As intellectual historians, we tend to look at ideas from the supply side—that is, we tend to depict intellectual exchange as an activity driven by the producers of ideas. The pace and direction of intellectual change is determined by the conditions obtaining among those producers, and in order to reverse engineer their products, we have to pay very close attention to the materials and techniques those producers used.
This approach is so common as to be almost invisible; its dominance only tugs at our awareness at moments when it is extended into a kind of teleological excess. This occurs when a historian argues that so-and-so’s ideas were “ahead of their time” and had to wait for the maturation of a market that would eagerly consume them. That is an intellectual historian’s variant of Say’s Law: supply creates its own demand (eventually).
This dominant tendency has been on my mind as I read (more closely than my first pass-through) Ibram Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas. (This excellent book has come up often at the blog—you can find links to most of the pieces we’ve published via this post.) Kendi’s book is assertively a demand-sided history. In his prologue, he writes:
Hate and ignorance have not driven the history of racist ideas in America. Racist policies have driven the history of racist ideas in America. And this fact becomes apparent when we examine the causes behind, not the consumption of racist ideas, but the production of racist ideas. What caused US senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina in 1837 to produce the racist idea of slavery as a “positive good,” when he knew slavery’s torturous horrors? […] Time and again, racist ideas have not been cooked up from the boiling pot of ignorance and hate. Time and again, powerful and brilliant men and women have produced racist ideas in order to justify the racist policies of their era, in order to redirect the blame for their era’s racial disparities away from those policies and onto black people.
To argue that we must attend to the “causes behind… the production of racist ideas” is to position the initiating force on the other side of the equation. A demand or a need for a racist idea meeting certain historically specific requirements calls forth a new mutation in the long chain of racist self-justifications. The producers of racist ideas take their cues from the immediate demands of the market.
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A demand-sided intellectual history is more obviously useful for certain kinds of ideas than for others, and it may in fact be completely unworkable within certain tightly controlled or hermetic traditions that purposely try to snub contemporary demands in favor of orthodoxy. Certainly we would be likely to find that a demand-sided approach has its greatest success within discourses that are highly politicized.
That is the case with the second example I’d like to mull over as an instance of a demand-side intellectual history: Gary Gerstle’s famous and highly-regarded 1994 AHR essay “The Protean Character of American Liberalism.” (Twenty-five years old this year!)
Gerstle makes an off-hand comment fairly early on, but it is a line that has endured—at least it is, I think, the essay’s most widely quoted line: “The protean character of American liberalism, so puzzling to European commentators, is in part traceable to its role as a surrogate socialism.” Gerstle does not, in fact, return to this insight: for the most part, the rest of the essay leaves socialism alone. What the line does do, however, is establish liberalism as, to some extent, a pretextual or supplementary politics, a politics that morphs around more strongly held beliefs (like socialism) in order to form a tighter fit with contemporary needs. It is a powerful argument.
Proteus, getting pinned by Menelaus.
The strongly held belief that Gerstle returns to throughout the essay, however, is not socialism but rationality. The liberals of the essay are people who want to focus their efforts on that part of society that they think is most amenable to rational projects of amelioration. When they think that cultural differences have generated irrational animosities between races or within particular ethnic groups, they seek refuge in the saner politics of solving economic inequality. When it seems that demagogues are leveraging economic disparities to whip up fervid mobs, they think again about the way that culture can create durable bonds between diverse people. They reconsider their previously held beliefs that rational action—education, prudent government intervention—could not diminish racial and ethnic antagonisms.
Like Stamped from the Beginning, the dynamics of Gerstle’s narrative give priority to the conditions rather than the intellectuals, to external events rather than interior awakenings. But neither Gerstle nor Kendi, I’d argue, fall into a reductive trap of pure determinism—intellectuals had to respond in such-and-such a way because conditions dictated that they do so. Both Gerstle and Kendi acknowledge the creativity of the intellectuals who are striving to meet new demands for this year’s ideological model—that is, I take it, the significance of the adjective “protean” in Gerstle’s title. Perhaps I am over-reading the word, but Proteus was, after all, a prodigiously ingenious sea-god who—in separate episodes in the Odyssey and the Aeneid—transformed himself into a host of different creatures in an attempt to escape men who were attempting to squeeze out knowledge from him. (One can see why he would be an apt figure for an elusive intellectual tradition with which the historian must grapple.)
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Where might all of this leave us—or better yet, where might it lead us? My point here is hardly to recommend a general reorientation of our subfield toward the demand side. As I noted, I think this approach works better for some topics than for others. To some extent, it also requires an argument along the lines both Gerstle and Kendi take: a certain body of thought has emerged over time in such a way as to appear superficially self-contradictory or at least highly variable, but in fact there is a single consistent principle at work that helps make sense of that variability once we take the underlying consistency into account. For Gerstle, liberalism will pivot 180 degrees, if that’s what it takes to maintain liberals’ preference for rationality. For Kendi, racist ideas will take any shape that conditions require—just as long as those ideas uphold an unbending commitment to the principle of black inferiority.
