he engaged in that endeavor as a means to help foster and refine a democratic culture. This is a theoretical structure, with a longer history, I use to make long-term sense of Adler's work. Yet the idea of a democratic culture is never explicitly discussed by him in his writings. I don't want to get into all of the details of my theoretical structure here, but will at least offer a brief sketch of how it relates to common sense.

Back Issues of democracy

A request from Sarah Leonard, Editorial Assistant at Dissent (and also Editor of The New Inquiry’s print publication):

"I wanted to tell you about a project that Dissent magazine is undertaking, and ask the kind help of the community of intellectual historians who read and contribute to USIH. You probably know that democracy magazine was a short-lived creature of the early eighties, edited by Sheldon Wolin and Christopher Lasch, that published a brilliant but peculiar brand of Marxist anti-modernism. The issues have gotten a bit hard to find, and have never been digitized, but the ones I've read are really excellent.

Because Dissent took over democracy's subscriber list and obligations when democracy folded, I've started a project here to digitize all the issues (only twelve in all) and make them available on our site. I really fear that these will disappear altogether, or at least not used by researchers, if they aren't digitally preserved. We've scanned the ones we have, but are missing several issues. Do you think some of your intellectual historians might be willing to sacrifice some copies to the cause? The magazines have to be torn up to be scanned, so it is a bit of a sacrifice. I'd really like to see these preserved, and I'm sure some others would too. The missing issues are:

January 1981 (Vol. 1. No. 1)
April 1981 (Vol. 1, No. 2)
January 1982 (Vol. 2, No. 1)
July 1982 (Vol. 2, No. 3)
Fall 1982 (Vol. 2, No. 4)
Winter 1983 (Vol. 3, No. 1)
---------------
This is a good cause. If anyone is willing and able to help, either say so in the comments section, or send me an email and I'll get you in touch with Sarah. Thanks.

The 1970s and Abrupt Consciousness U-Turns

I just returned from DC where I spent some time in the National Education Association (NEA) Archive. I did a great deal of research in the NEA Archive for my first book, Education and the Cold War, when the NEA housed its own records. At that time, it was mostly a disorganized mess. But since then, the NEA Archive has found a new home at the George Washington University’s Gelman Library, within that library’s International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) Labor History Research Center. What a difference trained archivists make! Though plenty of educational historians make use of the NEA Archive, few historians in other sub-fields do, and this is a shame because I find the NEA Archive a treasure trove of cultural, political, and intellectual historical artifacts.

One major insight that this particular visit to the NEA Archive has made clear to me is the rapid shift in consciousness that took place among left and liberal educators in the 1970s. Sure, recent 70s historiography has already made this consciousness u-turn clear to me more generally—especially Jefferson Cowie’s Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class. But to see this shift so clearly in the primary sources makes it more palpable. Let me give an example.

Leo Strauss, Common Sense, and American Conservatism

In his fascinating post last week on common sense, Tim quoted (via an earlier post of mine) the Ford administration's intellectual-in-residence and Leo Strauss student Robert Goldwin on why Goldwin hated being called an "intellectual":

There is something fishy about the word 'intellectual.' …I think of 'intellectuals' as people who have a real distaste, sometimes even contempt, for the common sense approach, which is fundamentally the political approach.

Reencountering this quotation in the context of Tim's post, I immediately thought that I ought to write something for the blog about the Straussians and the idea of common sense.   This is, for reasons that I hope to make clear below, a complicated, interesting, and important topic, which sheds valuable light on the relationship of Strauss's thought to the larger world of American conservatism, as well as on the place of a kind of intellectual populism in an essentially aristocratic brand of political philosophy.

As luck would have it, yesterday the New York Times Book Review published a review by Harry Jaffa of Robert Bartlett and Susan Collins new translation of Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics which provides the perfect starting point for this discussion.*

something to chew on

"The challenge for intellectual history, as I conceive the enterprise, is to mediate between the history of ideas per se and the history of politics and society...By meeting the challenge successfully, intellectual history can demonstrate that it is not the rival, much less the adversary, of political and social history but their complement."

Daniel Walker Howe

The Political Culture of the American Whigs, page 10

I'll just come right out and say it...

This has little to do with U.S. intellectual history. I could insult your intelligence with some clever argument about contextualizing this, problematizing that, analyzing our presumptions and so on. But the reality is that I just thought it was so damned interesting that I had to post it.

The following quote is from an article by David Eagleman, in the current issue of The Atlantic. Called "The Brain on Trial," it argues that our current legal understandings of culpability and commonsensical notions of "free will" are collapsing under the weight of scientific evidence suggesting how much of what we do is determined by things outside of our control: in particular, the function and dysfunction of our brains. (He gives the example of Charles Whitman, who climbed the Tower at the University of Texas at Austin in 1966 and shot and killed a large number of people. I attended UT and had heard all about Whitman. But I never knew that he had complained to doctors about his increasingly violent thoughts and wrote a suicide note asking that his brain be autopsied upon his death. The postmortem found a tumor pressing upon his amygdala; this condition would certainly account for the complaints that Whitman had made, and for his behavior. Had he lived and had the tumor removed, would we say that he was to blame for killing those people? If we determined that he was not culpable, would that be the same as declaring that he should be allowed to roam around free and unmonitored?)

"If you think genes don't affect how people behave, consider this fact: if you are a carrier of a particular set of genes, the probability that you will commit a violent crime is four times as high as it would be if you lacked those genes. You're three times as likely to commit robbery, five times as likely to commit aggravated assault, eight times as likely to be arrested for murder, and 13 times as likely to be arrested for a sexual offense. The overwhelming majority of prisoners carry these genes; 98.1 percent of death-row inmates do...By the way, as regards that dangerous set of genes, you've probably heard of them. They are summarized as the Y chromosome. If you're a carrier, we call you a male."