Jerrold Seigel's book on the self is a monument in three dimensions. A comprehensive review of this extraordinary achievement would require a volume all its own. Instead I will offer just a few remarks, first on the book's general argument, and second on some of its more specific claims regarding Heidegger and Derrida.

George A. Reisch, How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science: To the Icy Slopes of Logic (Cambridge and New York, Cambridge University Press, 2005)

Scott Soames, Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century. Vol. 1, The Dawn of Analysis; Vol. 2, The Age of Meaning (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2003)

Although How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science is narrower in scope, the two books included in this review by and large cover the same ground—the history of anglophone philosophy in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. Nonetheless, the two authors occupy two different universes, and it is instructive to examine the issues and styles of thought that separate their comprehension of analytic philosophy.

“Occult,” a 1902 international encyclopedia of religion tells us, is derived “from Latin occultus—Hidden,” and is applied to the assumption that insight into and control over nature is to be obtained by mysterious or magical procedures and by long apprenticeship in secret lore. The physical science of the middle ages, alchemy and astrology, and in modern times spiritualism, theosophy, and palmistry contain various factors of occult lore. Such doctrines, known as occultism, fall outside the realm of modern science. See MAGIC.

I want to begin by thanking all the participants in today's roundtable for their comments and criticisms, and especially those who worked to conceive and arrange it. I am enormously flattered, as I think most people would be, to find myself the subject of sustained attention, however critical, over a whole afternoon, and especially from such thoughtful and insightful colleagues. Too bad for me that I did not have all these critiques before finishing the book, since it would surely have been better for them. It did profit from earlier comments by two of today's panel members, Peter Gordon and Anthony La Vopa; that they have both been willing to add to the discussion in the way they have now is a mark of intellectual and personal generosity that I greatly appreciate. Let me take up each of the four comments in turn.

Allen C. Guelzo, Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1999)

William Lee Miller, Lincoln's Virtues: An Ethical Biography (New York: Knopf, 2002)

Stewart Winger, Lincoln, Religion, and Romantic Cultural Politics (Dekalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003)

Since Good Friday 1865 most Americans have adored their sixteenth president. They venerate him because he so vividly embodies their two most cherished cultural stories—the poor farmer's boy risen to the top, the preacher of charity martyred for his people—while so strikingly surpassing even those mythic achievements. For the masses Lincoln lives on as the visionary emancipator, forgiving warrior, self-taught wordsmith, contemplative sage, and (most miraculous oxymoron of all) honest politician. For intellectuals Lincoln commands allegiance for his reasoned argument, his practical political judgment, his commitment to the principles underlying republican communities, and his tradition-rich eloquence (Shakespeare and the King James Version vying for prominence in his speech with authentic backwoods witticisms). How strange, then, that until Allen Guelzo's Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President appeared in 1999 no historian had written his intellectual biography. Many important studies of Lincoln's thought have been produced, going back to Harry V. Jaffa's 1959 classic Crisis of the House Divided: An Interpretation of the Issues of the Lincoln–Douglas Debates (Guelzo calls it (p. 469) “incontestably the greatest Lincoln book of the [twentieth] century”) and beyond that to William E. Barton's now forgotten The Soul of Abraham Lincoln (1920), a trenchant study of Lincoln's religious thinking. But Guelzo is the first to produce an intellectually disposed life of Lincoln, one that follows the lead of Daniel Walker Howe (most recently expounded in Making the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln, 1997) by putting Lincoln's “Whig culture” and his distinctive theological musings at the heart of his personal and political story.

Fritz K. Ringer, a member of the MIH editorial board, died in February of this year, less than five years after he retired from a Mellon Professorship at the University of Pittsburgh. I was not one of his students, but from my graduate years onward his influence on my own scholarship was profound. In recent years his friendship helped keep me anchored in times of crisis.

In the last fifteen years or so, Chinese intellectuals have been heatedly debating the complex relationships between China's prospects, China's past, and the modern predicament. In this context Wang Hui has emerged as one of China's most challenging and controversial intellectuals. His work is controversial. At a time when intellectuals take modernization as a goal, Wang has consistently voiced reservations. Readers find his works challenging because, instead of criticizing modernity or capitalism from simple moral tenets, Wang has always sought to redefine the terms of the debate through detailed and sensitive historical analysis. Hence amidst his busy life as editor, professor, and polemicist, Wang has devoted more than ten years to writing his magisterial four volume book The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought (Zhongguo sixiang de xingqi), in which he fundamentally rethinks the relationship between modernity and Chinese thought. However, Wang's book is not just an immense contribution to historical and historiographical scholarship; his work is a self-consciously political intervention. Specifically, he highlights the role of intellectual history as critique and attempts to recover repressed elements of the past in order to question the structures that govern the present. In the last line of the conclusion to his book he writes, “the history that modernity loftily and even proudly rejects contains the inspiration and possibilities for overcoming its crisis.” Taking China as his focus, Wang attempts to write this history.

John Edward Toews, Becoming Historical: Cultural Reformation and Public Memory in Early Nineteenth-Century Berlin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. pp. xxiv + 466.

