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FORTY YEARS FROM WINGSPREAD: THE TRANSFORMATION OF AMERICAN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY

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Joel Isaac, James T.Kloppenberg, Michael O'Brien, and JenniferRatner-Rosenhagen, eds., The Worlds of American Intellectual History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2017

THOMAS BENDER
THOMAS BENDER*
Affiliation:
Department of History, New York University, emeritus E-mail: [email protected]
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Extract

If one Googles “Wingspread” a vast number of conference titles covering all manner of topics will fill the screen: from Fire-Rescue Service Stakeholders to Endocrine Disruptors, from Domestic Violence to Civic Responsibilities of Research. Of more interest to intellectual historians was the conference on the future of American intellectual history held at the Wingspread Conference Center in 1977. Over forty years the “Wingspread conference” and the book that came out of it has echoed through the field. Neither the conference nor the book that emerged from it, New Directions in American Intellectual History, edited by John Higham and Paul Conkin, was a celebration of the field. It focused on a collective crisis of confidence, particularly among the more senior scholars. The heart of the matter at the conference was the perceived challenge of social history, a social history that fancied itself “scientific” and more rigorous than intellectual history. There was fear that this movement in the profession was marginalizing a field that had flourished for a couple of generations.

Type
Review Essays
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 16 , Issue 2 , August 2019 , pp. 633 - 651
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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References

1 Higham, John and Conkin, Paul K., eds., New Directions in American Intellectual History (Baltimore, 1979).Google Scholar

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6 Quoted in Angus Burgin, “New Directions, Then and Now,” in The Worlds of American Intellectual History, 343–64, at 343.

7 There were twenty men and one woman.

8 Commager, Henry, The American Mind: An Interpretation of American Thought and Character since the 1880s (New Haven, 1950)Google Scholar. There was a chapter in this mode in the Wingspread volume. Welter, Rush, “On Studying the National Mind,” in Higham, and Conkin, , New Directions in American Intellectual History, 64–82.Google Scholar

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10 Over the years there were a large number of editors and coeditors of the Intellectual History Newsletter: Thomas Bender, David Hall, Richard Wightman Fox, Casey Blake, Howard Brick, Charles Capper, Anthony La Vopa.

11 See its website, www.s-usih.org.

12 Burgin, “New Directions, Then and Now,” 344.

13 Ibid., 245.

14 Ibid., 186.

15 In American studies there has been a move in this direction with the Journal of Transnational American Studies, founded in 2008, but the articles have been mostly literary scholarship, with rare contributions from historians, whether from Latin America or the United States.

16 It is dramatically different from the geography of Peter Gay's rightly admired The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, 2 vols. (New York, 1966–9).

17 Recent major works in Atlantic world intellectual history are more inclusive and cosmopolitan. The most notable include Dubois, Laurent, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean (Chapel Hill, 2004)Google Scholar; Ada Ferrer, Freedom's Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution (New York, 2014). For an introduction to Latin American American intellectual history, one can consult on the various chronological and regional volumes of the Bethell, Leslie, ed., The Cambridge History of Latin America, 11 vols. (Cambridge, 1984–2008).Google Scholar From the other side of the Atlantic there are two recent monumental intellectual histories: Kloppenberg, James T., Toward Democracy: The Struggle for Self-Rule in European and American Thought (New York, 2014)Google Scholar; and Israel, Jonathan I., Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights, 1750–1790 (Cambridge, 2011).Google Scholar

18 Quoted in Nico Slate, “‘We the People of Color’: Colored Cosmopolitanism and the Borders of Race,” in The Worlds of American Intellectual History, 57–74, at 71.

19 Gilroy, Paul, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA, 1993)Google Scholar. See also Ferrer, Ada, Freedom's Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution (New York, 2014).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

20 John Holloway, “Curating the Black Atlantic,” in The Worlds of American Intellectual History, 76–94, at 86.

21 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, Silencing the Past: Power and Production in History (Boston, 1995)Google Scholar. See also Dubois, A Colony of Citizens; Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, 2005)Google Scholar; Ferrer, Freedom's Mirror. For a museum exhibit catalogue addressing these three eighteenth-century Atlantic revolutions see Bender, Thomas, Dubois, Laurent, and Rabinowitz, Richard, eds., Revolution! The Atlantic World Reborn (New York, 2011)Google Scholar. Of course, there is the classic work of James, C. L. R., The Black Jacobins: Toussaint Louverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York, 1938).Google Scholar

22 Margaret Abruzzo, “The Sins of Slaves and the Slaves of Sin: Toward a History of Moral Agency,” in The Worlds of American Intellectual History, 97–114, at 99.

23 Ibid., 108.

24 Quoted in ibid., 108–9.

25 Ibid., 109, 110.

26 He does show up briefly in Ross's, Dorothy The Origins of American Social Science (Cambridge, 1991)Google Scholar, when she notes that he was major professor for Herbert Baxter Adams at Heidelberg and the inspiration for Adams's creation of the famous Seminar on History and Politics at Johns Hopkins.