This kind of approach also has an intrinsic risk, somewhat evident in the long quote from Kendi above. Here are the two sentences I left out, which track alongside the sentence about Calhoun:
What caused Atlanta newspaper editor Henry W. Grady in 1885 to produce the racist idea of “separate but equal,” when he knew southern communities were hardly separate or equal? What caused think tankers after the presidential election of Barack Obama in 2008 to produce the racist idea of a postracial society, when they knew all those studies had documented discrimination? (emphasis added)
There is a claim here that goes beyond what a historian can strictly prove. We can prove, for example, that Grady was present at a given moment in an environment that a reasonable person would not have described as “separate but equal,” and we can prove that those “think tankers” had come into contact with studies demonstrating the persistence of race-based discrimination. To say that they “knew” that what they were saying was contrary to the facts, however, is to assert something more.
It is, I think, a necessary “more”—necessary both in the sense that this kind of argument requires such a reaching beyond strict facts in order to fully work, and necessary in the sense that we need these kind of ambitious interpretations of the facts. Grounded, careful, and deliberate interpretations, but interpretations—extrapolations, imputations—nonetheless. And that, perhaps, is—more so than any strictly methodological point—part of the value of these demand-side studies: they tend to stretch and test our sense of the possibilities of intellectual history. And their relative rarity, therefore, may be a saving grace: in abundance they might lead to incoherence, but as sporadic examples of an alternative path, they renew the field.
6 Thoughts on this Post
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Love your parallel between Gerstle and Kendi. There can be little doubt that some creator/producers build “ideas” (ideologies) to support their desires. And then those bad-faith ideas take on a life of their own—used, abused, and revised by others. This is what makes them protean.
Aside: We can stick closely with the evidence in our a posteriori generalizations, but then those more modest generalizations don’t sell books or attract publishers. The publishing industry, in its desire for our “ambitious generalizations,” is a hazard to our intellectual honesty in tracking on-the-ground iterations and making arguments. This is a long way of saying that there are pressures everywhere to go beyond what we can “strictly prove,” whether in terms of producers or demand.
FWIW: I face this problem, of “protean”-ness/-ism, with anti-intellectualism. It’s environmental, and used by many actors to prove and support many things. So a demand side approach seems to be in the cards for my ongoing work on this topic. Even so, the literal history of anti-intellectualism tracks with (i.e., after) the creation of the term intellectual. And then there is the literal-v-figurative use of the notion of being an anti-intellectual, which goes beyond persons and into the cultural air.
Anyway, thanks! Your reflection has been generative, for me at least. Much appreciated. – TL
Thanks, Tim! I definitely take your point about the many different pressures on historians to go beyond what we can strictly prove–there are internal and external pressures for sure.
I’d love to hear you talk more about the proteanness of anti-intellectualism. The example that springs to mind as a parallel to what Kendi was talking about is of a person like Tucker Carlson or Lou Dobbs or Dinesh D’Souza or Donald Trump damning intellectual and cultural elites on the one hand, but then brandishing Ivy League diplomas of their own as bona fides of their intelligence and merit. Is that the kind of thing you’re talking about?
Andy, super enjoyed this. It touches on so much I’ve thought about in these past years and have tried to incorporate into my own work.
I very much appreciate Kendi’s take which, I think it is fair to say, can also be described as materialist. I cannot agree with those who posit that in order to do or commit to anything, humans must have ideas about it instead. Of course this is true in the strictest sense of “I will walk to the store” comes before walking to the store (but then again, there is sleepwalking, which in a way is a metaphor for how so many of our ideas unfold). But then we forget that humans are animals and we do not live purely in some realm of conscious intent and self-knowledge — of course racist goals preceded racist ideas in countless examples, Calhoun being a particularly good one.
And sometimes it is imperative that this gets established, for a host of political reasons and for historical understanding. But you hit the nail on the head when you pointed out that we cannot, strictly speaking, “prove” this — aye, there’s the rub. But anyone who thinks it cannot or should not guide our interpretations brings in a model of human behavior that not even they, likely, would recognize. We know humans are capable of self-deceit, and of justifying motivations, desires, and instincts *after* the fact of their presence. So if historians of any stripe, including intellectual historians, abandon this knowledge when they practice their craft, what are they doing? They’re trying to build knowledge of what actually happened with a model of a type of human being that doesn’t exist. It makes no sense to me.
Intellectual history is particularly prone to this mistake, for the obvious reason that we’re often studying ideas that had a shit load of thought put into them but also, I think — but cannot prove!, lol — that we want to believe that the human mind can overcome itself, that it can be “objective” and consider The Matter For What It Is, and so while we often nod and say of course, “no one escapes context,” we’re still terrified of the implications of that assumption, and so minimize its actual application in our methods. And of course, when it appears in others’ work past our comfort levels, one can be called “reductionist,” without the question ever being asked: perhaps it is, but does that mean it is wrong?
