U.S. Intellectual History

What are you waiting for?

2012-02-02T06:18:00.002-06:00

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

2012-02-01T04:22:00.041-06:00

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.

In rural Kentucky, queer youth use "boundary publics" to express themselves. Nationally, in media and in activist groups, "the good gay life" is seen as only urban. Moreover, according to this narrative, discovery of one's queer self requires things unavailable to a rural youth--" provacy to explore one's queer differences beyond the watchful eyes of those who presume to know everything about one; a visible community able to recognize and return one's queer gaze; and the safe space to express queer difference without fear of retribution" (from Gray's introduction to her book, Out in the Country:Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America).

In this "metro-centric" narrative, rural gays must be biding their time before they can escape to an urban space. But what Gray discovered is that gay youth stay in rural places. Their obsession is not how to leave, but who is the next gay person in the next county over. Gray's idea of "boundary publics" blur offline and online spaces, transform the narrative about what it means to be gay and rural, and establish a chance for social interaction. They express strategies for social recognition and a dialectic between iterative, ephemeral performances of the self and material conditions (rather than having permanent places to be themselves, they take over public spaces and then let them go).

The three examples she gave of "boundary publics" are
1. A church skatepark that was taken over by queer youth, particularly in order to hear bands play. One of the bands then collected email addresses and emailed mp3s with gay lyrics (mostly about heart break between girls) to the listserve.
2. Drag at Walmart (it functions as a fantastic defacto public space because it is a private space with nationally set guidelines for how "guests" can be treated, and is also often the only place open 24 hours in dry counties).
3. A transyouth blog, where his family left supportive messages in the guest book, while emphatically not discussing his transition in real life.

These rural gay youth teach us:
1. Identities are a process of collective action, not a condition waiting for discovery
2. Multiple visibility strategies in play
3. We need to stop moralizing about who does queerness right.

The commentator afterwards, Carol Mason, appreciated several aspects of the talk, but explained that her University of Oklahoma students resisted Gray's idea of "Boundary publics" as seeming to neglect protest. She gave an example of an art history prof at the University of Kentucky in the 40s who was found by the cops in a car with a young man and arrested for disturbing the peace and on a moralism charge. The disurbing the peace charge was because he tussled with the police. He quit his job and went to Oklahoma. Mason suggested that the "boundary public" of the parked car was not in fact a liberating alternative zone, but instead a sad fact of gay life--that he was forced there when no where else was possible (I'm extrapolating a bit here--that's the sense I got).

This point of disagreement between Gray and Mason reminded me a bit of my own work. I understand Gray to be exploring the alternative spaces that gay youth in rural places create, not because they are protest, but because they are the way that these youth have found to live and breathe and have their being. Whereas Mason wants to find the points of protest and oppression. I see my own work more in line with Gray's--trying to see and validate how African Americans lived during the years of Jim Crow, without having to divide up their choices between protest or accommodation. (Which is ironic because my book is entitled "A Spirit of Compromise and Protest." This suggests, as someone pointed out after a talk of mine recently, that I am exactly about looking at the eternal choice between compromise--a word which is related to, but different than accommodation--and protest.)

I checked in with Gray to see if my sense accorded with her own response to Mason. She wrote back, "I don't know if Carol and I disagree so much as I'm interested in those moments of liberation that do also grapple with limits because they reckon with something beyond LGBT identities or desires. I'm thinking of any person who has to negotiate multiple social positions, including their LGBT-ness, and how that necessarily leads to give and take." Give and take = compromise? And in my formulation, which does not suggest that compromise is the antithesis of protest, perhaps bringing an aunt into a virtual conversation about one's trans-ness by being both visible and kind is a compromise (by not talking about it at the dinner table) and a form of protest (as simple visibility can be in a homophobic world).

Call for Papers: U.S. Intellectual History

2012-01-31T16:10:00.004-06:00

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.

This year’s conference theme is “Communities of Discourse.” The theme highlights the fact that communities are essential to intellectual life. Intellectual historians often focus on individual figures, yet individuals are always embedded in wider communities of intellectual exchange. In addition, intellectual historians are themselves situated in communities of exchange that include not only other historians, but also academics from a broad range of fields (including literature, political science, communications, religion, sociology, anthropology, art history) and the wider public as well. The conference committee invites participants to reflect on all aspects of communities of discourse and the study of intellectual history. Although proposals that relate to the theme are particularly welcome, the committee will accept submissions that are relevant to any aspect of the study of American thought.

Given the growing popularity of the conference, the committee is introducing a number of new submission rules in order to ensure fairness. Please read carefully. We will only accept submission of complete panels and will no longer accept individual paper submissions. Panel submissions must include an abstract of each presentation, a separate description of the panel itself, and one-page CVs including the relevant means of contact for all participants. Abstracts for individual presentations should be no longer than 250 words; panel abstracts should be no longer than 500 words.

Please observe the following:

1. The number of participants in each session will vary with the format but each panel should have a chair. We will accept the following formats:
a. Traditional panels: Sessions featuring three academic papers and one commentator, who will also serve as the panel chair.
b. Roundtables: A series of ten-minute extemporaneous presentations on a topic followed by discussion among the panel and audience.
c. Discussion panels: Sessions in which the papers are circulated online prior to the conference. The entire session is devoted to discussions of the papers.
d. Brownbags: One-hour long presentations during the lunch period.

2. Each panel submission must indicate a panel organizer, who will serve as the point of contact for the conference committee.

3. The committee is especially eager to ensure a diverse representation of participants at the conference. All academic considerations being equal, panels will be selected whose participants contribute to that goal.

4. Participation will be limited to once on the program, so a person should only join one panel submission.

5. The committee assumes that submission to the conference is an indication that participants will be attending the entire conference. We are unable to accommodate scheduling requests.

6. All persons appearing on the program must become members of S-USIH and register for the conference in advance.

7. Deadline for submissions is June 1, 2012. All submissions must be emailed as attachments in MS Word or .pdf format.

Send all submissions to:
2012 Conference Committee
usih2012@gmail.com

Other queries may be directed to:
David Sehat, 2012 Conference Committee Chair
dsehat@gsu.edu

Socialism is the Name of Our Desire

2012-01-31T15:19:00.007-06:00

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.

Lest you dyed-in-the-wool empiricists out there object, I should point out that I also argued that including socialism as part of the U.S. history curriculum paints a more accurate picture of U.S. history. In making this case, I relied heavily on Michael Kazin’s indispensable new book, American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation (which Mike O’Connor reviewed for USIH here.) Kazin contends that the left, defined as “that social movement, or congeries of mutually sympathetic movements, that are dedicated to a radically egalitarian transformation of society”—has transformed the moral culture, or "common sense” of the nation, even though it has never been a serious threat to the concentrations of political and economic power. He writes: “Leftists who articulated big dreams of a different future did much to initiate what became common, if still controversial, features of American life. These included the advocacy of equal opportunity and equal treatment for women, ethnic and racial minorities, and homosexuals; the celebration of sexual pleasure unconnected to reproduction, media and educational system sensitive to racial and gender oppression and which celebrates what we now call multiculturalism, and the popularity of novels and films with a strongly altruistic and anti-authoritarian point of view.” In short, Kazin argues that the cultural left, from Harriet Beecher Stowe, to Max Eastman, to Toni Morrison, to Matt Groening, “articulated outrage about the state of the world and the longing for a different one in ways the political left was unable to do.”

Kazin’s thesis is exciting for intellectual historians because, insofar as the left has been influential in American life, such influence is best assessed by taking stock of how its ideas have been incorporated into mainstream cultural frameworks. This is not to say that American Dreamers is a work of intellectual history. Kazin takes ideas seriously, and intellectuals seriously, but usually as tangential to the larger social history of political movements. That is to say, he rarely pauses to analyze intellectual sources with any rigor. Which is fine. Like I said, the book is indispensable as a synthetic historical overview of the American left. I definitely plan to assign it to undergraduate students.

American Dreamers is also a good place for intellectual historians to begin rethinking the paradoxes of radical thought. For instance, in an obscure footnote Kazin quotes a stunning passage from Richard Hofstadter’s Age of Reform: “The dialectic of history is full of odd and cunningly contrived ironies, and among these are rebellion waged only that the rebels might in the end be converted into their opposites.” Kazin relates Hofstadter’s point about the populists in order to make his case that many New Left dissidents, those who staged dramatic sit-ins at universities across the country, ended up controlling the reigns of cultural power as represented by humanities departments. Although this paradoxical development sends shivers down the spines of conservatives such as Pat Buchanan—whose pithy quote, “Culture is the Ho Chi Minh Trail of power; you surrender that province and you lose America,” became a rallying cry for conservative culture warriors—Kazin qualifies the effect of tenured radicals.

On the one hand, Kazin recognizes, along with Richard Rorty, that New Leftists have reshaped American culture to be far less sadistic. Concomitantly, they changed the way millions of young Americans have learned about their nation. Kazin writes: “Gradually, their ideas about history, literature, and a just society percolated down to secondary schools across the land. Black studies, Chicano studies, women’s studies, queer studies, and cultural studies; history which examined America as a nation dominated by white people bent on empire, the so-called ‘holy trinity’ of ‘race-class-and-gender’ and the virtues of multicultural identity—all were norms of pedagogy and scholarship by the end of the twentieth century.” Although this is more than a touch overstated—more secondary students continue to learn from traditional curriculums than from those inflected with New Left ideas, and even most college surveys avoid using the “E word” (Empire) when describing the role of America in the world, apart from the era of the Spanish-American War—Kazin is basically correct about this remarkable cultural transformation.

But on the other hand, Kazin’s analysis of the cultural left is tempered by his pessimism that such success matters little in the face of conservative economic and political power. “The cultural influence of the post-1960s left thus became a background melody to a political narrative written largely by conservatives. It softened the tone and created some striking ironies”—such that Fox broadcast sixties radical Matt Groening’s satirically subversive The Simpsons for over two decades at the same time its news station became an effective mouthpiece of the Republican Party’s right-wing—“but it did not rewrite the script.” The trajectory of this analysis is similar to a line of thought I’ve been exploring: to what degree has New Left thought been sopped up by neoliberalism (cultural liberalism mixed with economic conservatism)? Kazin’s analysis that, “as respect for the individual rights of everyone advanced, the advocacy of collective uplift and economic equality receded further,” begs the following question: was the advance of the former the precondition for the recession of the latter? The answers to this question might determine whether the left has a future.

Kazin is a careful and fair scholar. But he gets caught up in his own brand of polemics when analyzing contemporary left public intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Michael Moore, and Howard Zinn. Although he is quick to point out that such intellectuals are handicapped by the fact that their ideas are disconnected from a movement—since a left political movement is mostly non-existent—he is even quicker to dismiss their ideas as grim and unrealistic. Kazin is especially harsh in rehashing his dour assessment of the late historian and activist Howard Zinn. Me thinks he doth protest too much.

Kazin begrudgingly recognizes that Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, which has sold over two million copies, has “became the most popular work of history an American leftist has ever written.” “Unfortunately,” Kazin writes, “Zinn’s big book was stronger on polemical passion than historical insight. For all his virtuous intentions, he essentially reduced the past to a Manichean fable and made no serious attempt to address the biggest question a leftist should ask about U.S. history: why have most Americans accepted the legitimacy of the capitalist republic in which they live?” This is a weird point of criticism given that a few paragraphs prior Kazin addresses the ways in which Zinn sought to answer “the biggest question.” “The American elite,” Kazin paraphrases Zinn, “used its wealth to pit ‘the 99 percent’ of the people ‘against one another’ and employed war, patriotism, and the military to ‘absorb and divert’ the occasional rebellion.” So the real problem is not that Zinn fails to address “the biggest question,” but rather that Kazin dislikes Zinn’s answers.

For Kazin, the American people cannot be reduced to either heroes or dupes. Fair enough. A professional historian should recognize nuance, complexity, irony, blah, blah, blah. But should A People’s History of the United States be judged by these standards? Or should it be assessed as a primary document of the left, similarly to how Kazin analyzes the Port Huron Statement? In other words, is accuracy or effect the barometer? Kazin assesses most of his primary sources according to the latter. What good did it do? Did it help the left? Did it make America better? I would argue Zinn’s book, and his legacy, should be analyzed as such. Kazin’s glib assessment of Zinn the lousy scholar—he didn’t even cite his sources!—is really beside the point.

Kazin has always been open about recognizing his personal position relative to his subject matter. He was the son of anti-Stalinist leftists. He was a New Leftist. He was a Maoist who cut sugarcane in Cuba. He was also, as the reader of American Dreamers discovers, a hippie communard who sought to get closer to nature while living in a group house and growing his own food in Oregon in the early 70s. Kazin has since gone out of his way to renounce some of his earlier positions as flawed. But, unlike someone like David Horowitz, he remains a man of the left, evident in that he’s the current editor of Dissent. I could compare his trajectory to Todd Gitlin’s. Gitlin was a renowned SDS member who has since worked hard to convince leftists that loving America—the flag!—is necessary and good. Similarly, Kazin was the only panelist on the American Exceptionalism plenary (that concluded last year’s USIH conference) who seemed to think American Exceptionalism something the left could embrace.

Given Kazin’s reflective self-positioning, I find it strange that he fails to see the ironies that plague his analysis of Zinn. For example, Kazin charges Zinn with, essentially, being a lumper, or, gasp, an uber-lumper. In contrast, Kazin carefully splits the left throughout his book. For example, one of my favorite chapters is titled, “The Tale of Three Socialism”: the prairie socialism from Wisconsin to Milwaukee, the secular-Jewish socialism of the needle unions, and the radical modernism of bohemian New York. Kazin also expertly delineates the differences between Old and New Lefts. And yet, in writing a book about the American left, from the 1830s to the present, he can’t help but also do some lumping of his own. Mike O’Connor expertly clarifies this problem in his review of American Dreamers:

It is difficult to know how Kazin might have addressed this problem short of writing an entirely different book. A deeper issue raised by American Dreamers, however, is whether “the left” qualifies as a tradition in the sense that Kazin intends. Without a core tenet, text or history, do the disparate struggles for justice in the name of race, gender and labor constitute a single movement? Moreover, to what extent does the work of later radical activists derive from that of earlier ones? To cite Kazin’s earliest examples, can we draw direct lines from David Walker to Malcolm X, Frances Wright to Robin Morgan, or Thomas Skidmore to Occupy Wall Street? Kazin suggests that all of these figures and groups are committed to the ideal of equality and therefore such connections are justified. But have these leftists seen themselves as unified in a common project? Is such self-conscious identification necessary to be designated a tradition in this sense?

Ironically, again, Zinn is perhaps the most influential chronicler of those radicals in American history whom Kazin would deem worthy of lumping together. Most contemporary radicals understand the history of the American left through Zinn. David Walker, Big Bill Haywood, Jane Addams, Eugene Debs, Tom Hayden, and many more, continue to be imagined as part of an unbroken chain of leftists. Such an imagination is thanks due in no small part to Zinn. Had a public intellectual from an earlier era achieved something of this magnitude, Kazin would not have heaped so much scorn. Zinn certainly did more than Dissent to keep Kazin’s beloved left—my beloved left—alive during its nadir! (Kazin is only recently the editor of Dissent!)

Nitpicking aside, read American Dreamers. Learning about the history of those Americans who dreamed of a better world is a good antidote to cynics who decry the Occupy Movement’s lack of achievable goals. As Kazin writes in his conclusion: “the utopian impulse should not be smothered under a patchwork quilt of policy prescriptions.” For Kazin, and for me, socialism is the name of this utopia. Or, as Lewis Coser and Irving Howe wrote in a 1954 Dissent essay: “Socialism is the name of our desire.” “Socialism,” Kazin writes, “has never been the name most Americans would choose for their dream society; today, many doubt such a society is either feasible or desirable. Without such an ideal, however, whatever we name it, the real world will be ever harder to change.”

Novel and Old School

2012-01-28T11:08:00.000-06:00

Since the popular literature of the Early Republic, and especially the early American novel, is a crucial source for my work on the idea of home, I can't avoid the scholarship of Cathy N. Davidson. Nor do I want to.

Davidson's work on the novel as a democratic genre, her explorations of how novels were read, and by whom, and to what purpose and effect -- all of her painstaking research, rendered into brilliant prose, has cut a path through the wilderness, along which I will gladly and gratefully walk for as far as it will take me in pursuit of my quarry.

At the same time, Davidson's work on learning and pedagogy -- especially writing pedagogy and the new literacy -- is likewise unavoidable for me. I teach rhetoric (a.k.a. "freshman comp") at my university, and our standardized syllabus requires a blog project as part of our students' portfolio of work. This requirement is due in no small part to the influence of Davidson and other scholars who are championing the blog as a tool for teaching writing -- perhaps even as a substitute for the research paper or term paper.

A recent article in the New York Times describes Davidson's take on "Blogs vs. Term Papers," and situates her as holding "a more extreme position" among professors and writing teachers who are all alike concerned with finding the best way to teach the best practices that make for the best writing both within and beyond the academy. The concern to teach writing practices that have some practical application beyond the ivied walls of the Ivory Tower is made explicit in Davidson's pedagogy, but, as I will argue below, I believe a concern for practicality is implicit in the commitments of those of us who continue to see pedagogical value in the research essay.

Now, as the reader may have gathered, I am fond of blogging. It is a fantastic medium for exploring ideas and establishing connections with fellow explorers working at other institutions. (Oh mercy -- what is it with all these metaphors of hunting, exploring, wandering in the wilderness? Clearly, I have been spending too much time with Catharine Sedgwick and James Fennimore Cooper.) Indeed, I think blogging can at least help create the conditions for establishing a vibrant intellectual community, a virtual post-modern Republic of Letters.

There's no doubt that blogging emphasizes the sense of writing for an audience and highlights the potential for interaction with one's readers in a way that writing a traditional term paper may not. The (in)formal conventions of blogging may help students better recognize that scholarship is not about building little (or big) monumental plinths that just stand there and gather dust -- it's not about writing essays, term papers, theses, dissertations as finished objects and final words. Rather, scholarship is about participating in and contributing to a larger conversation. So to the extent that blogging foregrounds this crucial aspect of scholarly work, I think it can be a valuable use of students' time and energy.

But I worry that a near-exclusive emphasis on blogging is not a very good use of students' money -- especially working-class students, first-generation students, students who are going into debt to attain that which an education confers. As Davidson has made clear in her own research on the early American novel and its readership, education confers empowerment -- often in ways that the educators never intended and that the educated never expected. And maybe that democratic and democratizing empowerment will be (already is?) the lasting legacy of blogging, the internet, the new literacy. In the meantime, though, I believe that championing the blog as the primary form of scholarly writing puts students at a profound disadvantage, not merely in the job market but, more crucially, in the public square.

In an era when most of the paths to erudition were closed to women, when a university education was not merely impermissible but also impossible because most women were not trained to read Latin or Greek, the novel democratized education and became a means by which disempowered women and men could not only gain knowledge but also produce knowledge and shape public discourse. As a result, the doors of educational opportunity that had been closed to women, to the working-class, to minorities, have been and are being opened. And I can see the similarities between the novel and the blog as genres that open up access to knowledge.

In some ways, though, championing the blog over the research paper as a cornerstone of a university education seems to be turning back the clock, taking back part of what has been gained. Knowledge is power, and the knowledge of how knowledge is constructed and deployed as a tool of empowerment and disempowerment -- not just how to recognize the process, but how to do it -- is the most powerful knowledge of all.

Judging from the Times' description of how Davidson uses blogging in her pedagogy, it is clear to me that she doesn't teach blogging as a substitute for careful research, but as a means of exploring new avenues for students to articulate what they have learned in ways that excite and ignite the interest of others. I'm sure that her students leave her class well-equipped to pursue and present a savvy, sophisticated argument across a full range of knowledge platforms. More power to them.

Nevertheless, despite the broad democratic potential of the blogosphere, there is still enormous privilege, power and prestige in traditional academic prose. Nobody -- not even the English department at Stanford -- is going to throw that baby out with the bathwater. So no matter the potential of blogging as a means of (re)producing knowledge, the best educated, the most privileged and empowered among us, will continue to learn the long-form, old-school research essay.

In this age of the soundbite, this era of intentional and celebratory ephemerality, this epoch of the quick and the slick and the flickering flash of momentary thoughts twittering across the collective mindscape, whose knowledge will carry the day? Whose perspective will endure to shape the present and open or close the future? In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. In the country of those who don't learn to value, much less know how to construct, a sustained, logical argument based upon careful research and a judicious treatment of evidence, David Barton and Newt Gingrich will be our greatest historians, our most influential public intellectuals.

Don't Trust Your Weakness

2012-01-27T08:57:00.005-06:00

I get to teach my favorite course this semester, historiography. My colleagues and I offer the course to our undergraduate majors as a way to get them oriented in the idea of history; in other words, we do not dedicate most of the class to studying historians but to thinking about what history is.

Obviously, such an approach can be translated in many different ways. So, for example, in the first few weeks I choose to dwell on movies, memory, and morality. I use the films including Christopher Nolan's Memento which came out almost twelve years ago.

I explained my admiration for this film in my review to David Sehat's extraordinary first book, The Myth of American Religious Freedom. The film strikes me as powerful because it demonstrates an idea I found endlessly interesting: the willful and ostensibly innocent construction of myth. I imagine that most folks know the film but to make explicit my use of it, let me give a brief synopsis.

The film opens with a man named Leonard killing another man, named Teddy. They seem to know each other, even be friends, but Leonard believes that Teddy bears responsibility for raping and killing Leonard's wife. But there is a wrinkle in what might otherwise be a straight-forward morality tale--Leonard has no short-term memory. Leonard has a condition--he never tires of explaining--that causes his memories to fade as soon as he makes them. The cause of this problem, though, also serves as his will to live. We come to learn that the fate of Leonard's wife motivates him to search for and consequently kill many people. So here is our dilemma: we know Leonard is physically responsible for killing people, but is he morally responsible? He can't remember what he does and, moreover, when he does kill he often seems to us, the viewer, either justified (in that film noir way), or manipulated.

I ask students two basic questions about this: how does Leonard create his mythical past? And why does Leonard create his mythical past?

We see that Leonard has a system of noting taking that is at once ridiculous and somewhat familiar. He takes Polaroid photos of his immediate surroundings to get a situated; he takes notes on everything from people he meets to directions to a hotel; and he tattoos things he wants to be considered as "facts" in order to create a "permanent memory." Out of this system, Leonard crafts narratives that help have agency. And out of this aspect of the film, I get to discuss the idea of narrative with my students.

I use an essay about Hayden White and an excerpt from an essay by White entitled, "The Fictions of Factual Representation," to play with the idea that we fool ourselves into believing that narrative is an adequate structure for representing reality. The reality we create in our narratives leads to new realities that we then represent in new narratives, thus perpetuating two kinds of myths--the one we live by and the myth that we can demolish a myth through a narrative of truth.

The device in Memento that represents this ironic relationship to narrative is pictured above. Leonard has a tattoo telling him to "remember sammy jankis." We come to learn that sammy jankis was either a person with the same condition as Leonard but without a system for living with it, or a con-man that Leonard has deliberately misremembered to give his system credibility. In one review of the movie, the writer smartly observed that Leonard might not be able to create new short memories, but the more serious problem is that he deliberately manipulates long-term memories as well. And so, sammy jankis is one very consequential manipulation.

In the end, I want students to figure out ways to understand what Leonard is doing to his past--and "the past" as an abstract, historical concept--and to imagine that their critique of Leonard's system of remembering, documenting, and acting has moral consequences. Not only does Leonard's misremembering get people killed, but his deception (by himself and others) illustrates the need for some vigilance when trying to think historically. In short, I want the students to consider what kind of historical method works?

I'm interested in what other people use to illustrate historical methods.

Saul Alinsky, Newt Gingrich, And The Culture Wars---Conducted Transtemporally

2012-01-26T13:40:00.009-06:00

A couple of years ago, in a "Tim's Light Reading" entry, I mentioned Saul Alinsky. At the time I expressed some surprise upon learning that Alinsky maintained a thirty-year correspondence with the French Catholic neo-Thomist philosopher Jacques Maritain. I have three subsequent observations: (1) Have I really been putting up "light reading" posts that long? Wow. Then again, yesterday was this blog's fifth birthday. (2) I'm _still_ amazed that Alinsky and Maritain kept in touch that long. (3) That post is the _only_ mention before today of Alinsky here at USIH. Today I am going to blow out (3) in a big way.

