Editor's Note
We are pleased to offer our readers this guest essay by Lawrence Glickman.
Lawrence B. Glickman is the Stephen and Evalyn Millman Professor of American Studies in the Department of History at Cornell University. He is the author or editor of five books, including, most recently, Free Enterprise: An American History (Yale University Press, 2019). He writes frequently for the public in Boston Review, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, Dissent, and other publications. He is a part of Cornell’s History of Capitalism Initiative.
Zachary D. Carter’s terrific new study, The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy and the Life of John Maynard Keynes, offers an excellent starting off point for thinking about varieties of intellectual history.[i] This is not a comprehensive review of the book. Instead, it is an exploration of what I will call “horizontal” and “vertical” approaches in intellectual history. My reflections here are tentative and schematic, with the recognition that these terms don’t perfectly capture the differences that I seek to explore. I hope this piece generates further elaboration of the differences or even a reasoned rejection of the framework I put forward. In describing vertical approaches, I draw mostly on my own research, not because I think I am the only scholar who has done such work but because the examples I draw upon illustrate how a different approach might lead us to rethink Keynes’s conception of how ideas shape history.
I take Carter’s approach to be horizonal, by which I mean that he argues persuasively that we should understand Keynes as an intellectual, not merely an economist, with deep interests in art, philosophy, and politics, all of which he traces with great sympathy and skill. A veteran financial journalist unintimidated by math, Carter does a superb job of analyzing Keynes’ technical and political writings and his analysis of them is probing, comprehensive, and, at times, critical. But he shows that Keynes’ ambitions were grander and that his intellectual biography requires taking all of these into account. So, we get a deep dive into his economic thought that is deeply contextualized by his life experiences and influences, and a persuasive argument that economics and politics cannot be separated. The approach is horizontal in examining the wide range of influences that shaped Keynes’s life and thought, and, also, showing, in turn, how that thought has shaped politics and policy.
By a vertical approach I mean, in contrast, an approach that not only looks across for context but above, below, and outside of these circles as well. Such an approach might explore not only those influences but things that Keynes didn’t notice because they lay outside his field of vision. Versions of some of Keynes’s key insights, taken to be original and even revolutionary, in the world of professional economics and public policy, can be found in circles that Keynes did not know about or take seriously, such as nineteenth century labor reformers or abolitionists.
The differences between what I am calling vertical and horizontal history may seem to resemble those between “top down” and “bottom up” approaches. But they are not identical because a “top down” history can also be vertical in that it can explore many different strata rather than keep its gaze fixed only at one, which is a characteristic of the horizontal approach. Nor am I suggesting that one approach is more radical than the other. What I calling vertical and horizontal approaches to history can take many forms and have no simple political valence. Indeed, I would describe Carter’s perspective as radical in its willingness to challenge orthodoxies and in its reminder of the fundamentally democratic message at the heart of Keynesian vision, which is the belief that we as citizens can, with the proper conceptual tools, both analyze the world and remake it too.
The approaches are not antithetical and most works of intellectual history, including Carter’s, combine elements of both. This is not a brief for one kind of intellectual history over another, but a reflection on the advantages offered by each. (And, of course, there are many other modes of intellectual history that I will not address at all here.)
Carter’s book is a wide-ranging, sure-handed, beautifully-written intellectual biography that places Keynes’s life in broad social, cultural, and political context. It is equally a work about the contested meaning of “Keynesianism,” most especially in the United States, and in particular about the ways in which Keynes’s key insights and goals were undermined by some of his major American popularizers, notably Paul Samuelson. Carter, an economics and finance reporter for the Huffington Post, expertly translates Keynes’s technical writings, making them accessible to non-expert readers (like me). But Carter goes far beyond this. Indeed, his main point is that, despite his technical brilliance (he studied Mathematics, not Economics, as a Cambridge undergraduate), Keynes, saw himself as a philosopher and artist as much as an economist, and that we cannot understand Keynes’s economic thought, or his body of thought more generally, unless we see it as inextricably connected to ethics, philosophy, and history. Carter thus simultaneously demystifies economics and puts it in its place. Putting it in its place means showing the monumental importance of economic ideas and policies, but also showing that these cannot be set apart from politics, since economics, for Keynes, was ultimately about the question of how we wish to live, not about allocating scarce resources or learning to live with the “iron law of wages” or the natural law of supply and demand. Keynes’ economic work, as Carter notes, “fused psychology, history, political theory, and observed financial experience like no other economist before or since” (p. 368).
