The Provocations of Dorothy Ross: An Appreciation, by Daniel H. Borus

Although I have been identified as a “Dorothy Ross student,” she was not my dissertation adviser. Indeed I never took a class with her. She was my second reader. The second reader is a strange institution and the commitment of second readers to the project vary from those who just want to sign off and those who were almost as actively involved as the adviser. Ross was the latter.

She probably wrote half as much in commentary as I did in the drafts. At one point, I considered reducing the margins to limit what she could write. For all the criticism, and it was often quite sharp, Ross was unfailingly supported me. She alerted me to jobs at Colgate and Rochester and vigorously lobbied on my behalf. Even though I really don’t do the type of history that she did. We present academics as collegial and collaborative; Ross lived the ideal.

No doubt others have similar tales. Exemplary mentor was far from her only legacy. She was a versatile historian, writing on topics ranging from the famous Sombart question “Why is there no socialism in the United States?” to the intersection of culture and psychology with her G. Stanley Hall to the meaning gendered reform with her essay on Jane Addams.

And there was her learnedness. Origins is a tour de force– extraordinarily well researched, argued, and written. It is exhaustive. The book is the place to go to know why The Polish Peasant is a landmark, what Arthur F. Bentley’s contribution to thinking of social life as a process was, or the significance of F. Stuart Chapin’s theory of change. I mean Ross read all of Henry C. Carey, whom a student of mine once called the most verbose, contradictory, and nonsensical writer in the American canon.

But Origins is not a primer or an introduction. It is a compelling story that finds a specific meaning in the development of American practices of sociology, economics, and political, to wit: that these discourses evolved to bolster and reinforce the notion of American exceptionalism in the midst of its crisis. In the process Ross showed that disciplines devoted to understanding our common activities came to resemble the activities they set out to apprehend. Even as they attempted to recognize and account for capitalist development, class strife, and ethnic differentiation, American social scientists all too often failed to place the United States fully in time. Whether through recourse to naturalist explanations, universal generalization, or positivist methodology, American social science eschewed confrontation with, to quote Ross, “continuous, qualitative change, moved and ordered by forces that lay within the process.” Even the process thinking of Bentley fell prey to this trap since, Ross argued, it subsumed the past into the present and blended history into nature.

Theses come and theses go – and Ross’s may one day be a quaint museum piece. Even so, her work will be worth reading and rereading. It will be valuable precisely because it makes us confront how so many components of the American experience intertwined with one another. The hallmark of great historical writing to my mind is that it compels readers to think and rethink their understandings and does so especially when readers are inclined to dissent. And for me the ability to provoke was Ross’s greatest quality.

Speaking personally, I did not fully concur with her accounts of John Dewey and Thorstein Veblen. To my mind they were less mechanistic thinkers with a more supple understanding of science than Ross argued.

Nor was I sure about her use of religion. Forty years ago, the study of religion was fairly confined to its own sphere. No one regarded Americans as unchurched or indifferent to Protestantism, but the general consensus was that, with some exceptions and eruptions, modern Americans were a secular people.

Ross was among a group of historians who challenged the premise. She was not the first to link millennial notions of time to American exceptionalism, but few argued so penetratingly that the understanding remained central to so many secular discourses. Even those who were dubious about God’s existence and rejected claims that Americans were carrying out God’s plan were far from immune from Protestant-inflected notions of history. I had never thought much about the presence of religious belief in ostensibly secular thought before and I realized right away I had some reading to do.

Still it did occur to me that while there were a good number of the producers of American social science who did not achieve the clerical careers they originally set out to have, it wasn’t as clear to me how central those religious remnants were or whether readers who did much to make the meaning of social science shared the religious undrstandings. The proposition for me raised a larger question: was secularization was simply an incomplete project or actually an impossible one?

I could tell a similar story about republicanism, a current of thought that was little recognized when I was an undergraduate. If it came up at all, it signified simple anti-monarchism. Origins shows how subtle and deep republicanism, with its sense of the dangers erosion was in the American culture repertoire and its relation to American exceptionalism. Ross achieves that subtlety by putting Karl Marx in dialogue with J. G. A. Pocock rather than opposing them as partisans for each writer were prone to do. Using them together, she was able to penetrate the stance of timelessness of liberal progress that characterized even those who placed the American republic in the vanguard of historical movement rather than beyond it.

I will admit it took me a long time to accept this republicanism as a full-fledged ideology rather than a different variant of liberalism with a fetish for words lie “virute.”. Were there really “Country” and “Court” currents in American thought? And since we didn’t talk about republicanism with a small “r” in the twentieth century, when did it end as an active ideology? When Americans accepted a standing army? When the Pope performed mass on the mall?

These are fairlty jejune objections. None are dispositive. Rather I offer them in passing to indicate the way Ross forced me to grapple with ideas I hadn’t considered before. After reading a draft of Twentieth-Century Multiplicity, Dorothy once said to me that I was fair to those with whom I disagreed. If that was true, a large reason for it was that I read a lot of Dorothy Ross.