Why? Newt Gingrich, of course! He's our recent bete noire, between the weblog and our USIH Facebook page. I can give you three guesses, but you'll see Gingrich-Alinsky link in the following passages from this story (bolds mine):

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Nearly 40 years after his death, Saul Alinsky's name is back in the news, peppered throughout presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich's speeches.

A native Chicagoan, Alinsky was "the father of community organizing," said Sanford D. Horwitt, author of Let Them Call Me Rebel: A Biography of Saul Alinsky."

"He invented community organizing … this very unique form of political action," Horwitt said, adding that Alinsky believed the goal of organizing people was to give them power.

It's that "community organizer" moniker that Gingrich is attempting to use in comparing Alinsky to President Barack Obama, who first came to Chicago as a community organizer practicing Alinsky's model, according to historians.

After winning the South Carolina Republican primary Saturday, Gingrich referenced Obama's "Saul Alinsky radicalism," painting it in a negative light. ...

"Newt realizes this is just an act, saying Alinsky is a dangerous radical. Gingrich is enough of a historian to know what Alinsky was about," Horwitt said. "This is something that he is feeding to a part of the conservative right."
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And the article goes on to recount the parallel between this and Tea Party enthusiasts continually reminding us of the links between Obama and another piece of radical living history, Bill Ayers. Politicians really are good at the guilt-by-association game.

But who IS Saul Alinsky? Here's your introduction to him from the rest of the article above (links that follow are mine):

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Born in January 1909, Alinsky grew up on [Chicago's] West Side, studied criminology at the University of Chicago and worked in state prisons before deciding he could make a bigger difference at the community level, said former Washington Post reporter Nicholas von Hoffman, who wrote Radical: A Portrait of Saul Alinsky.

Von Hoffman, who before becoming a journalist worked alongside Alinsky from 1953 to 1962, said Alinsky fought for fair working conditions, affordable housing and any cause that "boiled down to one thing: organizing people so they have a decent shake."

Alinsky's tactics included tying up bank teller lines with volunteers repeatedly exchanging a $100 bill for pennies and vice versa as a way to protest banking institutions, said John Kretzmann, professor at Northwestern University's School of Education and Social Policy. Another involved Alinsky's followers threatening to occupy all the bathrooms atO'Hare International Airportfor an entire day. The threat alone granted Alinsky a meeting with then-Mayor Richard J. Daley, Kretzmann said.
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And here's more from "Professor Wikipedia."

A significant portion of the entry derives from a 1972 Playboy magazine article (24, 403 words!), conducted a few months before Alinsky's death and reproduced here. Here are a few nuggets from the Wikipedia entry, mostly from that interview*, with brief commentary, both humorous and serious:

1. Time magazine once wrote that "American democracy is being altered by Alinsky's ideas," and conservative author William F. Buckley said he was "very close to being an organizational genius."

You'd think that Gingrich would appreciate Alinsky's focus on ideas. Then again, as Ben Alpers reminded us via two funny quotes from Frank and Krugman, the rigor behind Newt's ideas are often suspect. [BTW: Check out this post by long-time USIH blog friend and S-USIH founding member, Julian Nemeth, on Buckley, Gingrich, and Republican victimhood.]

2. Because of his strict Jewish upbringing, he was asked whether he ever encountered antisemitism while growing up in Chicago. He replied, "it was so pervasive you didn't really even think about it; you just accepted it as a fact of life." He considered himself to be a devout Jew until the age of 12, after which time he began to fear that his parents would force him to become a rabbi. "I went through some pretty rapid withdrawal symptoms and kicked the habit ... But I'll tell you one thing about religious identity," he added. "Whenever anyone asks me my religion, I always say—and always will say—Jewish."

It appears Alinksy had a Tony Judt-ish-type relationship with his religious/ethnic identity. [BTW #2 related to PhD Octopus: Check out this post by David Weinfeld on Judt.]

3. Contrary to the Chicago Tribune article above, Alinsky was an undergraduate major in archaeology. But then there's this confusing passage from Wikipedia, apparently derived from the Playboy interview: After attending two years of graduate school he dropped out to accept work as a community organizer for the state of Illinois as a criminologist. Hmm...

4. Alinsky's work as a community organizer attracted the attention of Adlai Stevenson: His early efforts to "turn scattered, voiceless discontent into a united protest aroused the admiration of Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson, who said Alinsky's aims 'most faithfully reflect our ideals of brotherhood, tolerance, charity and dignity of the individual.'"

Getting praised by Stevenson in the Forties probably wasn't the kiss of death in relation to anti-intellectual/anti-Egghead associations. That wouldn't occur until the 1950s, I believe.

5. When asked during an interview whether he ever considered becoming a Communist party member, he replied: "Not at any time. I've never joined any organization—not even the ones I've organized myself. I prize my own independence too much. And philosophically, I could never accept any rigid dogma or ideology, whether it's Christianity or Marxism. One of the most important things in life is what Judge Learned Hand described as 'that ever-gnawing inner doubt as to whether you're right.' If you don't have that, if you think you've got an inside track to absolute truth, you become doctrinaire, humorless and intellectually constipated. The greatest crimes in history have been perpetrated by such religious and political and racial fanatics, from the persecutions of the Inquisition on down to Communist purges and Nazi genocide."

So isn't it ironic that Gingrich, whom Alinsky would've no doubt called "intellectually constipated," is holding up Obama as a president that follows the ideology of a figure who despised ideology to the point of avoiding organizations he himself organized? Isn't it interesting to see the Culture Wars conducted transtemporally, or is this Gingrich living history in ideas? Consult with LD's recent post on "Big Ideas," particularly the parts on David Armitage, to make whatever sense you want of my last question.

6. And this: Alinsky described his plans in 1972 to begin to organize the white middle class across America, and the necessity of that project. He believed that what President Richard Nixon and Vice-President Spiro Agnew called "The Silent Majority" was living in frustration and despair, worried about their future,
and ripe for a turn to radical social change, to become politically-active citizens. He feared the middle class could be driven to a right-wing viewpoint, "making them ripe for the plucking by some guy on horseback promising a return to the vanished verities of yesterday." His stated motive: "I love this goddamn country, and we're going to take it back."

Was Alinsky unknowingly forecasting the arrival, on the wings of the New Right, of that famous presidential hero of American Western films, Ronald Reagan? - TL

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*I don't have the time, right now, to read the whole ~~book~~ interview

Reconsidering my reconsideration of "the racial protocol"

2012-01-25T05:59:00.000-06:00

You might remember my prior meditations on the "racial protocol" here and more recently here. Today I'm writing a stream-of-consciousness meditation on both the "racial protocol" and black internationalism.

My inspiration for reconsidering the "racial protocol" came from Anastasia Curwood's book Stormy Weather:

The literary theorist Claudia Tate developed the term 'racial protocol' for the assumption that African Americans' experiences can be reduced to racial politics and that individual subjectivity carries little importance. As a result of the racial protocol, much writing about African Americans focuses entirely on racial struggle and not on the human experiences that would move the analysis beyond a two-dimensional representation of African Americans' lives.

I was discussing this idea over dinner with a friend and colleague. He suggested that I border, if not tip over into, the offensive by attacking the "racial protocol," because it sounds like I am neglecting (if not negating) the oppression, in which, as a white person, I am implicated.

I removed the above quote from my talk and instead focused on this quote from Claudia Tate herself (in her book l, Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race, 1998):

The black text mediates two broad categories of experience: one is historically racialized and regulated by African American cultural performance; the other is the individual and subjective experience of personal desire signified in language.

This makes my analysis both/and rather than either/or. Both oppression/struggle and three dimensional subjective individuals are important. Both race and other identities are involved in the identity formation of my research subjects. I believe that this both/and emphasis is more reflective of what I do in my work, in which race/oppression/struggle matters as one primary category of analysis, but in which they are not the only categories.

As I mentioned in my previous blog post, this is in contradistinction to Michael West's and William Martin's argument that the black international “has a single defining characteristic: struggle." This struggle is born of consciousness and the dream of a “circle of universal emancipation, unbroken in space and time” (From Toussaint to Tupac: The Black International Since the Age of Revolution, 2009).

By analyzing the three-dimension subjectivity of individuals, I can understand how Eslanda Robeson's and Emma Goldman's relationship was primarily social, but through the click of their personalities, the aging Goldman persuaded the young Robeson toward a more radical stance on economic issues. West and Martin's formulation makes it seem predetermined that a black person would choose struggle, when in fact that choice was born of dark nights of the soul and wrenching decisions to put oneself and one's loved ones at risk.

At the same time, I've been pondering what makes black internationalism distinct when compared to Pan-Asian or Wilsonian inspired anti-colonial movements (I'm relying upon Erez Manela's Wilsonian Moment there). West and Martin offer a very succinct explanation of difference.

Reading some Social Darwinists for my USIH class, though, makes struggle as a defining characteristic unattractive. William Graham Sumner argues that "life on earth must be maintained by a struggle against nature, and also by a competition with other forms of life." (American Intellectual Tradition, p28).

Perhaps, then, it is not the fact of struggle that is defining so much as what is being struggled towards--the dream of "a circle of universal emancipation, unbroken in space and time." The meaning of that emancipation for a Christian missionary returning to Africa to civilize it, or Marcus Garvey's desire to also return to Africa to impose his own kind of civilization, is not so uni-dimensional or clear-cut.

One of the essays in West and Martin's collection offers a more nuanced alternative. Lara Putnam, in "Nothing Matters but Color: Transnational Circuits, the Interwar Caribbean, and the Black International" argues

First, that migration and migrants' activities created a West Indian-centered black internationalist world in the first decades of the twentieth century; second, that this world came under attack as a result of the rise of narrow, racially defined nationalism and imperial closures in the interwar years; and third, that the attacks reinforced 'race consciousness' among migrants, spurring increasingly explicit black internationalist critiques of imperial and neocolonial power.

She follows this with the conclusion that "In the interwar years, West Indian community leaders of diverse class positions and ideologies came to a common conclusion: only by putting race first could people of African descent attain collective uplift in a modern, racist world." [I wonder about the contrast between this quote and her title, in which she foregrounds color. It does not seem to me that color and race were the same thing in the Caribbean; indeed intraracial discrimination often occurred along color lines]

I'm so compelled by that statement, because some of the people that I study reached the opposite conclusion. Juliette Derricotte decided that fellowship could only be achieved, not by ignoring race, but by concentrating on similar religious convictions (she was among a diverse body of Christians, all trying to find a way to overcome racial and national animosities in 1928). Ralph Bunche, on the other hand, decided that the only way to overcome racism was by finding and attacking its economic root.

One of the things that most intrigues me about West and Martin's edited collection is the way that internationalism actually solidifies nationalism (is this the same as the thesis that Italian nationalism was created in America by Italian migrants? It is by being in a place where you are different that you search for someone who is similar). I think Erez Manela makes a similar argument in The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism. Manela argues that the emergence of the circumstances for decolonization was due "to the establishment, for the first time, of international institutions and norms that allowed, indeed invited anticolonial nationalists to challenge colonial powers in an external arena, circumventing and thereby weakening the imperial relationship." Manela is looking particularly at internationalist organizations like the League of Nations, while Putnam is considering more the experiences of individual British West Indian migrants, but both express the vibrancy of the international dialogue during the interwar era.

Putnam writes, "The black internationalism articulated by British West Indian migrants in the interwar years was not a revival of tradition, but a particular vision of the future, developed in dialogue and in step with the other nationalisms that defined North Atlantic modernity."

She and Manela certainly aid my argument that the interwar era represents a distinct moment in black American and black international history, rather than the culmination of the nadir or the beginnings of the Long Civil Rights Movement.

Another interesting consideration around the question of the black international is when does someone become a nationalist, when does someone become a Pan-Africanist (with or without becoming a nationalist) and when does someone become what Nico Slate terms a "colored cosmopolitan" (someone who felt common cause with other people of color in an anticolonial struggle)? I think that question of motivations and decisions will become a central one for my book.

Did Paul Goodman Change Your Life?

2012-01-24T05:21:00.007-06:00

After my recently published article, “Teach for America: The Hidden Curriculum of Liberal Do-Gooders,” went semi-viral, thanks in no small part to Valerie Strauss, who republished it in its entirety at her Washington Post education blog, I received quite a bit of interesting feedback from readers. Some of it was negative (coming mostly from TFA alums), but most of it was positive. The most interesting correspondence I had, however, was with filmmaker Jonathan Lee, who created the new documentary Paul Goodman Changed My Life. My article was forwarded on to him, and he got in touch with me, because I conclude my piece with a reflection on Paul Goodman’s writings on education, which included his most famous book, Growing Up Absurd, and his less famous but I would argue equally important book, Compulsory Mis-Education. My concluding paragraph:

“Goodman was not against education in the strict sense of the word. For him, the question of education was always of kind. In Goodman’s world, which I imagine as a sort of utopia, those who seek to institutionalize the poor are the enemies of the good. And teachers—real teachers, those who commit their lives (not two years) to expanding their students’ imaginative universes—they are the heroes. I can hardly imagine a better inoculation against the hidden curriculum of liberal do-gooders.”

Lee got in touch with me because he hopes to promote his film among those historians and educators who might eventually consider screening it for students. So he sent me a DVD, which is awesome because I was regretfully unable to attend the brown bag session at our last conference when Lee was present to show clips of his film, and, alongside Casey Nelson Blake and Michael Waltzer, engage the audience in discussion of Goodman. I promised to watch the film, which was a pleasure, and to blog about it. So here I am.

Three things struck me about the film (other than watching it, which was, for me, a truly enjoyable intellectual and aesthetic experience; Lee is a masterful filmmaker.) 1) Goodman was the most unique of the New York Intellectuals, highlighted by his anarchism. 2) Goodman’s non-normative sexuality perplexingly mixed with his hyper-normative misogyny. 3) A case might be made that Goodman was one of the most underrated American intellectuals of the twentieth century, or, as the film’s promotional materials phrase it, “the most influential man you’ve never heard of.”

1) One of the film’s interviewees discusses Goodman’s position among his more famous New York Intellectual brethren. He was definitely in that world. He went to CCNY, he attended the same parties, and he wrote for the same little magazines. Yet he was different. This mostly had to do with his politics. Unlike the other precociously smart CCNY Jews of the 1930s and 1940s, Goodman never joined the Communist Party or one of its Trotskyist offshoots. The interviewee is asked why not, and he flips the question on its head: Why did everyone else join the communists?

Goodman’s anarchism was not doctrinaire, of the syndicalist or primitivist kind. It was more a way of feeling politics. Dick Flacks nicely describes this in his contribution to an excellent if short Dissent forum on Paul Goodman Changed My Life, highlighted by an essay by Rochester graduate student and intellectual historian Michael J. Brown (winner of Dissent’s essay-writing contest “in which people under thirty were asked to name the most pressing social and political issue of our times and write a utopian essay that included practical proposals”—a seemingly paradoxical combination that Goodman often mixed with subtle deftness). A long passage from Flacks (which also speaks to my third point, regarding Goodman’s influence):

SDS, THE Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and other expressions of the New Left were anarchist without at first even knowing anything about the anarchist tradition. Paul Goodman’s use of anarchism was very instructive. To make change you join up with friends and neighbors and try to create alternatives that meet needs blocked by the big institutions. Or you demand new rules that can make life more livable directly—these modes of action are more practical and effective than appealing to authorities and institutions to bring the change.

Rather than spend primary energy to get the university to become a community of scholars, create your own—and by so doing you may affect the institution as well as making a practical difference. To oppose war, refuse to fight it. Goodman’s fusion of the utopian and the practical, in a series of essays during the sixties, provided substance for the impulses of resistance and the visions of a decentralization and community that defined the youth counterculture and the early New Left.

2) I won’t spend much time on Goodman’s non-normative bi-sexuality, which mixed too easily with his sexism, except to say that his marriage reflected this seeming paradox. He had an arrangement with his wife that allowed him to have sex with as many people as he desired, which seemed to be a lot, since his daily schedule was to wake up in the morning and write, then cruise the bars for men in the afternoon, before returning home to his family for dinner. Such an arrangement was not mutual, as his wife made clear in an interview. To Lee’s credit, he doesn’t gloss over Goodman’s large and complex faults.

3) My third point is the most interesting to me. How influential was Goodman? To what degree did his ideas shape a generation, or perhaps better framed, to what degree did Goodman’s ideas reflect the spirit of the Sixties? The film includes audio footage of Susan Sontag reflecting on Goodman. She claims he is perhaps the only person in the twentieth century who came close to Emerson as an American renaissance man of letters. Although this is probably overstated, it is irrefutable that Growing Up Absurd was perhaps the most-read book on college campuses during the high Sixties. In the film, educator Deborah Meier reminisces about the huge impact it made on her and her friends (even though, in her more recent reading, it came across as dated and sexist in its honest lack of interest in women and girls). I would argue that Goodman indeed is perhaps the quintessential Sixties intellectual. His antinomian disdain for the borders constructed by institutions, including both corporations and government bureaucracies, and by cultural norms, sexual and otherwise, speak to the larger countercultural ethos that did so much to reshape the mainstream cultural ethos.

I have long thought Goodman the quintessential voice of the 60s. Which is why I included an analysis of his educational thought in the last chapter of my book, Education and Cold War, a chapter that explored the explosion of new ways of thinking about education in the 1960s. Below is a chunk of that chapter. Read it and then be the judge. Is Paul Goodman “the most influential man you’ve never heard of”? (I realize that if you’re reading this blog, you’ve likely heard of Paul Goodman, but you are not representative.)
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Growing Up Absurd, assigned in college classes across the country, was a synthesis of a large body of work published in the 1950s that critiqued what Goodman termed the “Organized System,” the bureaucratic and corporate straitjacket analyzed by William Whyte, David Riesman, Vance Packard, and C. Wright Mills. But in opposition to these previous commentators, Goodman, in the words of historian Kevin Mattson, joined his fellow leftist Mills in making “clear that what often appeared as cultural problems – conformity and alienation – had political roots and demanded serious social reform.” Goodman argued that it was “curious” that the two most analyzed phenomena of the time – the “disgrace of the Organized System” and the problem of disaffected youth – were treated as separate entities except by youth rebels themselves. Goodman combined these two popular strands of social commentary – a critique of the bureaucratic society with an analysis of juvenile delinquency – and argued that the former caused the latter.

Goodman’s disdain for the corporate-organized society tied together his various intellectual interests. For example, his Gestalt theory of psychology posited that, in order for people to overcome their sense of alienation, they must reject the social structures that impeded self-awareness or self-actualization. In other words, the pursuit of an authentic self was not merely narcissistic: it required political transformation. This commitment to political reform also grounded his writings on youth culture and education. Goodman said he was motivated to write on the topic of education after one particularly sad conversation with a group of teenage boys. When he asked the boys what they wanted to do when they grew up, they shrugged their shoulders and unanimously answered, “nothing,” a response that brought to his eyes “tears of frank dismay for the waste of our humanity.” Goodman believed that “the simple plight of these adolescents could not be remedied without a social revolution.”

Goodman’s educational philosophy, as he often made explicit, was not far removed from Dewey’s pragmatism: Dewey’s democratic theory of education was consistent with Goodman’s thoughts on autonomy and decentralization insofar as Dewey believed schools should permit children to be boisterous and physically active in pursuit of meaningful, authentic learning. Goodman agreed with the Deweyan theory that society should adjust to the innate demands of young people rather than vice versa. However, Goodman recognized and was harshly critical of the ways in which Dewey’s thought had been co-opted. “Dewey’s pragmatic and social-minded conceptions,” Goodman lamented, “have ended up as a service university, technocracy, labor bureaucracy, suburban togetherness.” He was sensitive to the fact that those who propagated the despised “Organized System” – those like James Conant who sacrificed the individual to the “cult of efficiency” – were prone to invoke the authority of Dewey in defense of their project. Goodman blamed Conant alongside a multiplicity of educational actors: “timid supervisors,” “bigoted clerics,” “ignorant schools boards,” and, last, but certainly not least, the “school-monks,” his label for “the administrators, professors, academic sociologists, and licensees with diplomas who have proliferated into an invested intellectual class worse than anything since the time of Henry the Eighth.”

The gravest error of the “school monks” was that they wanted to further inflict their methods of socialization upon teenagers because they wrongly attributed the growing number of juvenile delinquents or “beats” to the “failure of socialization.” He wrote:

Growing up is sometimes treated as if it were acculturation, the process of giving up one culture for another, the way a tribe of Indians takes on the culture of whites: so the wild babies give up their ‘individualistic’ mores and ideology, e.g., selfishness or magic thinking or omnipotence, and join the tribe of Society; they are ‘socialized.’ ‘Becoming cultured’ and ‘being adjusted to the social group’ are taken almost as synonymous.”

This socialization process, which he described as “‘vocational guidance’ to fit people wherever they are needed in the productive system,” troubled Goodman in means and ends. He both loathed the practice of adjusting children to society and despised the social regime in which children were being adjusted to – “our highly organized system of machine production and its corresponding social relations.” For Goodman, socialization was the problem, not the solution, and was doomed to failure because it prepared “kids to take some part in a democratic society that does not need them.”

Goodman’s Populist critique of corporate society was powerful but flawed in the way that he romanticized pre-corporate America, a time and place when men supposedly exercised their “capacities in an enterprise useful to society.” The worst evils of the Organized System, in Goodman’s eyes, were its emasculating effects. “The present widespread concern about education is only superficially a part of the Cold War, the need to match the Russian scientists,” he contended. “For in the discussions, pretty soon it becomes clear that people are uneasy about, ashamed of, the world that they have given the children to grow up in. The world is not manly enough.” Goodman explained the rowdiness of adolescent males as a by-product of their need for authentic male behavior:

Positively, the delinquent behavior seems to speak clearly enough. It asks for what we can’t give, but it is in this direction we must go. It asks for manly opportunities to work, make a little money, and have self-esteem; to have some space to bang around in, that is not always somebody’s property; to have better schools to open for them horizons of interest; to have more and better sex without fear or shame; to share somehow in the symbolic goods (like the cars) that are made so much of; to have a community and a country to be loyal to; to claim attention and have a voice.

Goodman limited his analysis to boy culture because their future prospects were dimmer. “A girl does not have to, she is not expected to, ‘make something’ of herself,” Goodman argued. “Her career does not have to be self-justifying, for she will have children, which is absolutely self-justifying, like any other natural or creative act.” The boys, on the other hand, were being asked to run “the rat race of the Organized System.” The timing of his gendered argument was unfortunate, particularly since it was made just a few years before Betty Freidan’s The Feminine Mystique, in which she contended that women were the true victims of middle class conformity. That being said, Goodman’s overall critique of the education system was not limited by his idealized conceptions of male culture, particularly his arguments against compulsory education – what he called the “universal trap” – that he made in a collection of essays published in 1964 by the title, Compulsory Mis-education.

Goodman believed that compulsory education was not only wasteful, but did positive damage to adolescents. It was, in his eyes, partly responsible for an “upsurge of a know-nothing fascism of the right.” “I am profoundly unimpressed,” Goodman wrote, “by our so-called educational system when, as has happened, Governor Wallace comes from the South as a candidate in Northern states and receives his highest number of votes (in some places a majority) in suburbs that have had the most years of schooling.” Goodman’s left-wing critique of the schools mirrored Max Rafferty’s right-wing analysis, not so much because they both asserted that education was helping prepare the way for totalitarianism, but because they attacked what Goodman termed the “fascist vital center” from their opposite flanks. Rafferty might have found much to agree with in Goodman’s argument that the compulsory educational system was a “vast vested interest that goes on for its own sake, keeping millions of people busy, wasting wealth, and pre-empting time and space in which something else could be going on. It is a gigantic market for textbook manufacturers, building contractors, and graduate schools of education.”

For Goodman, if compulsory schooling was democratic, then democracy must have been synonymous with “regimentation.” “The educational role is, by and large,” Goodman intoned “to provide – at public and parents’ expense – apprentice-training for corporations, government, and the teaching profession itself, and also to train the young, as New York’s Commissioner of Education has said, ‘to handle constructively their problems of adjustment to authority.’” It was in school that people learned that life is routine, depersonalized, and “venally graded.” And it was in school that teenagers learned that, in life, it is best to abdicate authority to one’s superiors. This was what Goodman labeled “mis-education” or “socializing to the national norms and regimenting to the national ‘needs.’”

Goodman theorized that literacy was once imperative to democracy because people created their own social existences instead of being asked to adjust to an already-existing social order. “By contrast,” he asked, “what are the citizenly reasons for which we compel everyone to be literate? To keep the economy expanding, to understand the mass-communications, to chose between indistinguishable Democrats and Republicans?” Because a technocratic and managerial elite made all of the life and death decisions – decisions about the economy and war – the only justification for mass literacy was that people could be more efficiently propagandized. From Goodman’s point of view, mass illiteracy was better by comparison.

