For Charlie: Reflections on Intellectual History in an Anti-intellectual Age

One of the most accomplished and respected intellectual historians now working in the United States spent part of her career as a diplomat. Sabine Schmidke of the Institute for Advanced Study interrupted her study of Islamic intellectual history to work for seven years in the German government’s Foreign Service. This aspect of Schmidke’s career is a stark emblem for a remarkable trend among intellectual historians during the last generation. I refer to the greater intimacy and overlap between intellectual historians and diplomatic historians, practitioners of two of the fields possessed of the longest and deepest transnational foundations, and without doubt the two fields most marginalized during the last third of the twentieth century when the promise of social history was being the most energetically explored.

I don’t believe Arne Westad served in the diplomatic corps of his native Norway, but I mention him because the histories he writes of international relations display extensive learning in the intellectual histories of China and Germany and Russia, countries in whose languages he works regularly. I mention him also because one of Westad’s most noted institutional accomplishments was his founding of a think tank in London to which he gave the name, “Ideas.” Samuel Moyn’s several studies of human rights movements in relation to international politics are widely recognized examples of a trained intellectual historian—Moyn’s doctoral advisor was Martin Jay—making substantial contributions to European international history. Or Rosenboim’s recent book, THE EMERGENCE OF GLOBALISM, is another prominent case of the comfortable mix of intellectual history—Cambridge school, even, in Rosenboim’s case—with diplomatic history. Elizabeth Borgwardt’s NEW DEAL FOR THE WORLD, quickly recognized as an important contribution to diplomatic history, won the Organization of American Historians’ Merle Curti Award for intellectual history.

           But for people like me who study primarily the United States, a convenient place to observe the easy rapport between intellectual history and diplomatic history is in the pages of the journal, DIPLOMATIC HISTORY, published by the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, and in the programs of the annual meetings of that Society. Consider the work of Northwestern University’s Daniel Immerwahr, whose two books—THINKING SMALL and HOW TO HIDE AN EMPIRE– and whose articles in DIPLOMATIC HISTORY and THE JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS and of course in the journal that brings us together today, MODERN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY. All of these writings by Immerwahr show how the field of “US and the World” is now a professional domain in which the traditions of both of these sub-groups of scholars are being integrated. Nils Gilman’s MANDARINS OF THE FUTURE and David Engerman’s MODERNIZATION FROM THE OTHER SHORE and KNOW YOUR ENEMY are works with substantial influence among diplomatic specialists written by historians whose training was primarily in intellectual history and who have continued to publish widely in intellectual history forums.

Since Engerman, Gilman, and Immerwahr are, like Moyn, Berkeley Ph.Ds, I hasten to move beyond the home team and call attention to Bruce Kuklick’s BLIND ORACES and DEATH IN THE CONGO, works of international diplomatic and military history written by one of the leading American intellectual historians of our time. Kuklick is unusual or having worked for many decades within the circles of both diplomatic and intellectual historians. Indeed, his first book was a study of the issue of German reparations after World War II, AMERICAN POLICY AND THE DIVISION OF GERMANY, revised in 1972 from a dissertation completed under the direction of Gabriel Kolko. In that same year Kuklick published his second book, JOSIAH ROYCE, the still-standard intellectual biography of a great philosopher.

Kuklick is unusual for the duration and depth of his embeddedness within the ranks of both diplomatic and intellectual historians, but his integration of the two practices has continued in BLIND ORACLES, a book of 2006, and in his co-authored DEATH IN THE CONGO, a book of 2015. The emergence of the field, “US and the World,” often understood as simply the widening of focus on the part of old-fashioned diplomatic history, is also an incorporation of intellectual history into what the profession can recognize as international history.

That specialists in American intellectual history are now very much part of international history and regular contributors to the capacious field we call “US and the World” is a reality displayed at length in the recent volume, THE WORLDS OF AMERICAN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY, co-edited by Joel Isaac, James Kloppenberg, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, and the late Michael O’Brien. That particular global emphasis is not as strong in another collection of essays, AMERICAN LABYRINTH, edited by Ray Haberski and Andrew Hartman, but that volume does include an important and historiographically wide ranging essay by Christopher McKnight Nichols on precisely the relationship between diplomatic and intellectual history.

But both of these recent state-of-the field volumes also register something else, equally significant to any discussion of what intellectual historians are doing today. Most of the essays, especially THE WORLDS OF AMERICAN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY, address specific research problems, some large and some small, but neither book’s methodological aspect overwhelms their largely monographic character. This is important. I now believe more strongly than ever that methodological arguments about intellectual history, helpful and necessary as they sometimes can be, quickly reach the point of diminishing returns. Such arguments too often serve to blind ourselves and our colleagues in other historical fields to what intellectual historians are accomplishing monographically, as practitioners of Wissenschaft.

It is through our monographic contributions that we have the most to say about anti-intellectualism, the title theme of this two-session symposium. I am going to address two recent, monographic books that make important contributions to our understanding of anti-intellectualism in the present age. But before I do that, I will turn for a moment to Richard Hofstadter’s 1964 volume, ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM IN AMERICAN LIFE, because that book has long exercised and continues to exercise vast influence.

