U.S. Intellectual History

Although the first world, as seen through the lens of academia, seems to be prospering, and the third world has found its own place in the postcolonial intellectual order, the post-cold war world of semi-peripheries in East and Central Europe (ECE) has largely disappeared from the discourse of Comparative Literature. It sometimes appears as a convenient intellectual counterpoint or is included in postmodernist or postcolonial narratives; in both cases, however, it doesn’t convey regional specificity or allow local voices to speak. Both strategies – core and postcolonial – expropriate the semi-peripheral realm of second-world non-places.

Liberalism is a term employed in a dizzying variety of ways across the humanities and social sciences. This essay seeks to reframe how the liberal tradition is understood. I start by delineating different types of response – prescriptive, comprehensive, explanatory – that are frequently conflated in answering the question “what is liberalism?” I then discuss assorted methodological strategies employed in the existing literature: after rejecting “stipulative” and “canonical” approaches, I outline a contextualist alternative. On this (comprehensive) account, liberalism is best characterised as the sum of the arguments that have been classified as liberal, and recognised as such by other self-proclaimed liberals, over time. In the remainder of the article I present an historical analysis of shifts in the meaning of liberalism in Anglo-American political thought between 1850 and 1950, focusing in particular on how John Locke came to be seen as a liberal. I also explore the emergence of the category of "liberal democracy". I argue that the scope of the liberal tradition was massively expanded during the middle decades of the twentieth century, such that it came to be seen by many as the constitutive ideology of the West. This capacious (and deeply confusing) understanding of liberalism was produced by a conjunction of the ideological wars fought against “totalitarianism” and assorted developments in the social sciences. Today we both inherit and inhabit it.

Standard genealogies of knowledge posit the circulation of modernity in one direction, from the West to “the rest.” This history reveals the waves of influence flowing the opposite way, from nonstate people to the state. The essay introduces a new method for the history of knowledge that traces the travel of narratives, packets of media containing messages. Masks long viewed as objects of collection are seen here anew as subjects of recollection, mnemonic devices that archive the global propagation of knowledge. One set of masks is reunited with the narratives they encode: stories employed as a survival strategy by the Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw, a network of peoples who utilized the anthropologist Franz Boas as a host body to enter and alter the world that came to colonize them. The efforts of the Indigenous intellectual George Hunt to disseminate the masks—and, with the masks, his family message of transformation—directly shaped the concept of culture. Using the masks as teaching tools, Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw thinkers civilized Boas into a new modernity, shifting him from categorization to communication, from signs to messages, and from a Self/Other perception to a global consciousness of Host–Guest relations. The masks recollect a profound yet long suppressed Indigenous influence on modern thought.

This paper sets out an ambitious critique of contemporary political scientists, political historians and others concerned with the history of democracy. It argues that overwhelmingly the history of democracy relies on an overtly Eurocentric narrative that emphasizes the keystone moments of Western civilization. According to this narrative, democracy has a clear trajectory that can be traced from ancient experiments with participatory government in Greece and to a lesser extent in Rome, through the development of the British parliament, the American Declaration of Independence and the French Revolution, and then finally onto the triumphant march of the liberal model of democracy across the globe over the last 200 years, particularly under Western tutelage. Histories of democracy that focus exclusively on these events not only privilege Europe and its successful colonies, but also miss the broader human story of the struggle for and achievement of democracy.

This presents us with a distinct challenge. For those whose heritage does not include a direct link to Greek assemblies, the American Congress or the French Revolution, the 'standard history of democracy' provides a distant and exclusive narrative, which limits one's ability to embrace democracy. This paper concludes by noting that, as democracy spreads out across the world today, political scientists not only need to break down the intellectual orthodoxy that democracy has exclusively Western roots, but also to embrace a more global view of democracy as a political practise that has been present at various times and in sometimes unfamiliar ways in the complex histories and rich cultural traditions of most of the people of the earth.

