Author Meets Critics: Response by Dan Wickberg, Modernism as a Category in American Intellectual History

I want to begin with a few comments about Kunal Parker’s The Turn to Process, and especially its relation to my own book, and then turn to some of the thoughtful comments and criticisms from Paul Murphy, Casey Eilbert, and Angus Burgin. My goal is to identify what I think the strengths of my book are, and where its limitations and failings lie.

Parker and I have written very different kinds of books, but ones I think of as largely complementary. My aim has been comprehensive and synthetic; my book lacks the depth and analytical focus, let alone the use of evidence and quotation, we find in The Turn to Process, but it shares a thematic concern with modernism as a body of thought, and especially as a body of social thought. And in providing a more sweeping and general account, I think it sets something of a context for the kinds of arguments Parker makes in his book.  Both books suggest that a longer time frame than is often customary for American historians, yields a different vision of continuity and change than the one produced by period specialists. For most scholars, the term “modernism” invokes an aesthetic category—the ink spilled on modernism as a movement in literature and the visual and performing arts, far exceeds that on social sciences, philosophy, and religion. A notable exception is Dorothy Ross’s 1994 edited volume, Modernist Impulses in the Human Sciences 1870-1930.  The shift from the aesthetic to the social is exemplified by Parker’s clever invocation of the artist Jackson Pollock, whose mid-century drip paintings put process over content or, perhaps, process as content, as a central aesthetic concern.  By introducing Pollock’s work on the first page of a book (and on the cover!) about academic legal thought, political science, and economics, Parker signals that the three objects of his concern, each treated in a separate essay, are part of a much broader intellectual and cultural shift that shares with the arts and humanities a set of concerns and challenges.

The challenge here is to see the turn away from three distinct antebellum foundational concepts as partaking of a common pattern, partly because Parker’s choice is to challenge those who would treat the history of academic disciplines in internal terms—as a story of, for instance, economists developing their discipline in response to other economists, a story economists tell themselves about themselves. In the form of the book, Parker is challenging internalist historians on their own ground, treating each discipline as distinct despite all of them sharing in a common turn to method, process, technique or means in contrast to foundations and ends.  I can hardly give justice to the arguments here, but ironic process is central to the claims.  What began as a shift, in all three fields, to process as a way to deal with the unstable world of change, resulted in a conservative reinvention of process and method as content and substance. The final irony in the book, in my reading, is that after having given a historical processual account, Parker concludes that historical thinking is our own modernist problem, since it encourages a passive contextualism in looking at other social science, stripping those practices of substantive moral purpose. Given how much time Parker spends explicating his own process, to find ourselves at the end with the idea that our history has been, if I may put it in metaphysical terms, on “the wrong side of history,” is simultaneously liberating and deflating.

I learned a lot from Parker’s analysis about disciplines I knew less about.  While some of the thinkers that come up in his account appear in mine as well—Thorstein Veblen, Walter Lippmann, John Dewey, Friedrich Hayek—, most of them don’t. My discussion veers more toward sociology, anthropology, and history in its view of the social sciences.  I kept thinking, in reading The Turn to Process, why these three fields were important to him, and somehow not central to the account I gave of the late nineteenth-century research university, the turn from Victorian anthropology to cultural relativism, the rise of Progressive historiography, the Chicago School of Sociology, Cold War sociology.  I don’t think Parker’s account contradicts or in a substantial way suggests intellectual shifts at odds with the ones I portray, but I do think that it would be reasonable for a reader to ask why, given the significance of economics, law, and political science to practical application of ideas in government, institutional policy and administration, I have not engaged them or made them more significant. Choices must be made, of course, and I can justify why I chose to focus on what I did.  I think, however, that my predilection for the content of thought over its most immediate and concrete application, or as a response to concrete material conditions, explains something of the blind spot I might have. And as my generous critics acknowledge, my book is more comprehensive than one might reasonably expect given its length and limitations.

Part of what I tried to suggest, as Paul Murphy notes, is that modernist thinking led in contradictory directions, and produced diverse consequences—that the opponents and critics of progressivist thinkers were also necessarily arguing on modernist grounds—I think Parker’s analysis confirms this as well. Modernists, for instance, could be advocates for uniformity like Henry Luce, or advocates for pluralism and diversity like Alain Locke, advocates for religious liberalism like Harry Emerson Fosdick or for religious orthodoxy like J. Gresham Machen, Cold War liberals like Arthur Schlesinger or conservatives like Russell Kirk, feminists or men’s rights advocates. Murphy foregrounds the “acids of modernity,” the story of loss of faith and authority, and seems to suggest that conservative cultural critics had the more rigorous insight than the blithe optimism of the pragmatists and pluralists.   Murphy claims, if I’m reading him right, that modernist cultural conservatives such as Paul Elmer More and John Crowe Ransom, ever ready to judge modernity wanting for its failure to embrace fixed authority, provide an alternative to the kinds of modernism found in our books, willing to put belief on moral, rather than epistemic, grounds, willing to look at the dark side of modernist paeans to individual autonomy.  Having never been committed to Enlightenment foundations, they had no quibbles about embracing authority on the basis of faith rather than reason. Murphy knows much more about both thinkers than I do, but I can’t help thinking that measuring belief by its presumed salutary consequences, as both did, is a kind of processual thinking, and that Ransom, the literary critic who helped forge New Criticism in the mid-century, contributed to the method of “close reading” that moved aesthetic judgement from romantic notions of spiritual expression to the analysis of how poems work—a turn to process if there ever was one. That sounds like something in common with pragmatism, whether More and Ransom would have owned such a self conception as process thinkers.