The Price of Peace is, in part, a biography of Keynes, who valued friendship, conversation, and sexual connection, sometimes on a stunningly intimate level. Carter takes Keynes’s romantic relationships, especially his marriage to the acclaimed ballerina Lydia Lopokova, seriously (beginning his book with this event) and also includes a reproduction of a “note card that appears to tally years of sexual encounters between Keynes and various lovers.” But it is equally a sprawling history of some of the debates in politics and economics in Keynes’s time and beyond, for the last third of the book takes on his legacy, mostly in the United States. Keynes’s intellectual development is set alongside the historical events that shaped him, including world-historical events like the Great War and the Great Depression and aesthetic developments within Keynes’s Bloomsbury set. The book is a nonfiction bildungsroman that tracks Keynes’s development as a thinker who discovers that the economy and its components are constructed rather than natural. Carter highlights the ways in which Keynes departed from the “conventional wisdom” of his age (to borrow a term from John Kenneth Galbraith, Keynes’s idiosyncratic follower to whom Carter devotes a good deal of attention in the final third of the book) and pioneered a revolutionary new conception of economics.
Carter’s is thus a work of tremendous range and sensitivity, examining as it does both person, John Maynard Keynes, and the philosophical, artistic, historical, and political influences on his development. It may seem churlish to discuss some of the less developed parts of a book that accomplishes so much, so skillfully and with such erudition. But because doing so says something about the history of ideas, causality, and chronology, it may be a worthwhile endeavor.
If that angle of vision were as vertical as it is horizontal range, which is to say, if it examined thought that occured outside of Keynes’s awareness, especially in working-class and popular culture, we could see that in many ways Keynes, notwithstanding his originality, was reinventing the wheel. In the United States, at least, the nonnaturalness of the economy insight emerged in circles outside of those to which Keynes, and, increasingly the field of economics, paid attention. This is not to gainsay the Keynesian revolution in fiscal policy but to note that the fundamental notion of the economy as constructed was an old one.
Lawrence B. Glickman
Carter tracks Keynes every move and influence, but this approach can limit him to those that Keynes himself followed. To be fair, this is a vast field that Carter admirably digests and lucidly explains. Indeed, Carter’s approach—wide-ranging, generous, showing the power of innumerable influences in the arts, politics, warfare, history, and much more– mimics Keynes’s own narrative of his intellectual development. Carter additionally notes Keynes’s intellectual limitations—his class sympathies were not proletarian and he disliked the Labor Party’s commitment to the working class (p. 159)—which takes him beyond Keynes, to some degree. Carter’s treatment of Keynes is far from uncritical, and in seeking to historicize and explain Keynes’s perspective, he seeks not to replicate that viewpoint. But this can be difficult. To take one small example, Carter refers to the period from 1871 to the beginning of the Great War as “an era of ostentatious prosperity for both the aristocracy and an expanding middle class” and he notes that future generations would “romanticize it” with “names like La Belle Epoque and the Gilded Age.” Keynes would later refer to this period as an “economic Eldorado” and an “economic Utopia.” (p. 5-6). But, as Carter knows, many working people in the United States and England did not experience that period in this way but rather as a time of labor violence, vast economic inequality, and great selfishness on the part of the wealthy. Certainly, Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner did not seek to “romanticize” the era, when they called the period “The Gilded Age” in their 1873 novel of that name. Carter notes that Keynes underemphasized these problems and expected that the “engines of progress” would, over time, make them insignificant compared to the utopian possibilities of the age.
But Carter always doesn’t fully reckon with the costs of Keynes’s blind spots. We see the influence on Keynes of the“Apostles,” the all-male secret society at Cambridge that eventually morphed into the Bloomsbury set (p. 24) but we don’t learn about how the very different “Apostles of Free Enterprise,” the business leaders, politicians, and lobbyists whom I wrote about in my recent book, influenced ideas about politics, which, from Keynes’s perspective, seems an impossibility. Carter is undoubtedly correct that Hayek/Keynes battle engaged in “a very serious, multigenerational struggle over political theory,” (p. 195) but if we expanded the cast of characters who participated in that struggle to include the business executives, workers, editorialists and others, we might see that they also played a role in that struggle.
