Cards on the table

My incorrect views on a few things, and an attempt to fix them

The current state of US intellectual history leaves me very frustrated and very disappointed.[1] 

You could probably deduce my feelings from earlier posts here, but figuring out how to communicate the reasons for my frustration and disappointment has been more difficult than I expected, and I have struggled to express them directly and candidly. I will try to do so now.

The core or pit of my negative feelings about US intellectual history is the unfulfilled promise of what I thought I saw even four or five years ago, but which existed more brightly a few years before that—say, in 2014 or 2015. At that moment, it seemed to me that the field was capable of being something quite unusual: a community in which more senior scholars supported those in less secure positions—grad students, contingent faculty, independent scholars—as the latter group tried to redefine what it meant to be a part of the field, what the distinctive contribution was that the field made to history more generally. Younger and more peripheral scholars seemed capable of representing the field to the profession, of delivering a message that US intellectual history was changing profoundly: not only would it look at traditional subjects—Edwards, Emerson, James, et al.—in new ways, but it would actually break new ground, transforming the field by injecting new voices from the archives.

I was wrong about that promise on three counts.

First, I was wrong about the support that I believed existed among more senior scholars. There was no genuine will to re-think or redefine what studying US intellectual history meant. What was exciting to them was that “intellectual history” had a slightly higher profile within the profession: there was a bit more curiosity outside the field about what we all were doing and a bit more respect for people who were evidently doing it well.

Second, I was wrong to think that those of us who advocated for a more diverse field could achieve that goal simply by loudly inviting scholars of African-American, Latinx, Indigenous, and Asian-American intellectual histories to join us. We made an assumption that a lot of well-meaning white people make: that our desire to include someone is itself a reason why they’d want to join us.[2] We did not, however, go very often beyond invitations—we did not reflect enough on whether our own scholarship would contribute in some way to a mutual exchange of ideas, or whether we needed to make ourselves better informed about the texts, people, and institutions in those intellectual traditions.

Third, I erred in thinking that what the field needed was for senior scholars to step back and encourage younger scholars to steer the field in a more inclusive direction. What US intellectual history really needs is leadership from the big names, the men and women not only tenured but perched in named chairs at elite institutions. After the election of Barack Obama in 2008 and—to a lesser extent—after the Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011, many of these elite scholars seemed open to some self-reflection about how their ongoing scholarly projects or their selection of a new research project might incorporate these plot twists in US history—how a Black President or a focus on material inequality might recast certain traditional questions of intellectual history or even elevate some new questions to prominence. That cannot be said for any of the major events since Occupy.[3] Apart from some generic allusions to the menace of Trumpism, even the election of 2016 seems not to have really affected the top of the field deeply or caused the scholars at the apex of US intellectual history to respond with a sense of urgency.

What I think I have gained from these three mistakes is the recognition that, if I or you or anyone else thinks that US intellectual history ought to be more diverse in terms of what questions define the field and which people and texts are studied, then I (or you or anyone else) must make ourselves if not experts then at least very deeply read in the intellectual histories of minority groups in America. It is simply not enough to be open to dialogue with specialists in those histories—and then to go back to the mostly white archives we’ve curated. We must ask questions that can only be conceived from outside the majority tradition in which we’ve been instructed. If I believe that US intellectual history is not diverse enough, I must change the maps I have been using to guide my studies, must rechart the constellations that orient my thinking about who and what matters.

I had planned to be much more elaborate in my critique of the field. There are several drafts on my computer in which I try to historicize the problems that I’ve identified above, crafting a thumbnail intellectual genealogy explaining why it has been so difficult to make race into an important area of study within the mainstream of US intellectual history. But honestly, the energy I’d expend in close reading an essay by X or Y prominent intellectual historian is better put to other ends. I’d rather move forward.

So I’m going to use this newsletter to write about my exploration of the intellectual traditions that I believe are not covered well enough in a generic course of preparation for a US intellectual historian. Because that is really what this issue comes down to: as a field, there isn’t an expectation that all graduate students will become deeply familiar with any tradition other than the white Christian “mainstream” that flows from the Puritans down through the Founders, the Transcendentalists, and the Pragmatists. This means that most people practicing US intellectual history today are ignorant about whole swaths of material that properly belongs in their specialization. And that includes me, at least for now.

What you can expect: I’m going to read a bunch of books and essays, a mixture of primary and secondary literatures, and share what I take from them. Pretty simple—I’m asking for your trust that it will be worth your while to follow along and, if so inclined, join me in comments or emails.

I had planned to use this newsletter to work out some methodological questions I had about intellectual history and—to be frank—to complain about how philosophically unreflective a lot of intellectual historians are, how little they examine the categories they depend on.[4] But I think this project of self-education is more important. You may not think so—maybe you signed up for the Methodenstreit. And perhaps I’ll still do a little of that—who knows.

Soon: a letter on Charles W. Mills’s The Racial Contract (1997).

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[1] By US intellectual history, I mean the community of scholars that uses that name to designate the scholarly territory they study, even though—as I’ll be arguing in a moment—that coverage is quite selective. In one obvious sense, anyone who does African-American intellectual history is also doing US intellectual history, but I think it is significant that the AAIHS operates not as a caucus within S-USIH but as a separate organization. There is a tacit and deserved judgment there that the two societies don’t overlap much in terms of scholarly activity.

[2] In his well-known article “How Wide the Circle of We?” David Hollinger quotes the Edwin Markham poem “The Outwitted”: “He drew a circle that shut me out / Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout. / But Love and I had the wit to win: / We drew a circle that took him in.” That’s the entire poem. So what do we know about why “he” wants to keep his distance from us, and why should we assume we have the right to attach him to ourselves against his will?

[3] I mean, James Kloppenberg paused work on his massive history of democracy to write a book on Obama. Where is the book by an equally prominent intellectual historian on BLM or Standing Rock or (for pete’s sake) climate change? Maybe there’s one in the works—if you know of one, please inform me?

[4] “To study American intellectual history is to study Americans thinking…” Okay, but what kind of action is thinking? Can we study that action directly, and if so, how? Was heisst Denken?