Andrew Seal on Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen’s *The Ideas that Made America: A Brief History*

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that U.S. intellectual history can be told as a story: a single, continuous narrative with clear throughlines and persistent dynamics. What is the form of that story—what is its shape?[1] Many historians have attempted to answer that question with ambitious syntheses, and in The Ideas that Made America: A Brief History, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen makes the case that the intellectual history of the United States (and its colonial predecessors) is best thought of as a “conversation.”

Over the course of the centuries, Americans learned and self-taught, native born and immigrant, religious and secular, and left and right have contributed to this long conversation by offering new arguments and key terms for Americans to think about the world, themselves, their truth, and their America. No one, so far, has been successful in answering these questions once and for all. They only came up with provisional explanations and then posed new questions. Perhaps we should not want it any other way. And so the conversation of American thought continues (Ideas that Made America [henceforth ITMA], 180).

Ratner-Rosenhagen wrote this book to introduce a broad audience to U.S. intellectual history, and thus generally keeps to the road more traveled by. When she takes the reader to a particular location to observe the lives of intellectuals, it is mostly to New England we go, and when she examines a text, it’s likely to be philosophy, theology, or (less frequently) social science.

There are, of course, excellent reasons to synthesize rather than to diverge from the standard narratives when writing for a general audience—and I will discuss some of those reasons later. I want to use this review, however, not to retrace the route Ratner-Rosenhagen covers (she astutely notes “that in order to capture the imaginations of thinkers from the past, we need to be as intellectually peripatetic as they were” {5}), but instead to dig into that metaphor of U.S. intellectual history as a conversation, to think about where it places the reader vis-à-vis the intellectuals of the past, and what it presumes about why anyone—professional historian, undergraduate, or autodidact— is motivated to learn about history through the lives and works of intellectuals. ITMA raises big questions that we as intellectual historians mostly try quite hard not to confront head on, and because this review is for intellectual historians (and the lay readers dedicated enough to be following this site), I want to take the advantage of the opportunity.

Let us start by considering how “conversation” stands askew from the book’s title. “The Ideas that Made America” suggests that the motor of the book’s story—what keeps the action moving—will be abstractions: unit ideas, Begriffe, keywords, bodies of thought, what you will. But it is individual people rather than ideas who have conversations, and the book in fact does progress through history by jumping from biography to biography, life to life, rather than from text to text, word to word. In this book—as in American Nietzsche, Ratner-Rosenhagen’s previous book—what first catches the reader’s interest is the jauntiness or complexity of a human character, and it is curiosity about the human individual’s quirks and quiddities that pulls the reader toward engagement with that person’s ideas.

One might think that this approach “humanizes” intellectual history and makes it more accessible. The motif of “conversation” should—one might expect—promise a highly active role for the reader, but the reality can also be quite the opposite. In a given day, we take part in many conversations—we may even dominate some—but there are likely others in which we feel marginalized or from which we are deliberately excluded. Some we can only overhear or experience secondhand. “Conversation” is not automatically an inclusive structure for the story of intellectual history, unless it is a one-way inclusivity—being allowed to listen in to the table talk of the intellectuals Ratner-Rosenhagen profiles.

For some readers, silent observation may be what they desire: it is in fact the piquancy of eavesdropping that Ratner-Rosenhagen recommends to the reader of ITMA as the most compelling reason for using intellectual history to learn about the past.

The reason I became interested in American intellectual history, why it still holds my attention, why I love teaching it, and why my students seem to share the thrill of it is that it is a way to eavesdrop on the past. Its intent is not to spy on the inner thoughts of unsuspecting dead people. Rather, it is fueled by the desire to come into contact with interesting people we might not otherwise know but for the records of their minds they left behind (2).

I was troubled by this passage when I read it, by its suggestion that the appeal of intellectual history lies not in the experience of our own thought processes, sparked by encounters with the unfamiliar and the apposite, but in the vicarious, even subordinate experience of witnessing someone else’s brilliant and interesting mind at work. This attitude seems to me too reverent, too happy just to be in the company of great (dead) minds, to rub shoulders with genius.

My feelings of unease with this vision of a deferential intellectual history increased when I read a little later that Ratner-Rosenhagen sees “not… professional historians but… the general reader” as the ideal audience for this book, “like my mailman, my political representatives, my children’s piano teacher, my hairdresser, and my mom.”[2] Ratner-Rosenhagen roots this goal in the Wisconsin Idea, which she describes as the idea “that historical consciousness should not simply be the core of our discipline but that it should also be the discipline of an educated citizenry.” But is there not something surprisingly passive in a “consciousness” that is acquired through “eavesdropping,” that is meant as a “discipline?”

