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This post is a part of our Critical Connections series highlighting new or forthcoming works of historical scholarship that connect to current conversations and issues of widespread concern within American thought and culture. You can read all the posts in the series by clicking on this tag/label: Critical Connections.
There are innumerable distinct insights in Holly Case’s The Age of Questions (Princeton, 2018) which are worth exploration on this blog, and perhaps I will round back some time and pick up a few of them. But for today, I want to focus on just one.
First, though, a few words about the book as a whole. The subtitle gives some sense of the enormous scope and the light touch Case gives to what she terms “the extremely long nineteenth century (1770-1970)” (xiv). The Age of Questions, Or, A First Attempt at an Aggregate History of the Eastern, Social, Woman, American, Jewish, Polish, Bullion, Tuberculosis, and Many Other Questions over the Nineteenth Century, and Beyond is the title in full, and “aggregate” is an apt modifier for the book: although Case touches on all of these subtopics, the book is not organized in some mechanical fashion as a sequence of separate “questions” and their histories. Instead, what Case does in this book is to search for the formal, political, and rhetorical commonalities among these many different discourses, moving rapidly from one to another and backward and forward in time. It is a work that will prove both stimulating and essential to anyone who works on the nineteenth intellectual century, especially as more and more of us think beyond strict national boundaries in our research and writing.
What I wanted to draw out today, though, is less period-specific but rather a persistent part of intellectual history and a perennial part of intellectual historiography. Relatively late in the book, Case notes that one of the many commonalities among the questions was a certainty that ideas were both the vehicles for the desires or agendas of individuals and also agents in their own right. This dialectical belief was expressed in many ways, but one formulation was the term (found most famously in Marx and Engels) “ruling ideas.” Here is a characteristically fleet and brilliant paragraph from Case describing both the intellectual pedigree of this term and its meaning:
The notion of a “ruling idea” is likely descended from an array of sources: the “genuis saeculi” (spirit of the century) that became the “Zeitgeist” (spirit of the times) with Herder in the 1760s, which Goethe then satirized in his Faust (1808) as none other than the “rulers’ own spirit.” This notion of the rulers’ spirit was reversed in Hegel’s Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1821), when he wrote of the “Weltgeist” (world spirit): “states, nations, and individuals . . . are forever the unconscious tools and organs of the world spirit at work within them.” One was either being ruled by or being ruled through the spirit of the time, according to several discussions of the “social question” (Case 200).
The dialectical nature of “ruling ideas” does not stop at this point, though. It is not merely that ideas are both an expression of the will of rulers and also an autonomous force guiding the very development of those rulers’ thoughts and beliefs; the second turn of the screw lies in the way that they never quite express the reality of the age. Or, to put it somewhat differently: the ruling ideas of the age never quite fail to overshoot the mores of the day—they always express an ideal that is marginally higher than the actual behavior of the average person. Or, as Case interprets the ideas of Marx and Engels themselves:
In 1845 and 1846, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote The German Ideology, in which they put forward the notion that every age had its own “ruling ideas” (herrschende Gedanken), which were the ideas of the ruling classes. These could then be separated (“abstracted”) from the ruling individuals and relations of the time such that “one could, for example, say, that during the time of aristocratic rule, the notions of honor, loyalty, et cetera, reign, while under bourgeois rule the notions of freedom, equality, et cetera, reign.” But there was a problem, Marx and Engels noted: that “although every shopkeeper can tell the difference between what someone says they are and what they really are, our historiography has not yet come to this trivial realization. It takes every epoch for its word, what it says about itself and imagines of itself” (Case 200-201).
Marx and Engels, in other words, diagnosed a fundamental problem for intellectual historians: how to assess what is, on the one hand, a “ruling idea” in the sense that it actually described a common sense pervading and binding together people living at the same time, and, on the other hand, a “ruling idea” in the sense that it expressed a persistent desire for a moral code that extended just beyond the realm of the “thinkable” and the actual. Because intellectual historians focus so resolutely on the kinds of evidence they do, they are most at risk of confusing these two kinds of “ruling ideas.”
And, to take it one step further, it is not just that the “ruling ideas” of a society change as history moves forward; intellectual historians, looking back, also revise and rename the very phenomenon of “ruling ideas,” adopting new titles for the phenomenon: paradigms, climates of opinion, épistémès, etc. We (intellectual historians) sometimes mistake these changes in name as a kind of breakthrough in analytic sophistication. In reality, aren’t we—rather like the subjects of Case’s book—continually attacking the same question?
That, I think, is an especially nice insight to draw out, but I want to add one further and closely related issue that Case does not take up in the book. Case doesn’t say it in so many words, but she treats the “Age of Questions” as a historically unique intellectual formation. While she acknowledges that it had predecessors (in the scholastic and catechetical questions of previous centuries), the age seems to hang somewhat suspended in time.