In opposition to [James] Conant and others who favored staying the nation’s current educational course, Goodman called for a fundamental transformation:

The dangers of a highly technological and automated future are obvious: We might become a brainwashed society of idle and frivolous consumers. We might continue in a rat race of highly competitive, unnecessary busy-work, with a meaningless expanding Gross National Product. In either case, there might still be an outcast group that must be suppressed. To countervail these dangers and make active, competent, and initiating citizens who can produce a community culture and a noble recreation, we need a very different education than the schooling that we have been getting.

In order to be educated, young people had to be de-schooled or de-programmed. This was his call for “real” progressive education, education that would represent human rather than mechanical values.

...

Goodman had no problems with progressive education per se, which he defined as “the attempt to naturalize, to humanize, each new social and technical development that is making traditional education irrelevant.” Rather, he complained that progressive education “was entirely perverted when it began to be applied” because “Americans had no intention of broadening the scientific base and taking technological expertness and control out of the hands of the top managers and their technicians.” Goodman complained that the “democratic community became astoundingly interpreted as conformity, instead of being the matrix of social experiment and political change.” By differentiating between the theoretical intentions of Dewey and the ways in which progressive education had come to be practiced, Goodman set himself apart from his contemporaries who also critiqued the schools:

The recent attacks on Deweyan progressive education, by the Rickovers and Max Raffertys, have really been outrageous – one gets impatient. Historically, the intent of Dewey was the exact opposite of what the critics say. Progressive education appeared in this country in the intellectual, moral, and social crisis of the development of big centralized industrialism after the Civil War. It was the first thoroughgoing analysis of the crucial modern problem of every advanced country in the world: how to cope with high industrialism and scientific technology which are strange to people; how to restore competence to people who are becoming ignorant; how to live in the rapidly growing cities so that they will not be mere urban sprawl; how to have a free society in mass conditions; how to make the high industrial system good for something, rather than a machine running for its own sake… That is, progressive education was the correct solution of a real problem that Rickover is concerned with, the backwardness of people on a scientific world. To put it more accurately, if progressive education had been generally adopted, we would not be so estranged and ignorant today.

For truly progressive education to take hold, education had to become less demarcated, more informal. With his own childhood in mind, Goodman desired that the city itself replace the school building. He also wanted unlicensed adults to have more influence over the lives of children, in order to diminish the separation between childhood and adulthood characteristic of modern life “and to diminish the omnivorous authority of the professional school-people.”

Goodman’s ideal school was Deweyan in the best sense: the curriculum was organized around interests innate to intellectual development; the boundaries between learning and doing were erased. For those like Goodman, progressive education so defined was one plausible means to a less stifling, less technocratic society geared towards Cold War imperatives. However, unlike Goodman, most progressive educators were committed to an American liberalism that suffered from its all-encompassing commitment to waging the Cold War, which rendered secondary those aspects that drew many to it in the first place, namely its humanizing components.

Newt Gingrich's Big Ideas

2012-01-23T21:29:00.000-06:00

JOHN KING: Speaker Gingrich, I want to start with you. You're at this for months and you're out there. If there's one thing, just one thing in this campaign you could do over, what would it be?

MR. GINGRICH: I would skip the opening three months, where I hired regular consultants and tried to figure out how to be a normal candidate, and I would just to straight at being a big-ideas, big- solutions, Internet-based campaign from day one, because it just didn't work. I mean, it's not who I am. I'm not capable of being a sort of traditional candidate. I'm a very idea-oriented candidate. And I think the Internet makes it possible to create a momentum of ideas that's very, very exciting.

--South Carolina Republican Debate, January 19, 2012

Newt does not have ideas, he has ideas about ideas. He keeps saying what a good idea it is to have ideas. . . . He is the least substantive major political figure I’ve ever seen.

-- Barney Frank (in a February 1995 interview with Garry Wills)

He's a stupid man's idea of what a smart man sounds like.

-- Paul Krugman on Newt Gingrich, November 2011

Newt Gingrich has apparently always liked "big ideas." And, just as apparently, critics have felt that his attachment to "big ideas" was largely devoid of content. Gingrich's "interest in long-range and broad-range planning for the future...is clearly more appropriate to the orientation of our Department of Geography" noted his then employer, West George College President Ward Pafford, in a 1975 letter announcing Gingrich's removal from the History Department. "Not only is Mr Gingrich not a problem-solver," quipped The Economist's Democracy in American Blog last year, "he is a problem-aggrandiser."

Following Newt's big win in SC over the weekend, skeptical beltway pundits are having trouble identifying the ideas his campaign is supposedly based on. Via Gary Johnson, Ezra Klein unearthed the justly defeated Drug Importer Death Penalty Act of 1996, which would have put to death anyone bringing more than two ounces of marijuana into the U.S.* Ultimately, Klein concludes, when it comes to Newt's ideas, there's no there there: "Can anyone name some actually big, actually workable, actually new ideas that Gingrich has been associated with during his career? What has he brought to the table that wouldn’t have been there in his absence?"

But although Newt Gingrich's vaunted ideas don't amount to much, I think it would be wrong to dismiss their importance to his political success. Newt is hardly alone on the right in valuing the idea of ideas. Indeed, ideas a key part of what one might call the brand identity of modern American conservatism.

One of the founding texts of post-war conservative thought was Richard Weaver's Ideas Have Consequences. Conservative scholars have most often continued to view their own history in terms of ideas; it's no accident that the first major academic narrative of modern American conservatism understood the movement in fundamentally intellectual terms: George Nash's The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945.**

Conservatives have made exceedingly long novels of ideas into best-sellers.

The chief organizing strategy of the John Birch Society, the signature organization of the late 1950s and early 1960s far right, involved exceedingly long, detailed and dry seminars by founder Robert Welch:

More recently, we've seen the bizarre infamy of the Frankfurt School among some rightwing groups in the last two decades. Glenn Beck built his fame around weaving complicated conspiratorial histories on his whiteboards.

Whether or not we join Corey Robin in seeing conservatism as fundamentally an "ideas-driven praxis," there's no question that the idea of ideas has great power on the right.

The question is why?

This is, after all, a movement that has also boldly embraced a rhetoric of populist anti-elitism and has often celebrated anti-intellectualism. In 2005, in the midst of praising George W. Bush in the wake of Katrina, David Frum could conclude that the then President was "sometimes glib, even dogmatic, often uncurious, and as a result ill-informed . . . (but) outweighing the faults are his virtues: decency, honesty, rectitude, courage, and tenacity."

And yet, my guess is the fact that Newt Gingrich has a PhD in history probably does him a lot more electoral good than George McGovern's PhD in history ever did him. As Ezra Klein and others have noted, Newt's ideas don't much distinguish him from most of the other GOP presidential candidates. But the place of ideas in Newt's self-presentation is one of the distinguishing characteristics of his campaign and indeed his entire career. That it confounds and infuriates people like Barney Frank, Paul Krugman, and Ezra Klein is, among Gingrich's base, doubtless a feature not a bug.

Although I happen to agree with Corey Robin that it's worth spending time to understand the actual ideas of conservatives, I also think that historians ought to spend time understanding the imaginative place of ideas among movement conservatives and its relationship to the equally powerful strains of anti-intellectualism on the right. Rather than opposing tendencies, my sense is that they are actually two sides of the same coin.

_______________________________
* This is all the more amazing since Newt himself admits to having smoked pot in grad school.

** And not just scholars on the right. Corey Robin, too, argues that conservatism is a movement of ideas and that leftists and liberals have made a terrible mistake not to take those ideas more seriously.

What's the Big Idea?

2012-01-21T09:46:00.000-06:00

This was the catchy title of a critically important session I attended at the AHA this January -- important for me, anyhow. And judging by the fact that every seat was taken, and there were people sitting on the floor along the walls and in the aisle, and there were more people standing in the doorway, it was important for a lot of other folks too. How often do you get to hear David Armitage, James Kloppenberg, Darrin McMahon, and Sophia Rosenfeld in conversation together about their methodological approaches to long-range intellectual history, with Lynn Hunt as the MC? That session was the place to be, and I'm glad I had a seat.

Since most USIH blog readers didn't have a seat in the room, I thought I'd use this blog post to briefly summarize just one highlight of the panel: David Armitage's description of his methodological approach for doing long-range intellectual history.

Armitage described his current work -- a history of the concept of "civil war" -- as a "transtemporal history", governed by a method of "serial contextualism" that is diachronic, not just synchronic, resulting in not a "history of ideas," but a "history in ideas."

That's saying a lot. And, because it was David Armitage talking, it all got said really fast. Happily, he took time to expand upon what he meant by each of these points.

transtemporal history

A "transtemporal" history links discrete moments over large stretches of time. Someone tracing the long-range history of the contestation of an idea should be looking for both "continuities and conceptual ruptures." These moments are "inflection points" in the diffusion, reception, repurposing and transformation of ideas or texts or arguments.

serial contextualism

A "serial contextualism" zooms in on these transtemporal moments to closely examine and illuminate the larger historical context in which a particular instantiation of the "big idea" is embedded, or out of which it emerges.

history in ideas

Doing "history in ideas" (rather than a history of ideas) involves telling a long-range narrative of human experience as expressed in human thought.

This last point of Armitage's, hinging on the seemingly simplest of lexical shifts -- substituting one preposition for another -- was the most conceptually complex. Alas, my brain was working so hard to grasp the implications of "history in ideas" that I faltered in my note-taking.

However, I think what Armitage presented in this compact phrase was a shorthand summation of observations he had made in the introduction to his talk. In the course of giving a rapid-fire historiographical overview of the "history of ideas," Armitage took us from Lovejoy to Braudel to so-called "Big History."

While acknowledging some justice in Skinner's critique of Lovejoy's approach as an exercise in "non-contextualism," Armitage found approaches that treat ideas as epiphenomenal, or as precipitates of presumably deeper forces at work in history, likewise wanting. "Materialism," Armitage said, "reduces reflection to physiological reflect and intellect to interest." A materialist view of history trivializes and ultimately dehumanizes the past. "There is little that is more shallow than what we call 'deep history' because it evacuates the human mind of its purview."

In other words -- and these are my words, not Armitage's -- the purpose of history is to find and understand the meaning that people have made of their lives and their world. We find that meaning, and so make meaning for own time, by telling the stories of the past through the medium of ideas.
Believe me -- it made a lot more sense when David Armitage was saying it.

Evangelicals and Santorum Together: the Lure of War

2012-01-20T06:54:00.000-06:00

A few days ago, former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum told Frank Luntz, who moderated a forum hosted by the conservative Faith and Freedom Coalition, that evangelicals need a candidate who "can take the bullets." Santorum's reference to violence was not meant literally--he didn't volunteer to fight in Afghanistan...or Iran (for that matter). However, Santorum wants to remind folks that he understands war--if only rhetorically. In fact, it might be the former senator's bluster on military matters that has increased his appeal among conservative evangelicals. After all, his stance on social issues--the family, homosexuals, and abortion--echoes all other GOP candidates. He has been, though, more forthright--perhaps even reckless--when it comes to thinking out loud about war.

Following questions on homosexuals and abortion, the Santorum and his wife answered a question posed by Luntz about military service. The Santorums agreed that they would be proud to have their children enter the military and fight for the United States, though Santorum was quick to correct what he viewed as a prevailing misperception that he hoped for war with Iran. Rather, he clarified, "If Iran is not stopped from developing a nuclear weapon...there will be 'war that we have never seen the likes of in this country, and it is not a matter taking out this regime, it's not a matter of preemptive war, it's a matter of taking out this nuclear ability that would change the face of our country.'" Syntax aside (and perhaps logic as well), why is Santorum speaking about war with Iran changing the face of our country? The face of Iran, the Persian Gulf, perhaps, but our country?

A war, or at least talk of one, can change our country, of course. And speaking to a gathering of conservative evangelicals about such change was probably a sensible idea. As Andrew Bacevich observed in a book on the post-Vietnam romance many evangelicals developed with the military: "In the aftermath of Vietnam, evangelicals came to see the military as an enclave of virtue, a place of refuge where the sacred remnant of patriotic Americans gathered and preserved American principles from extinction." As their neocon allies also cheered in the late 1990s, a martial attitude would correct America's long delusional obsession with the culture wars.

Santorum is Catholic and his endorsement by evangelicals is not as shocking as it once might have been. But among the reasons for this rapprochement between these groups has been the steady development among conservative religious leaders of unified view of war--for more on this see the writing of Catholics George Wiegel and Michael Novak and, yes, Richard John Neuhuas. Of course, liberal religious leaders also found common ground on the issue of war; in the middle of the Vietnam War, groups such as CALCAV spoke out against the dangers of war for the nation. However, for conservatives that war served as an awakening of a different kind, distilling a moral language that would discriminate "patriots" from critics. Conservatives of various religious denominations concluded that the soul of America was worth sacrificing for, even if they would not volunteer to perform that service personally.

What conservatives of the 1970s rediscovered was the sublime nature of war in the abstract. Corey Robin pointed out on his blog recently that conservatism does not, by principle, tend to avoid war and violence, but, by practical necessity, seeks to channel its emotional power into a philosophical rush. War in the abstract--war in the sense of giving oneself over to something greater or, better, of commanding the ultimate sacrifice for something greater--is the conservative's oversoul. The realities of prosecuting a war, of paying for it, cleaning up after it, of dealing with the grief it causes, can be dismissed to the functions of the state. The nation can command sacrifice, the state only manages the paperwork.

So while Mitt Romney prattles on about his business acumen, and Newt Gingrich bellows about his big ideas for big problems (including, apparently, intergalactic empires), Rick Santorum might be the conservative to speak about the meaning of sacrifice in terms that the faithful will understand. And what about Ron Paul...well, I think more than just the GOP could stand to hear his analysis of war and the nation.

George Kateb's Place In The History Of Political Philosophy

2012-01-19T05:00:00.084-06:00

In the course of researching the reviews of Mortimer J. Adler's 1970s books, I ran across one by George Kateb. At the time he was a junior faculty member at Amherst College*, but is now an emeritus professor at Princeton University.

I don't know anything about Kateb's reputation among political philosophers, but his Wikipedia entry (or "Professor Wikipedia," in Bill Fine's words) calls him a "staunch individualist" and relays that "Kateb, along with John Rawls and Isaiah Berlin, is credited with making significant contributions to liberal political theory." Heady company. Suffice it to say that he is a champion for liberalism.

Here are the books authored by him alone:

- Utopia and Its Enemies. New York and London: Free Press, l963. Reprinted with a new Preface, New York: Schocken, l972.
- Political Theory: Its Nature and Uses. New York: St Martin's Press, l968.
- Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil. Totowa, N.J. and London: Rowman and Allanheld, l984.
- The Inner Ocean: Individualism and Democratic Culture. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1992.
- Emerson and Self-Reliance. Sage, 1994. 2d edition, with a new Preface, New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002.
- Patriotism and Other Mistakes. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.

The topics that are the objects of these books arise in predictable spots when one searches the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy online. This at least affirms something of Kateb's authority, or usefulness.

What do you know about Kateb? Where does he appear in USIH historiography? I haven't found him in any recent intellectual histories. So how can he really be on par with Rawls and Berlin in terms of contributions to political philosophy? What is Kateb's place in the history of American political philosophy? Who _is_ George Kateb?

Not that this answers any of my questions, but Kateb has made an appearance at the NYT philosophy blog, The Stone (the link takes you to a video interview--here's a transcripted excerpt). There Kateb characterizes himself "as an oncologist or pathologist of politics." To that point, his Wikipedia page adds: "More recently Kateb has turned his attention to what he sees as the increasing erosion of individual liberty wrought by the Bush administration and the poisonous influence of religious, ethnic and statist group identity on morality." Most interesting.

My inclination is to put him in the camp of non-analytic political philosophers whose works support a kind of secular libertarianism. But he also appears to have some sense of community responsibility. So perhaps he is simply a paragon of the individualist strain in mid-century liberalism. Thoughts? Let's see if we can build some kind of historiography in relation to his thought in the comments. - TL

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*Kateb was interviewed by Amherst professor William Taubman in 2008.

pages from my life as an intellectual historian

2012-01-18T04:11:00.003-06:00

Couple of interesting things happened last week that I thought I'd share with ya'll.

1. First day of a USIH class, I asked what an "intellectual" was. First answer--dead white guys--second and third answers agreed. I asked if they all agreed with that. Silence. Till one brave student suggested that he thought Du Bois might be considered an intellectual. Then a kid in the back started to talk about how different people groups might have esteemed different individuals (he might have said shamans...can't remember...but that was what he was referring to) as in the role of intellectuals. Same student told me later after class, after telling me that he was really going to enjoy this class, that he had wanted to say to the question, "Are all intellectuals dead white guys?" "no, but all the good ones were"....pause...."I'm joking of course!"

Oh, and the last comment of the class was that liberty was more important than equality, because some of us are more equal than others. Literally, said in the last second so I had no time to ask questions of that statement.

I'm glad I kept as much of an emphasis on race as I did in my class, though I did change the syllabus based on some of ya'lls comments last semester. I wonder what students will think after reading Pauli Murray's autobiography. I come back to the question, though, about my role in the classroom. I am not there to change someone's political point of view, but I am there to ask whoever steps through the classroom door to think more deeply about the subjects I pose. And yet, I cannot help wanting someone who comes in thinking that intellectuals are only dead white men to change their thinking to believe that intellectuals have come and are still coming in all shapes as sizes...and that intellectual history can refer to the kinds of things LD mentioned in her inaugural post as much as it can refer to William James. What subjects are within our purview as professors to attempt to change people's minds about?

2. I presented a portion of my research to the department on Friday. Among other great feedback someone challenged me that I was not doing an "intellectual history" as the subtitle of my talk declared, because....(wait for it)....I was doing a "history of intellectuals, not a history of their ideas." "Do you understand the distinction?" she asked me. I told her about this blog and suggested that we were redefining the idea of intellectual history to include, among other things, the lived experience of intellectuals. She had objected to me talking about what intellectuals did rather than what they thought.

3. Second day of USIH class, we discussed debates over the causes of the Civil War. I originally pondered this topic here. I also introduced them to Frederick Douglass and Ta-Nehisi Coates, neither white and one of whom is not dead. There was an undercurrent of agreement that the Civil War was not justified, not quite because of Lost Cause mentality, but because it didn't immediately lead to equality for black people. This is a smart group of undergrads who have remembered a lot from prior classes. It's going to be fun to challenge them with dense readings. The discussions are already rich with nuance.

Big Ideas for Everyone

2012-01-17T05:45:00.003-06:00

Last week Paul Murphy briefly mentioned Drew Maciag’s article in Reviews in American History: “When Ideas Had Consequences—Or, Whatever Happened to Intellectual History?” I recommend this short, provocative essay to all USIH readers. It makes three excellent points:

1) That intellectual history was at the apex of the historical discipline in mid-century America because it reflected the grand narrative of American modern progress, and because it reflected a time when powerful people believed ideas had consequences. Maciag writes:

in mid–twentieth-century America there was a virtually instinctive belief in the agency of applied ideas among the educated public, policymakers, academics, and historians. In part, this carried forward the nineteenth-century fascination with scientific and technological progress, which, contrary to myth, was not destroyed by the world wars. It was also a continuation of the somewhat teleological belief in the advancement of civilization thanks to a steady accumulation of knowledge: not just more information, but greater theoretical comprehension. The postwar faith in the collective benefits of higher education and of specialized expertise were examples of this, as were optimistic expectations about economic growth, public health, and less tangible “quality of life” enhancements. Human reason, now synergized into complex systems and commanding cutting-edge technology, could finally liberate people not only from unnecessary toil or danger, but from the equally cruel hindrances of customary ignorance.

2) That intellectual history as it was defined in mid-century America—the historical record of elite, mostly political thinkers—declined as the idea of progress, or more importantly, the idea of progress engineered by white men, fell into disrepute.

3) That we should be wary of celebrating a revival of intellectual history. On this matter, Maciag implicitly calls us out in a footnote:

I would liken the plight of intellectual history to that of poetry in America. In both cases there are apparent signs of revitalization, but they are deceiving. Poetry readings to aficionados in coffee houses or bookstores, the exponential growth of graduate creative writing programs, or an increase in the absolute number of published poets have done little to stem poetry’s relative decline as a component of broader American culture. So too, the appearance of a new journal, blog, or conference on intellectual history is no accurate indicator of the weight it carries outside its own circle.

This last point is important to keep in mind. We should remain sober-minded about the birth of S-USIH, and about the growing interest in our conference. These are probably not accurate barometers of intellectual history’s growing significance in the discipline. Rather, it’s evidence that some of us are very enthusiastic and effective promoters.

Yet, despite Maciag’s good points, the essay has problems. For one, although it is good on mid-century historiography, it is void of later historiography. A thumbnail, post-1970s historiographic overview complicates the declension model. What became known as cultural history was, in fact, the morphing of traditional intellectual history into something different. Cultural historians found ideas everywhere, in new forms of evidence, not just in the texts of political philosophers. Thus, the argument can be made that intellectual history did not die, it changed and spread out into other sub-fields.

Of course, I would be the first to argue that cultural history is not precisely the same thing as intellectual history, and that something was indeed lost with the decline of the old model. I like intellectual history that moves back and forth between elite and popular realms. I like that intellectual history affords me the space to pause on important and difficult philosophical texts, often written by elite thinkers, in ways that cultural history does not.

This leads me to my next critique of Maciag. His pessimistic conclusion, that intellectual history will not return to prominence because the discipline, and the ways in which knowledge is organized, is too fractured, misses recent trends. Maciag seems to think we’re still living in a postmodern moment. I think this moment has passed. An increasing number of people, including intellectuals and scholars, are returning to big ideas. Historians are once again writing big books. Close to home, think about David Sehat’s book The Myth of American Religious Freedom, which is big in both ideas and scope. Big is back. And with it, I think intellectual history is making a comeback as well, because intellectual history is one of the better ways to synthesize history. If I am right about this—it’s an open question—then we must think hard about how the new intellectual history will be different from the old. As I told The New York Times reporter who covered our last conference: “Big ideas affect everybody.”

Perhaps the S-USIH slogan should be: “Big ideas for everyone.”

Introductions

2012-01-14T05:17:00.002-06:00

For my first post as a USIH blogger, I thought I should formally introduce myself to our readers.

My name is Lora Burnett, and I am an American intellectual and cultural historian (in training). I earned my undergraduate degree in English from Stanford University and my M.A. in the Humanities from the University of Texas at Dallas. I am now a PhD student in the Humanities/History of Ideas at UTD -- I still have another two semesters of coursework ahead of me, then reading for exams, then the proposal, then the dissertation (on which I have already begun to do some work). Then -- joy of joys -- the ~~abysmal~~ academic job market.

My exam fields are American intellectual and cultural history (soup to nuts), American literature (Early Republic to the 1940s), and Transatlantic history in the long 19th century (as long as I can possibly stretch it -- so, 1789 to 1918). As you can see, I am partial to chronological range. In fact, one of my goals as a blogger here is to broaden the chronological scope of our posts. As I have noted in the past, the USIH blog skews very heavily towards examining the last four decades of the twentieth century. So I will do what I can to contribute to the diachronic diversity of the blog.

My predilection for wanting to take the long view ("long" to us Americanists anyhow, since we tend to periodize the history we do into something like fifteen-year chunks) has shaped my research interests and my dissertation topic. My dissertation will examine the long career of the song "Home, Sweet Home" -- once the most popular song among (white) Americans of all classes, now all but forgotten except for the oft-invoked phrase "there's no place like home" -- in order to frame and periodize changing conceptions of the idea of "home" from the Early Republic to the mid-20th century.

I am interested in exploring how this changing sense of what "home" meant/means connects to broader and more basic epistemic shifts in American thought. And, as I have said before in comments on this blog, thought and ideas are evident everywhere, in all sorts of texts, in all kinds of historical documents -- not just in those texts and documents produced by, for and among "intellectuals." So, regarding the sources upon which I draw for my work, I am just as interested in understanding the thought behind what people were singing in the saloons as I am in understanding the thought behind what they were saying in the salons. Both types of utterances alike instantiate ideas. And ideas are what I'm after, because -- in history and life alike -- ideas matter.

