Author Meets Critics: Angus Burgin, “Whatever Happened to American Thought? Comments on Kunal Parker, The Turn to Process and Daniel Wickberg, A History of Modern Thought, 1860-2000”

Kunal Parker’s The Turn to Process and Daniel Wickberg’s A History of American Thought are unusual in the breadth of their scope, offering accounts of the rise and fall of modernism that match the sweep and ambition of some of the great synthetic works from the heyday of American intellectual history. As such, their joint arrival provides an opening to reflect on the evolution of our field in the years since such integrative accounts were widespread.

While both authors look beyond recent historiography to engage in longue-durée conversation with historians of an earlier vintage, their implicit targets are different. Parker centers his attention on Edward Purcell’s The Crisis of Democratic Theory, now over a half-century old, as well as Dorothy Ross’s The Origins of American Social Science, which was released in 1991. Wickberg’s approach is modeled more closely after the synthetic accounts of the midcentury decades, when Commager and Curti and Gabriel wrote their classic works, and he readily acknowledge attempts to synthesize all of American intellectual history now present a “daunting challenge, rarely undertaken in the past 40 years.” So I’ll use these works to pose three questions about how synthetic accounts today can address the historical profession’s many methodological and epistemological changes since these predecessors appeared.

First, most of these prior works sought foremost to tell a story about “America.” Surveying Wickberg’s predecessors, we find Henry Steele Commager searching for something he called “the American Mind,” invoking a phrase that continued to linger as late as Rush Welter’s contribution to the Wingspread conference in 1979. The first page of Ralph Henry Gabriel’s The Course of American Democratic Thought reads: “The story of the rise of the United States and of the evolution of the American variant of Western civilization resembles a tall tale of the frontier.” Merle Curti begins his study with the problem that of explaining how “American ideas, American agencies of intellectual life, and the use made of knowledge … came to differ in America from their European counterparts.” Parker’s predecessor Dorothy Ross opened The Origins of American Social Science with the phrase: “American social science bears the distinctive mark of its national origin.” For all of these authors the contextual distinctiveness of American intellectual history was a central problem. Indeed for many of them, addressing that topic was a primary justification for the practice of American intellectual history, and the broad cultural interest in such an enterprise was a crucial reason why American intellectual historians then held a much larger place in the public consciousness.

Obviously, much has happened since those books were published, due in no small part to the dissemination of the modernist sensibilities at the center of both Parker’s and Wickberg’s accounts. Parker’s The Turn to Process documents how and why scholars came “to question all manner of established truths: settled conceptual orderings; notions of God, nature, custom, logic, morality, and rationality; and authoritative aesthetic norms.” To that list we could add the unit of the nation – a story he chronicles in his extended account of political scientists’ own turn away from centering the “state.” Over the past half-century scholars have become much more anxious about the possibility that scholarship that foregrounds the category of the nation can itself become a handmaiden to nationalism, and much more concerned that any attempt to treat the “American mind” or “American thought” as a singular entity achieves that coherence through an exclusionary logic. And this decentering has been abetted by the transnational turn, with its emphasis on the porousness of borders and the geographical diversity of intellectual networks.

Both Wickberg and Parker are very much aware of these historiographic developments. But as the titles of their books indicate, the nation persists at the very least as a narrative frame: Wickberg still chronicles the history of “American Thought,” and Parker’s story remains a history of “American Legal, Political, and Economic Thought.” They appear to have abandoned their predecessors’ interest in the distinctively American aspects of American thought, while also showing little interest in the successor project of decentering the nation. They seek to foreground neither the national distinctiveness of their stories, nor the lack thereof.

In some ways Parker’s book can be understood as a retelling of Dorothy Ross’s Origins, with its concern for the relationship between the social sciences and American exceptionalism set aside. And Wickberg’s ambivalence about these questions is clear in his chapter on the research university, where he writes that “we should not imagine that American social science was an entirely distinct thing, rather than a variant on the forms of European social thinking that informed modern thought,” but “nevertheless, the birth of American social science was indebted to strains of American ideology, as well as the corpus of European and international ideas circulating.” In such passages the national framing of these studies seems more a narrative contrivance than a deliberate object of reflection. I’m curious what both authors might say if we bring the unit of the nation into the foreground, and ask that most characteristic midcentury question: what do these stories tell us about “America,” and what, if anything at all, makes them distinctively American? And if that project has lost its interest or its feasibility, why continue to project of writing such broadly integrative histories of American thought?