27 Lieber's important essay “Nationalism and Internationalism” is getting increasing recognition, and it is reprinted almost in its entirety in Capper, Charles and Hollinger, David, eds., The American Intellectual Tradition, 2 vols. (New York, 2015), 1: 562–74.Google Scholar I think that Lieber's notion of liberal states in a cosmopolitan system of nations (or international order) presumes the particularity of each nation essentially distinctive and self-defined rather than exceptional. There can be only one exception, or one case against the rule, which is the meaning exception in a system. The word and concept have been challenged. One important instance is Rodgers, Daniel T., “Exceptionalism,” in Molho, Anthony and Wood, Gordon, eds., Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past (Princeton, 1998), 1–20Google Scholar. For a different critique made by placing American history into a global historical narrative see Bender, Thomas, A Nation among Nations: America's Place in World History (New York, 2006).Google Scholar

28 Duncan Kelly, “Nationalism and Cosmopolitan Humanity in Mid-nineteenth-century American Political Science,” in The Worlds of American Intellectual History, 115–32, at 127.

29 They may have had an exceptionalist notion of the United States, but I think rather that they have in mind the United States as one of the class of newly invented nation-states.

30 Kelly, “Nationalism and Cosmopolitan Humanity,” 127.

31 Charles Beitz, “Bounded Morality: Justice and the State in World Politics,” International Organization 33/3 (1979), 405–24, at 409, quoted in Samuel Moyn, “The Political Origins of Global Justice,” in The Worlds of American Intellectual History, 132–52, at 145.

32 Moyn, “The Political Origins of Global Justice,” 143, Beitz's emphasis, 147.

33 Ibid., 145.

34 Joel Isaac, “Pain, Analytical Philosophy, and American Intellectual History,” in The Worlds of American Intellectual History, 202–17, at 203.

35 Ibid., 204.

36 Ibid., 213.

37 Ibid., 214.

38 Lasch, Christopher, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (New York, 1991), 133, 376, 457.Google Scholar

39 Francesca Bordogna, “Unstiffening Theory: The Italian Pragmatists and William James,” in The Worlds of American Intellectual History, 155–81, at 159.

40 Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, “The Longing for Wisdom in Twentieth-Century US Thought,” in The Worlds of American Intellectual History, 182–201, at 197.

41 Sarah E. Igo, “Toward a Free-Range Intellectual History,” in The Worlds of American Intellectual History, 324–42.

42 See Forman, Paul, “Weimer Culture, Causality, and Quantum Theory, 1918–1927: Adaptation by German Physicists and Mathematicians to a Hostile Environment, 1918–1927,” Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 3 (1971), 1–197CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Harris, Neil, Humburg: The Art of P. T. Barnum (Boston, 1973).Google Scholar

43 Andrew Jewett, “Science and Religion in Postwar America,” in The Worlds of American Intellectual History, 237–56, at 240.

44 Ibid., 242.

45 Ibid., 243.

46 Ibid., 243.

47 Peter E. Gordon, “Religion within the Bounds of Democracy Alone: Habermas, Rawls, and the Transatlantic Debate over Public Reason,” in The Worlds of American Intellectual History, 257–79, at 267.

48 Ibid., 263.

49 Ibid., 269, italics in original.

50 David Hollinger, “Christianity and Its American Fate: Where History Integrates Secularization Theory,” in The Worlds of American Intellectual History, 280–303, at 297. Below this quotation from Dworkin on the same page is another equally compelling quote from the literary scholar M. H. Abrams referring to the intelligentsia of the early nineteenth century: “Despite their displacement from a supernatural to a natural frame of reference, however, the ancient problems, terminology, and ways of thinking about human nature survived, as the implicit distinctions and categories through which even radically secular writers saw themselves and their world, and as the presuppositions and forms of their thinking about the condition, the milieu, the essential values and aspirations, and the history and destiny of the individual and of mankind.”

51 Ibid., 296–7.

52 Gay, Peter, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, 2 vols. (New York, 1966–9)Google Scholar; and Darnton, Robert, “Reading, Writing and Publishing in Eighteenth-Century France: A Case Study in the Sociology of Literature,” in Gilbert, Felix and Graubard, Stephen R., eds., Historical Studies Today (New York, 1972), 238–80.Google Scholar This article was previously published in Daedalus, 100/1–2 (1971), 214–56, one of several in two issues that became this book.

53 Daniel T. Rodgers, “Paths in the Social History of Ideas” in The Worlds of American Intellectual History, 307–23.

54 Gilroy, The Black Atlantic; Rose, Sugata and Manjapra, Kris, eds., Cosmpolitan Thought Zones: South Asia and the Global Circulation of Ideas (New York, 2010)Google Scholar; Gluck, Carol and Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt, eds., Words in Motion: Toward a Global Lexicon (Durham, NC, 2009).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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56 Lovejoy, Arthur O., The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge, 1964; first published 1933)Google Scholar; Lovejoy, Essays in the History of Ideas (Baltimore, 1948).

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60 Michael O'Brien, “Afterword,” in The Worlds of American Intellectual History, 367–71, at 367.

61 Ibid., 368–9.

62 Howe, Daniel Walker, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (New York, 2007).Google Scholar