Aside from my dissertation research, I have a few other irons in the fire. I spend a lot of time thinking and writing about epistemology, mortality, ideas of personhood and conceptions of the self, the philosophy of history, history and memory, academic life as both vocation and profession, class issues in academe, the academy annexed to the marketplace, the idea of the university (see, for example, the CFP for a panel I am proposing for the 2013 OAH meeting), and other meta-questions related to life, and especially to life in and around the ivory tower. Oh, yeah, and -- lately -- gender.

So, that's me: "Lora Burnett" to my colleagues and profs, "L.D. Burnett" in print, and plain old "LD" on the USIH blog.

Doing an index: it's important but still a drag

2012-01-13T09:17:00.008-06:00

I am in the midst of doing the index for the book you see to the left. The book is due to appear in the summer of 2012, but the index needs to be done a bit sooner--in two weeks. I am reading through the page proofs just now, looking for any errors and assembling the index as I go.

This is not the first time I've done an index but each time I set to work on one I have a fantasy of handing off the job to someone else. And then a little voice enters my mind.

Actually, the little voice is Jeffrey Herf, the very good modern European historian at University Maryland, who was a mentor of sorts to me when he was at Ohio University in the late 1990s. At the time, I had just finished my doctorate and had received a contract from the University Press of Kentucky for my first book, It's Only a Movie. I had to do my first index and Jeff told me that no one other than the writer should do an index, though almost every professor I had at that time had long given that task to someone else.

One of my colleagues had a girlfriend who had become a professional editor and indexer. She offered to help me with the mechanics of indexing and when I asked how much she charged for doing this stuff, the figure was not unreasonable but would have pretty much absorbed the modest advance I received for the book--and I wanted that advance to buy the computer that would help me write a new and, of course, truly great book. Funny, the computer I bought did not have a key to help that process along.

And so, I am doing my index, and once again wringing my hands over how to list a term such as "civil religion" which is the subtitle of the book and in some ways on every single page. I wonder how far to divide up a term like this, and whether I should get a bit creative and use a term that might not appear a great deal in the book but that covers the points I make nonetheless. I know I must go beyond the obvious personal names, places, and terms, but I always deliberate over the threshold that needs to be met for inclusion in the index.

For example, if a person appears in the book but is simply part of a list of names to illustrate a larger point, should I include the names on that list, or just the term associated with the point? The publisher of this book, Rutgers University Press, has given me guidance, of course, but I am still the author of both the book and the index and can make some decisions that emphasize aspects of my work in ways that no one else really can. That was Jeff's point. And while I will not give the task of indexing to anyone else (at least for now...) I am curious what other writers use for guidance as they consider an index. I like looking at indexes when I am sizing up a book; I understand how important it is to do this well.

What makes a good index?

Tim's Odds And Ends

2012-01-12T11:35:00.004-06:00

No, this is not a new menu item at my fictional BBQ shack---or some kind of new junk book store. Rather, I'm using today's post as a dumping ground for intellectual history items that don't fit my usual, ironically titled "Light Reading" series---though these items truly are light USIH reading.

1. If my schedule were free February 2-3, 2012, and I happened to be on the campus of the University of California, Santa Barbara, I'd attend this gathering in a heartbeat: "The Port Huron Statement at 50."

I confess that I had never really done the obvious in thinking about the Port Huron Statement as an object of intellectual history until I read Cotkin's Existential America (pp. 241-249---even Howard Brick only gives it a few mentions in his better-than-survey assessment of the decade's thought). Indeed, I hadn't thought of Tom Hayden as an actor in America's intellectual history until I pondered, courtesy of George, Hayden's relationship with Camus. There's a whole post I "chould" (should and could) write about the Port Huron Statement, Hayden, and the Occupy movement. But I need to work on my own project for a while (even if I get an extension on the last--fingers crossed).

2. Like Ben, I intend on putting page updates here for the near term to hold myself accountable and get motivated. Here goes: I only wrote about 50 words this past week as I cleared my desk of the task of creating my spring term syllabi. But after I put up this post, my day is clear for writing.

3. Happy 48th birthday to our current "FLOTUS." I predict that someday she'll be the object of an intellectual historian's work.

4. I appreciated the following passages from Jennifer Howard's post-AHA interview with Anthony Grafton, appearing in the Jan. 9 Chronicle (bolds mine):

The Chronicle sat down with Mr. Grafton in Chicago to talk about his presidential year, scholarly directions in the field, the push to rethink graduate education and history careers, and the work that remains to be done.

"The association only matters insofar as it's vital to the profession and to the discipline—two separate things," he says. "Nobody's sure the annual meetings have much of a future." He would like to see the group become more of a communication hub for members, "a place of virtual discussion and dialogue."

In a back-and-forth about new directions in scholarship, Mr. Grafton mentioned intellectual history as a trend "which really delights my soul."

Intellectual history was counted out in the 1970s in favor of cultural history, but it now is clearly a very strong presence, he said.

As some examples, he mentioned recent work on the history of intellectual networks done by scholars like Daniela Bleichmar, an assistant professor of art history and history at the University of Southern California, and Harold J. Cook, a professor of history at Brown University.

Such approaches are "not the way we did intellectual history in the past," he said. "It's not intellectual history in its traditional sense, but it's informed by it, and it's in dialogue with it. It's intellectual history plus a social history of ideas. ... All of these are fields that are transformed by digital-humanities methods and digital archives."

...I'd say that some of that "strong presence" is a direct reflection of the work we've done creating the USIH conference and S-USIH. ...Pat yourselves on the back.

5. Check out the returns on this 1963 survey conducted by a 16-year old San Diego high school student named Bruce McAllister. Here are the opening three paragraphs of McAllister's story as told recently in the Paris Review:

In 1963, a sixteen-year-old San Diego high school student named Bruce McAllister sent a four-question mimeographed survey to 150 well-known authors of literary, commercial, and science fiction. Did they consciously plant symbols in their work? he asked. Who noticed symbols appearing from their subconscious, and who saw them arrive in their text, unbidden, created in the minds of their readers? When this happened, did the authors mind?

McAllister had just published his first story, “The Faces Outside,” in both IF magazine and Simon and Schuster’s 1964 roundup of the best science fiction of the year. Confident, if not downright cocky, he thought the surveys could settle a conflict with his English teacher by proving that symbols weren’t lying beneath the texts they read like buried treasure awaiting discovery.

His project involved substantial labor—this before the Internet, before e-mail—but was not impossible: many authors and their representatives were listed in the Twentieth-Century American Literature series found in the local library. More impressive is that seventy-five writers replied—most of them, in earnest. Sixty-five of those responses survive (McAllister lost ten to “a kleptomaniacal friend”). Answers ranged from the secretarial blow off to a thick packet of single-spaced typescript in reply.

Read the rest here.

6. What's on your mind? If nothing above excites your imagination, leave your topic of choice in the comments. - TL

Most helpful thing I got out of THATCamp

2012-01-11T06:59:00.004-06:00

I have been wanting to visualize the network of African American intellectuals and activists that I work on for a long time. This is for several reasons. One, it would be nice to have pretty maps in my future book. Two, I would like a computer to find patterns that I may have missed. Three, I would like a computer to keep track of everybody so that I don't let important connections slip in my mind. Unfortunately, though, the heart of this is a detailed database. This is unfortunate because it is something I should have been keeping since the beginning of my research. It is a bit daunting to think about going back through the hundred or so people that populated my dissertation and create a rich database. The next problem is figuring out what columns to use in the database, particularly since one of the primary things I want it to do is track relationships. To me, relationships are not something you can describe in one, reusable word like "strong" or "weak." For example, A small sub-theme of my work is the relationship between black intellectuals and their white graduate school mentors and classmates. Each relationship was marked by certain strains inherent in cross-racial interactions, but each relationship was also unique in the ways that it worked or did not work.

At any rate, something to share and a question to ask:

The most important thing I learned at THATCamp, for me, is that there is a software that does just what I want (well, I'm not sure if it can be overlayed on a map, but there is also other software that can place my network's physical locations on a historical map). Gephi is "an interactive visualization and exploration platform for all kinds of networks and complex systems, dynamic and hierarchical graphs."

The question--have you seen network visualization put to good intellectual use? Beyond pretty pictures? Did an author find something by quantifying their data that they would not have found by relying only on their brain to draw patterns?

(Images courtesy of Creative Applications Network).

A USIH (and S-USIH) Welcome to Lora Burnett!

2012-01-10T18:29:00.000-06:00

Image from Library of Congress

This is just a quick announcement to welcome the latest addition to the U.S. Intellectual History Blog: Lora Burnett! Lora is a PhD student in the History of Ideas program at the University of Texas at Dallas. She'll be joining the blog as our regular weekend blogger. For the past year, Lora has been a frequent commenter on this blog, posting under the initials LD.

Lora is also joining Tim Lacy and myself as the third member of the Society for U.S. Intellectual History's Publications Committee which, among other things, is responsible for this blog.

Welcome to the blog and PubComm, Lora! We look forward to your contributions!

(Finally, as promised last week, and no doubt breathlessly awaited by our vast readership: my book ms word count for the previous week. I'm afraid it's a not very magnificent 200 words. I could blame THATCamp AHA, a weekend of solo parenting, and various other commitments. I could also plead that I did a lot of other book-related work last week. But a book doesn't write itself and, at least last week, I didn't write it much either. I hope to have a more impressive number for y'all next week.)

The Utopianism of the Digital Humanities

2012-01-10T06:28:00.007-06:00

Alongside my blogmates, I attended my first THATCamp at last week's AHA meeting in Chicago. I learned a lot and enjoyed myself. I think we especially gained valuable feedback during the session that Ben proposed on E-publishing. That said, I came away somewhat skeptical of what I sensed was a utopianism among many of the digital humanists and historians at THATCamp. In one session that I attended--on the question, "What Are the Digital Humanities?" (still debated, not surprisingly, since the much older question, "What Are the Humanities?" has yet to be resolved either)--some of the participants made claims that digitalization has created a fundamental, even epistemological shift in how we think about history. I am underwhelmed.

I'm no Luddite or technophobe. I see the merits of the digital world for historians. Research can be made easier, or at least, more efficient. How historians deliver content is changing, obviously, evident in this blog post. But these are examples of how digitalization serves as an important new tool. It does not change the way we conceptualize the past. Or does it? I am genuinely curious about this question, so if you, dear reader, have answers, I would like you to share them.

There's another element of digitalization that worries me, beyond misconceptions of utopia. Some of the THATCamp participants have changed the types of work they have their students do. One professor told of having his students produce collaborative, digital media projects, like short digital films, in place of traditional essays. When it comes to teaching history and the humanities, the level of my distrust for technophiles rises. Call me crazy, but I think reading and writing remain essential, and I don't think digital filmmaking is a replacement in a humanities course, even though it is a valuable skill in and of itself. But what think you?

Department of Self-Promotion...and a Stray Comment

2012-01-05T20:48:00.005-06:00

As most of the contributors and key editors of the blog are conferencing in the City of the Big Shoulders, I thought I would hijack the blog for a bit of shameless self-promotion, namely announcing the publication of The New Era: American Thought and Culture in the 1920s, a book no library should be without.

On a less self-interested note, I read with interest "When Ideas Had Consequences--Or, Whatever Happened to Intellectual History?" by Drew Maciag, author of a forthcoming book on "The Americanization of Edmund Burke," which appeared in the December 2011 issue of Reviews in American History (available through Project Muse). Maciag makes the excellent point that the halcyon days of American intellectual history in the mid-twentieth century were rooted in the particular predilections of modernist intellectualism, specifically the conviction that ideas impelled human action and thus explained historical change, the tendency to reify cultural discourses as the American or modern "mind," the privileging of elites over the masses, and a faith in the power of reason to guide social and political development.

Maciag's reflections touch on one of the key preoccupations of this blog--the "crisis" of our subfield--although he offers cold comfort. He is a declinist, likening the "plight" of intellectual history to that of poetry. Signs of revitalization in poetry (more readings, creative writing programs, published poets) are deceiving, not having arrested poetry's "relative decline as a component of broader American culture." "So too, the appearance of a new journal, blog, or conference on intellectual history is no accurate indicator of the weight it carries outside its own circle." (Ouch)

Now What? Reflections On Historicizing American "Conservatism"

2012-01-05T05:00:00.005-06:00

I spent the better part of my allotted USIH reading time the past few weeks immersed in a round table, published in the December 2011 Journal of American History, titled "Conservatism: A State of the Field." Because the New Right has been an ongoing (to say the least) topic of concern here, since our January 2007 founding, there may be no better place than USIH for reflecting on the JAH round table. As such I expect other USIH contributors will chime in, either here or with additional posts.

My first thought on completing the round table was: now what? What are we going to discuss here, on this topic, now that Kim Phillips-Fein et al have so ably summarized the state of the historiography? It truly is a comprehensive collection. A graduate student could spend her entire education mining the essays, footnotes, and prominent books. And that student would be rewarded well for her effort. Because of its comprehensiveness, I beseech your advance forgiveness for not covering your favorite topics, authors, or passages from the round table.

Since I'm still processing the contents, and hence have neither a complimentary nor a counter narrative to offer, I'm going to reflect on the essays as they were presented---beginning and ending with Phillips-Fein.

Phillips-Fein's Introduction

This 20-page essay is clearly the heart of the round table. It's Phillips-Fein's show, and she doesn't disappoint. As such, this piece receives the greatest attention in this post. (Note: I'm going to shorten her name to KPF for the rest of this post.)

KPF [right] praises much of the new scholarship on conservatism and, as expected, notes its tendencies. She posits for the reader some of the now-familiar central themes for the growth of the New Right (not to be confused with just conservatism): anti-communism, opposition to the Civil Rights Movement, reactions to labor unions and their power, and "changing sexual norms" (p. 724). KPF recounts the impoverished psychological accounts of conservatism from consensus historians (think Hofstadter and Daniel Bell), to George Nash's The Conservative Intellectual Tradition since 1945 (which she calls "the most influential synthesis of the subject"---discussed here by Andrew Hartman) and Alan Brinkley's important 1994 AHR article, "The Problem of American Conservatism." Jennifer Burns's recent account of Ayn Rand is covered (also discussed here by Mike O'Connor). Our very own Paul Murphy gets a shout-out for his influential account of the veritable road-not-taken by conservatives as offered by southern agrarians (i.e. criticism of capitalism).* Other topics addressed by KPF include suburban conservatism, the sun belt, Christian conservatism, affluence and middle-class conservatism (not merely backlash or populist varieties). There are so many books covered in KPF's essay that my list above is scanty in comparison.

What of the issues KPF raises? She advocates for more work on "the connections between racial and sexual politics and conservative economic ideas." She also believes that can be written on mass media, local party organizations, "antifeminism and opposition to gay rights," "anti-immigrant and nativist sentiment," "war, nationalism, and patriotism"---the last inclusive of groups like veteran's organizations and the American Legion (p. 735-736). KPF spends a paragraph discussing the need for more work on recent conservative "extremists" (something Wilfred McClay takes issue with in his lead-off response, titled "Less Boilerplate, More Symmetry").

KPF notes the problem of periodization: Does New Right conservatism begin in the 1920s, 1930s (wherein Leo Ribuffo gets a shout out on p. 737), or after World War II? She fairly consistently argues that that 1945 is the legitimate starting point. KPF also reminds readers of the "long exception" argument on liberalism made by Jefferson Cowie and and Nick Salvatore in an essay that first appeared in International Labor and Working-Class History (74, Fall 2008).

The 1970s and 1980s receive special attention at the end of KPF's introductory essay. She notes that recent scholars covering this period are undermining "the 'whiggish' tendency to read conservatism's successes backward through postwar history" (p. 739). KPF argues that recent studies on these decades reveal something of the "fragility" of the conservative movement--that its success may have more to do with the fracturing of liberalism than has been previously discussed. Jefferson Cowie's recent book, Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (whose book has come up in four posts here) is mentioned, as well as neoliberalism via David Harvey and---wait...for...it---the much-discussed-at-USIH "instant classic" by Daniel Rodgers, Age of Fracture.

Near the end KPF acknowledges the need for more work "looking at conservatism from an international perspective...analyzing the ways that the movement drew from intellectual and organizational sources outside the United States" (p. 742-743).

And here's KPF's conclusion: "The real project is to see conservatism with a new perspective---to understand its tenacity through the liberal years, its longstanding relationship to the state and to economic elites, and how its history is intertwined with that of liberalism, as well as the ways its ascendance reflected not only its own political dynamism but also broader changes in American society" (p. 743).

"Less Boilerplate, More Symmetry" by Wilfred M. McClay (pp. 744–47)

I already mentioned one main point from McClay above. I will bring up another below---a useful metaphor. [Aside: For regular USIH commenter Varad Mehta, per your comment on my last post, Herbert Butterfield's The Whig Interpretation of History gets a nod at the end of McClay's piece.]

"Conservatism as a Growing Field of Scholarship" by Alan Brinkley (pp. 748–51)

This piece rehashes and praises many of the points made by KPF. Otherwise, Brinkley meditates on how the post-war movement managed to unify in the face of internal contradictions and paradoxes within (e.g. pro and anti-containment foreign policy). He is also fascinated with how the movement has drawn in new constituencies and used new media. He ends by discussing the problem of neoconservatism within the movement.

"Rethinking American Conservatism: Toward a New Narrative" by Donald T. Critchlow (pp. 752–55)

Critchlow [right] agrees with KPF's assessment of Nash's The Conservative Intellectual Tradition, saying it "remains unchallenged." Critchlow notes problems with the definition of "conservative" and, strange as it may seem, refers to the work of a medieval historian, Robert Stacey, on the concept of limited government. Also, interestingly, Critchlow proposes "a little counterfactual thought experiment" wherein he argues that the notion of "modern liberalism is the ideological anomaly of the twentieth century" (p. 754). Sound familiar? It echoes the Cowie/Salvatore argument mentioned above from 2008. Critchlow concludes as follows: "The story of conservatism in postwar America is one of ideological contradiction, political opportunism, electoral triumph, and of deeply held beliefs about the nature of the individual and the good society."

"On American Conservatism and Kim Phillips-Fein’s Survey of the Field" by Martin Durham (pp. 756–59)

Durham's essay praises KPF's introduction. He argues for closely studying the conservative magazine, National Review, as a unifying force in the history of the New Right. Correspondingly, on the temporal diversity of the movement, he writes that "it would...seem wise to describe conservatism since 1954 as modern conservatism"--acknowledging that libertarianism and anticommunism existed earlier (p. 759).

"Political History beyond the Red-Blue Divide" by Matthew D. Lassiter (pp. 760–64)

Lassiter's thesis seems to be the following: "The new political history has inadvertently replicated some of the blind spots of the liberal consensus school that it supplanted, especially through a linear declension/ascension narrative that has conflated the fate of the New Deal with the political triumph of the New Right. ...The interpretations of political history have tracked too closely to the red-blue binaries of journalism and punditry; ...the literature has taken the contradictions and fragmentation of liberalism as given but smoothed over similar weaknesses and fissures within conservatism" (p. 760).

Lassiter [right] wants us to distinguish between the history of conservatism and broader political history. He also wants us to recognize "the times and places in which liberalism and conservatism have overlapped." And this move "requires a reconsideration of the polarization thesis that has animated the scholarship on the New Right. ...[This] thesis has evolved into a hegemonic framework" (p. 762). Lassiter wants a better periodization of the various conservative elements. He also sees a problem with the lumping of unconnected currents of change with Reagan's election.

Finally, I wondered whether Lassiter had read Rodgers when he wrote (bolds mine): "The phrase 'free market' describes a principled ideological position, if not a concrete reality. It seems more useful to evaluate the rhetoric of 'anti-government' and 'free enterprise' conservatism as a political and cultural construct, a discursive fiction wielded as a form of power in the struggle to shape the nation's political culture and its political economy" (p. 764). It's not an assertion of a "contagion of metaphors," but it goes to Rodgers' point about the changed nature of discourse since the 1970s.

"Now That Historians Know So Much about the Right, How Should We Best Approach the Study of Conservatism?" by Lisa McGirr (pp. 765–70)

The title sort of says it all, or at least articulates something of McGirr's main theme. Like other round table contributors, McGirr admires KPF's "thoughtful survey" (p. 765). While recounting and restating many of KPF's points, she adds several points: (1) We need to study more deeply the "secular shifts in global capitalism" (p. 767). (2) We would do well to study better "the arguably important institutional areanas where conservatives have long held substantial sway," such as in Congress (p. 768). (3) McGirr echoes KPF's call for more study of transnational networks and "the roots of ideas"/origins (pp. 768-769). (4) McGirr is also generally an advocate for looking at conservatism after World War II as a distinct, more cohesive kind of conservatism--an entity "constructed afresh from a new constellation of ideas" (p. 770).

McGirr [right] pushes readers to look again at the demise of Progressivism for some hints at what occurs later. She then makes an artful, relatively concise statement about the stakes of those potential connections: "In no small part due to the traumatic experience of national prohibition in the 1920s, modern liberals drew a thicker line between private behavior and government regulation than had early twentieth-century reformers. Indeed, liberals' increasing emphasis on personal rights and freedoms opened up space after World War II for conservative claims to being the champions of 'moral virtue'" (p. 770).

Finally, McGirr comes out as a proponent of Cowie and Salvatore's "long exception" thesis. The period from the New Deal through the Great Society was unusual---a highpoint for American liberalism as we think of it today.

"A Response" by Kim Phillips-Fein (pp. 771–73)

I have already referenced KPF's final response above, and will do so again below. For now I just want to say that she addressed concerns raised in nearly every round table piece. I found this passage particularly intriguing and enlightening (underlines mine):

While recognizing the divide between ideology and policy, it remains important to think about how economic ideas matter. While conservatives have not limited the growth of the state in the ways that their rhetoric might suggest, their opposition to the welfare state has significantly shaped their approaches to public policy. Alan Brinkley raises the question of how to think about the attraction of conservatism to people who are, as he puts it, perched precariously in the middle class. The recent rise of economic inequality, he suggests, may actually have led to the embrace of an antigovernment, antitax politics by middle-class and working-class people, who, facing stagnation of their incomes and living standards, have grown frustrated with a state that seems increasingly incapable of aiding them. The erosion of government...has not led to a call for more government, but rather to a sense of the impotence of the state and a deep pessimism about the possibilities of government activism, and a feeling of resentment about rising tax burdens that yield few tangible benefits (pp. 772-773).

Excellent.

Conclusions

Returning to my original question: What now? Where do we---as a USIH community---go from here? KPF herself, on page one of the round table (p. 723 in JAH) states: "Historians might be forgiven for asking whether there is anything left to study in the history of the Right." I certainly felt that way immediately (but only immediately) after reading the round table.

For her part, KPF synthesized the round table contributions by laying out "three subjects" she believes "will be at the heart of moving the interpretive project forward: [1] the question of origins, [2] the relationship between the radical and moderate parts of the conservative movement, and [3] the role of economic ideas in conservatism" (p. 771). I like [1] and [2], but think that [3] is already well under way---or implicit in many works already done. I like to think that USIH (the field, the society, and this blog) will be integral moving [1] forward.

Corey Robin's The Reactionary Mind obviously helps move the project forward in relation to the "question of origins."** Robin's book was not included in the round table, which is a shame, but most likely due to its recent publication date. Robin [right] goes toward what Brinkley suggests in his round table contribution: namely, synthesis. Robin also addresses something KPF calls for in her final "Response": the need for more work on "deep currents" (p. 771). Robin's book also goes toward KPF's call for internationalizing the conservative movement. Finally, both Brinkley and KPF seem to suggest there is a need for more lumping (though not "über-lumping"!) and less splitting. Robin's book does that too.

But other post-hole, or "splitter" if you prefer, studies are open for exploration. Hartman's work on the Culture Wars will be a welcome addition to the historiography (many of these USIH posts are his), as will Ben Alpers's forthcoming book on the Straussians (several Alpers pieces on that topic have been posted here) and Ray Haberski's forthcoming book on the problem of war in the post-war period (latest installment here). I think my work on Adler and "Great Books Liberalism" (and more) will contribute to delineating some of the intellectual boundaries of the liberal-conservative divide. In other words, several USIH blog contributors are, and will be, at the heart of furthering the historiography on conservatism and liberalism in the near future.

Pardon the self promotion that follows, but two problems noted by several round table authors have been broached here before by me. First, to build on KPF's point about "extremists" (p. 736) and McClay's response to that topic, we need emotional histories of American conservatism. I wrote about this in an April 2011 post titled "The Emotional Panoply of American Conservatism, 1964-Present." In that post I argued that "the array of emotional states covered by recent American conservatism suggests a necessary, renewable source of power behind the ideas and ideology of movement." Or, in the words of Alexander Pope via Nicole Eustace, "passion is the gale." Corey Robin's Fear: A History of a Political Idea also goes to this point.

