Author Meets Critics: Casey Eilbert, “The Making of Modernism: Comments on Kunal Parker, The Turn to Process and Daniel Wickberg, A History of Modern Thought, 1860-2000”

In these recent works in U.S. intellectual history, Daniel Wickberg and Kunal Parker offer readers thorough histories of the major developments in modern American thought, valuable interpretations of the modernist paradigm and its consequences, and excellent material for thinking about ideas, the contexts that give rise to them, and the processes of ideological change.

Daniel Wickberg’s A History of American Thought, 1860-2000 is an overview of the major intellectual developments that have defined the modern United States. The book is a work of synthesis, and from the outset, Wickberg acknowledges scholars’ wariness of the genre. But in spite of his intellectual humility about the limitations of synthetic projects, the book’s coverage is   extensive and convincingly makes the case that we might need works that do “something different than specialization and detailed exploration”(Wickberg x). A History of American Thought introduces to its many potential audiences –  intellectual historians, undergraduate and graduate students, the broader non-academic public – to key subjects in American intellectual history, to name just a few: pragmatism and Progressivism, the “revolt against formalism” and the advent of cultural relativism and religious pluralism, and the evolution of ideas about gender, sexuality, and race over the 20th century.

The book also considers the project of intellectual history more broadly, and its useful introduction is worth paragraphing. “We create forms of historical study defined by the objects and activities of people in the past,” Wickberg tells the reader, describing intellectual history as that which foregrounds “thinking and thought as its central objects.” Less concerned with the validity of ideas and arguments, it emphasizes questions like “‘what is being said,’ ‘where did it come from,’ ‘where did it go,’ and ‘why.’” Wickberg introduces readers to the notion that “all ideas are false but important” (Wickberg 4). Equally false for Wickberg is the perceived binary between close reading and contextual analysis. For intellectual historians, sources can be both “containers of thought” and “containers of information,” used to learn about the past and the ideas that emerged within it (Wickberg 7).

In Kunal Parker’s The Turn to Process, we see this project in action. Parker’s “containers” are legal, political, and economic thought between 1870 and 1970. Parker shows how in these fields, established truths became unsettled, making it so that “methods, processes, and techniques – ways of seeking truth – came to enjoy ever greater importance, moving into the foreground… relative to the ends toward which they were directed” (Parker 5).The first part of the book depicts a world of settled beliefs: in common law, a truly national people, and in economic concepts of labor. The disruptions of the late 19^th century, Parker argues, made this knowledge insufficient. In response, the disciplines of law, politics, and economics – each addressed in their own detailed essays within the book – became newly concerned with history and psychology and deemphasized their earlier truths, reimagining them as processes and methods (Parker 22).

The Turn to Process convincingly demonstrates these intellectual shifts. And it also connects them in interesting ways to an important material development of broad scholarly interest: the rise of the administrative state. The “turn to process,” Parker argues, legitimated the administrative state as “renderings of law, democracy, and markets as methods, techniques, and processes” accommodated its development (Parker 14). Law was reimagined as mere procedure, a transformation embodied in the 1946 Administrative Procedure Act (Parker 101-102). Likewise, in the study of politics, it “was freely admitted and accepted that administration could engulf politics,” with administrative scholars like Woodrow Wilson and Frank Goodnow at the forefront of the field (Parker 179).

Both works are vast in scope and articulate and demonstrate what intellectual history can achieve at its best. They synthesize major developments in modern American thought while offering more specific insights about their core subject: modernism. Wickberg tells readers that modernism is “characterized by a consciousness of innovation, of the need for new ways or imagining knowledge, nature, society, human beings, morality, beliefs, and values” and that it is the overriding feature of American thought between 1860 and 2000 (Wickberg 1). For Parker, modernism has two key features: a questioning of “all manner of established truths,” and a tendency to subject all emergent truths to “historical and psychological critique” (Parker 4-5). For Parker, it’s an orientation best exemplified by philosopher John Dewey, whose emphasis on “doing, making, building, acting, [and] manipulating” and insistence that “thought only acquires meaning in and as action” made him “a celebrated exemplar of the modernist Zeitgeist” (Parker 7, 5).

