Kollin Fields on Daniel Wickberg’s *Thinking the Modern: A History of American Thought, 1860-2000*

Carl Becker told his fellow historians in 1931 that we are not dissimilar from “bards and story-tellers and minstrels, of soothsayers and priests, to whom in successive ages has been entrusted the keeping of the useful myths.”^[1] Historians do indeed tell stories, and as Becker reminded his audience, whether story or myth, narratives often prevail until they require revision. This is a fitting way to approach Daniel Wickberg’s recent survey of American thought, Thinking the Modern (2024), as Wickberg identifies, unpacks, and traces the contours of ideas in America since 1860. The ideas themselves tell a story—species adapt or die, truth is what happens to an idea, or that truth is simply the convention of language, for instance—but Wickberg tells a story about those stories. His narrative is one of epistemic instability, theological uncertainty, and the creation and contest of culture, among others. At its core the book is a story of the unmooring of fixity and foundation: how did Americans think and live in a modernist framework—or “sensibility,” to use Wickberg’s heuristic—when basic assumptions about truth and reality were destabilized?

Methodologically, Thinking the Modern is ambitious, attempting to locate and synthesize the key ideas, texts, and occasional sites of popular culture that gave life to American history between 1860-2000. As the author discusses in the Preface, historians have been wary of such synthetic attempts in the last half-century for understandable reasons: perhaps such a survey threatens to become a gloss, “suspect[ed] as a form of reductionism”; or its practitioners are unsure of what or whom to include; and there is also the possibility that in attempting to say everything, we say nothing— our generalizations risk “concealing a contradiction or complexity that demands further analysis” (ix). And yet as the book implies, and something to which many a historian would agree, it is often these zoomed-out stories that contain the most compelling narratives of how the continuity and conflict of the past shape the present. In his words, the author “seeks to balance these two orientations” of intellectual history: the discrete and localized contexts of ideas and their purveyors, on the one hand, but within a long-range approach that reveals how the specific became generic (8). Wickberg suggests that the latter approach—returning in some ways to the methodology of the earlier History of Ideas field—has returned in recent years, reminding “historians that ideas do not appear merely as expressions of local contexts, but have long-range persistence—people are not free to think in wholly new ways, since they operate in the discursive and intellectual environment of inherited ideas” (8).

The book is divided into three parts, covering ideas and arguments about those ideas from 1860-1919, 1920-1962, and 1963-2000. Wickberg styles his work as an overview of its key figures and ideas, guarding against zooming in too far lest the narrative lose focus. But in an era of increasing academic specialization, there is more than enough meat on the bones for academics, students, and a lay audience to consider within its 300 pages. We might first consider what “modern” and “modernism” are. The author presents various helpful iterations and definitions of the concept, and perhaps the most concise arrives in his introduction where Wickberg writes that “irony, contradiction, and unintended consequences are both the form and substance of modern thought.” Beginning especially with Charles Darwin’s publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859, the Atlantic world—and in this case specifically America—broke from the past in many ways. But it was not only in the field of biology, of course. Darwinian evolutionary theory, though not completely in and of itself, destabilized ontological and epistemological notions of fixity and order. Breaking from the received wisdom of Victorian thought and culture, modernist sensibilities pervaded everything from science and theology to politics, aesthetics, and language. “Modernity has meant,” among others, “both new kinds of freedom and new determinisms . . . secularism and renovated faith . . . progress and tradition,” Wickberg writes (10). Considering the last quarter of the twentieth century in Part III, these ironies, contradictions, and unintended consequences were perhaps most obvious in the “Culture Wars.” And as he notes, the idea of the Culture Wars themselves have a history in the first half of the twentieth century, suggesting the staying power of modernist modes of thinking, despite our occasional historical amnesia.