Second, several round table authors argued that we need more and better histories mid-century liberalism (KPF, pp. 727, 773; McClay, pp. 744-745; Brinkley, p. 750; Critchlow, p. 754; Lassiter, ALL; and McGirr, pp. 766, 770). Around this time last year I suggested (here and here) that our discussions of conservatism would be incomplete so long as we didn't understand better the boundaries between it and liberalism---what mid-century liberalism really was. In his round table contribution McClay called this dialectical tension "the reciprocating engine." He implored us to remember that these "ideological dispositions" are "mutable" (p. 745). I agree.

Although I have not discussed this topic explicitly at USIH, I would suggest that anti-globalism is another splitter line of study worthy of exploration. This was not suggested by KPF in her long list of a dozen or so worthies (pp. 735-736). I've studied this only partially in relation to Hutchins's and Adler's advocacy for world federal government, and reactions to their positions---most notably by Birchers in the 1950s and 1960s. But the Birchers' response was more about nativism (maybe?) than recent fears of global markets (think 1999, Seattle, and the WTO), concerns about the value of labor, conspiracy theories about one-world government (think Limbaugh, Beck, etc.), and fiscal austerity (the Ron Paul position). These later formulations of anti-globalism could be better analyzed.

Whatever we do, we need to fight the kind of garbage offered up by pundits-turned-historians, like this piece by Robert Reich blaming our situation on the Civil War and white southerners---not that any USIH folks would ever produce anything that simplistic.

What are your thoughts? What of the round table---overall or by piece? And what do you think is left to do? - TL

--------------------------------------------
* We've covered so much ground on the New Right and conservatism at USIH that I was mildly surprised to see no citations of either our blog posts or book reviews. Perhaps we don't cite enough JAH articles around here? Just kidding, but our work has most certainly contributed to the scholarly conversation. This may be the ultimate argument for creating an S-USIH journal.

** I'm wondering if Robin's book won't also become something of an instant classic. I say this because you don't attract high-profile ire from the likes of Mark Lilla unless you hit a nerve.

Reconstruction era conservatives

2012-01-04T06:44:00.020-06:00

This week, I offer a couple brief primary sources to add to the conversation about the history of conservatives, sparked by Corey Robin's book and Mark Lilla's review; Andrew wrote an excellent response yesterday.

(This was in part inspired by Corey Robin's response to Ta-Nehesi's Coates' defense of his work)

Ortiz writes, "Growers in the plantation districts of middle Florida created a plan of action to seize control of the political system. Plantation owners used employers' meetings to educate each other about the scheme:

     Here are a few facts, which it would be well to state: 1st: the negro population of our country constituting the only labouring class of any importance are nearly all our political enemies & we are satisfied that the Chief reason why they have become such trifling workers is simply because they have so much to do outside the field to sustain the heavy weight of Radicalism & keep up the Radical Party.
     2nd: Our circumstances are such that we cannot afford to allow our fields to remain uncultivated & if we are not able to get our friends as labourers we must of necessity take our enemies.
     3rd: This is distasteful & repugnant to our feelings & yet we cannot afford to 'cut off our noses to spite our faces.'(25)

"For decades afterwards, conservatives remembered the election of 1876 in heroic terms. The Times-Union crowed: '[The white man] violated the sanctity of the ballot box to save his State from shame and his community from destruction.' Black get-out-the-vote meetings were violently broken up." (26-27)

From Paul Ortiz, Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White Violence in Florida from Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of 1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).

Post-THATCamp USIH Gathering: An Invitation

2012-01-04T06:30:00.001-06:00

Colleagues,

Several USIH folks are presenting, or at least attending, THATCamp-AHA tomorrow (and the AHA meeting after). Ben Alpers has proposed a USIH-related THATCamp session involving all regular USIH bloggers. Do check out the link with his proposal.

But I'm here today to invite you to a post-THATCamp USIH gathering---dinner, drinks, and socializing at the Billy Goat Tavern. We'll be there around 6:30 pm. We've selected the original location: Near Tribune Towers and Wrigley Building, 430 N. Michigan Ave at Lower Level. If you're unfamiliar with the Billy Goat Tavern, check out this and this (around 0:25 for Belushi).

If there's a problem with the Billy Goat, our first alternate location is Rock Bottom Brewery.

FYI: There is also a post-THATCamp Happy Hour organized by Amanda French at the D4 Irish Pub & Café (345 Ohio St. ). They're meeting 6:15 pm-ish.

On second thought, maybe that should be our alternate? - TL

S-USIH Executive Committee Meeting Agenda

2012-01-04T05:00:00.001-06:00

Prepared by Andrew Hartman

January 13, 2012, 11:00 a.m. (EST), via teleconference

1. Reports from ExComm Officers

A. Andrew Hartman, President
B. Mike O’Connor, Treasurer
C. Ray Haberski, Secretary
D. Ben Alpers, Publications
E. David Sehat, Conference

2. Proposal: Keynote honorarium ($250): Discuss and vote.

3. Proposal: Book prize—discuss/vote on whether to form an ad hoc committee to implement a book prize.

4. Discuss/vote to approve revised budget (as prepared by Treasurer, Mike O’Connor).

5. Proposal: Nominating committee—discuss/vote on whether to form an ad hoc committee to seek out nominations for this year’s S-USIH elections.

6. Proposal: Working Group on Gender and Women in Intellectual History, as proposed by Lillian Barger. Discuss/vote on whether to form an ad hoc committee—or else proceed differently.

7. Diversity survey: the membership committee would like to survey existing membership on how they would like Society to proceed in terms of diversity. How to proceed?

Mark Lilla’s Truly Awful Review of Corey Robin’s Book

2012-01-03T09:43:00.013-06:00

Mark Lilla’s much-discussed review of Corey Robin’s much-discussed book, The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin, is truly awful. Not only is Lilla’s tone glib, unsurprisingly, but the review is really bad history, which might come as a surprise, since Lilla has gained renown as the New York Review of Book’s expert on conservatism.

Lilla dismisses Robin’s thesis out of hand, without so much as examining it (a fault expertly dissected by Alex Gourevitch in his brilliant critique of Lilla at the Jacobin blog). Such is common practice in the NYRB, where books serve more as openings for essayists to write about what they would rather write about. Usually I am OK with this standard practice. But the harshness of Lilla’s dismissiveness, seen in the ugly comparison he makes of Robin’s thesis to one of Glen Beck’s maniacal chalkboard conspiracies, demands a higher standard of engagement. His seemingly damning charge—“The Reactionary Mind is a useful book to have—not as an example to follow, but one to avoid”—needs to be supported. It is not.

My goal today is not to review Robin’s book. We will be running a full review of it here at USIH soon. If anyone wants to understand Robin’s thesis, go to his blog, where this post—“Revolutionaries of the Right: The Deep Roots of Conservative Radicalism” (which won third prize in the 3QuarksDaily 2011 Politics and Social Science contest)—summarizes it nicely. Robin seeks to overturn the notion, held by many, including such notables as Sam Tanenhaus, Andrew Sullivan, and, well, Mark Lilla (who indicted the Tea Party as “Jacobins” in an earlier NYRB essay), that conservatism used to be a wise, reasonable, and pragmatic sensibility, but has recently been overtaken by reactionaries who seek to destroy rather than conserve the current order. In contrast, Robin argues that reaction was always-already the key to understanding modern conservatism, dating back to Edmund Burke, who Robin shows, in an important revision, was willing to upend the old aristocratic order to turn back the tides of Jacobinism. In short, Robin theorizes that although conservative rhetoric and argument morph to fit various contexts of space and time, at its core conservatism is about counterrevolution. He writes:

Conservatism is the theoretical voice of this animus against the agency of the subordinate classes. It provides the most consistent and profound argument as to why the lower orders should not be allowed to exercise their independent will, why they should not be allowed to govern themselves or the polity. Submission is their first duty, agency, the prerogative of the elite.

As most of his critics have pointed out, including our own Ben Alpers (in his excellent recent post, "Lumpers, Splitters, and Essentialists"), Robin is a lumper, not a splitter, or in Lilla’s disdainful eyes, an “über-lumper.” I don’t necessarily have a problem with Robin’s particular style of lumping because, even if I might disregard the term “reactionary,” which is admittedly loaded, I think Robin is correct inasmuch as conservative thought, in its many variations, is usually, if not always (or essentially), an attempt to rationalize or valuate hierarchy. Despite his outwards stance, Lilla is not against lumping, per se, given that, in skewering Robin as an “über-lumper,” Lilla does a breathtaking bit of lumping himself:

[Robin offers] history as WPA mural, and will be familiar to anyone who lived through the Thirties, remembers the Sixties, or was made to read historians like Howard Zinn, Arno Mayer, E.P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, and Christopher Hill at school. In their tableau, history’s damnés de la terre are brought together into a single heroic image of suffering and resistance. Their hats are white, immaculately so. Off in the distance are what appear to be black-hatted villains, though their features are difficult to make out. Sometimes they have little identification tags like those the personified vices wear in medieval frescoes—”capital,” “men,” “whites,” “the state,” “the old regime”—but we get no idea what they are after or what their stories are. Not that it matters. To understand the oppressed and side with them all you need to know is that there are oppressors.

Like I said, breathtaking.

No, Lilla’s real complaint with Robin is not for lumping, but rather, that Robin’s particular version does not allow for the celebration of a distinct branch of conservatism that Lilla wishes to celebrate: you know, the wise, reasonable, and pragmatic type. In this sense, Lilla’s essay, like all his NYRB essays on the topic of conservatism, comes across as a more sophisticated version of the argument put forward by Sam Tanenhaus in his thin 2010 book, The Death of Conservatism. Tanenhaus divides conservatives into two categories: real and pseudo, or, in his terminology, “realist” and “revanchist.” He argues that realistic conservatism is dead at the hands of revanchists, and that the nation is the worse for it. Similarly, Lilla draws a bizarrely arbitrary line between conservatives and reactionaries, arguing that, until recently, Americans who went by the conservative label were decidedly un-reactionary.

As I asked in a critical review of the Tanenhaus book, on what proof does this “golden age” of responsible conservatism rest? On the way William Buckley, Jr. reframed his worldview when he ran for mayor of New York, even though so-called revanchists continued to consider him a hero? On California Governor Reagan’s response to campus unrest, which was wildly popular among John Birchers, the quintessential revanchists? On Nixon’s contradictory presidency, Watergate paranoia and all? Tanenhaus’s (and Lilla’s) version of Burkean conservatism did not die; it was never alive (and as Robin makes clear, the very notion of Burkean conservatism—as wise, reasonable, and pragmatic—is a mythical construction).

It’s facile but wrong to divide conservatism as Tanenhaus and Lilla do. Yes, there have been plenty of conservatives who have been more moderate in their temper than Robert Welch, the conspiracy-driven founder of the John Birch Society. But they tended to have a great deal in common with Welch, in terms of political ideals. The lauded conservative intellectual Russell Kirk, who touted Burke and Disraeli as his heroes in his philosophical work, The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Santayana, was as anti-statist as they came in many of his actual policy positions. For instance, Kirk called federally subsidized school lunch programs “a vehicle for totalitarianism,” the Hayekian slippery slope otherwise known as the “road to serfdom.”

What Tanenhaus and Lilla seek to do above all else is cordon off the reputable, what used to be called the “Vital Center,” from the disreputable to their left and right. But Vital Centrism, as analysis, and as prescription, is no better now than it was in 1949, when Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. made a less facile case for it. In fact, it’s a whole lot worse.

In a footnote to his recent post on the Lilla review, Ben writes: “Though I think Lilla is correct to see an apocalyptic streak on the contemporary U.S. right, the idea that apocalypticism is a new phenomenon in American politics seems very problematic to me.” Agreed, though I would take this a step further: Lilla’s problematic history undermines his argument time and again. For instance, the following sentence is one of the least historically informed I have ever read: “In the 1970s, if you thought that public schools were being used for social indoctrination, that power over them should be decentralized, and that children would be better off learning at home, that put you on the far left. Today those views put you on the right.” Huh? Yes, there might have been a few hundred left-leaning holdouts from the free school movement around in the 1970s, who sent their children to private, progressive schools, if they could afford such schools, out of a desire to evade the capitalist reproduction machine. But compare this to the hundreds of thousands of Americans who joined the Christian day school movement in the 1970s. Someone familiar with the history of American conservatism ought to know something about how resistance to public schools was part and parcel of the rising Christian Right in the 1970s.

Some of the most influential evangelical writers of the 1970s—Francis Schaeffer, Rousas John Rushdoony, and Tim LaHaye—placed education at the center of their plans to redeem American culture. They contended that the schools had been taken over by an elite who sought to spread an anti-Christian ideology they termed “secular humanism.” LaHaye, who later gained fame as the best-selling author of the premillennial dispensationalist Left Behind series, founded a network of Christian schools in San Diego in the 1960s and wrote a number of popular books in the 1970s and 1980s that provided readers with a framework for understanding secular humanism. More than an ideology, LaHaye described secular humanism as a religion in its own right. LaHaye dedicated his 1983 book, The Battle for the Public Schools: Humanism’s Threat to Our Children, to “the growing army” of parents “who realize that secular humanism, the religious doctrine of our public schools,” is to blame for “the origin of rampant drugs, sex, violence, and self-indulgence in our schools, which are not conducive to the learning process.” LaHaye aimed his rhetorical onslaught against an educational establishment that he believed was “determined to jam atheistic, amoral humanism, with its socialist world view, into the minds of our nation’s children and youth, kindergarten through college.” LaHaye listed all of the traits that he thought defined a religion, and argued that secular humanism evinced all of them, including “a stated doctrine or dogma,” “a priesthood,” “seminaries,” and “open acknowledgement of its position.”

No doubt Lilla considers LaHaye and his sort beyond the pale of his wise, reasonable, and pragmatic conservatism. But if anything, conservative intellectuals of the type that Lilla might celebrate have learned from Christian Right activists like LaHaye that the way to political victory is through this combustible mix of anti-statism and traditionalism, what I have elsewhere called the “culture wars dialectic.”

Lilla implies such a dialectic is at work in his analysis of the neoconservative trajectory:

The real news on the American right is the mainstreaming of political apocalypticism. This has been brewing among intellectuals since the Nineties, but in the past four years, thanks to the right-wing media establishment and economic collapse, it has reached a wider public and transformed the Republican Party. How that happened would be a long story to tell, and central to it would be the remarkable transmutation of neoconservatism from intellectual movement to rabble-rousing Republican court ideology. The first neoconservatives were disappointed liberals like Irving Kristol and Nathan Glazer, who saw the failures of a large number of Great Society programs to deliver on the unrealistic expectations of its architects, and consequently began to appreciate the wisdom of certain conservative assumptions about human nature and politics. Kristol’s famous quip that neoconservatives were liberals who’d been mugged by reality captured the original temperament.
……..
Sometime in the Eighties, though, neoconservative thinking took on a darker hue. The big question was no longer how to adapt liberal aspirations to the limits of politics, but how to undo the cultural revolution of the Sixties that, in their eyes, had destabilized the family, popularized drug use, made pornography widely available, and encouraged public incivility. In other words, how to undo history. At first, neoconservatives writing in publications like Commentary and The Public Interest (which I once helped to edit) portrayed themselves as standing with “ordinary Americans” against the “adversary culture of intellectuals,” and to that end promoted “family values” and religious beliefs they did not necessarily share, but thought socially useful. Yet by the Nineties, when it became apparent that lots of ordinary Americans had adjusted to the cultural changes, neoconservatives began predicting the End Times, and once-sober writers like Gertrude Himmelfarb and Robert Bork started publishing books with titles like On Looking into the Abyss and Slouching Towards Gomorrah.

Although Lilla is correct in that Himmelfarb and Bork raised the stakes of their culture war rhetoric—particularly Bork, who singled out the signing of the Declaration of Independence as the beginning of all that went dangerously wrong—Lilla is incorrect in his assertion that neoconservatism underwent dramatic changes. It changed in focus, from domestic to foreign policy, but I do not think it dramatically changed in tone. The neoconservative reaction to the cultural revolution of the 1960s began in the, wait for it, 1960s.

In the wake of the 1960s, neoconservatives did not merely interpret liberal or New Left movements such as “women’s liberation” as hostile to traditional family values. They also understood these movements as dangerously anti-capitalist, dangerously anti-American. Midge Decter captured this argument in her harsh 1972 rebuke of feminism, The New Chastity and Other Arguments Against Women’s Liberation. Decter contended that modern American women had it better than ever, for example, in their newfound abilities to secure gainful employment and control pregnancy through birth control. And yet, she pointed out, even with such advances, or perhaps because of them, the “women’s liberation” movement protested in increasingly fevered tones that women were subjected to patriarchal strictures. Decter countered that, far from wanting more freedom, feminists feared their newfound freedoms, because with them came new responsibilities. For instance, if women were going to enter the workplace like men, then they had to be prepared to compete alongside men in the dog-eat-dog world that men had long grown accustomed to. In short, Decter believed that feminists wanted to shirk the responsibilities of living in capitalist America. Her cultural critique of feminism doubled as a defense of capitalism. Decter was of Robin’s “reactionary mind.” So what is Lilla's complaint again?

Writing...And Other New Year's Resolutions

2012-01-02T14:44:00.001-06:00

This new year is going to be exciting and hopefully busy for me. This spring I have a research-intensive semester (i.e. no teaching); next fall, I have a sabbatical.*

And for me this means a year of writing. I have a book ms due at the end of the year.

I'm going to use this blog to help keep me on track. Starting next week, I'll be posting in my weekly blog entry the number of words I've written in the previous week.**

Consider this an open thread to discuss both writing strategies and things you hope to accomplish in 2012.

Happy New Year, y'all!

________________________

* These are actually meaningfully different arrangements, at least at my institution. I have my full service load this spring. I'm not even allowed to serve on university, college, and departmental committees next fall. This spring, I am also expected to be present on campus as I would be in any normal semester.

** I'm only going to count words that are part of the book, of course. No credit for blogging, commenting, and Facebooking!

Five Influential Books---For Intellectual Historians

2012-01-01T18:30:00.008-06:00

The end of the year is a traditional time in journalism to offer up various "best books" lists. Here are a few for your reading pleasure.

Today, however, I want to offer something a bit different. An online magazine called The Browser has a regular series titled the "Five Books Interviews." The series has attracted some intriguing folks, such as Lynn Hunt offering her best of five on the French Revolution, Judith Flanders on the Victorian Age, and Woody Allen discussing the books that have inspired him. Recently The Browser created a list of the five best philosophy books, recommended by philosophers, on "the big questions of morality, suffering, and meaning."

That list inspired me to think about the five works of intellectual history, broadly defined, that have been the most inspirational, or personally influential, to me. What follows are my five, offered in no particular order and only briefly annotated. In the comments I invite you to offer your own choices---with explanations, if you're so inclined. Here goes:

1. Frederick Copleston's eleven-volume A History of Philosophy series. I remain amazed at the depth and breadth of this project, covering philosophy from Greece and Rome up to Existentialism. I don't know how intellectual historians and philosophers get along without this set.

2. Arthur Lovejoy's The Great Chain of Being. I finally read this for the first time early in 2010. I promised Dan Wickberg a series of reflections here on that reading, and I've never followed through. Part of the reason I broke that promise was finding a place to start in the context of USIH. Perhaps I should've started with Lovejoy himself, in whom I believe we have something of a paragon for historians of thought/intellectual historians/historians of ideas.

3. Jonathan Rose's Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. Here's a review for a taste of the book's contents. I love the combination of dealing with great books and working class thought, which came together as a kind of intellectual-history-from-below. I loved this book at the first read, and have lost no admiration since.

4. Henry F. May's The End of American Innocence: The First Years of Our Own Time, 1912-1917. This is one of those early books---and a book I read early on---that showed me how one artfully combines intellectual and cultural history. This book inspired me to search for more like it---and to want to write my own some day.

5. John Tracy Ellis's American Catholics and the Intellectual Life. As a Catholic, this short book---which is both a primary source and a work that dealt with a useable past---alerted me to the existence of a critical intellectual tradition within the Church. And I loved learning that one of the main cogs of that tradition was a Church historian, an ecclesiastical historian, who did not explicitly claim to write intellectual history. The link above is an assessment of that book's place in Catholic intellectual history.

And---an unconventional bonus choice:

6. William Cronon's Nature's Metropolis. Although Cronon is not normally recognized as either an intellectual historian or a philosopher (though he qualifies, I think, as a kind of environmental philosopher-historian), I find his combination of deep reflection, archival work, analysis, and storytelling inspirational. That book is, to me, one of the highest models of historical thinking for all kinds of professionals. The link I provided is to January 2007 summary review of the book that I have found useful for teaching about the book. - TL

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[Update: Here's another book list of interest---not really for 2011 alone, and deserving of another post entirely. - TL]

Obama's Psychological History

2011-12-31T23:31:00.004-06:00

The string below is reproduced from a Facebook discussion of Jackson Lears's review of two books (by Sally Jacobs and Janny Scott) that appears in the London Review of Books:

[Opening entry from me, Tim Lacy] Check out the review below [above]. And here's the commentary I added at my profile page: "Most of this review is a complicated, informative look at Obama's family history. At the end Lears hits you with some lefty pessimism about where Obama's presidency is headed. Fine. The last year has inoculated most of us from that. But in the very last line---Boom!---Lears implies that Obama would be willing to draw us into a war with China. ...Wow. ...There's pessimism, and then there's pessimism. Lears thinks that Barry has inherited his father's arrogance, and is willing to apply it Bush-43-style to our foreign policy." ...Am I the only one that sees this a bit far out?

Comments:

John Haas ‎"... while the president dispatches US troops to Australia and the secretary of state to Burma."