Casey Eilbert opens a provocative line of thinking by suggesting that the causal explanation of why particular bodies of thought appear when they do is vague and inconsistent in my account.  I don’t think I can disagree. I do emphasize continuity in some fundamental ways, and suggest that, for instance, the late twentieth-century thinkers who proclaimed a break with the past were echoing earlier modernist thinkers—that so-called post-modernism is a form of modernism rather than a break from it. I tried not to write a pessimistic account focusing only on the inescapable failures of modernism to sustain transcendent purpose, but perhaps I didn’t succeed on that count, although Murphy seems to suggest that I was not pessimistic enough in failing to ask cui bono, and Eilbert that I was insufficiently optimistic in not providing space outside of modernism for its critics. Sometimes I suggest that changing political and material context help explain the development of particular bodies of thought. But Angus Burgin and Eilbert are right to see these as gestures rather than as sustained analysis. Other times I emphasize the ways in which particular intellectual shifts opened up new ways of thinking—Darwinism, pragmatism, Freudian psychoanalysis, the idea of culture, the linguistic turn, the discovery of DNA.  But I largely avoid the kind of focus on causal explanation, in part because it demands a kind of intellectual investment in arguments that can’t be sustained in the form of the synthetic account I give. I wanted to keep the focus on the “what”—the multiple forms of thought that constitute the object of my analysis—rather than the “why,” but it obviously can’t be a historical account of thought if there aren’t contextual explanations and a sense that bodies of thought were responding to previous ways of thinking and aiming to solve particular kinds of intellectual problems presented by different contextual situations.  It’s not an intellectually satisfying answer, even if true, to say I would have had to write a book twice as long to do what they suggest.

But as Burgin indicates, the choice to focus more on material conditions is also a choice to focus less on intellectual ones. And here I think I’m on stronger ground, precisely because we can get the kind of perspective that Burgin wants by looking at the dominant practice of intellectual history today, and its alternative is not as widely available.  The return of a longue duree approach, I think almost necessarily emphasizes continuity at the expense of thinking of thought as critical intelligence responding to immediate problems presented by a changing world.  If we want to understand why people respond to changing material conditions in the way they do, we need to understand the tracks of thought they have inherited and that present them with the terms of possibility in which they can formulate responses to immediate problems.  I don’t think contemporary intellectual historiography does that enough, although I think I can point to important works in the present that do, so my choice here is compensatory.

Also, a note on the contrast that Burgin makes between Parker and my books, on the one hand, and David Harvey’s materialist analysis of the origins of postmodern thought on the other. My own tendency here is to see Harvey’s intervention in the late 1980s, although I don’t discuss it in A History of American Thought 1860-2000, as part of a modernist attempt to give Marxism a voice in the culture wars at the end of the twentieth century, a moment in which the Marxist left and the neo-conservative right converged on a critique of Deconstruction and the linguistic turn; Marxist ironists are never happy when irony comes for them. Harvey and other commentators (Jameson, Lyotard, etc.) were also following out the attempt to see a rupture between the high modernism operative from the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, and the newer version of modernist thought that they subjected to sustained criticism for its radical epistemic challenges to modernism itself.  In other words, Harvey’s text would be a primary source for me—one to be explained by changing patterns of thought in the late twentieth century, rather than as an analytic frame outside of those patterns of thought. As I indicate in my book, we do have to rely on the modernist frames of thought that are both our historical objects and the lens through which we view them, but my eye is turned more frequently to the intellectual conditions of modern thought, than to adopting points of view that try to convert modernism into a stable base of analysis and grounded critique.

Burgin also raises a question about the role “America” plays in Parker and my accounts. This is trickier—I have sought in my career to overcome what I regard as a parochial view of American intellectual history, whether coming from Europeanists who see modernism wholly in European terms, or Americanists who have set up a problem of national exceptionalism or imagined an “American Mind.” My touchstones have been transnational works like James Kloppenberg’s Uncertain Victory, Daniel Rogers’s Atlantic Crossings, Leslie Butler’s Critical Americans, Angus Burgin’s The Great Persuasion, Ruben Flores’s Backroads Pragmatists, and Keisha Blain’s To Set the World on Fire—the list, of course, goes on. But I have also keenly appreciated works from Dorothy Ross, Sarah Igo, Louis Menand and Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen that have put the figure of America at the center, perhaps insisting that thought in the United States is not simply the weaker cousin of the profound modernism of Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger and Foucault. But American intellectual history has always been more about sensibilities and modes of thought than about a canon of “great” thinkers—Wiliam James, John Dewey, W.E.B. DuBois, and Judith Butler not withstanding.  Combine this with taking seriously the historiographical anxiety about reproducing nationalist ideology, and I have been led to a concern that the turn to transnational frameworks and decentering America as the focus of study should be subject to a similar critique—to what extent is transnationality, borderlands study, etc. a kind of globalized or neoliberal expression, Turnerian frontierism in a new key, even if couched as a critique of modernist triumphalism? So, perhaps this is why I land on what Burgin calls my “characteristic ambivalence” and ambiguity.

Burgin’s question of what American intellectual history, as presented in our books, can do for us in our present moment is a tough one, and one I don’t think I’m equipped to answer, particularly in a limited forum like the present one. What I might ask is what the current dominant version of intellectual history, with its narrower topical focus, its concerns with very specific concrete contexts, and the foregrounding of political and practical institutional life, is doing for us to address the conditions we face. One of the attractions of intellectual history for me has been its sense of the breadth of possibility, a Jamesian injunction to think both widely and deeply, to imagine both the plurality of the world and its limitations. I would hope that to see that the new is never entirely new, that the crises we face are both novel and not, is a resource that provides more options than tunnelling ourselves into the moment of our specialized and contained worlds, worlds in which we have lost the means to escape from the contexts we have built for ourselves.