Author Meets Critics: Response by Kunal M. Parker

Immense thanks to Paul Murphy, Casey Eilbert, and Angus Burgin for their thoughtful engagements with Daniel Wickberg’s A History of American Thought, 1860 – 2000: Thinking the Modern and my own The Turn to Process: American Legal, Political, and Economic Thought, 1870-1970.  In this response, I set forth what I hoped to accomplish in The Turn to Process.  This will allow me to respond to Murphy, Eilbert, and Burgin.

In The Turn to Process, I explore a particular modernist ideational structure: one in which ways, means, methods, techniques, procedures, and processes took center stage relative to—or otherwise continually displaced, deferred, or suspended–truths, ends, and foundations.  Consider the following statement by the postwar constitutional theorist Alexander Bickel: “But legal technicalities are the stuff of law, and piercing through a particular substance to get to procedures suitable to many substances is in fact what the task of law most often is.”[2]  Or this one by the prominent political scientist and economist Charles Lindblom in one of his many celebrated midcentury studies of political and bureaucratic decision-making: “[W]hat we establish as policy objectives we derive in large part from an inspection of our means.”[3]  Or this one by the Nobel Laureate economist Friedrich von Hayek: “Competition is essentially a process of the formation of opinion . . . . It creates the views people have about what is best and cheapest, and it is because of it that people know at least as much about possibilities and opportunities as they in fact do.”[4]

Albeit in different contexts, all of these statements place means, methods, techniques, procedures, and processes above truths, ends, and foundations.  Bickel tells his readers that “the task of law” is not to come up with substantive rules, but instead to find procedures that work for a range of substantive issues.  Lindblom and Hayek insist that we do not choose our means once we have determined what our ends are, but instead that our means and techniques give us our ends, tell us what we want (for Hayek, it should be remembered, the market was a technique).

How is one to grasp this way of thinking?

In The Turn to Process, I locate the origins of this way of thinking in the modernist crisis of knowledge that took hold in the Euro-American world in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.  Truths were everywhere becoming increasingly unreliable qua truths.  This was principally because their claims to being timeless could be undermined by showing that truths had arisen in historical time and because thinkers were increasingly aware of psychological theories that called into question their ability to get at truths.  As a consequence, thinkers in a range of disciplines and endeavors turned to means, methods, techniques, procedures, and processes, all ways of getting at truths rather than truths themselves.  American law, political science, and economics all reoriented themselves this way.

In The Turn to Process, I also show that, in law, political science and economics, the very same things that had passed for truths in the nineteenth century came to be configured as methods in the twentieth.  As thinkers assumed a stance of skepticism towards truths, in other words, they changed perspective on their old truths, representing them instead as methods.  The Turn to Process draws attention to what I call “truths-become-methods,” uncanny hybrid creatures that retained some of the weight of truth while insisting that they were “only” methods.  Something that I hope the book also accomplishes is to effect a change in the picture we currently have of Cold War thinking: we need to move way from our image of this period as aridly hyperrational and to think of it as far more self-consciously irrational, appreciative of the vague, the felt, and the mysterious.  Finally, The Turn to Process also highlights the relationship, altogether too unexplored, between modernism and conservatism.[5]

But The Turn to Process is fundamentally a book about the writing of history.  In my earlier work as a legal and intellectual historian, I have been interested in exploring the complex and fraught relationship between historical and legal temporalities and in highlighting the pitfalls of bringing historical context to bear upon objects such as law that resist, in specific and important ways, the temporalities of modern disciplinary history.[6]  In The Turn to Process, even as I expanded my focus beyond law to include political science and economics, such preoccupations remain prominent.

Specifically, the question I repeatedly confronted in the writing of this book was: how does one write a history of the ideas of those who were as aware of the condition of living in history as we are and sought to extricate themselves from it?  For a reorientation towards method, as I see it, was precisely a way of extricating disciplines such as law, political science, and economics from dissolution into history.  Unlike the older truths that had oriented these disciplines, all of which had proved vulnerable to historical and psychological critique, methods immunized themselves from history by claiming to be “only” provisional, “mere” tools that could be picked up or set down as the occasion demanded.  In writing a history of the turn to methods, procedures, and processes, then, I asked myself: was more history the answer to thinking about those who sought to stave off engulfment in history?  Was more context the superior approach to understand those who sought to transcend context?

In The Turn to Process, I opted to present the turn to method in law, political science, and economics in some plenitude so that readers could appreciate its weirdness, establish a relationship to its aesthetics, recognize their own implication in its world of technique, and (for the historians among its readers) engender reflection about the limits of writing history.  My attempt to “think with” my subjects “sympathetically” meant that I opted for close readings of their ideas over situating those ideas within frames more familiar to the historian.  I did, however, want to provide enough for historians to go on so that they could read the turn to process in their own ways, make it their own.

