To Understand and to Judge: Kloppenberg on Haskell

Posted on May 11, 2013 by L.D. Burnett

As I have noted earlier, it was my great delight this past March to attend a symposium at Rice University paying tribute to the career and legacy of Thomas L. Haskell. The speakers represented a gathering of truly extraordinary scholars, all united in expressing their admiration and gratitude for — and, more importantly, to — their colleague, mentor and friend.

For most of the speakers there, Haskell had served in all three roles at one time or another — sometimes, I gathered, serving in all three roles at once. This seemed to me to be the case especially for those speakers who had been Haskell’s fellow PhD students at Stanford. Rosalind Rosenberg of Barnard College, James Mohr of the University of Oregon, George Forgie of the University of Texas at Austin, Michael Johnson of Johns Hopkins University, and James Kloppenberg of Harvard University — these scholars were PhD students at Stanford from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s. Some of them preceded Haskell through the PhD program and some followed him. But all were there to thank him for how much they had learned from him beginning from their days in graduate school and continuing throughout their careers.

I am pleased to share with our readers some of the remarks that James Kloppenberg made in his talk, titled “History as Moral Inquiry.” These excerpts are not taken from a manuscript of his talk, because there wasn’t one — Kloppenberg spoke from notes sometimes, and sometimes simply by heart. He certainly spoke from the heart, as did his colleagues. And while they were speaking, for the whole conference, I was sitting in the back row, writing everything down as fast as I could. So before writing this post, I sent Prof. Kloppenberg my notes to make sure that I had heard him correctly. So, with his kind permission, below is a very condensed version of some of the main points Kloppenberg made in his tribute to Tom Haskell. Continue reading →

Perry Miller and the Puritans: An Introduction

Posted on May 8, 2013 by Rivka Maizlish

Perry Miller was a complicated person. He was a teacher, writer, reader, literary scholar, O.S.S. officer, world-traveler, messy-eater, social critic, academic, alcoholic, atheist, spiritualist, philosopher, and, of course, historian. Was he the Father of American Intellectual history? I suppose there are a number of mid-century historians who might deserve that title, if it’s a valuable title at all, which is questionable. Regardless, Miller’s thought, if taken seriously and explored in all its delightful complexity, still retains untapped potential to inspire new modes of inquiry and writing in U.S. Intellectual history. Here is a brief (re)introduction to Miller as most of us first encountered him: historian of New England Puritanism.
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Thinking about Feminist Political Thought and Historicizing Liberalism

Posted on April 24, 2013 by Rivka Maizlish

That the personal sphere of sexuality, of housework, of child care and family life is political because the underpinning of most feminist thought. We have strong and persistently challenged the long-standing underlying assumption of almost all political theories: that the sphere of family and personal life is so separate and distinct from the rest of social life that such theories can justifiably assume but ignore it.

Susan Moller Okin, Justice, Gender, and the Family,1987

In 1987, political theorist Susan Moller Okin, known for challenging giants of the Western philosophical tradition such as Aristotle and Rousseau for their unenlightened views on women, published a provocative book in which she argued that women in America have foolishly fought for equality in the public sphere– suffrage, equal pay, the Equal Rights Amendment– while keeping the private sphere– the home– free from public evaluations of justice. According to Okin, “’How political is the personal?’ and ‘In what ways is the personal political and the political personal?’ are important questions within the feminist argument.”¹ They are also important questions for the historian examining past claims about justice, gender, and the ideal society. Continue reading →

Let’s Debate: Is Garry Wills An Intellectual Historian?

Posted on April 17, 2013 by Tim Lacy

Garry Wills has been lurking in the back of my mind for about two weeks now. It started after reading a March 13 article in Prospect authored by Sam Tanenhaus. Titled “The American Mind,” it’s a biographical endeavor with a special eye towards Wills’ work on American political history. The latter angle is unsurprising given the direction of Tanenhaus’ own work over the past fifteen years.