Much of what Keynes said was original but many other insights were unknowing repetitions of working-class analysis. Keynes’s 1930 critique of “excessive thrift” (p. 192). for example, was an echo of a working-class discourse that extended back more than 50 years. This was the central point of the American labor radical Ira Steward’s essay called “Economy and Extravagance,” written in the 1870s.[ii]
“The first economic theory that came under my eyes was not calculated to make me think highly of economists,” Samuel Gompers, leader of the American Federation of Labor, once said. “My mind intuitively rejected the iron law of wages, the immutable law of supply and demand and similar so-called natural laws.” Gompers may have rejected mainstream interpretations but he did not reject the study of economics. “Political economy is the science of life,” he wrote in 1898, “and why shouldn’t laboring men study it?” In 1882, Carroll Wright, a labor reformer and pioneering labor statistician said that the true spirit of economics should be an “ethico-political economy” that would inject “a new life, a warmer blood” so that political economy could reclaim its proper role as both a “moral philosophy” and a “science.” Many working people spoke of the need for a “social economy” to replace what George Gunton called a “one-eyed political economy” that failed to place economic questions in their proper social, philosophical, and humane perspective.[iii]
I include these observations about economics from nineteenth century labor leaders and labor reformers, taken from my 1997 book, A Living Wage: American Workers and the Making of Consumer Society, because challenges to mainstream economics long predated the kinds of critiques that Keynes was to make of the economics profession. As Carter tells the story, Keynes initially was hostile to the labor movement but came to value the movement (and the Labour Party, which he later supported) after the onset of the Great Depression. Carter writes that “Keynes believed it was only a matter of time now before other ideas supplanted laissez-faire” (p. 151). But challenges to laissez faire long predated Keynes, although they did so in circles that Keynes ignored, and which his famous quotation from the General Theory suggests that “practical men” could only draw ideas from others rather than constitute original ways of thinking themelves. In contrast, I have argued that we could find the roots of Roosevelt’s New Deal as much in working-class economic thought of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as in Keynes’s economic thinking: “living wage advocates laid the groundwork for New Deal economic thinking” (155).
Int this context, Carter’s accurate assessment of Keynes’s worldview– “It was a political vision, as much as an economic doctrine.” (241)—seems less revolutionary and rather in keeping with the working-class tradition of social economy, a tradition, that as Dorothy Ross argued, had once been part of political economy in the United States but was forgotten as figures like Richard Ely and John R. Commons were marginalized or forgotten by the time Keynes turned his attention to the field.[iv]
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Keynes deeply believed in the causal force of ideas, but he also expected to find those ideas in certain places, the kind of circles in which he hung out—intellectual, academic, philosophical, high culture, Bohemia. As Carter writes, “Compared to the persuasive power of ideas, he insisted, `the power of self-interested capitalists to stand in their way is negligible’” (p. 219). Implicit in this formulation is the belief that ideas (or at least “persuasive” ones) emanate from intellectuals and that “self-interested capitalists” are incapable of producing such ideas. Similarly, in a famous passage toward the end of his General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, Keynes wrote:
The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. (Cited in Carter, p. 274-75.)
Carter quotes this passage that captures Keynes’ view and notes that it was an appeal to Marxists to understand the power of sedimented ideas as a motive force in history.
But what if Keynes was right about the power of ideas but wrong, or at least showed a constrained imagination, in thinking about their sources? With a different view of intellectual history—what I am calling a “vertical” understanding of it–we can invert Keynes’s statement, which posits that “economists and political philosophers” develop ideas first and that these ideas “rule.” What if economists and philosophers sometimes formulate ideas already in circulation and developed by “practical men” of business or by working-class thinkers or by consumer activists or by emancipated former enslaved people?
My own work on the history of the living wage, consumer activism, and free enterprise ideology, which I am describing here as “vertical” intellectual history, offers an approach that, pointing to different lines of causality, can also produce a different chronology, so that the ideas of economists and political philosophers don’t precede but follow.