I am entering territory too philosophical for a mere book review, but perhaps we can draw back by asking a practical question: what would a mail carrier want from a book on U.S. intellectual history—what would they hope to find in its pages? For Ratner-Rosenhagen, the answer again imagines the reader as passive and even somewhat awed by the intellectuals of other times:

What most concerns us today might have seemed ludicrous to our ancestors. And what our ancestors perceived as having great urgency might have somehow become irrelevant for us. Why? That is what intellectual history tries to figure out. In seeking the answers, we achieve a little epistemic humility, which is indeed humbling, but also strangely energizing and ennobling (6).

Let us set aside the normative question of what intellectual history should do—is “epistemic humility” what the general reader wants to learn from intellectual history? Surely not everyone feels the same frisson Ratner-Rosenhagen describes as a corollary of being humbled, and I am even more skeptical that such a complex sensation is the desired effect all general readers crave.

But asking what the general reader wants may be putting the cart before the horse. What do we as professional historians want from the history we read and write and teach? U.S. intellectual history has proceeded (and, relatively speaking, succeeded) for the past decade or so by muting internal disagreements about not only methodology but also motivation—why we do what we do, and what we want out of it—and attitude—how we orient ourselves conceptually and even affectively to the past. Is history a drama that we re-stage in our minds and overhear the actors’ lines with a kind of awe? Or are there other ways to grab hold of the past, even to treat it roughly, not necessarily with disrespect but without deference?

Consider this categorical declaration from ITMA: “The most reliable commentators on a period are often those who lived through its changes” (52). What precisely does “reliable” mean here? Is Ratner-Rosenhagen registering a claim about the factual completeness of contemporary accounts versus those written later, or about the greater authenticity—even the moral authority—of certain intellectually gifted eyewitnesses? The specific application of the claim for contemporaneity is to the American Scholar himself: “It was as if Emerson had a divining rod to the inner yearnings, worries, and inconsistencies of antebellum Americans’ ‘modern mind’” (ibid.).

Did he? How would we test that proposition? “Antebellum Americans” covers a lot of territory, and this kind of claim takes intellectual historians back to the field’s old tendency to expatiate airily about “the American mind” or “the Victorian mind” or the “modern temper.” Chastened by social historians’ tendency to hold our feet to the fire, intellectual historians backed away in the 1970s from generalizations about “the x mind” or the “climate of opinion” to be found in y Era. Do we really want to return to that older mode of writing and lecturing?

The danger I fear is that the “conversations” which are best suited to the grand abstractions of writing about the “American mind” tend to have a very narrow set of interlocutors—the kind of text which we look to an Emerson or a James to provide is a genre with a dominant color and a typical sex. If we base our stories of U.S. intellectual history on these conversations, we may now put in a few more non-white men at the discussion table—a Margaret Fuller here, a Frederick Douglass there—but we will be offering our readers and students roughly the same narratives that they could have read and heard forty or even sixty years ago.

It was clearly not ITMA’s goal to be radically revisionist, but it demonstrates this regression from time to time. For example, I looked at some of the instances where the word “conversation” shows up in the book and noticed a strange pattern. When “conversation” or “dialogue” or “debate” appears in the context of cross-racial exchanges, it does so under a peculiar cloud of failure: non-whites tend to either have too much language or not enough. Speaking of the “extraordinary linguistic diversity” of Indigenous peoples in the immediate post-contact era, Ratner-Rosenhagen asks the reader to take on the perspective of a European settler, who she speculates

felt that they were confronted by a most imposing, unscalable Tower of Babel… For British Protestant settlers, this surely contributed to their chronic fear of being surrounded by chaos. The scale and nature of the linguistic barriers were contributing factors to European encounters with natives ending in violent warfare rather than temperate debate (22).[3]

This claim is, first of all, tendentious—consider the syntactical contortions of the last sentence as it avoids holding Europeans accountable for their violent acts[4]—but its implications go even farther when coupled with Ratner-Rosenhagen’s insistence that, although it would be nice to be able to begin the story of American intellectual history with “Native Americans… as historical subjects and not objects of Europeans’ analysis and scrutiny,” such a beginning is impossible. “As intellectual history seeks to recover and interpret ideas, and preferably from reliable evidence wherever possible, this study will privilege the beginning for which there is much sturdier and more extensive documentation” (11). We would like to include their worldviews in our story, but the Europeans either shot or converted them, so what are you going to do?