Even before reading the Tanenhaus write up Garry Wills had been on my radar screen for quite some time. Wills has only been mentioned a few times here at the blog. But I discovered, early in my own research on the great books idea and Mortimer Adler, that Wills had reviewed, in 1970, what I believe to be a crucial work in the evolution of Adler’s politics. Of course Wills hated the book—but did so, of course, with panache.*

I don’t know Professor Wills personally, but we seem to share a number of significant historical interests and present-day traits. For starters, we’re both Catholic. We both abhor Church hypocrisy. We both have two degrees from Jesuit institutions. We both like the writings of Augustine of Hippo. We’ve both read at least one Adler book. We both live in the Chicago area. We both care a great deal about post-WWII American history. Neither of us like gun nuts. We’re both political converts—from conservatism to independent, left-of-center liberalism. We’re both concerned about anti-intellectualism and politics. Neither of us like Richard Nixon, and we both voted for Obama (though both of us have suffered some post-election disillusionment).

Of course we have our differences. Continue reading →

New Directions in the Study of the American Enlightenment

Posted on April 6, 2013 by Ben_Alpers

(Editor’s Note: This is the latest in Christopher Cameron’s series of Saturday guest posts. — Ben Alpers)

In their article recently published in the Journal of American History, Nathalie Caron and Naomi Wulf explore some of the historiographical trends in the scholarship on the American Enlightenment. Caron and Wulf, both of the University of Paris, begin by noting that few French scholars of early America study intellectual history, while few American intellectual historians study the Enlightenment. The reasons for this neglect are twofold, in their view. First, the adherence to Protestantism of most Americans has made it “inconvenient for scholars to examine the criticism of Christianity inherent in the epistemological project of the rationalist Enlightenment.”[1] While they do not mention it, this is seemingly true of early African American intellectual history as well, as most studies of black thought before the Civil War focus on some form of religious history. The second reason they give for the neglect of the American Enlightenment is that examining the European origins of the movement challenges ideas about American exceptionalism. Continue reading →

Carl Becker, ROOM 237, and the Work of Scholarship in the Age of Digital Reproduction

Posted on April 1, 2013 by Ben_Alpers

In 1931, Carl Becker delivered what remains the single most famous Presidential Address in the history of the American Historical Association. Entitled “Everyman His Own Historian,” Becker’s speech continued his by then decades-old assault on the “scientific school” of history, which believed that the historian’s task was simply to correctly assemble the facts of the past, which would, in turn, interpret themselves. In its place Becker proposed a vision of history that was both more relativistic and more populist. His address was greeted with a standing ovation and has been celebrated in the ensuing decades as both laying the foundations for, and anticipating, many of the changes in history writing that would take place over the course of the next several decades. But Becker himself expressed disappointment in his speech shortly after giving it. And, as historians have pointed out ever since, Becker’s bracing new vision of history was full of internal tensions and contradictions.[1]

Although the relativism of Becker’s understanding of the historical endeavor has been most discussed over the years, Becker’s populism—reflected in his title—is what I was reminded of when I watched the recently released documentary Room 237, which focuses on five rather obsessive readings of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, and read the controversies it has aroused among some film reviewers.[2] Continue reading →

Beliefs as Motivating Forces in (Writing) History

Posted on March 30, 2013 by L.D. Burnett

Recent conversations on this blog and elsewhere about the historical study of religion, the place of religion (or religiosity) in historical study, whether or in what ways scholarship written by “confessing historians” can be regarded as inescapably (or admirably) confessional, the place (or lack thereof) for confessing historians in the secular academy, what “secular” even means, the political and moral commitments that may (must?) be implicit in various epistemologies of historical inquiry — all these discussions have in one way or another bumped up against a set of (mostly unspoken) assumptions by which (or against which) professional historians construct our various explanatory schemes. And since these are the very assumptions from which we write about our assumptions, it is often difficult to trace their contours clearly. It’s hard to get a bird’s-eye view of the ground upon which you stand.