The horror.
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Ben Alpers
To be fair to Lears, his argument about China is that we would never accept Chinese troops in Venezuela as we expect the Chinese to accept US troops in Asia. Obama, Lears concludes, is insisting on "the open door" not war with China, though he does suggest that the policy risks danger: "The open door for US involvement in Asia, flung wide in Japan’s face a century ago, is now reopened in China’s. One can only imagine the American reaction, were China to make a similar move in Venezuela or Colombia. Obama’s recoil from disappointment may turn out to endanger us all." I don't read Lears as saying anything controversial about what Obama is doing here, though one might well question Lear's psychological explanation for it as well as his sense that Obama's policy is fraught with danger for the US and the world.
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Ben Alpers How has the last year inoculated us against lefty pessimism about where Obama's presidency is headed? Or, rather, how has it so inoculated you?
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James Livingston
The paranoid style in American political biography, rendered now as psychological reduction to the ruined dreams of the father? This piece is of course a poignant measure of the academic Left's profound disillusionment with Obama. And the antidote--not the cure--is, of course, James Kloppenberg's long march through the intellectual history of the president, beginning in earnest with the legal realism and pragmatism learned at, uh, Harvard. But you can reach certain of Lears's conclusions by another, less reductionist path, and that would entail only this knowledge: like most academic leftists who believe the electorate has been in thrall to the Right since Reagan, Obama reads the country as center-right, and therefore believes he must compromise with the addled agenda of the Republican Party. In fact the country is center-left, and so this attitude of compromise with the Right is mostly unnecessary (see, to begin with, the Pew Poll Andrew Hartman cites). But notice: the academic Left wanted Obama to overrule what it took to be the right-center majority, in the name of truth, justice, and the real American way. The president, being a politician who studied Lincoln closely, doesn't believe he can ignore or flout public opinion, the practical embodiment of consent, so he's bound to disappoint those who, like Dick Cheney, don't care about this predicate of democracy. And notice this too: Obama is in essential agreement with the academic Left on the benighted state of the majority's opinion; he just can't get around it by declaring it stupid.
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Tim Lacy Ben: The lefty pessimism has been consistent enough---steady and at a low-enough level--for those who pay attention to not be fazed by yet another appearance of it. I have grown quite used to it. I suggested others may share my sense, but I don't guarantee it.
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Tim Lacy Ben: On your first comment, I don't see Obama as someone to recoil from disappointment in that fashion. I say this as a psychological comment, but it derives from 2+ years of watching him (remotely of course) react politically to things.
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Tim Lacy Jim: Thanks for putting into words a portion of my reaction, namely that this piece measures the academic left's disillusionment with Obama. And I want to be clear---I share some of it. I don't agree, however, that only the academic left wanted Obama to overrule the perceived center-right majority---a lot of rational, centrist, and moderately progressive folks wanted him to work harder against that perceived group.
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Ben Alpers Tim: I think we agree in our assessment of Lears' psychological explanation. To me it seems unnecessarily complicated. There are things that have surprised me a bit about the Obama administration (e.g. its tepid environmental record), but its foreign policy is pretty much exactly what I expected based on what Obama said throughout the 2008 campaign.
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James Livingston
When I say overrule, I mean disregard and forge ahead, public opinion be damned, ala Cheney, unitary executive and all that. If you believe in public opinion as the embodiment of consent, you can't ignore it. If you read that opinion the way the Left, academic or not, does--as the expression of a population duped by the Right, ala Thos Frank--you're stuck either with compromise or with the dictatorship of the A students, those who know better than you do what's best for you.
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Ben Alpers
Jim: I agree about the implications of Frank's argument, but I'm less convinced that the Left (academic or otherwise) universally accepts it. There are just as many who insist that the public is actually to the left of the Democrats. On at least a handful of issues--a healthcare public option, ending US involvement in Afghanistan, and taxing the wealthy are three examples--polls suggest that they are...though I think this optimism about public opinion can lead one into political deadends just as Frank's pessimism can. But especially since 2008, I've heard the argument that our political system has been captured by economic elites and is unresponsive to public opinion more frequently on the left than Frank-like arguments that a majority of the public have been duped by the right.
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Varad Mehta From a recent Gallup poll: 42% of Americans describe themselves as "conservative," 37% as "moderate," and only 19% as "liberal." The center-right sure adds up to a lot more than the center-left. http://www.gallup.com/poll/151814/Americans-Huntsman-Romney-Paul-Closest-Ideologically.aspx
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John Haas That depends on what those "moderates" mean by the term. Many no doubt think "liberal" is an extreme designation. Many of those self-described "conservatives" also happen to generally support the New Deal.
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James Livingston
The NORC at Chicago and the SRC at Michigan have been for years asking these so-called conservatives what they want, and they have invariably said--until June of this year--that they want more public spending on health and education. So it all depends on what you mean by "conservative." Newt Gingrich was, and is, right, most self-professed conservatives are actually liberals who don't trust or understand the people who act on "liberal" principles. Irving Kristol was also right in suggesting, back in 1978, that so-called liberals in the US had evolved into social democrats of the European kind.
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John Haas
Yes to JL. We do have some "Manchester liberals" in this country--libertarians and those that lean in that direction. We have very few real conservatives--if by "conservative" you mean those who want to conserve ("good") values and life-ways, and who see threats to those coming as much from the market as from "big government." Our "liberals" are more social democrats, and are rooted as much in the progressivism of Lincoln and (T) Roosevelt as they are in anything else. If we want American labels for American predilections, we might better see contemporary American "conservatives" as essentially Jacksonians, and "liberals" as Whigs. Like the Jacksonians, American conservatives are not afraid of executive power (as long as their guy has it) and they're not shy about big government when it's associated with war. Government spending designed to benefit everyone--or, even worse, demographic groups not their own--they hate, however, along with a national bank/federal reserve, national roads/green energy, and red and brown folk hanging around on land they desire . . .
8 hours ago · Like

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Let's continue the discussion here! (or is it ?) - TL

African Americans' desire and more on the racial protocol

2011-12-28T15:19:00.001-06:00

I am returning to thinking about the racial protocol, which was begun here.The original quote that introduced that phrase to me is:

"The literary theorist Claudia Tate developed the term 'racial protocol' for the assumption that African Americans' experiences can be reduced to racial politics and that individual subjectivity carries little importance. As a result of the racial protocol, much writing about African Americans focuses entirely on racial struggle and not on the human experiences that would move the analysis beyond a two-dimensional representation of African Americans' lives."

--Anastasia Curwood, Stormy Weather: Middle-Class African American Marriages between the Two World Wars

This contrasts starkly with Michael West's and William Martin's argument

that the black international “has a single defining characteristic: struggle.” This struggle is born of consciousness and the dream of a “circle of universal emancipation, unbroken in space and time” (From Toussaint to Tupac: The Black International Since the Age of Revolution, 2009). To me, this suggests that African Americans can be wholly understood through "the struggle." Or at least primarily understood. That is insufficient to understanding the lived experience of African Americans.

Turning to Tate's book that gave rise to the term racial protocol, Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race (1998), I think she offers a more nuanced perspective, one that does not neglect race and the struggle, but puts it into conversation with individual personality. She writes specifically about novels, but I think it can be broadened to many other forms of African American writings.

"The black text mediates two broad categories of experience: one is historically racialized and regulated by African American cultural performance; the other is the individual and subjective experience of personal desire signified in language."

She warns,

"If we persist in reductively defining black subjectivity as political agency, we will continue to overlook the force of desire in black texts as well as in the lives of African Americans."

For my work, this means that I explore relationships between people, whether or not they influenced the individuals' understanding of "the struggle," starting with as much as I can understand about an intellectual's childhood. I also acknowledge similarities between blacks and whites--in other words, if all you see about Juliette Derricotte is the way she lectured against racism, you miss her internal dialogue (happily available through rich letters to her family) and you miss the ways that she unconsciously replicated the discourse of white colonial travelers. All three are important to understanding how and why Derricotte acted.

On my original post, Tim suggested that I was trying to do "research for research's sake"--understanding black people's lives for the pure satisfaction of understanding. I think, though, that adding in personal desire-- the internal dialogue of black people (to the extent that we can know it through the veil of dissemblance)--to understandings of political agency, we can more fully assess the strengths and weaknesses of social movements. At the same time, acknowledging and researching the internal lives of African Americans gives us a more nuanced perspectives into the lived experiences of black people and understand when and where race matters by acknowledging that sometimes it matters greatly and sometimes it doesn't.

Let me end with a final quote from Tate:

"Certainly, race matters. It matters precisely because in the United States 'race remains a salient source of the fantasies and allegiances that shape our ways of reading' all types of social experiences (Abel, 'Black Writing,' 497). These racial fantasies and allegiances have historiclaly conditioned all social exchanges, and they continue to do so. Indeed, the racial conventions of the United States seem to have sentenced black subjects to protest forever the very deficiencies that white subjects presumably do not posessess. Racism allows white sujbects generally to assume that they have 'fully developed, complex, multi-layered personalit[ies[' (Prager, 'Self Reflection[s],' 357). By contrast, racism condemns black subjects to a Manichean conflict between their public performance of an essentialized, homogenous blackness, which is largely a by-product of white 'ideological formations' of racial difference (Althusser, 'Freud,' 219), on the one hand, and a private performance of individual personality, on the other." ...

"Whether we realized it or not, we all mediate in different ways the hegemonic effects of white male power with whatever authority we personally claim."

"These novels tell other stories about the desire of black subjects that do not fit the Western hierarchical paradigm of race as exclusion, vulnerability, and deficiency. These works depict what I call a 'surplus,' a defining characteristic not generally associated with African American personality and culture."

Ribuffo, "President James A. Garfield Had a Great Personality" (Personality and the Self Panel, Part III)

2011-12-27T09:56:00.009-06:00

Dear Readers: As a special holiday season treat, I give you one of the more interesting panels from our recent conference--"Personality and the Self in Twentieth-Century American Social Thought."' See the first paper by Dave Varel here. The second paper by Dave Steigerwald is here. Below are the comments by Leo Ribuffo.

PRESIDENT JAMES A. GARFIELD HAD A GREAT PERSONALITY
Leo P. Ribuffo, The George Washington University

In the generous spirit of S-USIH, this is less a comment in the AHA/OAH “gotcha” sense than some reflections on two interesting articles. My first reflection is that both of these essays deal with what might be called the self-absorbed era in the conceptualization of the self—and all deal primarily with middle class people or above in a rich world power during a relatively short span of time, the past 120 yrs or so. Accordingly, choosing a conception of the self was to an increasing degree voluntary, especially after the culturally normative “American Way of Life” of the Great Depression yielded to the looser notion of “life styles” in the 1960s and 1970s. This is the era, as David Varel stresses (following Warren Susman's classic essay), when, amid visions of affluence, an ascetic emphasis on “character” yielded to a “culture of personality” befitting a “culture of consumption.”

Without totally discounting the now standard notion that the search for the self in some sense escalated during the modern era, whenever that began, let me suggest that it had a longer lineage, was not confined to rich “Western” countries, and often involved what William James called forced options. Consider the following hypothetical situations:

A speaker in 331 B. C. E. Persia. “Believe it or not, guys, Darius III just lost to Alexander the Great. We’ve got to decide how Hellenized we’re going to become.”

Fast forward to the Indian subcontinent in the seventh century C. E. “Hey, guys, there’s this new religion going around called Islam. It doesn’t have a caste system. Sounds pretty good to me.”

Fast forward again to the sixteenth century—to a place our history department colleagues call early modern Europe. “Hey buddy, does the wine in church turn into Christ’s blood or is it just a symbol? Decide fast; we’re piling the kindling around the stake.”

And across the ocean in Peru: “Look, guys, I know the Spanish conquerors have really powerful weapons and are trying to win our hearts and minds with paintings of the Apostles as Indians, but don’t we owe it to our Inca ancestors to join Tupac Amaru’s revolt?”

Even for the prosperous United States. (by world standards) choices about self were in play for more than a century before the era of self-absorption began in the late nineteenth century. We can see this behavior in many “keywords.” In addition to the ubiquitous “character,” we have for instance: republican virtue, honor, patriot, true woman, born again Christian, and manliness (preferably self-made). At the same time there were negative selves that should be avoided or (in the Darwinian worst cases) could not be avoided—undeserving poor, rebel, feeble minded, racial mongrel, and gook.

As Susman acknowledged, such notions did not disappear even as the “culture of personality” came to dominate the Zeitgeist. For instance, self-made manliness survived from Henry Clay through Booker T. Washington to Malcolm X and the Nixon White House, honor persisted from the Hamilton-Burr duel to Paul Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd, gook echoed from the Philippine War to the Vietnam War, and derision of the undeserving poor affected politics from Theodore Roosevelt's Square Deal to Bill Clinton’s signing of welfare reform, so-called, in 1996.

Nor should we forget the enormous legacy of Romanticism with its cult of the hero, which popularized the self-absorbed search for the self long before this disposition became professionalized. Despite the countless gospel of success guides published by Russell Conwell, Edward Bok, Garfield, et al, what red blooded American boy would choose to clerk in that startup company Carnegie Steel instead of riding with General George Custer? At least until June 25, 1876.

And if we want a more complicated symbol (or modal personality if you prefer), although James Garfield wrote one of the classic tracts about achieving success through character, he did have a great personality even before there was a whole “culture of personality,” a fact confirmed by his phrenologist, by his rapid political rise, and by the three women madly in love with him during his early twenties.

David Steigerwald takes us from the early days of the professionalized search for the self to the 1970s. Steigerwald begins by bringing us back to the first heyday of guides to success, variously defined, in this world and the next, and nicely places this search in the context of a longer debate about free will and determinism.

Thus we return to the question that vexed scholars three decades ago in the heyday of the academic study of the gospel of success--such scholars as Susman, Donald Meyer, John Cawelti, Irwin Wylie, Richard Huber, and Lawrence Chenoweth --Is William James responsible for Norman Vincent Peale? This question is a lot of fun, along with its kin: Is Marx responsible for Stalin, is Rousseau responsible for Timothy Leary, and what would Jesus do? Steigerwald gets it right in this instance, writing that James with his “famous open-mindedness” would have found some merit in Charles Reich’s The Greening of America.

Yet Steigerwald leads us astray when he dismisses the medical side of nineteenth century positive thinking as “self-evidently unscientific.” These theories were considered science by many Americans just as much as eugenicist warnings against racial mongrelization and the homeopathic medicine preferred by President Garfield. So too, later on, with Abraham Maslow cultivating his peak experiences and Wilhelm Reich absorbing the intergalactic libido in his orgone box.

The issue of “agency” also needs a closer look (“deconstruction” if a trendier word makes readers feel smarter). As currently bandied about, agency means two related but separate questions. First, can “the people” in some sense think for themselves or are they just easily manipulated dimwits, a notion already on the rise in American social science before there was a Frankfurt School even in Frankfurt, as Edward Purcell showed in his brilliant book The Crisis of Democratic Theory. As Purcell also showed, this question influenced the interwar debate between behaviorists and humanists in the social sciences.

Second, even if “the people” can think for themselves, do they have enough power--agency--to change the Zeitgeist let alone the social order? In the broad sweep of things, my sense is that people do think for themselves when they are moved to think, but that they tend to limit their thoughts and feelings to what seems possible. Hence most educated women went along with the feminine mystique in the 1950s, there is no socialism in the United States, and only a minority of Incas joined Tupac Amaru’s revolt.

Steigerwald sees two great eras of agency affirmation, and both seem to coincide with periods of major social change and political flux. The odd exception is the 1930s, and here Steigerwald’s Google search may have led him astray. Guides to success flourished during the Great Depression, none more so than Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. If there was a drop off in references to free will, perhaps this was because a critical mass of “the people” temporarily had both the will and the freedom to change things significantly (by American standards).

Varel takes us forward to Henry Murray, a self-described William Jamesian and one of the creators of “humanistic psychology”--as Murray called the field as early as 1930--along with Gordon Allport, Carl Rogers, John Dollard, and Abraham Maslow.

While agreeing that we need more than an “internalist” examination of Murray’s ideas, I am skeptical of Varel’s main choice of social-intellectual context. From Richard Hofstadter through Christopher Lasch to Jackson Lears, historians have noted the importance of personal crises about the meaning of life for modern thinkers, crises summed up in the key word “weightlessness.”

Murray doesn’t fit very well. As a youth he stuttered, felt rejected by his mother, and suffered from sexual repression but he is a long way from being a Jamesian “sick soul” and a modal personality for an age of “weightlessness.” Until his early twenties, Murray’s main crisis seems to have been guilt about his role in a rebellion against his Harvard crew coach that may have resulted in a loss to Yale. As we used to say in working class New Jersey before I encountered the psychiatric mode of denigration, the young Murray was a rich spoiled jerk.

In his early thirties Murray did suffer what he called a “profound affectional crisis” that involved immersion in Romantic literature, enthusiasm for Carl Jung, and lust for Christiana Morgan. Except perhaps for the Jungian infatuation, John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor would have understood ninety years earlier.

This affectional crisis did influence Murray’s work, including his senior authorship of Explorations in Personality, but so too did a broad assortment of ideas. Although Varel can only sketch the early years, we do need to appreciate what a juicy life Murray lived. By his early forties his circle included Alfred North Whitehead, Lewis Mumford, Conrad Aiken, Eugene O’Neill, Archibald MacLeish, Joseph Schumpeter, and Paul Robeson.

Varel neatly summarizes Explorations in Personality but we should appreciate, too, what an incredible mish mash the book is, a combination of empiricism, insight, jargon, empathy, and elite insularity. For instance, Murray in effect regrets that his Catholic subjects, adhering to their church's "rationalized fantasy system," are "blissfully" less neurotic than their Protestant and Jewish counterparts. Certainly Murray's work had the potential to nudge psychology in various directions. The TAT became a tool for sorting out corporate executives, as William Whyte satirized in The Organization Man. Murray personally influenced Talcott Parsons as well as Kenneth Keniston and Erik Erikson.

If we are looking for sweeping contexts, we might say that both Explorations in Personality and Murray himself in the late 1930s illustrate tenacious American optimism. According to Murray at that time, Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents exuded “black despair.”

Since Murray lived well into his nineties, he can be used as a symbol or modal personality for many intellectual trends. After the United States entered World War II he discovered evil, informed the world of its existence in his writings, and administered TATs for the Office of Strategic Services--“great fun.” Murray testified for the defense at the second Alger Hiss trial, diagnosed Whittaker Chambers as a “psychopathic personality” on the basis of his writings, and took pride in coming off better on the witness stand than Cornell psychiatrist Carl Binger. Joining in the post-World War II disenchantment with “the people” this rich spoiled jerk complained that soldiers, students, and his own research assistants were becoming uppity. Ever adaptable in self-absorption, however, Murray enjoyed an acid trip with Timothy Leary.

As we move into the 1960s and 1970s, Steigerwald sees the denouement of the descent from Jamesian giants to Maslovian pygmies. Although guides to success variously defined still proliferate in all sorts of media, the late 1970s marked the end of a phase in the discussion of the self. It had been a triumphant phase marked by psychological interpretations in venues as significant as George Kennan’s Cold War tract “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” the United States Supreme Court decision in Brown v Board of Education, and Justice Harry Blackmun's majority opinion in Roe v Wade.

Maslow, Reich, and others criticized by Steigerwald, a good Laschian, have never been my cup of chamomile tea, and I have been trying all of my professional life to bury the phrase “paranoid style in American politics.” But as a Susmanite I have always had a soft spot for the gentler positive thinkers. Many people would be better off listening to Maslow than listening to Prozac. And with the resurgence of “economic man,” construed with a stunted conception of rationality that would surprise Adam Smith, I am softening further. Come the revolution, perhaps we could sentence the authors of Freakonomics and the policy wonks at the American Enterprise Institute to a few weeks in a hot tub with Charlie Reich.

Steigerwald on "The Willful Self" (Personality and the Self Panel, Part II)

2011-12-27T06:36:00.008-06:00

Dear Readers: As a special holiday season treat, I give you one of the more interesting panels from our recent conference--"Personality and the Self in Twentieth-Century American Social Thought"' See the first paper by Dave Varel here. This paper is by Dave Steigerwald. Comments by Leo Ribuffo will follow.

“Hollo! I must lie here no longer”:
Versions of the Willful Self from the Gilded Age to the Me Decade
by David Steigerwald, The Ohio State University

As one or two of you may be aware, I’ve made a bit of a living over the last few years criticizing the concept of individual agency in postwar America, especially in its application to consumerism. Typically there it includes claims that consumers exercise some measure of decisive power over the marketplace when they make idiosyncratic choices about either what they purchase or how they interpret the goods they buy. Choice is good, this line of reasoning seems to go, and because it provides so much of it, contemporary consumerism must also be good. Because versions of this line of thought came to pervade a good deal of writing about consumerism from the 1980s on, it seemed to me worth poking a few sticks at. At its most serious and most fruitful, the consumer-as-agent argument was a necessary counter to Frankfurt School cultural determinism, that stifling intellectual blanket laying upon those who began writing in the 1970s and 1980s. [1}

Yet in criticizing the concept of consumer agency, I’m afraid that I left the impression that I was defending Frankfurt, which is only partly true. Adorno and Horkheimer’s most concise summary of their view of the radio listener (a paraphrase of Henry Ford, it seems to me), that the listener wants what they’re going to get anyway, still strikes me as sound. Still, I had this nagging fear that someone would say to me what a defender of free-will Methodism in the 1890s wrote in criticism of predestination: “Why hold on to [this belief] as with a death-grasp ruled by Calvin’s dead hand from his very grave, trying to soften its asperities, and still keep mumbling the decrees as Roman priests do the mass in an unknown tongue, patching new pieces of truth to old garments of error worn in the Dark Ages?” [2]

To skirt just that possibility, I’ve widened the inquiry into the doctrine of choice in a book on alienation and affluence in postwar America, which I’m now finishing. In it, I’m arguing that the doctrine of choice become the antidote to alienation not just in consumer culture, but as a means by which individuals might think of themselves as successfully negotiating through an age of automated labor, bureaucratic regimentation, political powerlessness, and a profound shift in values that issued from the evaporation of the Protestant ethic. “Choice” became the universal default, in part because it was easy-to-hand and in perfect harmony with consumer capitalism. But it also spoke to the essential social psychology of alienation: that is, the pervasive sense of individual estrangement and isolation. Even if only an invocation, the belief that individual choices are both freely rendered and individually efficacious can be enough to lift the pallor of alienation for any given person. To the extent that the late-20th century political economy promised choices across the board—not just in soaps and shampoos, but in churches, communities however ephemeral or “virtual,” and technologies that provided private access to all—it effectively institutionalized such efficacy. And all this goes a long way toward explaining why we’re not alienated any more.

Having arrived at a via media all my own, it makes sense to me to admit, and follow up on, what should be obvious: that a debate over agency, or the efficacy of choice, is nothing new. While of course it is drawn out of the clash between the old Marxism and the New Left, it may be fruitful to see it as part of an even longer historical trajectory. We should see it, accordingly, as another episode in the old division between determinism and free will that runs back, in American letters, to the antinomian critique of Calvinism, and that intensified between 1880 and 1920 in the important debate between Darwinists and the theologically inclined—between, as one Darwin partisan put it in 1892, the “intellectual measles” of religion and “scientific certitude.” [3] A cursory look at the literature tells me that these forty years will take up the bulk of a book on the subject of free will. But a quick glance at the Google NGRAM—one of my favorite new research tools—shows that the use of “free will” in modern American writing had two peaks: a double-humped one that began around 1870, dipped at the turn of the century, then accelerated through the Great War; the second erupting sometime around 1960 and running perhaps a decade or so. And the possible connections between these two periods, as well as the different uses and meanings of the ideas deployed, provide an intriguing and natural parameter for such a study.

The first question, then, should ask what structural similarities the Gilded Age shared with the 1960s and 1970s, or what I’ll call the mid-postwar period. What comes immediately my mind is that in both periods, fundamental socio-economic change apparently generated distinct social-psychological maladies: neurasthenia/hysteria, in the Gilded Age; alienation in the mid-postwar period.

These two forms of psycho-social maladjustment, moreover, themselves shared similarities. Both were commonly accounted for as reactions against the warp speed of modernity. Train schedules, factory whistles, and the clock were superimposed on nineteenth-century people physiologically attuned to the leisurely pace of the natural world, while automation and mass communications generated “future shock” in the latter case. Both nervous exhaustion and alienation seemed to have weighed most heavily on sensitive young adults.

I have always been impressed, for example, by how clearly the sentiments in the Port Huron Statement echoed Jane Addams’s self-analysis in that wonderful essay, “The Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements.” Addams, of course, knew a thing or two about damaged youth, having been one herself. And in that essay she described the personal debilitations, the spiritual enervation, that plagued educated young adults who found themselves rendered useless by modernity’s material well-being. Whereas the generation before them was absorbed in the “starvation struggle” against the frontier, Addams’s generation had been elevated into comfort and educated presumably in order to take on a purposeful life, only to be deprived of meaningful outlets for their abundant vitalities. This situation was particularly intense for young women like Addams, whose typical fate was to graduate backward into the “family claim.” In the passage that has always caught my eye, Addams described with her usual clarity the quiet agony of her peers:

We have in America a fast-growing number of cultivated young people who have no recognized outlet for their active faculties. They hear constantly of the great social maladjustment, but no way is provided for them to change it, and their uselessness hangs about them heavily. Huxley declares that the sense of uselessness results in atrophy of function. These young people have had advantages of college, of European travel, and of economic study, but they are sustaining this shock of inaction. . . . Many of them dissipate their energies in so-called enjoyment. . . . Many are buried beneath mere mental accumulation with lowered vitality and discontent. . . . This young life, so sincere in its emotion and good phrases and yet so undirected, seems to me as pitiful as the other great mass of destitute lives. . . . Our young people feel nervously the need of putting theory into action, and respond quickly to the Settlement form of activity. [4]

Some sixty years later, Paul Goodman described almost the exact same problem as “growing up absurd,” and it is no stretch at all to think that Addams would have had enormous sympathy for the young people who in 1962 began their Port Huron Statement with the rallying cry: “We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.”

Every bit of Addams’s language in the “Subjective Necessity” points us to another similarity in the distress that reached across time: both nervous disorder and alienation were maladies of the self, and because of that, they recommended at least some measure of subjective assertion. This is precisely Addams’s point. Earnest young people cut off from the starvation struggle of the urban masses could recover their physical vitality and sustain selfhood through settlement house work. Let me suggest that those alienated young people who launched Students for a Democratic Society and scoured the social landscape in search of objects for their political energies were doing the exact same thing.

Rather than making that argument here, I want to muck around in what I’m thinking of as a prior, more distinctly subjective reaction to psycho-social maladjustment. Both Addams and her peers and Tom Hayden and his alleviated their distress by throwing themselves into the public arena with the intention of changing objective conditions, and it is my view that such an effort was undoubtedly the healthiest, most meaningful antidote. But it raises the question of whether it is possible to overcome personal agony through purely subjective assertion, through something we could profitably think of as “the will.” If indeed one can successfully will oneself to mental well-being, if indeed the subjective is sufficient, then perhaps those who put great stock in individual agency are on solid ground. If the subjective will can, in a tangible way, affect the practical conditions of one’s life, then self-assertion is not merely subjective; it has some objective consequence. This, I take it, is what people mean by “agency.”