Carter shows that Keynes assumed the causal power of ideas, but he doesn’t sufficiently break from Keynes’s view about the source of those ideas. A vertical approach to intellectual history can show the limitations of Keynes’s conceptions of how ideas come to shape history. In my book Free Enterprise, for example, I wrote an intellectual history of people who did not consider themselves intellectuals and were certainly not considered as such by others. Yet the business lobbyists, corporate executives, ministers, politicians, and editorialists and others who lobbied against the New Deal developed an original vocabulary. In this case, I was not looking below intellectuals in the class hierarchy (indeed most of my protagonists were either rich and powerful themselves, or chose serve the interests of the rich and powerful) but at a different stratum of thinker, who shaped conventional wisdom in ways that are often unacknowledged. A key point that I try to make, and one that challenges Keynes’s framing, is that these “practical men” came up with ideas that became common sense, even before famous intellectuals addressed them. As I wrote:
Although scholars tend to assume that prominent public intellectuals such as Walter Lippmann, the popular columnist and author of the influential 1937 book The Good Society, initiated the attack on the dangers of `planning,’ the onslaughts of NAM, anti-New Deal politicians, and many editorialists were under way by that time. Lippmann’s admirer Friedrich Hayek, the author of the best-selling critique of collectivism The Road to Serfdom, published in 1944, condemned the burgeoning welfare state, but as the Austrian émigré himself acknowledged, an army of mostly anonymous free enterprise publicists and propagandists challenged the New Deal order as effectivity as did intellectuals, and their efforts to delegitimize it began well before the publication of his classic book (p. 18).
“What this country needs is less intelligentsia and more commonsensia,” wrote Norman Vincent Peale, the minister and free enterprise advocate, in 1936 (p. 12). A key part of my argument is that contra Keynes, the ideas that became American “common sense” mostly emanated outside of intellectual circles and that sympathetic intellectuals elaborated ideas already in circulation rather than creating new ones out of whole cloth.
The point can be extended. As I wrote in Buying Power, consumer activists “have been political theorists, offering a context and narrative to educate consumers about the meaning of the goods they buy, or choose not to buy, and the social impact of their shopping choices” (3). Although most consumer activists did not understand themselves to be, in Keynes’ terms, “political philosophers,” they acted as such when they formulated a theory of consumption as ethical action, and, in doing so, as I show, they framed consumption in “modern” terms well before most historians had previously dated it.
Looking beyond and below elite sources prompts us to reexamine causality and periodization. Take, as another example of how bottom-up intellectual history can transform periodization, consumption. In Keywords, Raymond Williams writes that “it was really only in the mid twentieth century that the word passed from specialized use in political economy to general and popular use.”[v] Similarly, Richard Ohmann wrote that “the very concept and word” appeared only in the late nineteenth century.[vi] But abolitionist consumer activists used the term in its modern sense (as purchasing rather than using) in the first half of the nineteenth century. “If there were no consumers of slave produce, there would be no slaves,” as a slogan of the abolitionist “free produce” movement had it. (Buying Power, 73).
If we take those whom Keynes called “practical men”—or better yet all people, whether or not they are “practical” or “men”—as thinkers in the sense that Lawrence W. Levine described in his classic book, Black Culture and Black Consciousness, when he wrote that he preferred to think of intellectual history as the history of “men thinking” rather than as “thought,” we can see not only the construction of canonical ideas, but an intellectual history that takes seriously the way that ordinary people puzzle out and explain the meaning of their lives and struggles.[vii]
My addendum to Levine’s formulation (which he borrowed from the Chinese historian, Joseph Levenson) is that the realms of “thinking” and “thought” are not impermeable: people thinking can in fact precede and influence thought, just as thought can influence thinking and also doing.