In their studies of modernism, both works emphasize a new origin point for the splintering of fixed truth in American life. Both narratives begin in the second half of the 19^th century, pushing back against the sense that the 1970s were first the “age of fracture” in American ideas. Parker articulates this compellingly when he argues that this “seventies fracture” is better understood as a “fracturing of an earlier fracture” (Parker 302). For both authors, the big break is a century prior, in the 1860s and 1870s.

This new origin point for modernism’s ascent raises questions about how, when, and why ideas develop and achieve influence, even hegemony.  Underpinning both accounts of modernism’s rise are theories of intellectual development and questions about how ideas evolve and gain currency.

In Wickberg’s account, the conditions which engendered modernism appear twofold. On one level, the book suggests that intellectual transformation begot more intellectual transformation. Charles Darwin’s 1859 On the Origins of Species upended the “fixed categories, universal essences, [and] firm boundaries” of the natural order, opening the door for pluralism, relativism, and anti-foundationalism more broadly in the realms of science, social science, and human values (Wickberg 17). On another, the modernist viewpoint seems to be the product of material changes in the late 19^th century. Modernists, Wickberg tells readers, “could not help but engage the dynamic world they faced” – one shaped by, among other things – “a new economy defined by industrial production and market capitalism” (Wickberg 1). The forces maintaining modernism’s influence throughout the 20^th century are less clear.  Economic circumstances changed, but modernism retained its currency. And diverse – even competing – intellectual movements embraced modernist thinking even when they disagreed on other matters. It begs the question: what gave modernism its staying power in a period otherwise rife with social, cultural, and economic change?

Parker’s account is similarly attentive to both the material and intellectual underpinnings of modernist thought. Modernist thinkers were “compelled to confront urgent problems for which older knowledges had not equipped them,” among them political economic issues like “the management of large cities” and “the regulation of capital markets” (Parker 19). Moreover, Parker argues that modernism had material manifestations in the growth of the administrative state, the development of which likely reinforced its power. More purely “intellectual” causes also feature in Parker’s account of modernism’s rise. Like Wickberg, Parker gives Darwin a central place in modernism’s ascent. Parker also offers an interesting discussion of Tocqueville’s perspective on American democracy’s relationship to concepts of truth. “According to Tocqueville, American democracy’s destruction of hierarchy makes Americans question all received forms of knowledge. At the same time, American democracy’s ceaseless and turbulent motion makes Americans doubt whether truth can ever be stable,” Parker explains (Parker 68). It’s a view that suggests that modernism – even absent the disruptions to social and economic life of the late 19^th century, or Darwinian evolutionary theory’s arrival in the United States –would’ve become the dominant mode of thought in modern America.

Taken together, these two accounts compel readers to think further about the mechanisms by which ideas – like modernism – emerge and maintain their power. They offer myriad ways to conceive of ideas: as the products of the direct influence of intellectuals, as the fruits of practical efforts to explain the material world, as necessary corollaries to particular political systems, as the inevitable outcomes of crises, or as the cumulative products of successive revolutions in thought.

And above all, they stress their longevity. Wickberg’s discussion of “Cultural Revolutions and Ruptures” introduces readers to thinkers like Quentin Skinner and Thomas Kuhn who opposed what they regarded as “false continuities between vastly different thinkers” and “rejected ways to think about history that involved notions of evolutionary development and continuity” (Wickberg 203, 206). But what emerges in these accounts of modernism rise – and continued dominance – is not a theory of “revolution and rupture” but of continuity. Neither Wickberg nor Parker seem to suggest modernism’s decline, instead the depicting the 1970s “fracture” they treat as their endpoints as a doubling down on modernist skepticism. Modernism hasn’t been without its critics – among them Reinhold Niebuhr, Dewey’s intellectual rival, and postwar Weberian intellectuals alarmed by the modern emphasis on means at the expense of ends. But this anti-modernist perspective still remains a minority one. What theory of ideological change can account for modernism’s dominance for over century? And what would it to take to bring about its end?