First, I’m sure I speak for all our bloggers, readers, and members in wishing safety and relief to everyone in the Carolinas and greater Appalachia who is dealing with this natural disaster. The flooding and the damage from this slow-rolling storm are heart-wrenching to see, and we hope everybody can get through this together. I saw on Twitter that the University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill? all campuses?) is using its facilities to shelter refugees from the coastal area. There is a long road of recovery ahead, and we wish everybody the very best.
Next, a shoutout to Andy Seal for his yeoman’s work at the blog this week in posting and commenting, including running this fantastic guest post by Joshua Lynn. That was an outstanding essay and it offered a great, concise overview of the historiography of American conservatism(s). I am putting together a roundtable for Dr. Lynn’s forthcoming book, so if anyone is interested in participating in that, ping me here in the comments or via email: [email protected]
In the meantime, we have a roundtable in the works for Lillian Barger’s new book, running in late October or early November.
Next week I will resume my desultory series on the Stanford reading list for “Western Culture” – after a year or so (a year and a half? I can’t remember), I have made it as far as Machiavelli. So I’ll read The Prince again, and J.G.A. Pocock’s Machiavellian Moment for the first time. (Don’t judge; you haven’t read everything either.)
As you may have noticed, I am writing about Christopher Lasch now, but I am almost finished with that section of this section of this book. Next up: Peyton Place. Why? Well, why not?
This book is a bear of a problem. Bless his heart, my editor at UNC Press took time out from his hurricane prep to talk to me about the manuscript on Monday. I felt like a heel and a loser for not delivering a manuscript by the date stipulated in the original contract, but he assured me that “this happens, it’s normal, don’t worry, just let me know when you think you can get it in and we’ll work from there.” So after getting nothing done for God knows how long (well, nothing except find a new job, drive across the country to bring my niece to live with us, set up a second household, marry off my kid, etc, etc, etc), and missing that first deadline, I feel strangely liberated to write now.
Can’t explain it, but I’ll roll with it.
I got today’s work on this chapter done early – a good 500 or so words before the sun was up. Then I did a little home beautification project and extended the back patio at my apartment. Not joking. I went to Wal-Mart and got 24 1’x1’ pavers and six bags of river rocks – quantities I had decided on just by eyeballing the projected extension area.
Damn if I didn’t figure it just right. Carried all six bags of river rocks and every last one of those pavers from the parking lot through the apartment to the back door, poured myself a La Croix, and put my slap-dash patio together. Now the part of my back yard that never, ever sees any sun due to the orientation of the building will no longer be an unsightly display of bare dirt and leggy strands of stray Bermuda grass, and the soil will stay put when it rains. I am pleased.
Hope your weekend is as restful or as productive as you need it to be. Thanks for reading. Sorry this post isn’t all that, but last week’s piece kind of took it out of me. That and carrying 408 pounds of concrete and 240 pounds of river rocks and then putting that all where I wanted it to go.
Time for a nap. Hope the Republic is still standing when I wake up.
These days, one never knows.
6 Thoughts on this Post
S-USIH Comment Policy
We ask that those who participate in the discussions generated in the Comments section do so with the same decorum as they would in any other academic setting or context. Since the USIH bloggers write under our real names, we would prefer that our commenters also identify themselves by their real name. As our primary goal is to stimulate and engage in fruitful and productive discussion, ad hominem attacks (personal or professional), unnecessary insults, and/or mean-spiritedness have no place in the USIH Blog’s Comments section. Therefore, we reserve the right to remove any comments that contain any of the above and/or are not intended to further the discussion of the topic of the post. We welcome suggestions for corrections to any of our posts. As the official blog of the Society of US Intellectual History, we hope to foster a diverse community of scholars and readers who engage with one another in discussions of US intellectual history, broadly understood.
Hmm. For now, never mind The Prince. I’d rather write about The Machiavellian Moment. Will count on those of you who are familiar with the text to contribute in the comments!
Single most important work of scholarship for me, until I read Barbarism and Religion. Heh heh.