Hofstadter’s perspective on what it meant to be devoted to the intellect was too parochial. He described as the “house organ of the American intellectual community” the magazine of his own New York cultural milieu, THE PARTISAN REVIEW. He was preoccupied more than his major themes required with the capacities for oppositional politics and playfulness that he associated with “the intellectual” as a certain type of human being. He was way off on John Dewey, failing to understand the significance and role of Dewey’s campaign for a science-based civilization as recently detailed by Andrew Jewett and other historians. Hofstadter filled his book with questionable obiter dicta, such as that intellectual creativity heavily depends on “facing the world alone,” not in communities. For a good catalogue of things about Hofstadter’s famous book that just don’t pass muster today, I recommend Tim Lacy’s essay in the new Haberski and Hartman book I mentioned a few minutes ago. But Hofstadter was on to lots of important things, especially in his treatment of evangelical Protestantism. This is one feature of Hofstadter’s analysis that is actually better than Hofstadter’s critics of today seem to allow. That is the part of Hofstadter’s book that still lives.

Hofstatdter’s nearly 100-page section near the start of his book says little about the period after the 1920s, but what he says about that earlier period, drawing conscientiously on the scholarship of Sidney Mead and William McLoughlin and other authorities of Hofstadter’s generation, stands up pretty well after more than half a century. He does not deal directly with the concept of Biblical inerrancy, however, which is an important gap. But Hofstadter’s summary is basically right:  the key reality is a “one-hundred per cent mentality—a mind totally committed to the full range of the dominant popular fatuities and determined [to] tolerate no ambiguities, no equivocations, no reservations, and no criticism.”

It is exactly there that Molly Worthen’s APOSTLES OF REASON: THE CRISIS OF AUTHORITY IN AMERICAN EVANGELICALISM links nicely with Hofstadter. Worthen’s book of 2014 studies arguments internal to the evangelical leadership during the period since World War II and analyzes exactly the closed-mindedness that Hofstadter identified. Unlike many discussants of evangelicalism, Worthen insists that the evangelical community “believes ardently in the power of ideas.” But where her close and empathically deep reading of the writings of American evangelicals of period since World War II confirms Hofstadter’s basic outlook is her analysis of just what specific ideas her subjects take seriously. “Evangelicalism is a far more thoughtful and diverse world than most critics—and even most evangelicals themselves—usually realize,” Worthen writes. Yet evangelicalism contains, she continues, “a pattern of hostility and ambivalence toward the standards of tolerance, logic, and evidence by which most secular thinkers in the West have agreed to abide.” The evangelicals rely on Biblical authority, but many non-evangelicals respect the Bible while candidly employing “extrabiblical authority” to help them interpret scripture. Evangelicals are single-minded. Worthen calls them “apostles of reason” because they do perform reasoning with great earnestness, but in the strict framework of Biblical inerrancy. This epistemic vacuum is well encapsulated in a Bible verse I don’t believe Worthen quotes, but fits: 2^ndCorinthians 10:5, where the Apostle Paul demands that the disciples “cast down” all unfaithful impulses and “Make every thought captive to Christ.”

The diverse and fascinating characters in Melani McAlister’s THE KINGDOM OF GOD HAS NO BORDERS are poster children for evangelical anti-intellectualism as analyzed by Worthen. Their closed-mindedness in McAlister’s story has to do specifically with the Global South. When American evangelicals look at the Christian communities of Africa and the Middle East, McAlister finds, their world-view prepares them to see certain things and not others. McAlister reveals the precise structure of the lenses through which many American evangelicals have looked at the globe, and explains the process by which these lenses were ground and put in place. Like an effective pair of glasses dealing with the different needs of two eyes, “enchanted internationalism” and “victim identification” work together well. The first is a deep longing for a vibrant connection with the divine, reminiscent of the intense religious experience of the earliest Christian communities as described in the gospels. The frank supernaturalism of many Global South Christians appeals to American evangelicals as an authentic experience of the Holy Spirit. Dreams like Daniel’s are not contained in ancient Mediterranean antiquity, but are experienced today in Brazil and Nigeria. Although McAlister does not use the term “romantic primitivism,” it describes “enchanted internationalism” very well. In the modern, industrialized, technologically and bureaucratically advanced west, even the most devoted of evangelicals are surrounded by a world that had become somehow “disenchanted,” while the more simple communities of faith in Uganda and Angola seem more like the churches Paul the Apostle visited and addressed in his letters.

The second lens is a propensity to recognize and identify with Christians who are subject to persecution, especially by not exclusively by Muslims. These victims include missionaries martyred in the jungles of Ecuador, Christian believers imprisoned in Eastern Europe, and Africans mistreated and sometimes killed by neighboring Muslims. The more enchanted the Christians of the Global South appear to be, the more outrageous becomes their suffering and the more attention it demands. “Believers in the United States were invited to see themselves as part of the global Christian family,” McAlister explains, “and thus to identify with the victimization they saw elsewhere.” (11) They came to see the decline of Christian cultural hegemony in their own country as part of the same thing as the abuse of Christians in the developing world and in communist regimes. Secularization amounted to the victimization of Christians. Hence “by the turn of the twenty-first century,” American evangelicals viewed the world as one vast domain of persecution, in which Christians were on the defensive, struggling to maintain their faith amid a virtually infinite expanse of enemies. Just as an impoverished, enslaved woman in South Sudan refuses to deny her faith when her oppressors try to force her to convert to Islam, so, too, will an American evangelical owner of a business in Indiana or Colorado refuse the secular state’s demand that they serve same-sex couples. Christians around the world stand up against persecution, in solidarity with one another. It’s all the same, in Sudan and in Denver.

Both Worthen and McAlister practice the intellectual historian’s classic method of Verstehen, and thereby illuminate a major strain of anti-intellectualism by going inside major domains of evangelical thinking and revealing the operative assumptions and structure.  Intellectual history at its best, illuminating the ant-intellectualism of our own times.