This insight was accepted in cultural history, I believe, well before it was in intellectual history. As Levine wrote at the end of his classic 1984 article, “William Shakespeare and the American People”:
As we gradually come to the realization that Fred Astaire was one of the century’s finest dancers, Louis Armstrong one its more important musicians, Charlie Chaplin one of its most acute social commentators, we must remember that they could be shared by all of the people only when they were shared as `popular’ art, only when they were rendered unthreatening by being relegated to the nether regions of the cultural complex.[viii]
It strikes me that the challenge to the highbrow/lowbrow distinction proceeded more quickly in cultural history in part because, at its peak in the 1980s and 1990s, the “new cultural history” seemed to encapsulate all forms of historical enquiry. I remember describing the kind of cultural history that Levine wrote (and that I hoped to write) as “intellectual history of people and ideas that intellectual historians don’t study.” Thanks to the work of the Society for U.S. Intellectual History, the Association for African American Intellectual History, the Journal of the History of Ideas Blog, and other institutions and the work of many scholars, intellectual history now also reaches into what we might call the “nether regions of intellectual life,” while also analyzing canonical thought (as well as reimagining and historicizing what constitutes that canon. As I was working on this piece, I came across two relevant posts on the vertical turn in intellectual history on this blog, one by Robert Greene II, in which he observed that intellectual history has “in recent years, expanded to include a wide range of voices once ignored by the field,” and the other by L. D. Burnett noting that Frederick Douglass “had sketched out the fundamental moral dilemma that would later become the beating heart of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, the moral dilemma of its titular character” and speculating about whether Twain had read My Bondage and My Freedom.
One of the most exciting elements of the new intellectual history is its breadth of sources, topics, and methods. I see Carter’s book as a superb example of this history. At the same time, there are multiple ways to understand the life and times of Keynes and one of them is to explore the ideas he missed and perspectives that he might have encountered but did not. The point can be extended to all sorts of intellectual history, and it highlights the importance of putting the work of studying those previously left out of the canon in dialogue with the more conventional thinkers and subjects.
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[i] Zachary D. Carter, The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes (New York: Random House, 2020).
[ii] Lawrence B. Glickman, A Living Wage: American Workers and the Making of Consumer Society (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), p. 80-81.
[iii] A Living Wage, 57-60.
[iv] Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 42-48.
[v] See Lawrence B. Glickman, Consumer Society in American History: A Reader (Cornell University Press, 1999), p. 17.
[vi] Lawrence B. Glickman, Buying Power: A History of Consumer Activism in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), p. 328 n. 14.
[vii] Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom(New York: Oxford University Press, 30th anniversary edition, 2007), Preface to the First Edition, p. xxiii.
[viii] Lawrence W. Levine, “William Shakespeare and the American People: A Study in Cultural Transformation,” American Historical Review, Vol. 89, No. 1 (Feb., 1984), pp. 34-66. Quotation 66.
11 Thoughts on this Post
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Larry,
I really appreciate this way of drawing a distinction between different modes of doing intellectual history. In the past, I feel that intellectual historians have more often placed the division within our subfield somewhat invidiously between those who properly write about ideas and those who just happen to write about intellectuals. Partly, I think this dates back to intellectual history’s uneven accommodation of the rise of social history and its uneasy alliance with cultural history–there was a kind of suspicion among some intellectual historians that by acceding too much to the critique of the social historians and getting too close to the cultural historians, intellectual historians were losing the qualities which defined the subfield and gave it meaning. Of course, quite a number of intellectual historians didn’t feel this way and were eager to learn from social historians and (as you indicate above) saw cultural history as an extension or expansion of intellectual history into new territory, but there has also been a consistent temptation to define the subfield through some kind of qualitative discrimination between histories that deal with complex or serious ideas on the one hand, and, on the other, histories that examine the lives and networks of people whose jobs mark them out socially as intellectuals.
What I really appreciate about your horizontal/vertical distinction is the way it allows room both for very grounded reconstructions of particular communities of discourse or paths of intellectual transmission (a more social historical method) as well as for a more fluid account of how particular concepts or vocabularies cohered over time against larger background conditions. Yet in both, you assert the causal potential of ideas, whereas I think the traditional contrast between a history of ideas and a social history of intellectuals has tended to suggest that only the former truly accepts that ideas can affect history.
Thanks, Andy, for these really helpful comments. I am curious how the horizontal/vertical distinction maps onto older debates about the history of “ideas” versus “meaning” and canonical versus popular.
Larry,
The directional metaphor got me to thinking that the best kind of intellectual history–maybe even of history in general–works at the diagonal!