But especially if we think of “questions” as themselves “ruling ideas,” or to be more precise, if we think of the question-form as a ruling idea, then it becomes clear that in fact there have been many parallel forms which broadly structure intellectual discourse at a given time. One form that springs to mind is what Mark Greif described as “crisis thinking” in his Age of the Crisis of Man, a work that in many ways resembles Case’s Age of Questions. I wrote about Greif’s book here about two and a half years ago, and I think about frequently still. (I’m sure that Case’s book will have a like effect.)
Both Greif and Case are most interested in how intellectuals adopt a particular mode of intervention in public discourse and how they use that mode not so much to introduce novel lines of inquiry as to proffer original solutions or exhortations for further action. Both Case and Greif wrestle with a nagging sense of the pretextual: many of their subjects seem to be using the terms of the dominant discourse in basically opportunistic or even (occasionally) facetious ways. The “social question” and the “crisis of man” may, perhaps, have been merely two different names for a single impulse: the intellectual’s desire to say Something Important.
That is a bit cynical, but it seems to me that we could extend this sequence one step further. If there is a form today that resembles Case’s “question” or Greif’s “crisis,” it is the suffix “-ization,” as in globalization or financialization. We no longer formulate the problems of the present as “the global question” or the “financial question” (though obviously there was a financial crisis). Instead, we speak in terms of engulfing, often tautological processes: globalization is the world becoming more global (an atrocious tautology); financialization is the economy becoming more dominated by the financial sector.
Process and tautology: could these be said to be the ruling ideas of the present? An instance occurs that, given the context of what I have just said may seem to be (intended to be) pejorative, but in reality I mean for it only to be diagnostic.
I am thinking of the title of Michelle Obama’s massively bestselling memoir Becoming. Michelle Obama could have titled her memoir just about anything and it would have become a bestseller, but the title itself announces the dominance of process as a way of thinking about a life at this historical conjuncture and tautology as the appropriate way of summing it up. Becoming—a Nietzschean werde der, der du bist for the neoliberal era?
Ben Rhodes—a former deputy national security advisor for Barack Obama—similarly titled his memoir of his years in the administration The World As It is, a possible allusion not to Nietzsche but to (the similarly slippery) V. S. Naipaul. Another tautology, although not a process.
It is just a hypothesis at any rate: the present as an age not of questions or crises but of process and tautology. But the endurance of these ruling ideas, expressing themselves through a prevalent form of intellectual intervention—that, it seems to me, is a worthwhile quarry for intellectual historians.
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Andy – Thanks for these thoughts on a book that’s sure to get a lot of attention.
The distinction between the descriptive and normative aspects of ideas is familiar enough, though I’d rather think of uses or functions rather than “kinds.” If they emerge out of messy particulars of fact and experience, as they summarize and generalize, and get elaborated into orders of abstract symbolization; they can thereby take on an inspirational, urgent character. Isn’t this basically what Becker called their “magic?” Doesn’t the very act of using the abstract language of ideology or political theory to describe a political order just entail difference that lend themselves to criticism and aspiration? Predictive and normative overshooting, you might say.
I still like Kenneth Burke’s formulation:
the nature of language is such that it could not possibly be confined to strictly literal, univocal usage. If words did not admit of loose application, you couldn’t apply the same terms to a variety of objects, processes, circumstances. For in its details, every situation is unique” …. A Culture’s symbolically conceived “world,” or “universe of discourse,” is thus built figuratively of terms originally grounded in reference to the nonsymbolic realm of motion. Otherwise put: the realm of what is usually called “ideas” is constructed of symbolic material usually called sensory “images.” [“Non-Symbolic Motion/Symbolic Action,” 813, 815]
To use his terms, there’s a sort of duplication in stretching the literal/physical into the metaphorical, which at the same time generates differences and momentous dualities… including Burke’s own!
I wonder whether the thought that our age is one of “process and tautology” is an afterthought to your earlier remarks on Jonathan Levy: We’ve escaped the reification of concepts by thinking of capital as a process, and widespread, dominant capitalization as, well, capitalism. Among other things, questions about sequence and causation can then be debated.
There might be something suggestive about our age as one of “turns” – affective, cognitive, linguistic, liturgical, narrative, etc: I’ve counted about 40. Turns in the process of becoming. There’s a nice discussion in Judith Surkis, “When Was the Linguistic Turn? A Genealogy,” in the AHR, June 2012, Forum on “Historiographic ‘Turns.’”
Bill,
Thanks for this–I always appreciate more Kenneth Burke!