I’ve tried to write about Pocock as a political thinker, especially about early modern empire as a framework of continuing relevance for thinking about modern politics, but I have never been able to make it coherent except to people who were just being nice, or land the essay anywhere. You will probably do better! Anyway, Pocock is absolutely worth reading and thinking about today, maybe more so than ever. His essays in the Discovery of Islands volume are really, really interesting. I would recommend those to anybody. They are in a sense primary sources for me in thinking about the intellectual history of imperial versus postcolonial histories of the Pacific, and the relationship between history and anthropology, etc. He’s also relevant to the recent discussion of conservatism. He fits very unevenly in blends of Tory skepticism of capitalist modernity that isn’t just reactionary, its as much Keynes meets Tolkien as it is Burke and Gibbon, but also very much in conversation with Arendt and the wider republican critique of liberalism.
The crucial thing for me that I take from his writing is historiography as a form of political thought, and so politics as collective work on narratives. I’ll be wrestling with that idea for the rest of my life.
All the best to people in the Carolinas, especially people in Wilmington.
Matt, if you’d like to take another crack at writing on Pocock and Machiavellian Moment, we’d be glad to run the essay here.
Agreed on the historiography — the linkage between the emergence of modern historical thinking and the emergence of modern conceptions of republican government is such a delight to me as a reader. Funny that you mention Tolkein — between JGAP quoting C.S. Lewis from the get-go and some of his asides, I have pictured him as a jovial high-church Anglican in his own practice but with a somewhat latitudinarian stance towards those whose views differ. (Not claiming any correlation with his actual life experience — this is just the image his authorial voice evokes. A real pleasure to read.)
As far as ecclesiology goes, though, my biggest takeaway from this book is how effortlessly Pocock bridges the (phenomenal) gap between “religious” thought and “secular” thought. He bridges the gap by demonstrating that there isn’t one, I suppose, the saeculum itself being a Christian explanatory scheme. In any case, his approach is not only pertinent for the era he discusses; it’s pertinent for any era. But few historians offer both an “internalist” and an “externalist” intellectual history of the interrelationship between ideas debated within religious communities and ideas debated outside those communities, ether sequentially or concurrently. This is another feature that makes the book such a delight to read.
In any case, if you — or any other reader — would like to contribute a guest post on Pocock, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with me at the email address above. This is my first pass through a very rich text, and I’d rather our readers have the opportunity to hear as well from people who know it better than I do. (But, as I think I made clear at my own blog, I’m not exactly chopped liver either.)
No doubt, that was a great post. Thanks for mentioning it. I’m sending it to my diss advisor right now to shame him for all the times he told me I had slipped into what we came to call neo-Pocockian prose (no, it was not as good the original).
Anglican to the corps, absolutely. I think it might be my own upbringing in a deeply Anglophilic and liberal Episcopalian family (as in choral evensong is who you are, C.S. Lewis is a saint, these are your people kind of stuff) that makes the prose and part of the argument appealing. I think your point about the history of theology and his erudition in it is right on, too. Under appreciated, and too often, especially in early American studies, religious history is reduced to cultural history and the weight of the theological traditions in play get short shrift as a result (if people want to follow Pocock in this adventure, Volumes III and V of his Barbarism and Religion reflect directly on religious thought and politics over the long term).
I would love to try and get some thoughts down about this, and will be in touch, thanks, and would love to read some further discussion about it.
I have put Barbarism and Religion on my wantlist. I think I’ll need to sock away a few paychecks before I can snag all six volumes, but that’s my hope. The first volume, I notice, came out seven years after Prof. Pocock became an emeritus professor. This is the kind of scholarly achievement that may be all but impossible, from a purely practical standpoint, for almost all academics. Not that I begrudge Prof. Pocock the time or the resources to produce six volumes on the Enlightenments. I am grateful that somebody somewhere has both the resources and the rich understanding to do such work — not to mention the good health and sound mind and long rich life. But I do wish, and I am sure he would wish, that “whosoever will” might have the resources and the time to do such deep and enduring work. I am amazed at what some of my colleagues do while teaching a 4/4 load without sabbaticals. I keep kicking myself for not already having my book out — but I have been teaching a 4/4 or a 5/5 since I finished my dissertation, and I have good friends who pay their bills by teaching more sections than that every semester. And they are writing all the while — as I am, though more slowly than I’d like. This has been a good week at the keyboard, now that I’ve gotten accustomed to my new institution and the new responsibilities of my job. I hope, after years of “becoming,” I can settle in for a long, steady stint of “being” and “doing.” For me, that means teaching and writing, writing and teaching, valuing neither over the other but relishing both.
So far, so good.
Amen