My questions echo Andy’s:
I’m curious to hear more about how you distinguish intellectual from cultural history in looking to “non-elite” thinkers? Is the horizontal mode essentially intellectual history, as currently defined, and the vertical, as you describe it, cultural history? Or, are there other ways of thinking about the intersections and overlaps between these two fields?
Does the attention to what you describe as the vertical level always relate to those seeking to define and control what counts as “commonsensia”? Which is to say, is the vertical always shaped by and concerned more with issues of politics and power in the way you are framing it? Can the vertical level ever be less concerned with practice, force, power? If so when and how?
Finally (Levine lurking), how does the horizontal-vertical schematic you outline relate to a broader range of expressive modes: visual art and design, music, dance?
And how does the horizontal and vertical schematic relate not only to other expressive modes of art and culture, but even to things like statistics, technologies, or other kinds of epistemological vessels of knowing (or thinking one knows)?
Michael
Michael, Your comments (and Andy’s) are so rich that I can only skim the surface in answering right now. The set of questions you ask are so good and I would love to see them debated and discussed more broadly. I think I used to see the division of labor as horizontal/intellectual and vertical/cultural but now I don’t think that’s the case anymore. In part, this is less a purely intellectual development than a question of the relative importance of intellectual and cultural history, which, I think, have flipped in the last decade or so. It strikes me that S-USIH is a good example of this–when I read the blog or attend the conferences (or read the recent Haberski/Hartman state of the field collection) I see a real diversity of approaches–both horizontal and vertical, as well as many others that probably don’t fit into either category.
As I mentioned, when I was in grad school, working with Larry Levine, the kind of cultural history I gravitated toward was, as I wrote, “the intellectual history of people and ideas that intellectual historians don’t write about” because they are not canonical. Of course, even then, at the zenith of the new cultural history, there were many other cultural approaches that were quite different. But this was the lane that I gravitated toward. And it’s interesting that as I became involved with the History of Capitalism over the last 6 or 7 years, I, along with some others, have tried to apply it to this field. Last year, I remember long Twitter battles with economists and economic historians in which i argued that the intellectual history of capitalism was as legitimate an entree into the field as economic history.
Larry–
Thanks for this thoughtful piece. I’m not sure that “horizontal” and “vertical” are entirely clear ways of getting at the distinction you’re after here. That’s partly because the terms, which seem to refer to social strata and their relations as a primary reality, get conflated with other distinctions: between conscious and unconscious forms of influence; between thought and thinking; between intellect and culture. I also think the horizontal/vertical distinction can’t help but evoke the forms of economic integration in a corporate economy, although I don’t think that’s what you were after. In any case, if we frame thought and thinking in terms of verticality, your version of it seems much more interested in “trickle up” than “trickle down”. Historians of science have traditionally made a distinction between “internalist” and “externalist” accounts, and that might be relevant here. The first seeks to explain thinking in terms of disciplinary specificity, abstracted from the larger social and cultural environment; the latter seeks to root intellectual developments in forces and factors outside the inner circle of specialized thinkers (and owes a good deal, I think, to the Marxist tradition). But Carter’s biography of Keynes is obviously externalist (looking for influences outside the sphere of economic theory), even as it evades making some of the connections between what I would describe as the wider world (horizontal!) of thought and thinking outside of Keynes’s immediate circle.
On top of all that, your essay left me wondering about the form of intellectual biography, that centers a particular thinker (rather than, say, a discourse, or a school of thought, or an idea) as the object of historical study. What’s the relationship between the particular choice of an individual thinker as the lens through which to see thinking and thought in the past, and the attention to what you are calling vertical and horizontal forms of intellectual history?
More questions than answers. Very fruitful post!
Dan,
Thanks so much for these comments. I was not entirely happy with the vertical/horizontal distinction and I think you’ve put your finger on some additional reasons why these might not be the best terms to capture what I was trying to say. (I too was thinking of horizontal and vertical integration from business history and I don’t think the parallel is what I was aiming for.) On twitter, the political theorist Bonnie Honig had some really interesting things to say about the horizontal/vertical distinction by talking about Moby Dick and the fact that sailors could only get a perspective on the horizontal by climbing the mast.
I do think that Carter’s book does a good job of exploring both internalist developments within economists and the externalist intellectual world that Keynes both emerged from and shaped.