I think the connection you make back to (my reading of) the Jonathan Levy article is completely apt, although it hadn’t occurred to me! But yes, it must have been on my mind as I thought about how we might update Case’s book to the present. Perhaps there is a way that we could link the 19th century “questions” to the particular mode of production in which they took root…
And I’m glad you mentioned the Surkis article. I read it just a few weeks ago and was planning on using it in the Levy post. But I found it less helpful, somehow, than I had hoped–it was less clarifying regarding what was at stake in the linguistic turn and who was advocating it than it might have been, I thought.
Thanks Andy. This is a great post, and now I have yet another book to put on my list to read. There’s a lot here, so let me just throw a couple of ideas out there. First, It’s unclear to me that anybody in the last 30 to 40 years actually thinks there are “ruling ideas” in contemporary culture in both the senses you describe–as authority and as aspiration. That is, the plurality of recent discourse (since the 1960s, call it “postmodern” if you like), seems unwilling to imagine master tropes except to dismantle them, is suspicious of the claims of any idea or system of ideas, denies the premise of cultural holism that would seem to be necessary to believe in “ruling ideas.” Every claim seems likely to be met with an opposing claim, or is an instance of people talking past one another. To read Marx claiming that the ruling ideas of any era are the ideas of the ruling class seems almost quaint. It’s not like there isn’t constant critique of ideologies, but that critique itself almost seems like a sign that nobody really believes any idea or ideas sits on the throne, commanding allegiance. Today, instead of an age of questions, we have an age of interrogations, perhaps? But perhaps I’ve missed the idea here or am thinking in a different cultural register than you.
Second, on process and tautology: I guess I’m not quite seeing what is recent about the focus on process, and particularly why Michelle Obama’s biography might represent a departure from some very long-standing (since early 19th-century Romanticism) conceptions of selfhood and history. The elevation of “becoming” over the essentialist and static “being,” from German idealism through pragmatism and existentialism seems an extension or reiteration of 19th century ideas, rather than a rejection of them. In fact, more recent thinking about rupture and discontinuity (everything from Foucault and Kuhn to the celebration of “creative destruction” as the lifeblood of capitalism) would seem to deny the premise of continuity that the vision of process as “becoming” suggests. I get why you would suggest that ideas such as “globalization” are tautological, but outside of the examples you give, I’m hard pressed to think of another, and I’m not clear on why Obama’s “Becoming” is tautological rather than an account of growth and development, with the implication that the Michelle Obama who wrote this account is not the same woman who is depicted in the narrative, but somebody different who can reflect on her earlier incomplete self. I think of Barack Obama, also, as explicitly describing his position on gay marriage as “evolving.” Again, maybe I’m not quite getting what you’re after here.
In any case, a very interesting post!
Dan,
Thanks so much for these questions!
The existence of a ruling class is always a matter of dispute, and I wholly take your point that there’s a very strong case to be made against the possibility that any such thing exists now. What I am thinking about, though–in exceptionally crude terms–might be some kind of combination of or the overlaps between the kind of thinking one gets from Silicon Valley and the people who attend Davos.
More soon–have to run out for an errand!
Actually, I don’t think I was saying anything one way or another about the existence of a ruling class (or classes). I was saying that I don’t think in a world of both niche and mass media (which are often the same thing) like our contemporary one, the idea that there are ruling ideas seems less tenable. Maybe it’s just too much cacophony or specialized segmentation of the thinking world (or the “chattering classes” as the British say). There may in fact be ruling ideas, but if you asked ten randomly chosen people what they were, I’m pretty certain you would get ten different answers, if anybody thought they could answer the question at all. And I’m pretty sure that 99 out of 100 people could not tell you what Davos is or refers to. Not that one has to know anything about Davos (but Davos is interested in you!) for what goes on there to shape one’s life and thinking. I think there have been attempts to define what used to be call zeitgeist for our recent history, of course (Age of Fracture, anyone?). Is Globalization a ruling idea? I don’t think it’s necessarily shaped our thinking about, say, biology, medicine, sports, gender ideologies, epistemology, etc. in the way that Darwinian and evolutionary categories shaped almost every arena of late nineteenth-century thought. Not that globalizing processes have not shaped all of these areas of thought; just that the idea of globalization has not. Maybe in the future we will see that all forms of anti-essentialist thought, critical theory (Foucault is really a neoliberal, e.g.), commitment to fluidity of various kind, racial nationalism, pluralistic thought, the uses of the human genome, etc. will appear as a cogent and unified set of “ruling ideas”. But I guess, at least for me, it’s hard to see that in the present. Anyway, when I referenced the quaintness of Marx’s contention about ruling classes and ruling ideas I was not denying the existence of a ruling class, just the easiness of a kind of straight-forward base-superstructure formulation about the relationship between class domination and ideas.
