We are pleased to announce the winner of the 2023 Dorothy Ross Prize for the best article in U.S. intellectual history. This award goes to an emerging scholar, defined as a current graduate student or a scholar within five years of receiving the PhD. The article must have appeared in an academic journal in the 2022 calendar year and may be submitted by the author, editor, or others. The winner receives $500.
This year’s award goes to Gili Kliger (Harvard University), “Translating God on the Borders of Sovereignty,” American Historical Review, 2022, 127(3): 1102-1130. We thank the prize committee of Tim Lacy (Chair), Francesca Bordogna, and Guy Emerson Mount. Here is the committee’s statement on Gili Kliger’s prize-winning scholarship:
“The 2023 Ross Prize Selection Committee thanks everyone who applied for this year’s prize. Our 2023 winner is Gili Kliger’s “Translating God on the Borders of Sovereignty” (American Historical Review (Sept. 2022): 1102-1130.
Building on the international literature of colonial sovereignty that has emerged in recent decades (particularly Charles S. Maier), Gili Kliger, working in a comparative mode, expands on linguistic and alternate models of sovereignty to incorporate Protestant missionary work and indigenous ideas of an all-powerful being into a North American context covering the Dakota, Algonquin, and Iroquois peoples. While the topics of translation and sovereignty are not strictly new ground in this historiographical arena of indigeneity and postcolonialism, Kliger deftly applies that framework, with depth and style, to power relations on the Anglo-American colonial frontier. She focuses on single words and vernacular print to chart “the way ideas move–or indeed to not move–across borders, both linguistic and spatial” (p. 1109). Kliger draws in missionary work from New Zealand and other south Pacific islands to bolster her arguments about the workings in North America. “On the fraught terrain of a frontier both profane and sacred,” Kliger wrote that all parties in conversation about nature and the meaning of power “understood that answers to such questions went to the heart, equally, of spiritual life and political existence” (p. 1123). On resistance and anticolonialism, she writes that “if the Christian God provided a means and idiom through which to assert or contest a certain kind of sovereign power, untranslatable God words challenged that power…by putting forward a different way of thinking about the very meaning of sovereignty”–for instance “as power shared with land” (p. 1125). Kliger’s essay rests a diverse array of sources, solid historiography, and erudition. It stands as a superlative example of how comparative intellectual history strengthens and expands U.S. intellectual history. As such, it was a unanimous selection by the committee.
Our 2023 runner-up is Daniel Coleman (University of Cambridge), “Getting Tough or Rolling Back the State? Why Neoliberals Disagreed on a Guaranteed Minimum Income,” Modern Intellectual History (2022): 1-28. Daniel Coleman takes a little understood and underexplored topic–support by some U.S. conservatives and/or neoliberals for a guaranteed income–and explains its origins, debates about it, and its demise. In the process of charting a heretofore obscure conversation that began in the 1940s and ended, for American right-wing neoliberals, in the 1970s with the Nixon administration, Coleman puts on display some internal complexities in the Mont Pelerin Society orbit. The neoliberal continuum for reducing the size of the welfare state moved, on one end, from conservative technocrat Milton Friedman and his “negative income tax” (NIT), as well as his ally George Stigler, to the moral, paternalist, or “rehabilitationist’ paradigm” that included Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Henry Hazlitt (“the most persistent opponent”) and, ultimately, Ronald Reagan (p. 3, 15). Coleman shows how this debate was about more than policy; among American-style neoliberals, “it represented fundamental disagreements on the meanings and obligations of citizenship” (p. 4). Friedman argued that the NIT gave the poor freedom to choose, worked against geographical concentrations of poverty, and abolished the welfare bureaucracy, while the paternalists lamented its negative moral effect of giving the poor the freedom not to work at all (i.e., eliding the deserving/undeserving poor distinction). Coleman then shows how this came to a head in the Nixon administration–and demonstrates, ultimately, why the idea could not completely die among neoliberals, reemerging in the early 2000s in writings by James Buchanan and Charles Murray. This commendable essay rests on a solid foundation of primary and secondary sources.”
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