Readers will note how frequently Wickberg deploys the term “sensibility.” The modernist sensibility, as I understand the author, is not so much a particular conclusion as it is a way of seeing the world. It is not an ideology but rather a discrete lens. Thinking the Modern references: a Darwinian sensibility, a Pragmatist sensibility, a Progressive sensibility, the sensibilities of the New Liberals, a Social Constructionist sensibility, and a radical feminist sensibility, among others. He even concludes with the “tragic sensibility” of dialectical thinkers from the period who “affirmed the contradictory nature of modernity…” (280). Allegiance to one sensibility did not mean common cause with another; in fact it often meant the opposite. But this is what the author means about modernism being ironic and at times contradictory: the modernist sensibility tree from which these sensibility branches grew encouraged its adherents to question and search in new ways, and in doing so often led to unexpected and at times uneasy outcomes and alliances. Darwin’s theory of natural selection, for example, could be used in service of Thomas Huxley’s agnosticism, or Asa Gray’s theistic defense of design; or the detachment of gender from sex during Second Wave Feminism could support overt female sexuality as “sex positive,” but also lead liberal feminists to ironically find common cause with conservative evangelicals against public displays of hypersexuality. Thus the modernist sensibility often erased fixity while implicitly or explicitly establishing new borders, boundaries, and categories. For those Americans operating within modernist ideas, the ironic result was an attempted ordering of a seemingly orderless world. In defining what exactly a sensibility is within Wickberg’s analysis, we might defer to his previous work—“What is the History of Sensibilities?”—where he writes that “the history of sensibilities focuses on the primacy of the various modes of perception and feeling, the terms and forms in which objects were conceived, experienced, and represented in the past.”^[2] Modernist sensibilities, then, might be taken to mean the shared perceptions and feelings surrounding a particular idea, and the way wider intellectual and popular culture engaged those ideas since 1860. Not quite the catch-all “mind” of, for instance, Perry Miller’s New England Mind or Henry Steele Commager’s American Mind, the modernist sensibility seeks to explain the ways Americans dealt with intellectual and cultural instability in a pluralistic age.

Chronologically, Thinking the Modern explores ideas of: Darwinian evolution and social Darwinism, Pragmatism, the research university and developing social sciences, Progressivism, femininity and masculinity, cultural relativism, science and culture, religious pluralism, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, political identity and ideas of self in the Cold War, and the various scientific and cultural conflicts in the last half of the twentieth century such as post-modernism and post-structuralism, as well as the pitched battles between progressives and the Christian right. This brief gloss on the contents of the book do not, of course, do it justice, as each chapter contains within it a score of thinkers, texts, and cultural references readers will find themselves jotting down for later use. As Wickberg demonstrates, these ideas were often of immeasurable significance not only for so-called intellectuals, but for the general public. Americans’ very identity and way of understanding the world were often at stake: Does God exist, or are we the result of random adaptation? Does language mirror reality or simply create social constructions of our choosing? Or even more relevant for our purposes in the academy, should American history reinforce national greatness and exceptionalism, or catalog a history of oppression and violence? Of course, Wickberg is not weighing in to offer answers, but simply gaining a deeper understanding of the sensibilities that motivated these discourses reveals to us the modernist framework we continue to inhabit. As he states, “We think in terms of modernity ourselves. We can’t help but see the ideas of modern thinkers through the lenses, categories, and sensibilities that have given us—or that we have taken from them” (ix).

Beyond the historical breadth of the book, readers will be especially interested in the Introduction which contains an answer to the question, “What is Intellectual History?” Wickberg’s analysis of what exactly it is we do as professionals is a useful reminder to us as practitioners—as well as opening further conversation about the field—but it is also helpful to students pursuing intellectual history, as well as the general reader who is interested in historical methods. The bibliographic essay at the end of the book is also an excellent resource for those of us in the field, as well as graduate students pursuing comprehensive exams. Thinking the Modern would be ideal for undergraduate and graduate courses in American intellectual history—perhaps paired with the second volume of Hollinger and Capper’s primary source reader, The American Intellectual Tradition—but could also be of use in the second half of the American History survey. As a resource for historians in the field, they might consider it alongside other fairly recent texts such as The Worlds of American Intellectual History, American Labyrinth, and The Ideas that Made America.^[3] The book is a significant contribution to the field, and we might hope that he or someone else extends a similarly wide treatment to American thought in the centuries preceding 1860.

^[1] Carl Becker, “Everyman His Own Historian,” AHA Presidential Address (1931), American Historical Association, https://www.historians.org/presidential-address/carl-l-becker/.

^[2] Daniel Wickberg, “What Is the History of Sensibilities? On Cultural Histories, Old and New,” The American Historical Review 112:3 (Jun., 2007), 662.

^[3] David A. Hollinger and Charles Capper, The American Intellectual Tradition, Vol. II: 1865 to the Present, 6th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); James T. Kloppenberg, et al., eds., The Worlds of American Intellectual History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016); Raymond Haberski Jr., and Andrew Hartman, eds., American Labyrinth: Intellectual History for Complicated Times (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018); Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, The Ideas that Made America: A Brief History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019).