Is US Intellectual History Still "Thriving"?

The field after its "revival"

I am writing a review which has caused me to look back at some recent “state of the field” discussions for intellectual history. Among the most fascinating is a 2019 exchange in the Journal of American Studies between two reviewers—Mia Bay and Daniel Geary—and James Kloppenberg. Kloppenberg acts as the respondent for the book under review, The Worlds of American Intellectual History (2016), and does his best to defend the book from the two critiques which both reviewers made: that the essays it contains are unoriginal and that the roster of its writers are too homogeneous.

One of the principal questions that comes out of the exchange, especially between Geary and Kloppenberg, is how one might assess the health of the field in light of those two problems in the book, and I think it is useful to take up that question further.

Kloppenberg asserts with the opening line of his response, “American intellectual history is thriving” (1053). The reviewers do not so much contradict that view (Bay even uses the same word to judge its health) as they demur from Kloppenberg’s enthusiasm and self-satisfaction. Their more qualified assessment rests on a few points, but one of the first is the suspicion that Kloppenberg—and similar senior figures in the field like Daniel Rodgers—is compromised as a judge because of his privileged position: as a professor at Harvard, he simply does not circulate among less successful graduate students, contingent faculty, or even tenure-track faculty who teach at less prestigious institutions and may struggle to find the time to publish, go to archives, etc. Life is very good for intellectual historians at very good universities. But does that mean that the field is thriving?

To be honest, I may be reading a little bit more bite into Bay’s and Geary’s reviews than is really there, but Geary does check Kloppenberg for the elitism of Worlds’ contributor list—“Worlds might come to be known as the “Cambridge volume” for the preponderance of scholars associated with either Cambridge University or its sister university in Cambridge, Massachusetts” (1051)—and he does point out the following:

It is particularly striking that no contributors are leaders of the Society for US Intellectual History (S-USIH) or the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS). The emergence of the S-USIH, first as a blog in 2007, then as a fully fledged organization in 2011, has been the most significant development in the subdiscipline in the past decade. It has energized and publicized US intellectual history. There is a major disconnect in the subfield between the contributors to Worlds (scholars with plum positions at elite universities) and those who are central in running the subfield’s central institution (who teach at less prestigious institutions and are often graduate students and non-tenure-track faculty). Any serious effort to understand the structure of the field of intellectual history today would have to grapple with this fact, but it is one boundary that the contributors to Worlds do not question. (1052)

There isn’t much Kloppenberg can say to refute Geary’s (rather soft) charge of elitism,¹ but he does point out that the book’s origins lie all the way back in 2008, when the USIH blog was still a “fledgling” project (1055). Yet rather than letting Kloppenberg and the other organizers of the Worlds volume off the hook from trying to make the project more inclusive as it took shape over the next eight years, Kloppenberg’s excuse inadvertently demonstrates the inability or unwillingness of the field’s elites to follow its evolution. The editors of Worlds—with the ostensible mission of demonstrating the vitality of US intellectual history as it is practiced now—decided not to adapt to the emergence of new communities of intellectual historians who existed somewhat outside their orbits, even though they had about eight years to think of a way to do so.

Geary and Bay imply that the cost of the volume’s elitism is its lack of fresh ideas, a charge which punctures the self-congratulations of a field that believes it has finally overcome the condescension of social historians and their insistence on studying “ordinary people.” Geary and Bay suggest that US intellectual historians didn’t so much come up with a better argument for studying a small, highly specialized section of the populace as they waited until they no longer had to justify doing so. US intellectual history is “a still rather tradition-bound field. While many of the individual essays are first-rate, most focus on topics and thinkers that would not seem out of place in collections published several decades ago” (1047), and “The basic methods of intellectual history seem relatively unchanged from [the late 1970s]” (1050). Worlds “is unfortunately less than the sum of its parts because it adds little to our understanding of the methods, structure, and content of American intellectual history” (ibid.).

Kloppenberg misunderstands this assessment in a way that is characteristic of many elite scholars when they confront a charge that their work is “tradition-bound.” Kloppenberg appears to understand Geary and Bay’s critique as being entirely about inclusion—not, this time, a lack of scholars from different institutional backgrounds and different ranks, but a lack of diversity in terms of the people under study. Here he feels on firm ground: Kloppenberg is happy to argue that the field’s canvas is already very diverse, and that we would do better to push on from that reality than to continue to ask for greater representation of certain marginalized groups. “Intellectual historians should be celebrating the explosion of outstanding work in our field, and teaching the next generation to surpass us, rather than debating whether one group or another is receiving the attention it deserves,” he writes (1056).

Whether or not you find Kloppenberg’s exhortation on or off the mark (and I’ll have more to say about it in a subsequent piece), Geary and Bay are complaining about a lack of creativity in the field, and while one of the ways this lack is made visible is by the overabundance of studies of the same bunch of white philosophers and theologians, it does not follow that a moratorium on dissertations about William James would automatically improve things.

Nor is it necessarily true that “new blood” always brings in “fresh ideas,” a belief that might seem to offer an easy path to shaking up the field—just amplify the voices of people outside the elite institutions (and which Geary seems to favor). It does not seem to me that there is an untapped reservoir of innovative studies being written right now in less prestigious universities, a glut of dissertations or obscure first monographs that are too forward-thinking to crack into the empyrean of prestigious notice from the Ivies, Oxbridge, and the public Ivies. The field of US intellectual history, from bottom to top, remains a tradition-bound field; its methodological norms have nowhere broken from the paradigm set in the late 1970s.

Does all this mean that the field is “thriving?” Creative stagnation for thirty-five years does not sound like thriving to me. It does not matter how many “first-rate” studies are produced, if—as Bay said of the essays in Worlds—almost all could have been published in 1985 as easily as 2005 or 2015.

In a second post/letter, I’m going to lay out what I think is a comprehensive theory explaining both why the field is so static and elitist and why efforts to critique its stasis and its elitism generally fail to generate any changes, even when there is genuine desire to make them.

1. Kloppenberg’s fuller explanation is extraordinarily ineffective at countering the elitism charge but amusing in its lack of self-awareness: “O’Brien and I agreed that we should ask two younger scholars to join us in selecting the contributors and editing the book. It made sense to us to ask two of our former students, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen and Joel Isaac. To include rising historians, the four of us had to trim the list of scholars whose stock had already risen to the heights, which meant we had to omit not only some of the profession’s most accomplished historians but also some of our best friends” and “Although there was never an attempt to limit the book to people at certain universities, it is not a coincidence that many of the people whose work we especially admired had earned prominent positions.” (1054 and 1055, emphases added).