So I thought it might be useful to share with our readers a dialogue that proved particularly helpful for me in beginning to make sense of what, when I first encountered it as a grad student, made no sense at all: the seeming reticence of (some) professional historians to take religious motivations seriously as “causal forces” in history.

In the fall of 2010, my first semester in the PhD program, I took Dan Wickberg’s seminar on “Slavery and Freedom in Modern Thought.” In the first four weeks of class, we read David Brion Davis’s Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, Seymour Drescher’s Abolition, Lynn Hunt’s Inventing Human Rights, and Christopher Leslie Brown’s Moral Capital. Reading these texts and discussing them in seminar was both illuminating and frustrating for me, and I couldn’t quite figure out why. So I did what I always do when I don’t know what to think: I wrote my way towards my problem. I am grateful to Dan Wickberg for answering my questions then, and for kindly granting me permission to publish his answer now. The email exchange is printed below. Continue reading →

History and Theory Today

Posted on March 28, 2013 by L.D. Burnett

History and Theory Today

by Kerwin Lee Klein

[Editor's note: this is the fourth and final essay in a series of roundtable essays on Kerwin Lee Klein's From History to Theory (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2011). -- LDB]

One of the cheeriest things about our current academy, is the way that younger scholars have built institutions like this one. I am struck by the care my readers have devoted to the text. Gregory Jones-Katz’s elegant synopsis of Chapter Three; Daniel Wickberg’s canny observation that Chapter Four is also a reflective critique of the book; and Ben Alpers remarking the ways that I evade some of the contested ground on the frontiers of secularism and religion. These readings were really helpful for me, because when I return to my older work all I can see is duct tape, bondo and primer. The responses raise too many questions and issues for me to engage serially, so I will briefly situate the book in ways that I hope will address most of them, and then close with a few comments on our current moment. Continue reading →

Reflections on the Edges of Historical Thinking

Posted on March 26, 2013 by L.D. Burnett

Reflections on the Edges of Historical Thinking

by Daniel Wickberg

[Editor's note: this is the second in a series of roundtable essays on Kerwin Lee Klein's From History to Theory (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2011). -- LDB]

Kerwin Lee Klein’s From History to Theory is an unusual book. Neither a traditional monograph, nor a theoretical treatise, nor really a traditional essay collection, it is in many ways sui generis. It’s hard to think of a book quite like it, mostly because its angle of analysis is so unlike the common coin of historical writing. Klein’s book is a collection of essays, each a kind of historical-ethnographic portrait of a major term/idea/intellectual orientation within the recent intellectual history of a decidedly minority discourse. The ideas are central to the intellectual history of our own time, but the discourses in which they are examined are marginal to the central disciplinary orientation of the field of history itself. That is, when mainstream historians discuss their discipline, they do so in terms that might be regarded as much more “nuts and bolts” than those theoretical, philosophical, and conceptual ones considered by Klein here. The objects of Klein’s analysis are the discourses of those self-reflective historiographers, philosophically-oriented intellectual historians, and erstwhile “philosophers of history” that exist within and without history departments, but at their periphery. The effect is of an historical account of keywords, a la Raymond Williams, in recent cultural history, told from and through the margins. And yet, because his approach is not a narrow disciplinary intellectual history but an examination of cultural discourse, this small band of marginal historians, in Klein’s work, becomes a window onto some of the most profound cultural and intellectual transformations of the past half century.