As I tried to say, I’m also wary of mapping horizontal/vertical onto “top-down” and “bottom-up” approaches.
Anyway, thanks so much for this engagement. You’ve given our community a lot to think about.
I haven’t read Carter’s The Price of Peace, but intellectual biography, pretty much regardless of how “vertical” or “horizontal” the approach, can be an excellent and engrossing way of illuminating a whole swath of intellectual and/or political history, especially if the figure chosen knew a lot of people and corresponded or otherwise interacted with them. I suppose that’s an old-fashioned bias in the sense that it tilts toward subjects who knew a lot of influential types, “movers and shakers,” or else just knew a lot of interesting people.
My reading of biography and/or intellectual biography has been limited. That said, a few examples of the genre done skillfully and with a good deal of attention to the context, period, and intellectual currents come to mind. One is Ronald Steel’s Walter Lippmann and the American Century. Another, very different and more sprawling and detailed sort of book (but arguably kind of similar in certain relevant respects) is Michael Holroyd’s three-volume biography of Bernard Shaw (of which the first volume is the only one I’ve read). The third that comes to mind off the top of my head is Peter Conradi’s Iris Murdoch: A Life, which necessarily goes into the fairly tight-knit, insular world of British intellectual life in the mid-twentieth century. A lot of the standard works on, say, the American “founders” could doubtless serve as examples here too, but for the most part I haven’t read them.
Btw, the internalist/externalist distinction is also a “thing” when it comes to the disciplinary history of international relations, or the history of international thought more broadly. But I won’t go into that.
A brief further comment perhaps a little more directly related to the post. I think it’s true, as Prof Glickman writes, that, reversing Keynes’s famous quote, “practical men” can originate ideas that intellectuals later elaborate on (knowingly or otherwise). But also eventually the phenomenon becomes sort of circular, perhaps. So, for example, let’s say, with Glickman, that businessmen and editorialists opposed to the New Deal voiced arguments that were later echoed or elaborated on in the anti-planning works of Lippmann and Hayek. Presumably Milton Friedman, for instance, read and was impressed by Hayek. Then Friedman’s own popularizing work had (again, presumably) an influence on conservative pundits and politicians, increasing the popularity of the Reaganite/Goldwater version of “free enterprise” or “free market” ideology.
So, on this story, the arrow of influence, knowing or otherwise, runs from anti-New Deal businessmen and editorialists (who were not self-identified intellectuals) to Hayek and Lippmann (who were intellectuals) to economists like Friedman (ditto) and then to politicians, (other) pundits, and the public at large. No doubt this is a very considerable oversimplification, but it might suggest that the ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ dimensions at some point get a little hard to fully disentangle.
Louis,
I don’t have time to fully respond to this right now, but just wanted to thank you for this excellent formulation. I think you are exactly right and I tried to to suggest (but perhaps not very clearly) that this the vertical and horizontal are somewhat artificial categories and that there is a lot of interpenetration. To take one more example from my research on working-class political economists, it is important to note that they were basing their comments on their readings of the classical political economists, like Smith, Ricardo, and Mill. So on the one hand, my reference to them is “vertical” but they themselves were relying on methods that we might call “horizontal.” So I really appreciate this formulation.
Your comments on vertical readings evoked for me Quentin Skinner’s hermeneutic method and Michel Foucault’s genealogies of discursive repertoires. In these two approaches, causation is less important than clarifying the fields of meaning available and how those changed over time. How relevant are these approaches for •Free Enterprise, an American History•?
Richard,
Thanks for these comments and the question. The issue of causation is complicated. Part of what I wanted to say in this review essay is that if we examine different strands of thought we might also have to rethink causation. For example, in my book FREE ENTERPRISE, I argue that ideas we associate with prominent thinkers like Hayek were already in circulation in places where intellectual historians don’t often look–like the Nation’s Business, the journal of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, or in pamphlets produced by the National Association of Manufacturers, or in speeches by free enterprise politicians and business leaders. At the same time, I think you’re right that causation is not my primary interest, but rather in tracing the development of discursive fields and in particular how they become “common sense.” I’ll keep thinking about this and hope to have more to say soon.