Angus Burgin signals the anxiety of contemporary intellectual historians when it comes to talking “only” about ideas as ideas.  As Burgin puts it in his comment: “In the decades since [the big midcentury intellectual histories were written], 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.”

Disciplined by such developments, the intellectual historian has now come to see ideas not as being about themselves, but as being symptoms or expressions of something else.  What would it look like, Burgin then asks, if The Turn to Process and Wickberg’s History of American Thought were “less about how ideas respond to preceding ideas, and more about how ideas emerged in response to the changing material circumstances of intellectual life?”  In a related vein, Paul Murphy asks: “Were ‘process’ and “culture” both tools by which to obscure value and political commitments? . . . Who gains authority by the turn to process? . . . Did the turn to process reinforce the authority of elites, eventuating in conservative or liberal policies depending on the proclivities of which elites held power when?”

As Burgin and Murphy recognize, “material circumstances” and questions of power do not provide a ever-present substratum for the account of intellectual transformation advanced in The Turn to Process.  This is not because the book eschews in any programmatic sense an engagement with the “real.”  As Casey Eilbert recognizes in her comment, The Turn to Process is in major part a book about the engagement of law, political science, and economics with the twentieth-century American administrative state, which was itself indissociable from material circumstances and questions of power.  But I chose not to situate the turn to process in terms of “material circumstances” and elite power (both critiques that were around even when the turn to process was at its zenith) because doing so would very likely have dulled or blunted or domesticated what I found—and continue to find—striking and arresting about the turn to process: the obsessive tarrying with means, the concerted suspension of ends.  To have told this story as a story of capitalism or power would have told us what we likely already know: that capitalism explains the shapes that disciplines take, that elites come up with languages to hold on to power.  Why not resist the temptation of telling the familiar story?  Why provide yet another reconfirmation of ideas the reader already possesses if one could possibly do something else?  Why not bring forth instead a different object and emphasize its uncanniness so that it might provoke us in unpredictable ways?

Let me respond briefly to Burgin’s other observations.  Burgin is absolutely correct that my account is not intended as an argument about America or as an attempt to identify something distinctive about American thought.[7]  It is instead an attempt to place before the reader an intellectual development I find fascinating.  It is indeed about American legal, political, and economic thought, but only in the shallower sense in which “America” is my archive.  For good measure, I add that I do not claim descent from the long tradition to which Burgin alludes—Merle Curti, John Pocock, Louis Hartz, Dorothy Ross, etc.—that identified the “American” through its contrast with the “European.”  This contrast has been a useful one, no doubt, and has produced brilliant and foundational scholarship, but my intellectual interests are not framed in terms of the difference between Europe and America.

Finally, Burgin asks: why this history now?  Identifying what he sees as the “ironic sensibilities” of The Turn to Process and Wickberg’s History of American Thought, Burgin writes: “in these closing weeks of 2024, I also cannot help but wonder if our moment requires something more than ironism.”  Other commentators on The Turn to Process have asked whether the book’s focus on elite experts’ propagation and wielding of methods fits the world we seem to be entering, a world in which expertise itself (together with the university) seems under threat.[8]  To such anxieties, I can only respond that the best parts of the larger turn to process seem worth hanging on to, today more than ever.  The Turn to Process was not intended as an act of nostalgia: let’s hope it does not end up becoming read as one.

[2] Alexander M. Bickel, The Morality of Consent (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), pp. 120-21.

[3] David Braybrooke and Charles Lindblom, A Strategy of Decision: Policy Evaluation as a Social Process (New York: Free Press, 1963), p. 232.

[4] Friedrich A. Hayek, “The Meaning of Competition” (1946) in Hayek ed. Individualism and Economic Order (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1980 [1948]), p. 106.

[5] Paul Murphy’s work is an important (and wonderful) predecessor here.  Paul V. Murphy, The Rebuke of History: The Southern Agrarians and American Conservative Thought (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).

[6] Kunal M. Parker, Common Law, History, and Democracy in America, 1790 – 1900: Legal Thought Before Modernism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

[7] For an argument that The Turn to Process describes a distinctively American development, at least in the legal arena, see the legal historian Amalia Kessler’s comment on the book.  https://balkin.blogspot.com/2024/11/the-turn-to-process-in-comparative.html.

[8] See https://balkin.blogspot.com/2024/11/the-procedural-turns-faith-in-elite.html (comment by Aziz Rana).