To get at this question, we should begin not with Jane Addams but with her contemporary, William James. James’s engagement in the debate over human volition was both important and typical of him, one of the important building blocks, as our good friend James Kloppenberg taught us, in the via media of American pragmatism. In Uncertain Victory, Kloppenberg described the “nature of the will” as “among the most vexing problems confronting late nineteenth-century thinkers.” Broadly speaking, that problem pitted the partisans of the physical sciences, “who dismissed religious arguments for free will as wishful thinking,” and the theologically inclined, who obliged themselves to believe in the complete independence of the individual human being. The automaton squared off against the autonomous, we might say. Clearly, these were just the broad parameters of a discourse that contained many variations—the intellectual mud-wrestling between Huxley and his scandalized critics; a revival of the debate over Calvinism among some American Christians; the growing importance of Freud; and, not least, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. These variations indicated that high stakes were on the table, and that, combined with the irresolvable impasse between the two antagonistic positions, made the question of the will irresistible for American pragmatists. [5]

As Kloppenberg argues, the philosophers of the middle way crafted a philosophy of voluntary action that characteristically insisted on measuring any claims against experience. By the time they had arrived at a satisfactory position, their theory of voluntary action held that people were capable of choosing to sustain a thought and were therefore aware of the freedom to select between competing options; that the individual selects both what sensory data to act on and how to do so; that thought and sensation were mediated into action through volition; and that free will, though it clearly exists, is nonetheless constrained by social, and therefore historical, context. [6]

But what particularly attracts me to James was, as Kloppenberg also notes, that he immersed himself in the question of the will out of “the crucible of personal anxiety.” [7] The philosophical stakes aside, the personal capacity to will oneself, in James’s case, to some mental equilibrium that permitted engagement with the world was at the core of his philosophy of volition. Had James meekly accepted Huxley, he would have withered away. Instead, he climbed out of his debilitating mental exhaustion by translating into action one option from among a set of options. In a passage on the “psychology of volition” in Principles of Psychology, he offered a veiled description of his own experience. In trying to prove that ideas could be translated into action by suggesting that many ideas also inhibit action, James offered the example of arising out of bed on a cold morning. One knows that one must get up and face the day. “But still the warm couch feels too delicious, the cold outside too cruel, and resolution faints away and postpones itself again and again.” One mental urge throws itself against another; the imperatives compete. Extrapolating from “my own experience,” James asked: How do people ever raise themselves? “The idea flashes across us, ‘Hollo! I must lie here no longer.” [8]

Jackson Lears noted some time ago that James’s recovery was hardly so dramatic, that he recovered only gradually and then only after taking up his teaching career at Harvard. That said, what interests me is the connection between physical activity and mental health—a connection, incidentally, that Jane Addams also acknowledged. [9] We know today that physical activity is an important ingredient in the successful treatment of depression, and it begins with the Jamesian act of will—simply getting out bed and facing the day. More to the point, such an act of will, whatever its value to the philosophy of voluntary action, has real empirical value. It is possible to see in, and therefore to measure through, the improvement of the subject’s mental disposition the extent to which the subjective assertion of the self alters objective conditions. It is an example of the efficacy of the will.

If anything, James was overly insistent on the physiological origins of the will, at least in that long section on the subject in Principles of Psychology. Partly, his medical training explains his preoccupation with the “kinaesthetic idea.” But it is obvious that he was driven to scrutinize determinism more aggressively than its opposite, religious feeling. If I understand him correctly, James’s main intention in this bit of writing was to distance the source of sensation from the physical movement that is sensation’s effect. The simple distinction between involuntary and voluntary movements—the former were primary “functions of our organism”; the latter “secondary” ones—was his point of departure. But the distinction was not absolute, because in certain cases the body was capable of learning through motor memory from the first involuntary reaction to a particular sensation. The body learned other movements as well and at some point selected which action to undertake in response. (One example: The child who starts at the roar of a train as he stands on the platform does so involuntarily at first experience; thereafter, the same sensation might produce a similar response, but maybe not.) While this argument qualified the distinction between involuntary and voluntary movement, James used the point to separate out sensation from the response to sensation. “In reflex action, “and in its emotional expression,” he wrote, “the movements which are the effects are in no manner contained by anticipation in the stimuli which are their cause. The latter are subjective sensations and objective perceptions, which do not in the slightest degree resemble or prefigure the movements.” [10] Whereas determinism presumed a direct identity between sensation and movement, James insisted on a continuum that linked sensation, reflection, and action. By opening up room between the spark of motor movement and the actual movement itself, James crafted out space for volition, for the capacity of one to choose between impulses, and therefore for indeterminacy, or what he referred to elsewhere as “chance.” And chance, he knew, was the enemy of determinism. [11]

James always recognized the religious implications of this matter and understood perfectly well that the Huxleyan uproar was a resumption of the debate over free will. As he told Harvard Divinity students in a 1884 talk, while “common opinion” might be “that the juice has ages ago been pressed out of the free-will controversy, . . . I know of no subject less worn out, or in which inventive genius has a better chance of breaking open new ground.” [12] He joined the issue most clearly in “Reflex Action and Theism,” an address given to Unitarian ministers in 1881, whom he praised for their efforts to assimilate contemporary science into their world views. (He also praised them, by the way, for their rejection of Calvinism: “A God who gives so little scope to love, a predestination which takes from endeavor all its zest with all its fruit, are irrational conceptions, because they say to our most cherished prayers, There is no object for you.” [13]) James’s intention here, however, was to disabuse his open-minded brethren of any flirtation with the “doctrine of reflex action” then dominant in physiology and psychology, which dogmatically insisted that all “acts” are mere “discharges from the nervous centres” in response to external stimuli. The adherents to this theory, James claimed, were quite sure that it dealt the “coup de grace to the superstition of God.” The fallacy of the determinists, as anyone’s experience easily confirmed, was that the “real order of the world” was so overwhelmingly chaotic that individuals had to sort out what to respond to and what to ignore, and those decisions issued from “our subjective interests.” James maintained that subjective interests were given play in “the conceiving or theorizing faculty—the mind’s middle department,” and that they were independent of external stimuli. That middle department “is a transformer of the world of our impressions into a totally different world, . . . and the transformation is effected in the interests of our volitional nature.” [14] James reassured his theistic listeners that the middle department’s job was to adjust sensations until it mastered the chaos of the objective world. And that, he figured, was really what theology was about.

For James, then, the will connected the metaphysical and the phenomenological and was the bridge between subjective and objective realities. More than that, though: it was the activating agent in transforming belief into action, or abstract faith into faith revealed and affirmed. So it’s not too much to claim that James’s famous open-mindedness toward religious conviction grew out of his engagement with the free-will debate. If his main intention in “The Will to Believe” was to defend “our right to adopt a believing attitude in religious matters,” as he put it, what justified that right was belief’s place in the continuum of action. True, the believer could not will the existence of God. But our volitional nature could nonetheless translate belief in such a way as to “help create the fact” that belief sought out by making the faithful “better off even now.” In other words, the practical, objective effects of religious conviction concluded the continuum whereby the subjective was translated into an objective effect. [15]

This same formulation explains James’s interest in the “mind-cure” movement that proliferated after 1890. Self-evidently unscientific, mind-cure had to be understood as a religious movement, akin, he wrote, to Lutheranism or Methodism. Like earlier evangelical faiths, mind-cure banished original sin, which was probably enough in itself to appeal to James. Its practitioners harbored no “contrite hearts”; they were already “one with the Divine without any miracle of grace.” Much of what he read from mind-cure authors baffled him. But James took note of how the audacity of the advice had struck a vibrant chord among the public. “The leaders of the movement,” he observed, “have had an intuitive belief in the all-saving power of healthy-minded attitudes as such, in the conquering efficacy of courage, hope, and trust, and a correlative contempt for doubt, fear, and worry.” They cleverly packaged their sunny nostrums as “cures” and thereby trespassed on the turf of medical science. But the only sensible way to measure a “cure” was through its results, which in the case of mind-cure seemed to be promising. “The blind have been made to see, the halt to walk; life-long invalids have had their health restored. The moral fruits have been no less remarkable. The deliberate adoption of a healthy-minded attitude has proved possible to many who never supposed they had it in them; regeneration of character has gone on an extensive scale; and cheerfulness has been restored to countless homes.” The movement’s “practical fruits,” its “palpable experiential results,” were enough to warrant respect. [16] Here again, as with religious conviction, the will created the fact.

At the considerable risk of drawing up a genealogy that links pigmies to giants, it might be an interesting exercise to apply the Jamesian formula to the psychology of the self that blossomed in the late 1960s and 1970s. It is the case that the cult of the self, that great obsession of the Me Decade, evoked a fair amount of writing about the will—hence the second N-Gram hump. There was every bit as much charlatanry and snake-oil in the Seventies Era cult of the self as in the mind-cure days of James. But following James’s example, we are compelled to take seriously results, regardless of the means.

Humanistic psychology, for instance, rested on the subjective will. Leslie Farber, Viktor Frankl, and Rollo May all wrote on the subject. The Esalen Institute sanctioned such books as Roberto Assaglioli’s The Act of Will, which recommended the not unreasonable development of a “skillful will” as a psychological cog-wheel that could keep elemental instincts and behavioral impulses in alignment. [17] Abraham Maslow’s self-actualized person might be understood as a version of James’s once-born: free of illusions, guilt, shame, or anxieties, self-actualized people were driven to be what “they must be,” to realize their idiosyncratic potential and “become everything that one is capable of becoming.” [18]

The question, though, is whether self-actualization was a self-conscious achievement that bespoke the assertion of will, or whether it was a mental state to which one evolved as one moved through the needs hierarchy. Maslow was vague on this count. His motivation theory revolved around the satisfaction of needs, where will was largely a means to an end. Self-actualized people often did things without any motivation whatsoever; “expressive” actions, such as appreciating a great work of art, were intrinsically good and ends in themselves. Moreover, Maslow spoke of the self-actualized at times as though they were finished products, “fully evolved and authentic” people whose “needs” were all satisfied. Yet in his later writing he insisted that personal “growth” was a life-long process, “a never-ending series,” he wrote, “of free choice situations” where one assumes that “free choice” meant “the wisest choice.” Will must have mattered, except that “choice” was substituting for will. [19]

Let me suggest that perhaps what Maslow was doing here was updating conceptions to fit a consumer society, where choice, rather than freedom, was the defining virtue. In his psychology, choice was to have something of the purpose as James’s volition: it was a means of self-emancipation from the defining social-psychological burden of his day. Efficacious choice was a means for addressing alienation. And in my view, the energy invested in the self during the 1970s was a widespread effort to do just that.

If we can use Jane Addams and William James as examples of people who willed themselves to mental equilibrium and lived to write about it, can we locate any examples of people who “chose” to overcome alienation and lived to write about it? I actually think there are many of them, including the bulk of those from the self-help movement, Seventies era feminists such as Gloria Steinem, and psychoanalysts such as Heinz Kohut spring to mind. One of the more peculiar cases was that of Nathaniel Branden, Ayn Rand’s acolyte and lover, who turned himself into a self-help guru after their falling out.

I had, in fact, planned to conclude my remarks today by examining how Branden’s “new psychology” gave him an intellectual escape route from his personal enslavement to Rand into something that seems like self-assertive respectability. But I figured that even the slightest implication that William James and Ayn Rand were somehow distant relatives would be treated in this group as a form of heresy. So let me to Charles Reich.

Yes, I mean that Charles Reich.

Some of you may remember Reich, as the Yale law professor who authored the best-selling The Greening of America. I won’t belabor that book; properly much-ridiculed at the time, it’s an easy target for criticism. It will do to note that he depicted “youth” engaged in creating “Consciousness III” as fundamentally alienated from the deadening society of Consciousness II, and that the blessings of the economy of abundance held out the possibility of a “nonartificial and nonalienated” way of life, if only the appropriate values would take hold. [20]

Because Greening was such a flash-in-the-pan, such a quickly dated book, not much attention was paid to Reich’s next book, an autobiographical account of his coming out as a gay man. As he recounted the story, his life was one long string of unrelenting misery. Coming of age in a Cold War society that “dominates self,” he was denied “autonomy”; alienated, he was deprived of “self-knowledge.” He spent his early career in high places. He clerked for Justice Hugo Black and befriended William O. Douglas before landing a job at a prominent DC law firm. But he was agonizingly lonely. Stuck in Washington, “a city of loneliness,” condemned to starched collars and stuffy corporate lunches, Reich was incapable of forging decent friendships, much less enduring relationships. Taking a position at Yale in 1960 was but a tiny step from the button-down world of Washington, given the university’s solid place in the establishment. [21]

In New Haven, he settled into the cloistered world of the eccentric bachelor professor until a young man he had met only once insisted he visit Berkeley. There, during the Summer of Love, Reich discovered the “new consciousness,” and it changed his life. “More than any place I had ever seen,” he wrote, “Berkeley was populated by people who seemed to be doing what they chose to do, rather than what they had to do. . . . Berkeley culture was a proclamation of the freedom to choose.” From that point on, Reich described his life as a steady shedding of the stifled, repressed self that had always been him: first in adopting a new teaching style and closer, more informal relationships to his students; and finally to a full coming out in San Francisco. His was hardly an unusual story for a gay man of his particular age. What draws our attention here is that Reich’s emphasis was not so much on repressed sexuality as on his sense of a broader alienation, which was dispelled not only by finally coming to terms with his sexual orientation but through the assertion of will, cast as choice. “Alienation isolates each of us in a separate prison cell,” he wrote, but he came to see that “the way out” was to find “within us the ability to change.” “Growth and change opened people to dimensions of themselves which alienation had banished from awareness,” he wrote. [22]

What can one say but more power to him? James would have been pleased to see that choice, in this case, was efficacious in liberating a person from anguish.

We can, then, find many parallels between the two periods, not least a confidence in the efficacy of the assertive sense. The Calvinist in me remains suspicious though, and suspects that something is lost when free will becomes transmuted into choice. If nothing else, the latter seems to indicate that no great philosophical stakes remained by 1970. Indeed, what was the alternative to “choice” at that point? It would be prudent to keep in mind that James himself never thought that one could will happiness, anymore than the believer could will the actual existence of God. Efficacy, to him, really was nothing more triumphant than forcing oneself to get out of bed on a cold morning and begin life’s struggles. Even if it were just a matter of using resonant language to accord with consumer society, “choice” trivializes its own origins. Free-will philosophy was rooted in the claim that the truly important choices that a human being faced were between good and evil, and, further, that the very definition of freedom lay in having to make such choices. It was rooted, in other words, in the presumption that human beings are frail, if not inherently flawed, creatures. This reminds us, perhaps, that choice doesn’t carry much gravity unless Calvin’s hand is there, at least threatening to maintain its “death-grip.”

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Endnotes

1. For an example of my position, as well as a dose of the relevant literature, see David Steigerwald, “All Hail the Republic of Choice: Consumer History as Contemporary Thought,” Journal of American History 93 (September 2006), 385-403.

2. T. M. Griffith, “The Methodist Doctrine of Free Will,” Methodist Review 10 (1894), 560.

3. Henry Blanchamp, “Thoughts of a Human Automaton,” The Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature 55 (May 1892), 600.

4. Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910), 121-22.

5. James Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870-1920 (Oxford, 1986), 79-80.

6. Ibid., 85.

7. Ibid., 80.

8. William James, Principles of Psychology, vol. 2 (New York, 1907), 524-25.

9. T. J. Jackson Lears, “William James,” The Wilson Quarterly 11 (Autumn 1987), 89-90. Addams understood the yearning for public engagement as partly instinctual, a biological inheritance from the primitives: “We all bear traces of the starvation struggle which for so long made up the life of the race. Our very organism holds memories and glimpses of that long life of our ancestors which still goes on among so many of our contemporaries. . . . We have all had longings for a fuller life which should include the use of these faculties. These longings are the physical complement of the "Intimations of Immortality" on which no ode has yet been written.” Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House, 118.

10. James, Principle of Psychology, II: 494.

11. William James, “The Dilemma of Determinism,” in The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (New York, 1923), 153.

12. Ibid., 145.

13. William James, “Reflex Action and Theism,” in The Will to Believe, 126.

14. Ibid., 113, 115, 117-19.

15. William James, “The Will to Believe,” in ibid., 1, 9, 27. Also Patrick K. Dooley, “The Nature of Belief: The Proper Context for James' "The Will to Believe,’" Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 8 (Summer 1972) 141-50.

16. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York, 1936), 92, 99, 93-94. See also Donald F. Duclow, “William James, Mind-Cure, and the Religion of Healthy-Mindedness,” Journal of Religion and Health 41 (Spring 2002), 45-56; and Jennifer Welchman, “’The Will to Believe’: and the Ethics of Self-Experimentation,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 42 (Spring 2006), 229-241.

17. Leslie Farber, The Ways of the Will: Selected Essays (New York, 2000); Viktor Frankl, The Will to Meaning: Foundations and Applications of Logotherapy (New York, 1988); Rollo May, Love and Will (New York, 1969); and Roberto Assagioli, The Act of Will (New York, 1973).

18. Abraham Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being 2nd ed. (New York, 1968), 141-42, 11-12; Abraham Maslow, Motivation and Personality, 3rd ed. (New York, 1987), 7, 131-36, 22.

19. Maslow, Motivation and Personality, 70-71; Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being, 16, 47-48, 45.

20. Reich, The Greening of America: How the Youth Revolution is Trying to Make America Livable (New York, 1970), 24-26.

21. Charles A. Reich, The Sorcerer of Bolinas Reef (New York, 1976), 3-4, 9, 63.

22. Ibid., 99, 117, 10, 101.

Varel, "Saving the Self" (Personality and the Self Panel, Part I)

2011-12-26T15:20:00.007-06:00

Dear Readers: As a special holiday season treat, I give you one of the more interesting panels from our recent conference--"Personality and the Self in Twentieth-Century American Social Thought"--with papers by Dave Varel and Dave Steigerwald, followed up with comments by Leo Ribuffo.

Saving the Self:
Henry Murray and Humanistic Personality Psychology, 1920-1940
by Dave Varel
PhD Candidate, University of Colorado-Boulder

When asked about the reasons for his shift from physiology to psychology in the 1920s, Henry Murray, a leading early personality psychologist, explained: “human personality, because of its present sorry state, had become the problem of our time—a hive of conflicts, lonely, half-hollow, half-faithless, half-lost, half-neurotic, half-delinquent, not equal to the problems that confronted it, not very far from proving itself an evolutionary failure.” [1] This comment reveals Murray’s concern for the fate of the individual in modern society at the same time that it suggests an activist element inspiring his work in the field. Yet too often scholarship on Murray has overlooked the social and cultural context in which he self-consciously functioned, instead highlighting his place in the disciplinary dialogue of psychology and the interpersonal relationships that informed his life. [2] This paper argues that the life, work, and significance of Murray can only be fully understood by linking his personal and professional life with the broader historical context. It also shows how Murray, in addition to reflecting the emergent “culture of personality” and fear over the “masses,” imbued the concept of personality with mystery, complexity, and uniqueness through his work in the social sciences. [3]

Despite his important later accomplishments in the discipline, there was nothing inevitable about Murray’s turn to psychology, and, in fact, it appeared highly unlikely at first. Born into a conservative, moderately wealthy family in New York City in 1893, Murray remained an indifferent student through grade school and college at Harvard, where he mused that his “two fields of concentration had been rowing and romance.” [4] Despite a troubled relationship with his mother, some eye problems, and stuttering issues, Murry’s childhood was that of “an average, privileged American boy.” [5] Murray became a more serious student after marrying the upper-class Josephine Lee Rantoul in 1916 and entering medical school at Columbia. He took an M.D. from there in 1919 and a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Cambridge in 1927, where he conducted extensive research on chicken embryos. In other words, the evolution of his professional career still revealed few signs that he would be a man to enter the field of psychology, much less revolutionize it.

Beneath the impressive veneer of this professional career was a much less stable and complacent personal life. Murray described the 1920s as a period of “profound affectional upheaval” for him. He began cultivating his emotional potential, which he felt had been denied by the exacting biochemical work in the lab, by engrossing himself in humanistic literature like that by Melville and Proust, in music by Beethoven and Wagner, in poetry by E.A. Robinson, and in plays by Eugene O’Neill. [6] This was a man searching for deeper meaning and understanding of the human experience, and in 1923 two experiences changed his life. The first was his reading of Carl Jung’s Psychological Types and the subsequent personal relationship he struck up with the famous Swiss psychiatrist. The second was his encounter with a young woman named Christiana Morgan, whose beauty, intelligence, and fascination with psychology excited in Murray feelings previously unknown to him. [7] These two relationships – one unlocking profound insight into the human being through the unconscious, the other unleashing intense sexual and emotional desires – pushed Murray away from biochemistry and into psychology. In 1926, while still finishing up his Ph.D., Murray took an assistantship position under Morton Prince of Harvard, who had just founded the Harvard Psychological Clinic to study hypnosis and abnormal psychology. Soon after, Harvard appointed Murray as an assistant faculty member of the psychology department, though he had never received any formal training in the discipline (unbeknownst to most of the faculty). [8]

Culture conditioned Murray’s personal experiences and his path towards psychology. Take his feelings of superficiality and his longing for deep experience and fulfillment. This was a common feeling among Americans at the turn of the twentieth century. T.J. Jackson Lears has written about this extensively, contending that Americans began to feel that their “sense of selfhood had become fragmented, diffuse, and somehow ‘weightless’ or ‘unreal’” as a result of “the corrosive impact of the market on familiar values, the dislocating impact of technological advance on everyday experience—and above all in the secularization of Protestantism.” [9] Lears traces how consumption and the “therapeutic ethos” associated with it became the major way Americans attempted to secure their identity and attain personal fulfillment in the modern world. Along with consumption, Americans at the turn of the century sought fulfillment through bodily vigor and emotional intensity, evident in a range of popular activities from the Arts and Crafts movement to camping and competitive sports. [10] Murray’s longing for deep experience and emotional intensity can only be understood as part of this larger context.

Murray responded to this sense of weightlessness in both common and unique ways. His immersion in literature and music, as well as his prolonged extramarital affair with Christiana Morgan, were not atypical ways Americans dealt with modern life. His interest in psychology and selfhood, furthermore, was widespread. Murray’s privileged life and education, however, positioned him to use the social sciences to explore his ideas and thus shape an academic discipline in ways obviously unavailable to most. Though helping to forge the field of personality psychology would certainly not fall into the category of a “typical” response to modernity, his life and work only makes real sense when understood in that light.

While modernity conditioned his movement towards personality psychology as a career (and, indeed, the career itself was a distinctively modern one, with Gordon Allport founding the sub-discipline in the 1920s), it also informed his entire research agenda. As mentioned previously, Carl Jung had a decisive impact on Murray’s early career, for in the unconscious Murray saw an avenue to exploring the complexity, nuance, and mystery of human beings. Murray came to Harvard intending to explore the unconscious through psychoanalysis and other techniques, only to discover that mainstream American psychology had very different interests. The discipline remained dominated by psychometrics and behaviorism, which Murray explained as: “almost everyone was nailed down to some piece of apparatus, measuring a small segment of the nervous system as if it were isolated from the entrails.” [11] While Murray longed to study people holistically, most of academic psychology concerned itself with outwardly measurable behaviors perceived as reactions to external stimuli. Murray’s uniqueness here can be explained partly by his training outside of formal American psychology, but it also must be seen as part of his activism to rescue modern selfhood. Regardless, Murray’s frustration prompted him to unleash a virulent attack on the discipline in a published paper in 1935, where he complained that mainstream psychology “has contributed practically nothing to the knowledge of human nature…It has not only failed to bring light to the great, hauntingly recurrent problems, but it has no intention, one is shocked to realize, of attempting to investigate them.” [12] Much to his dismay, he perceived personality psychology as simply mirroring and reinforcing the plight of the individual in a mass society.

In direct opposition to most practitioners of the discipline in the U.S., then, Murray set out to investigate the self in a holistic, comprehensive, often psychoanalytic way. Here he borrowed from Freud as well as Jung, all the while maintaining a methodological independence, insisting “I have never called myself a Freudian, a Jungian, or any other –ian.” [13] In terms of psychoanalysis, he accepted “a large part (more than half) of the psychoanalytic scheme,” but he used it only to inform his research, not totally direct it. [14] His specific entrees into personality research reveal his eclecticism, as his magnum opus, Explorations in Personality, published in 1938, drew from interviews, self-report questionnaires, and a whole host of projective tests. This eclecticism underscored Murray’s wider goal of developing a comprehensive view of the human personality, using any and all tests that would move in the direction of that goal.