Confident statements have been made many times before about the sparseness or absence of “reliable evidence” left behind by non-whites; those statements quite often turn out to be injudicious if not ignorant. The study of Indigenous literacies is, in fact, currently a field of rapid and exuberant growth—it is not my field, but it seems clear to me that the idea that ITMA could not start with the ideas made by Native Americans is simply not true: the material to do so exists.[5]

In a similar fashion, ITMA also emphasizes deprivation as the predominant intellectual condition of African Americans, at least in the nineteenth century.[6] Ratner-Rosenhagen paints the arguments of African Americans about slavery as instinctual, formed out of raw experience and not out of reflection, not grounded in philosophical principles, but in visceral rejection of the pain of enduring enslavement. “The main difference [between white and Black abolitionists] is that white authors had the luxury of coming to these ideas by way of books and polite conversation. The black authors of slave narratives, by contrast, had to come to them by way of a daily struggle for survival” (72). This is simply an outdated understanding of Black abolitionists and intellectuals, and the misfortune is that it deters readers from seeking out the quite sophisticated Black-authored texts that abundantly exist—and the even more abundant secondary literature on those texts.

The Ideas that Made America captures the present state of the field at a pivotal moment, one which demands clarity about what kind of intellectual history we want, and what we want from intellectual history. It is—no pun intended—an excellent conversation-starter, and it does all intellectual historians the service of bringing to the surface issues that we have, in the interest of revitalizing the field, too often tried to keep submerged. Let us hope that we can take Ratner-Rosenhagen’s lead and think about and express to one another just what about intellectual history holds our attention, what excites us, what made us want to dig into the past with the tools of the intellectual historian.

[1] forma, Latin for shape or outline.

[2] Brad Baranowski, “Wisdom and History: An Interview with Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen,” The Past and the Present: 2018 News for Alumni and Friends from the Department of History (College of Letters & Science, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2018), 11. Available at <https://history.wisc.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/202/2018/12/history-newsletter-2018.pdf>.

[3] The next sentence—“However, the difficulties arising from the extraordinary array of indigenous tongues went far deeper than impeding conversation”—is where the specific word “conversation” shows up, but the sentences I quoted are just as pertinent.

[4] Ratner-Rosenhagen overlooks the ample possibilities of gestural communication as mediating between mutually incomprehensible languages. A recent study which considers this angle is Céline Carayon, Eloquence Embodied: Nonverbal Communication among French and Indigenous Peoples in the Americas (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2019). Carayon also published an article on this topic in AHR in 2016.

[5] See, for instance, Alyssa Mt. Pleasant, Caroline Wigginton, and Kelly Wisecup, “Materials and Methods in Native American and Indigenous Studies,” Early American Literature 53.2 (2018): 407-444; much of the work of Birgit Brander Rasmussen: Queequeg’s Coffin: Indigenous Literacies and Early American Literature (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012); “Indigenous Language and Literacy” in The Routledge Companion to Native American Literature (New York: Routledge, 2015); and “Native American Literature, 901 AD? A New Reading of the Battiste Good Wintercount,” PMLA 137.2 (March 2022); as well as Edgar Garcia, Signs of the Americas: A Poetics of Pictography, Hieroglyphs, and Khipu (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020); Jon Parmenter, “The Meaning of Kaswentha and the Two Row Wampum Belt in Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) History: Can Indigenous Oral Tradition Be Reconciled with the Documentary Record?” Journal of Early American History 3 (2013): 82-109; Lisa T. Brooks, “Corn and Her Story Traveled: Reading North American Graphic Texts in Relation to Oral Traditions,” in Thinking, Recording, and Writing History in the Ancient World (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 2014); Angel Calcaterra, Literary Indians: Aesthetics and Encounter in American Literature to 1920 (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2018); and Jerome McGann, “Colonial Exceptionalism on Native Grounds: American Literature before American Literature,” Critical Inquiry 45 (Spring 2019): 640-658, among many other secondary studies of Indigenous literacies and literatures. And for an excellent historiographical critique of the tendency to dismiss Indigenous history as not having left a sufficiently permanent record (textually, environmentally, or politically) to include in more traditional accounts, see Jean O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).

[6] In fact, there is a similar passage to the one I analyze above, but with reference to African Americans and World War II: “African American authors did not need a cataclysmic war to tell them that the world was out of whack or that justice was a chimera, or to feel a deep and abiding sense of cosmic abandonment” (143).