My second question turns to the methodology of intellectual history. In the midcentury decades, and perhaps even as late as 1991, when Dorothy Ross published her Origins, many intellectual historians were still writing histories that self-consciously situated ideas in the context of other ideas. In the decades since then, as the number of jobs advertised for intellectual historians withered, and as skeptical questions from social historians took their toll, the methodological remit of the field has changed. Most of those who contribute to the USIH blog now situate ideas in the context of material conditions, and much of the work that focuses on ideas in the context of ideas has now taken refuge overseas.

On methodological grounds, these books seem more interested in reviving than rejecting the approaches adopted by their predecessors. For Parker the “turn to process” was a phenomenon that unfolded within disciplines, due to very specific theoretical predicaments confronted by their practitioners. Wickberg is capacious and ecumenical in his own account of the practice of intellectual history, as his landmark AHR essay “What is the History of Sensibilities?” manifests — but apart from (and even in) one chapter on the history of the research university, his overwhelming focus in this book is on ideas in the context of other ideas.

I’m curious whether the authors think there is another way to tell these stories that brings material contexts more clearly into the foreground. David Harvey could serve as a provocative interlocutor here. Harvey attributes a sharper break between modernism and postmodernism than Wickberg, but in broad thematic terms his book The Condition of Postmodernity discusses the rise and dissemination of many of the same logics that Wickberg explores in his History of American Thought. Harvey’s explanation for these phenomena, however, is altogether different. In his telling shifts in the world of ideas can best be understood as responses to changing technological and material circumstances: capitalism entered a “crisis of overaccumulation,” which, in conjunction with a transformation in “the experience of time and space,” led aesthetics to triumph over ethics, images to become more influential than narratives, ephemerality and fragmentation to take precedence over eternal truths and unified politics, and explanations to shift from the realm of the political economy to a presumption that cultural and political practices were “autonomous.” So for Harvey the most relevant context for the discourses Wickberg discusses could be found not in theoretical predecessors but rather in changing material conditions. Meanwhile, Harvey’s Brief History of Neoliberalism forms an obvious contrast to Parker’s book, and especially Parker’s treatment of the economics profession’s turn to technique — attributing the theoretical endeavors of Hayek and his colleagues less to their responses to problematics internal to their disciplines, and more to their embrace of a hegemonic project facilitated by corporate and financial elites.

One need not agree with Harvey’s accounts to invoke him in asking whether the stories told in these books are overemphasize intellectual context and devote insufficient attention to the technological and economic conditions that may have precipitated the discursive shifts they chart. How would their accounts look different if the authors broadened their contextual engagements, thinking less about how ideas respond to preceding ideas, and more about how ideas emerged in response to the changing material circumstances of intellectual life?

Finally, I’d be interested to hear more about how both authors see their books in relation to our present moment. When Merle Curti wrote The Growth of American Thought, he saw it as speaking directly to an era marked by “the cult of widespread prosperity, the substantial basis for it, and the related consciousness of abundance,” and as counteracting a resulting absence of “fundamental debate.” Purcell delivered The Crisis of Democratic Theory to a scholarly community that he saw as having embraced a relativist theory that had itself “become an ideology.” Obviously the conditions of the United States in the twenty-first century are very different. So: why tell these stories today? Wickberg’s History of American Thought is ambiguous on that point. Invoking Hegel, he positions the book as “neither a progressive tale of emancipation from the intellectual cages of the past, nor a tragic tale of alienation and loss… Rather it is both at the same time.” And Parker urges us to avoid reconfirming any of our present-day normative beliefs through his account, saying that he approaches his subjects’ “condition of living in and with methods, processes, and techniques” with deliberate “equanimity.” As a fellow historian, I share both authors’ ironic sensibilities; but in these closing weeks of 2024, I also cannot help but wonder if our moment requires something more than ironism. Can such broadly synthetic histories of American thought still prove useful for readers who harbor hopes of influencing its future?