Klein’s book lies somewhere in the liminal land between intellectual history, philosophy, and anthropology; since this is both the point of view of the text and its subject matter, the work reads like an ethnography of contemporary thought, written from the point of view of a participant observer who is also an historian. In other words, the intellectual historian in this text is a “marginal man,” observing and reflecting on the intellectual history of his own discipline, and on the history of thinking philosophically and theoretically about intellectual history. He is both inside and outside, using the very perspectives and conceptual schemes he is analyzing to understand and make sense of their history. Unlike any other contemporary work I can think of, there is a persistent collapse of the distance between object and subject, so the book’s arguments are illustrations of the very intellectual changes it documents and analyzes; the dialectic logic of identification and estrangement makes for what is both a model of an original way of writing history, and a self-reflective analysis of the conditions of its own possibility. If Hayden White’s Metahistory challenged historians to see their own narrative strategies of representation as prior to empirical content, Klein goes one step further, both backward and forward; instead of asking us to reflect theoretically on history, he is in effect reflecting on the historicity of the idea of a theoretically informed history. This is, in his words, “a history of history’s edges,” (p. 169) itself written from the edge of history.

If all this sounds like a headache in the making, an abstruse, theoretically dense text that seeks to “out meta” the “meta” of post-linguistic turn theory, I have good news. Klein writes with a genial clarity that represents the best of the “plain speech” craft tradition in historical writing. His distinctions are sharp and clear, his analysis delivered with a careful, almost Lovejovian, command, his points articulated in a reasoned and compelling voice. His prose is occasionally chatty, always expressive, witty and unpretentious. This is a highly sophisticated critical and historical analysis that doesn’t need to signify its erudition with jargon, unnecessary abstraction, neologisms, and throw-away references to the obscure texts of the academic inside dopester. There will undoubtedly be references that are unknown to the neophyte, and the text is by no means a light read, but its entire thrust is to explicate and make clear a set of historical relationships between ideas, rather than to impress its audience with its own learning.

Continue reading →

A Home-Grown Crisis of Secularism

Posted on March 25, 2013 by L.D. Burnett

A Home-Grown Crisis of Secularism

by Ben Alpers

[Editor's note: this is the first in a series of roundtable essays on Kerwin Lee Klein's From History to Theory (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2011). -- LDB]

Kerwin Klein’s From History to Theory is a brilliant, idiosyncratic, and argumentative book. Klein spends a good deal of time in his introduction explaining to his reader what he is — and isn’t — up to. Too long, perhaps. It’s in the nature of projects like this that the real proof of the pudding is in the eating. In his most succinct introductory description, Klein writes that his book is “a series of interwoven accounts of particular episodes in modern philosophy of history, mostly in the United States and largely concerned with academic rather than popular discourse” (p. 5). He adds that his concern is more with words than with institutions or individuals. Such a description, while accurate, doesn’t actually tell us much about what follows. I mention all of this as a kind of apology of my own. Just as the only way to really get what Klein is up to in From History to Theory is to read it, the only way I feel I can do it justice is to begin by describing it, chapter by chapter.

The book opens with a fascinating essay on the idea of historiography and its evolving place in the professional study of history. This is followed by a rich chapter on the brief flourishing of the idea of the philosophy of history in the U.S. during the middle decades of the twentieth-century and the founding of the journal History and Theory in 1960, at the moment when the philosophy of history was beginning to run aground. Klein’s focus here—largely mid-twentieth-century analytic philosophy and theory before “French theory”— very nicely sets up the third chapter, which concerns the linguistic turn…or really linguistic turns. Klein notes that, prior to the linguistic turn taken by the new cultural history in the 1980s, the term was in vogue to describe logical positivism in the 1950s. In this and the following chapter, Klein does a terrific job of showing some important American roots for ideas commonly associated with the flood of French thought after 1968. In chapter three, Klein notes the importance of mid-20^th-century Anglo-American philosophy to Clifford Geertz, who took the phrase “thick description” from Gilbert Ryle and approvingly cited Susanne Langer. In chapter four, Klein traces the evolving meanings of metanarrative in the works of both French and American thinkers, who sought to locate essential differences between Western and non-Western discourses, and concludes with a strongly argued objection to this project: “The search for eternal principles separating the discursive modes of the West and the rest has reproduced the sort of metaphysics that so many of us wish to escape . . . We would be better off recognizing that narrative mastery comes not from ‘meta’ form but from social situation” (p. 110).

Continue reading →

Category Archives: historiography