A closer look at Explorations and at the now famous Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) reveals how Murray attempted to deal with the self in modern society. He based the project on two premises: 1) personality can be measured comprehensively, and 2) personality needs to be measured. The first premise reveals Murray’s faith in science to approach something as complex and amorphous as “personality.” Despite his insistence on the complexity and final mystery of human beings, he maintained that science could provide a valuable, comprehensive framework for evaluating the self. The second premise reveals Murray’s unease with the place of the individual in modern society – his insistence that “human personality…had become the problem of our time.” [15] He believed that a more complete portrait of human beings was needed because, like many modernists, he saw the modern self as fractured, shallow, and weightless due to the dislocations of urban, industrial society. In a footnote in Explorations, he comments directly on this superficiality, saying there is:

A general disposition which is widespread in America, namely, to regard the peripheral personality—conduct rather than inner feeling and intention—as of prime importance. Thus, we have the fabrication of a ‘pleasing personality,’ mail courses in comportment, courtesy as good business, the best pressed clothes, the best barber shops, Listerine and deodorants, the contact man, friendliness without friendship, the prestige of movie stars and Big Business, quantity as an index of worth, a compulsion for fact-getting, the statistical analysis of everything, questionnaires and behaviorism. [16]

Here, in his focus on “inner feeling and intention” over “conduct” and performance, we see his criticism of Victorian culture and his espousal of more modern ideas of selfhood. We also see his disdain for reducing human beings and their world to an endless stream of shallow statistics. So, for Murray, by mapping the self in a comprehensive way that accounted for the unconscious and the conscious, he hoped to add depth to the human personality.

From the very beginning, the massive project that would be published as Explorations aimed to further this goal. Rather than focusing on “the perceptive and cognitive functions of the human mind” or “the behaviour of animals” in laboratory settings, Murray analyzed “emotional and behavioural reactions” in conditions that “resembled as nearly as possible those of everyday life.” [17] The project examined 51 male subjects of college age over the course of several weeks or several months. An eclectic group of researchers administered an equally eclectic array of 29 procedures and tests to each subject. [18] The research began with self-report questionnaires, free association exercises, and interviews to gain as much background information as possible, but then researchers gave a broad array of projective tests. The staff administered these tests and then collaborated to determine the major aspects of each subject’s personality. This was a massive project that presumed the complexity of each subject – a complexity that could only be approached through the thorough, sustained, and diverse testing of each candidate by a collection of variously-trained researchers. This was in stark contrast to the simple personality inventories and questionnaires dominating much of the field, which naturally had very different assumptions about the human personality and how it could be measured.

Despite the diversity of approaches utilized by Murray, the most important tests were “projective” ones. Freud first developed the theory of projection in 1894, and it held that people unconsciously cast outward onto other people or objects any unacceptable thoughts or feelings they have. [19] Murray drew from a host of projective tests that attempted to penetrate the unconscious in a variety of creative ways. By far the most important and enduring of these was the Thematic Apperception Test – “Thematic” because “it elicited the animating themes of a person’s life, ‘Apperception’ because it drew on the internal imaginative process.” [20] The TAT presented subjects with a variety of provocative images that they then had to narrate into a story. The directions for this test are as follows:

This is a test of creative imagination. I am going to show you some pictures. Around each picture I want you to compose a story. Outline the incidents which have led up to the situation depicted in the picture, describe what is occurring at the moment—the feelings and thoughts of the characters—and tell what the outcome will be. Speak your thoughts aloud as they come to your mind. I want you to use your imagination to the limit. [21]

Murray and other psychologists found the test so useful because they believed patients reveal a great deal about their unconscious in narrating a story, but they do not realize it because it is focused on a particular external image.

The TAT and its projective nature reflect Murray’s wider humanistic ideals. Murray, quoting George Santayana, declared that “in the human being imagination is more fundamental than perception.” [22] He saw humans as creative, self-actualizing beings, where the whole being is “as essential to an understanding of the parts as the parts are to an understanding of the whole.” [23] In other words, individuals are “dynamic” and “goal-directed,” not merely a collection of competing impulses reacting to external stimuli. Seeing imagination and creativity as the most basic elements that defined humanity, he found continuity among Native American art, the great literature of Melville, and the stories formulated during the sessions of the TAT. This was a direct repudiation of behaviorist scientists as well as cultural commentators who lambasted the irrational, lemming-like quality of individuals in crowds – ideas that came to enjoy further prestige amid the spread of fascism in Europe. These ideas also rebuffed Freudian conceptions of the unconscious. Murray saw Freudian psychoanalysis as excessively pessimistic and overly focused on neuroses. The unconscious, for Murray, was more than merely a repository of repressed drives, it was also a bastion of creativity and human mystery. In this way, Murray used the unconscious partly as a shelter for Romantic ideas. Precisely because of its final immeasurability, the unconscious would remain a source of mystery and individuality that neither the impositions of mass society nor the incursions of scientific and technocratic rationality could extinguish. [24] In the end, Murray insisted that both human rationality and irrationality were central in coming to terms with the full human personality, thus revealing his part in the modernist project, which aimed to overcome false dichotomies and integrate and synthesize opposites into something new. [25]

The word best describing Murray’s philosophical position, then, is “humanist.” He was far from a behaviorist and departed crucially from psychoanalysts. More than anything else, he was a man reacting to the fractured and superficial aspects of the self that permeated modern American culture. In his personal life he fought against the superficial nature of modern life by attempting to live deeply through intense emotional experiences with Morgan and through immersing himself in literature, music, and art. In his professional life, he fought the same battles in attempting to map the personality in a way that revealed the depth and ultimate uniqueness of every human being. Every person, for Murray, had his or her own unique mind, individual experiences, and singularly creative imagination. This emphasis on unique individuality was a clear response to the fears over the fate of the individual in a mass society that homogenized people.

By imbuing “personality” with this rich uniqueness through his work in the field, in turn, Murray helped load the term with a meaning that could resolve these fears. Though the richness of Murray’s humanism would lessen among the commercial and clinical success of the TAT, Murray’s ideas and his test would live on in personality psychology and in popular culture as symbols of the complexity and mystery of human beings. [26] These ideas would always exist in dialectic with behaviorist and psychometric psychology, as well as with a wider culture increasingly obsessed with mapping the “average” with statistics, both of which tend to reduce the complexity of human beings by breaking them into their component parts. [27] Perhaps ultimately then, it is “personality’s” ability as a concept to house such competing impulses regarding the self that allow it to function so well as the concept we now use to embody our modern, complicated selves. [28]

So Murray’s final significance, I think, lies in how his life and work both reflected the emerging “culture of personality” and helped to reinforce and redirect it. Contra Warren Susman and some later cultural historians, personality was no simplistic modal type in line neatly with the evolving economic structure. Instead, that term was capacious and contested. Joan Shelley Rubin, for one, has shown this contestation among middlebrow literature. [29] But social scientists like Murray deserve more attention here, for as experts in an age of science, they enjoyed particular prestige, and, hence, particular power to infuse notions of the self with specific meanings. Despite being a minority voice in his field, Murray’s conceptions of the self are still with us today. With his characteristic sense of excitement and optimism, he insisted upon the creativity and final mystery of human beings. In his own words, he called for us all to “Await the unforeknown. Expect the unforeseeable. Welcome the improbable.” [30]

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Endnotes

1. Henry Murray quoted in Salvatore R. Maddi and Paul T. Costa, Humanism in Personology: Allport, Maslow, and Murray (Chicago: Aldine Atherton, Inc., 1972), 38.

2. See, for example: James William Anderson, “The Life of Henry A. Murray: 1893-1988” in Studying Persons and Lives, edited by A. I. Rabin, et al (New York: Springer Publishing Company, 1990), 304-334; Also: Lon Gieser and Morris Stein, eds, Evocative Images: The Thematic Apperception Test and the Art of Projection (Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association, 1999).

3. Research on the “culture of personality” is rich, but it began with Warren I. Susman’s “‘Personality’ and the Making of Twentieth Century Culture,” in Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon Books, 1973).

4. Murray quoted in Anderson, “The Life of Henry A. Murray,” 311.

5. Ibid., 305.

6. Ibid., 315.

7. For a full account of this relationship and its professional and personal implications, see: Forrest Robinson, Love’s Story Told: A Life of Henry A. Murray (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).

8. Paul, 76-78. Murray was very much an outsider in this department, and many faculty members resented his presence there – especially after learning of his formal training in biochemistry and not psychology. He was almost let go a number of times, and he did not earn tenure for another two decades.

9. T.J. Jackson Lears, “From Salvation to Self-Realization: Advertising and the Therapeutic Roots of the Consumer Culture, 1880-1930” in The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American Essays, 1880-1980, edited by Richard Wrightman Fox and T.J. Jackson Lears (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), xiii.

10. As a formative example of this literature, see: Fox and Lears, The Culture of Consumption.

11. Murray quoted in Annie Murphy Paul, The Cult of Personality: How Personality Tests are Leading Us to Miseducate Our Children, Mismanage Our Companies, and Misunderstand Ourselves (New York: Free Press, 2004), 78.

12. Murray quoted in Anderson, “Life of Henry A. Murray,” 319.

13. Murray quoted in Paul, 80.

14. Murray quoted in Anderson, “Life of Henry A. Murray,” 320.

15. Henry Murray quoted in Maddi and Costa, Humanism in Personology, 38.

16. Henry A. Murray, Explorations in Personality: A Clinical and Experimental Study of Fifty Men of College Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 1938), 9.

17. Ibid., vii-viii.

18. The diverse staff of researchers was “composed of poets, physicists, sociologists, anthropologists, criminologists, physicians; of democrats, fascists, communists, anarchists; of Jews, Protestants, Agnostics, Atheists; of pluralists, monists, solipsists; of behaviourists, configurationists, dynamicists, psycho-analysts; of Freudians, Jungians, Rankians, Adlerians, Lewinians, and Allportians.” Ibid., xi.

19. Paul, 86.

20. Ibid., 85.

21. Murray, “Techniques for a Systematic Investigation of Fantasy,” 130-31.

22. Henry A. Murray. “In Nomine Diaboli,” The New England Quarterly 24 (December 1951): 438.

23. Murray, Explorations in Personality, 38-39.

24. Robert C. Fuller, Americans and the Unconscious (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 199-200.

25. Maddi and Costa, Humanism in Personology, 25-26. On modernism, see Daniel Singal, “Modernist Culture in America,” American Quarterly 39 (1987).

26. See Paul, 90-103.

27. See Sarah Igo, The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007).

28. See also Ian Nicholson, Inventing Personality: Gordon Allport and the Science of Selfhood (Washington D.C.: American Psychological Association, 2003).

29. Joan Shelley Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1992).

30. Murray quoted in Paul, 103.

Lumpers, Splitters, and Essentialists

2011-12-26T07:45:00.000-06:00

Mark Lilla has a thought-provoking review of Corey Robin's The Reactionary Mind in the January 12, 2012, issue of the New York Review of Books, though its interest is less in what he has to say about Robin than in his own argument about what is going on in American conservatism these days. Though Lilla sees himself as arguing from fundamentally different premises than Robin, in at least one crucial respect, I believe they make a similar mistake.

Lilla dismisses Robin's book fairly quickly, calling Robin an "über-lumper":

...which may please his beleaguered readers on the left, but makes his entire enterprise incoherent. He fails to see that it is based on a glaring fallacy of composition: he posits a class, isolates a characteristic of one of its members, and then ascribes that characteristic to every member of the class. Catholic reactionary Joseph de Maistre and George W. Bush are both on the right in Robin’s scheme; following his logic, since Maistre spoke flawless French, Bush must too. Which would be some national secret. Yet that’s exactly how Robin proceeds, until he has corralled everyone he doesn’t like into a pen and labeled them all conservatives and reactionaries and right-wingers, terms he fails to distinguish.

I haven't finished Robin's book, but from what I have read of it, there's at least a grain of truth to this accusation. Certainly Robin's project is to identify what he sees as the essence of conservatism, an essence that defines conservatives throughout Western modernity. Conservatism, according to Robin, is always an "idea-driven praxis" and those ideas are, always and everywhere in the modern world, counterrevolutionary. Robin is certainly a lumper...though whether or not this makes his project "incoherent," as Lilla claims, is less obvious.

In contrast to Robin's lumping, Lilla instead erects a model based on limited, but fundamental, splitting. Lilla describes modern, Western politics in terms of two binaries: liberal-conservative and revolutionary-reactionary, two divides which, in Lilla's account have no necessary relationship to each other whatsoever:

The quarrel between liberals and conservatives is essentially a quarrel over the nature of human beings and their relation to society. The quarrel between revolutionaries and reactionaries, on the other hand, has little to do with nature. It is a quarrel over history.

Conservatives, in Lilla's scheme, follow Burke (a much more conventional American version of Burke than Robin's, it should be said) in believing that society is "metaphysically prior to the individuals in it," while liberals believe the opposite. As a result, conservatives in this sense are suspicious of change and value cultural inheritance for its own sake, while liberals are suspicious of cultural inheritance and believe that society can always be changed so as to further maximize human freedom.

The revolutionary-reactionary split, on the other hand, is a quarrel over the nature of (post-1789) modernity: revolutionaries like it; reactionaries detest it. Reactionaries, according to Lilla, should be further divided between "restorative reactionaries," who dream of returning to some imagined pre-revolutionary state, and "redemptive reactionaries," who believe there is no going back, and dream instead of simply burning down modernity in the hopes that something new and better will arise to replace it. The former group, according to ~~Ferguson~~ Lilla, includes, among others, "French aristocrats who hoped to restore the Bourbon dynasty, Russian Old Believers who wanted to recover early Orthodox Christian rites, Pre-Raphaelite painters who rejected the conventions of Mannerism, Morrisites and Ruskinites." The latter group includes Joseph de Maistre and both Stalinists and Fascists.

American politics, Lilla argues, has long included restorative reactionaries. But only with the rise of what Justin Vaïsse calls the "third wave" of neoconservatism--and its popular analog in the Tea Party--have redemptive reactionaries found a place in American politics. The current deadlock in Washington and the rhetoric of the GOP presidential candidates all point, according to Lilla, to an apocalypticism that is entirely new in U.S. politics and that we should find alarming.*

Lilla's review is interesting and well worth reading. True to its introductory paragraphs, it is indeed built on splitting rather than lumping. But, as Lilla himself suggests, compared to Robin, virtually everyone is a splitter. And Lilla's splitting is both extremely limited in scope and extremely severe in depth. While a bit more articulated than Robin's all-conservatives-are-the-same taxonomy, Lilla still presents a political world with only two meaningful, transhistorical dimensions of controversy. And Lilla wants to claim that the debate over human nature between his liberals and conservatives has nothing whatsoever to do with the debate over history between his revolutionaries and reactionaries.

The evidence for this last contention seems to be that certain folks on the left might be described as "restorative reactionaries"(e.g. Ruskinites, sensibly) and certain others as "redemptive reactionaries" (e.g. Stalinists, somewhat less plausibly). But these examples can't begin to prove that one's view of the relationship between the individual and society has nothing to do with one's theory of history. On the face of it, it seems obvious that the two are related to each other...though as the case of restorative reactionaries on the left might suggest, this relationship is potentially complicated. And it is precisely in their failure to account for such complexities that I find both Robin's and Lilla's views somewhat wanting.

Both Robin's and Lilla's arguments take essentialist approaches to understanding the contemporary American right. Both hope to find a transnational, transhistorical essence in the phenomena they're analyzing. For Robin, this essence is of a monolithic conservatism. To Lilla, it's an only slightly more complicated series of rigid binaries. Both seem to understand politics as addressing a set of issues that has stayed more or less the same since the late eighteenth century and that yielded an essentially stable series of possible answers.

But terms like "liberal" and "conservative," "right" and "left," and even "revolutionary" and "reactionary" are themselves, constantly, the object of politics. They are fought over repeatedly and their meanings really do change. For much of the twentieth century, "liberal" was a positive word in American politics. When supporters of the New Deal and its legacy managed to coopt that word, opponents who considered themselves "liberals" in an older sense like Herbert Hoover and Milton Friedman tried to hang on to the term, but failed. In the Sixties, as "conservative" was becoming a positive word, at least within the GOP, some politicians who we now think of as moderate or liberal Republicans, like Henry Cabot Lodge, tried to argue that they, and not their Goldwaterite opponents, were the real conservatives. And Paul Goodman, far from the GOP and in a much more contrarian vein, tried to claim the mantle of conservatism for himself...and even he had a point in doing so.

All politics may not, in fact, be local. But some politics really is. "Radical" meant something very different in, e.g., late 19th-century France than in the late 20th-century U.S. Which is not to say that these--and other--uses of the term are not linked by a common history. But that common history, like most histories, is complicated and sometimes contradictory. Political actors cannot, like Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking Glass, simply claim that a word means whatever they say it does. And political history is rife with actors who try, unsuccessfully, to label their views with one or another of these words. But the history of these terms--and the movements that they have described--is not the history of the coming-into-being of a series of transhistorical political principles. An adequate historical account of these political terms is unlikely to reveal them to have been entirely philosophically coherent. And if your history does make them out to be so, you're probably doing it wrong.

______________________________________

* Though I think Lilla is correct to see an apocalyptic streak on the contemporary U.S. right, the idea that apocalypticism is a new phenomenon in American politics seems very problematic to me.

Teach for America: The Hidden Curriculum of Liberal Do-Gooders

2011-12-23T05:47:00.004-06:00

Dear Readers: Since our posts have slowed down considerably with the holidays, I thought I would offer some reading content, which just so happens to double as shameless self-promotion. I give you my article, just published in the Winter 2012 edition of Jacobin Magazine:

Teach for America: The Hidden Curriculum of Liberal Do-Gooders

If you're into left-wing polemic, the entire issue is quite good, and plenty of it is available on-line gratis.

No Quarks for Us

2011-12-19T15:55:00.000-06:00

Stephen M. Walt has announced the three winners in the annual 3 Quarks Daily Politics and Social Science blogging prize. Unfortunately, USIH's entry among the finalists, Andrew's terrific post “When the Zulus Produce a Tolstoy We Will Read Him”: Charles Taylor and the Politics of Recognition was not among the winners. And a very impressive bunch of winners it is:

1. Top Quark, $1000: Kenan Malik, Rethinking the Idea of "Christian Europe"
2. Strange Quark, $300: David Graeber, On the Invention of Money
3. Charm Quark, $200: Corey Robin, Revolutionaries of the Right: The Deep Roots of Conservative Radicalism

Congratulations to Malik, Graeber, and Robin! And congratulations again to Andrew for making it into their company.

Results for Proposed Changes to S-USIH Constitution

2011-12-16T08:20:00.003-06:00

Thanks to those who voted. We needed to meet a threshold of 77 votes for a measure to pass. Voting closed on December 15 and the results of the voting are below. Five of the six proposals passed. They are now officially incorporated into the S-USIH constitution.

[Alteration to Article III, Section 3] Replace “Treasury” with “Treasurer. PASSES 81-0

[Addition to Article III, Section 3] Add to end of section: “The Treasurer shall also be responsible for ensuring that the Society is in compliance with all state and federal laws and policies relating to incorporation, taxation and other financial matters.” PASSES 80-1

[Addition to Article III, Section 4] Add to end of section: “The Secretary shall also be responsible for maintenance of the Society's web page.” PASSES 79-2

[Addition to Preamble: Founding Principles—“Inclusiveness”] “Encouraging the participation of anyone with an interest in the intellectual history of the United States, including professional historians and scholars who work in other fields andalso teachers, public historians, journalists, policy analysts, artists, and free-lance critics.” PASSES 78-3

[Addition: Proposed as Article II, Section III] “Members are presumed to be in good standing unless specifically determined to be otherwise as a result of behavior detrimental to the goals of the Society. Such determinations shall be made by the Secretary, subject to approval by a majority of the Executive Committee. The membership in the Society of a person determined not to be in good standing shall be revoked for a length of time to be determined by the Secretary, up to and including permanently, subject to approval by a majority of the Executive Committee. The dues paid for a membership that has been revoked may or may not be returned to the former member, at the discretion of the Secretary." REJECTED 68-13

[Addition to Article III, Section 2] All instances of the phrase “the approval of the Executive Committee” should be changed to “the approval of a majority of the Executive Committee.” PASSES 81-0

The War Prayer and the Other Ratio

2011-12-16T08:19:00.001-06:00

Mark Twain's "The War Prayer" has been deployed as a scathing indictment of the piety people seem to embrace in a time of war; in Twain's case during the Spanish-American War. This indictment asks what we pray for when a nation goes to war. The video clip above is a short film version of the prayer with Edward Hermann playing the "lunatic" messenger from God. Reportedly, Twain chose not to publish the piece during his lifetime out of trepidation expressed by friends, family, and his publisher.

Recently, Barack Obama announced the official end to America's war in Iraq. On December 14, this past Wednesday, he and his wife traveled to Fort Bragg to commend the soldiers and their families on a mission that was now complete. In a way, Obama acknowledged another "ratio" that has come to define our time. Rather than denounce the 1% that has fractured the economic future of the other 99%, Obama recognized the 1% that has unified the other 99% through their duty to the nation. Either way, the 99% is in the balance.

"You remind us we're one nation," President Obama declared to the assembled military personnel. In a speech marking the end of the American war in Iraq, the president paid tribute to those who served, especially those who gave their last full measure of devotion to a cause but, as Twain asked, to what?

That was the question that struck me as I read through Obama's speech. The collision between Obama's saccharine piety and Twain's cynicism is striking, it seems to me, not because it allows us to dismiss flag-waving for the troops, but because it reveals a turn toward the promise of martial sacrifice in yet another time when the nation is so evidently fractured by its own economics. In our age of destructive wealth, battles over economic justice, and debates over the state's obligation to the people, Americans have taken some refuge in the abstractions of war.

Obama gushed to the troops that they make American whole, "And that's why the United States military is the most respected institution in our land because you never forget that. You can't afford to forget it. If you forget it, somebody dies. If you forget it, a mission fails. So you don't forget it. You have each other's backs. That's why you, the 9/11 Generation, have earned your place in history.

You remind us we're one nation."

I hope that among the many duties that the troops must take up, one is not to make Americans into "one" nation. They might fight for the nation that exists as an abstraction, and in their weaker moments, Americans undoubtedly pine for that ideal, but Obama seemed to make a dangerous allusion to the idea that a lack of faith imperils the nation?

Obama went on: "Because of you, because you sacrificed so much for a people that you had never met, Iraqis have a chance to forge their own destiny.

That's part of what makes us special as Americans. Unlike the old empires, we don't make these sacrifices for territory or for resources. We do it because it's right.

There can be no fuller expression of America's support for self-determination than our leaving Iraq to its people. That says something about who we are."

So, who are we? After nine years of war in Iraq that took over 4500 American fatalities on the way to deposing Saddam Hussein and shattering that nation, what has the war made us?

We are, according to Obama, the people who allowed the Iraqis to "forge their own destiny," and we are the first empire in history to make war but decline to take its spoils in resources and territory. We are the first nation to fight wars for principles...

"Never forget," Obama concluded, "that you are part of an unbroken line of heroes spanning two centuries - from the colonists who overthrew an empire, to your grandparents and parents who faced down fascism and communism, to you - men and women who fought for the same principles in Fallujah and Kandahar and delivered justice to those who attacked us on 9/11."

What made these troops heroes? Was it the mission, their bravery in battle, or the nation that asked them to serve and sacrifice? And what might the obligation of the 99% be to this debate?

Christopher Hitchens: RIP (1949-2011)

2011-12-16T08:18:00.006-06:00

[Updated: 9:55 am]

I won't profess to being either a fan or knowledgeable of Christopher Hitchens's life and work. But I'm game to reflect here on both. What follows are a few reasonably trustworthy sources to start a conversation:

1. The NYT obituary.
2. Scott McLemee on Hitchens in a June 2010 piece at The National.
3. A collection of his recent essays at VF Daily.
4. Corey Robin's brief, not-so-flattering reflection on Hitchens's narcissism.

What are your thoughts? What's Hitchens's place--positive, negative, or otherwise---in the late twentieth-century U.S. intellectual landscape? I expect instant-historical perspective and analysis. :) - TL