Back now!
In answer to your second question, I clearly needed to expand on my comments regarding Becoming–and I think your allusion to Barack Obama’s “evolving” comment is a good one as well.
What I see in the title of Becoming–and this may be wholly out of step with the contents of the book itself–is a vision of life that is quite different from the classic picture that assumes that a person at some point begins (generally in adolescence) a more or less deliberate or at least self-conscious project of self-creation and, much later, completes it, either by dying or by coming to some kind of terms with their own foibles. In other words, “becoming” is a part of one’s life, a stage that has a beginning, middle, and end. One’s childhood may foreshadow certain later characteristics or set the terms of later conflicts, but it is not the same thing as the more concentrated process of self-improvement or personality formation.
I’m deliberately running character and personality here–or, if you like, inner-direction and other-direction–because I feel like the “becoming” of Michelle Obama’s title is something else: all of life is becoming, it seems to say. Life and becoming are one and the same–that’s the tautology.
Hopefully it’s clear that I’m thinking about more than just the title of one biography here. I’m thinking more about how innumerable kinds of assessment and quantification have overtaken both our very early years and persist into old age: there is never a time, it seems, when we shouldn’t be working on ourselves, trying to become something else. That, to me, is a fairly dominant trend in daily life and also a shift in the way life itself is conceptualized.
I’m not sure if that clarifies anything, but hopefully it is at least an elaboration of my abbreviated comments above!
Andy, this is a helpful clarification for me. So, I suppose someone like Ben Franklin had a formative period in life (about which he wrote in his own autobiography), but at some point stopped “becoming” and was “set” or fixed in terms of his character. You seem to be suggesting that whereas “becoming” was once a project for the young and malleable, it has now become a project for people of any age — perhaps because becoming is less about forming a character than maybe modifying one’s life(style) or personality? This would fit with Warren Susman’s perspective on that shift from character to personality, and maybe fits with the market’s sovereignty over all aspects of life. This is where your “Davos elite” and Silicon Valley types would come in as embracing constant becoming rather than being.
I think this tension, though, is an old one in American thought and predates the mass production of the 2nd industrial revolution and the rise of consumer capitalism. It has been expressed, for example, as a theological tension between Calvinism and “Arminianism,” Calvinism and Methodism, etc. Calvinism is a lot less work, but offers a lot less hope — which is, I suppose, a supremely Calvinistic thing to say.
In any case, is the shift to “becoming” and “interrogation” a new thing, or is it just the return of the anxious bench in American secular life?
LD,
I’m out of my element when it comes to Protestant soteriology, so I’m hoping you can save me here! How does Calvinism and Arminianism map onto this?
Sorry, salvation is not my table — but soteriology is in my wheelhouse.
The basic idea in positing Calvinism v. “Arminianism” (and that should go in scare quotes, because as Amy Kittelstrom points out in The Religion of Democracy, various groups/preachers/theological movements were polemically labeled as “Arminian,” even though that’s not how they would have identified themselves) — the basic idea, as it relates to your post, is the problematic relationship between grace and works. That’s problematic enough within Calvinism, but becomes even more so in theological systems which tend to view salvation not as something that is foreordained/obtained eternally, but as something which can be lost. So while strict Calvinism might technically offer great assurance (“once saved, always saved”), Arminianism emphasizes persevering in the faith as the way to make one’s salvation sure. This is often flatly characterized as “people can earn their own salvation” or “people can contribute to their own salvation” or — sometimes — “people themselves can choose to be saved.”
But even that doesn’t really get at the notion of faith as process that’s so central to, say, the Methodist tradition, a process of continually bringing the human will into accord with the Divine will. The hope is that a life of continual self-discipline in the way of holiness and the conforming of the human will to the Divine will can result in something called “entire sanctification,” in which the will to sin (original sin, if you will) is expunged entirely from the believer in this life on earth.
Calvinism would never hold out such a prospect — or, I suppose, such a burden.
“Work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who is at work within you, both to will and to do his good pleasure.” That verse is cited by both Calvinists and Arminians, and with good reason — it encapsulates the whole tangled problem of human agency and/or divine agency in the work of salvation. Calvinists would emphasize that God is the one in you doing all the work, while Arminians would give all glory to God as the source of salvation but would emphasize the imperative “work!” It’s pretty much a distinction without a difference — unless you are a Calvinist or a Methodist arguing with the other guy.
Hi Dan,
I see–I’m sorry I misunderstood your meaning!
LD,
Ah, I get what you’re saying. Certainly, I think there’s a kind of iterative, restless, ever-incomplete quality to the “Arminian” side, but there’s still, ultimately, a telos, whereas I’m not sure that “becoming” has a final goal in mind.