George S. Williamson, The Longing for Myth in Germany: Religion and Aesthetic Culture from Romanticism to Nietzsche. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. pp. xiv + 428.

Peter Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004. pp. 268.

Each generation chooses its own objects of historical inquiry. Over the past decade or two, many historians have moved away from perennial topics in social and political history, turning their gaze on more ethereal questions in the realm of “memory studies.” The three splendid books under review here examine elusive phenomena in nineteenth-century Europe: the transformation of historical consciousness, the invention of national myths, and the emergence of nostalgia as a prominent element of European culture after the French Revolution and the Napoleonic age. Taken together, these works vividly illustrate both the value and the challenges of scholarship on the modern historical imagination.

“I am an American, Chicago born,” runs the first line of a famous novel by Saul Bellow. Anyone who knew the historian Kenneth Cmiel, who died on 4 February 2006, will recognize how this blunt affirmation of Chicago identity could serve Ken as well as it served Augie March. Not that Ken played the identity game pretentiously. A capacity to live a particular persona without being captured by it was one of his countless endearing traits. But being a Chicago person, by birth and by doctorate and by a style that never left him in Iowa City or Berkeley, meant a lot to Ken, and it gave a certain tone to his skeptical, yet sensitive, responses to the conceits and aspirations of his colleagues and friends.

Thomas Augst, The Clerk's Tale: Young Men and Moral Life in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003)

Scott A. Sandage, Born Losers: A History of Failure in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005)

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, as the historian William Leach has written, is a fairy tale about faith and capitalism in modern America. First published in 1900, L. Frank Baum's long-loved work tells the story of two ordinary Midwesterners in a country where wishes come true: a farm girl named Dorothy and a phoney wizard whose only real power turns out to be that of “making believe.” By pretending to bestow brains, heart, and courage upon Dorothy's fellow pilgrims, the “great humbug” turns their faith in him into faith in themselves, in the untapped powers they have held all along. “All you need is confidence in yourself,” he says, and his gift makes them rulers in their own lands much as he rules over his. Viewed as a spiritual quest, Dorothy's odyssey is about living in a world with no higher power than oneself. But like Norman Vincent Peale's later bestseller, Baum's sunny story joins the “power of positive thinking” to the Emerald City; the yellow-brick road is also the road to riches, to wondrous works as well as self-fulfilling faith. Like the alternative Americas depicted in Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward and more than a hundred other utopian novels of the late 1880s and 1890s, Oz is a promised land where faith supplants politics, less a commonwealth than a common dream.

Susan M. Ryan, The Grammar of Good Intentions: Race and the Antebellum Culture of Benevolence, Cornell University Press, 2003

Gregg D. Crane, Race, Citizenship, and Law in American Literature, Cambridge University Press, 2002

Moral sympathy does not necessarily imply condescension. Try to do something about sympathy, cross the line to benevolence, try to improve someone else's lot in life, and that can too easily change. Reform can become coercion and intolerance. The needy can come to seem permanently debased. They can also trick or manipulate the benevolent. These ambiguities pose severe problems for anyone who wants to imagine a democratic politics based on morality. Does neediness make the needy incapable of self-reliance and citizenship? Does benevolence corrupt the giver? Who gets to decide what laws are moral? According to literary scholars Mary Ryan and Gregg Crane, antebellum American literature perceived these problems and in many cases quite self-consciously tried to resolve them.

John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination. English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London: HarperCollins, 1997)

John Brewer, Sentimental Murder. Love and Madness in the Eighteenth Century (London: HarperCollins, 2004)

Times have changed. Consider how George Orwell, in 1946, imagined the reader sitting down to a moment of pleasure.

Kathleen G. Donohue, Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Idea of the Consumer (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003)

Jonathan M. Hansen, The Lost Promise of Patriotism: Debating American Identity, 1890–1920 (University of Chicago Press, 2003)

Daniel Horowitz, The Anxieties of Affluence: Critiques of American Consumer Culture, 1939–1979 (University of Massachusetts Press, 2004)

To recapture the ideal vision that many late nineteenth-century American thinkers held for their society one can do no better than Edward Bellamy's utopian novel, Looking Backward, 1887–2000 (1888). In it Bellamy transports his young protagonist, Julian West, from the Boston of his day to a far more appealing version of the same city imagined as it was about to enter the twenty-first century. Julian finds a consumers' paradise, where each citizen receives a credit card to use in selecting from a virtually limitless variety of goods available for sale at local distribution centers. With everyone receiving a per capita share of the burgeoning national output, the entire society has now become securely middle class. Indeed, there is so much wealth that citizens are actively encouraged to spend rather than save. “The nation is rich,” we are told, “and does not wish the people to deprive themselves of any good thing.” Labor unions, strikes, and class conflict have all become a distant memory. Along with the working class, the unsightly factories that once dominated so much of the urban landscape have essentially vanished. A cornucopia of goods miraculously appears, with the apparatus required for manufacturing them entirely out of sight. Given this happy state of affairs, all citizens exhibit a strong degree of patriotism. Dissent and disloyalty have become unknown, since there is no longer any need for them.