That is so, so well put. And I think it should also be noted that often the kind of suspicious questions we’re talking about–“Are you sure that’s really present in the document? Can you prove it?”–tend to be asked more often about scholarship on race and gender. A Twitter thread related to Kate Manne’s Down Girl makes this argument with regard to social science norms much more eloquently than I can, so I’ll just link it–here’s the first tweet: https://twitter.com/jrpjrpjrp/status/1120461008135442432
In history, I find this kind of phenomenon is articulated more in the injunction to describe historical figures or movements in ways that would be legible to the figures/participants themselves. Certainly, this is a good check on anachronism and on willful disregard for context, but it also is a great way to hamstring feminist and antiracist analysis. My favorite example of this is Manhood at Harvard, which at one point early in the book states that men at the time weren’t as obsessed with gender as we are today. This is said in a book on manhood! What I think the author was trying to say was that we shouldn’t carelessly import a late twentieth-century concept of gender into the late nineteenth century, but on another level, what he is saying just makes no sense. Of course they were obsessed with gender, even if they would not have used the word in the way we do and would not have characterized their behavior as obsessive. At a certain point, we have to be able to stand at a distance from our subjects and call things by names that make sense to us in the present.
“To say that they “knew” that what they were saying was contrary to the facts, however, is to assert something more.”
Interesting post, Andy. Something like that question comes up in the history of the uses of science for political purposes. It can be somewhat difficult to characterize what writers, say, around 1890, were doing, when they discussed the then-presumed medical effects of environment or “vice.” They did not *know* that syphilis, for example, directly caused dementia or could be transmitted from husband to wife to child. This wasn’t shown until the Wassermann test allowed the detection of undiagnosed or untreated disease. They surmised through observation and statistics that syphilis, like alcoholism, led to late in life dementia, and that the children of those fathers were also often ill. Their theories led them to believe that the children of such men were irredeemable, and that the grandchildren and further descendants would be even worse off. Their understanding of the medical causes of this was faulty, and ours is superior. The decisions they made, about how to deal with public health questions politically, were as a result faulty and more often than not racist. But it’s necessary to write about them without suggesting that they should have known what Wasserman would show in what was then still their future. You can’t just juxtapose them with Carl Sagan (say Broca’s Brain) or with Stephen Jay Gould and say they weren’t properly scientific, much less go on to diagnose *them* as driven by emotion rather than reason for making what we now would see as a silly mistake. It’s tempting to do so, however, in the course of emphasizing that they did often go quite far into explicit racism. But this exaggerates their distance from our own time and suggests we’ve escaped the danger.
However, to say that Grady knew both “separate” and “equal” were lies seems to me to be doing something different. As interpretation, this is more akin to saying late 19th century degeneration writers were driven by anxieties about the decline of (white) “Western” civilization, which is undoubtedly true, regardless of whether they understood the technical details in a way we’d now consider accurate.
Andy – Fascinating post. It’s my impression that demand and supply are usually understood as relational quantities that define the price point in a market. How far would you propose to go in using the models with which such terms are associated as bases for intellectual history?
Kendi seems to use economic terms in the passage you quote from page nine in a loose, metaphorical way, which of course doesn’t mean that they don’t imply important relationships; but he doesn’t provide theoretical elaborations.
Actually, demand as you describe it seems close to some familiar understandings of “context,” which makes me wonder about the premise of your piece, that little attention has been given to the production of ideas. What does the notion of demand contribute, exactly, unless [which I doubt] you propose a wall-to-wall marketization of intellectual history?
An aspect of demand, so to speak, that Kendi gives great emphasis to is “self-interest,” since as he says on the same page, “racial discrimination led to racist ideas,” and “racially discriminatory policies have usually sprung from economic, political, and cultural self-interests, self-interests that are constantly changing.” Ideas as a function/product of objective conditions and the play of interests they reflect and promote?: does this recall old saws about the ideological character of ideas, even to asking if actors are fully aware whether what they believe, or claim to believe, is consistent with what benefits them?
It might be worth noting that beginning in the ‘70s some work was done under the label of the “production of culture” perspective, such as Diana Crane, ed, The Production of Culture: Media and the Urban Arts, 1992, Lewis Coser, ed, “The Production of Culture,” Social Research 48, 2, 1978, or Richard Peterson, ed, The Production of Culture, 1976. Some of this was linked to the cultural studies movement, as in Peterson’s “Culture Studies Through the Production Perspective: Progress and Prospects,” in Crane, ed, The Sociology of Culture: Emerging Theoretical Perspectives, 1994. A more recent overview can be found in Peterson and N. Anand, “The Production of Culture Perspective,” Annual Review of Sociology 30, 2004, which has been cited hundreds of times.