Although its origins stem from theological debates, the general will would ultimately become one of the most celebrated and denigrated concepts emerging from early modern political thought.  Jean-Jacques Rousseau would make it the central element of his political theory, and it would take on a life of its own during the French Revolution before being subjected to generations of embrace or opprobrium.  James Farr and David Lay Williams have collected for the first time a set of essays that track the evolving history of the general will from its origins to recent times.  These essays include attention to the general will’s theological, political, formal, and substantive dimensions with a careful eye to the concept’s virtues and limitations as understood by its expositors and critics, among them Pascal, Malebranche, Locke, Spinoza, Montesquieu, Constant, Tocqueville, Adam Smith, and John Rawls.

This paper studies contrasting American attitudes towards Old Master art. In particular it seeks to explain and contextualize the phenomenon of American artists traveling abroad to refine their artistic education with a stop at the Uffizi Museum in Florence to copy its masterpieces. Though mostly from the US, these artists also include Canadians, Mexicans, Argentians, and Brazilians. Also included in this group of cultural pilgrims were seven American women artists who studied Old Masters at the Uffizi. An appendix lists the 135 American artists who petitioned for permission to copy at the Uffizi in this period.

This is the introduction to the monograph "Madness in Cold War America" (Routledge, 2016). This book tells the story of how madness came to play a prominent part in America’s political and cultural debates. It argues that metaphors of madness rise to unprecedented popularity amidst the domestic struggles of the early Cold War and become a pre-eminent way of understanding the relationship between politics and culture in the United States. In linking the individual psyche to society, psychopathology contributes to issues central to post-World War II society: a dramatic extension of state power, the fate of the individual in bureaucratic society, the political function of emotions, and the limits to admissible dissent. Such vocabulary may accuse opponents of being crazy. Yet at stake is a fundamental error of judgment, for which madness provides welcome metaphors across US diplomacy and psychiatry, social movements and criticism, literature and film. In the process, major parties and whole historical eras, literary movements and social groups are declared insane. Reacting against violence at home and war abroad, countercultural authors oppose a sane madness to irrational reason—romanticizing the wisdom of the schizophrenic and paranoia’s superior insight. As the Sixties give way to a plurality of lifestyles an alternative vision arrives: of a madness now become so widespread and ordinary that it may, finally, escape pathology.

Liberalism sanctions both democracy and capitalism, but incorporating the two into a coherent intellectual system presents difficulties. The anti-foundational pragmatism of Richard Rorty offers a way to describe and defend a meaningful democratic capitalism while avoiding the problems that come from the more traditional liberal justification. Additionally, Rorty’s rejection of the search for extra-human grounding of social and political arrangements suggests that democracy is entitled to a philosophical support that capitalism is not. A viable democratic capitalism therefore justifies its use of markets on the consent of the governed, rather than appeals to liberal notions of individualism, liberty, and property.

The rise of German academic institutions in the nineteenth century considerably altered the landscape of American higher education. American students of theology looked to Germany to develop their discipline, where they found model textbooks that gave directives in learning and piety, transforming academic and theological practice. With sensitivity to the history of the book and the history of the rich cultural traffic across the Atlantic, this article focuses on the reception in English translation of the important and widely read Swiss-German church historian Karl Rudolf Hagenbach, whose textbooks enjoyed a considerable audience in the United States by crossing ideological boundaries and unseating obdurate assumptions. By examining this reception in the United States and Britain and investigating those “transatlantic personalities” who played pivotal roles in bringing his ideas from the “Old World” to the “New,” this article demonstrates Hagenbach's lasting influence on the changing fields of history, church history, and academic theology in America. An “Atlantic” perspective on these themes offers new insights for our understanding of religion in the modern academy, the movement and translation of theological ideas in an age of steamship travel, and the surfacing of commonalities among ostensibly mismatched, if not outright conflicting, Protestant religious cultures.

I recently discovered that I was one of four Rutgers Professors put on a "watchlist" of Professors  with "radical agendas" as a warning to  conservative students, alumni, trustees, etc.  The "list" has as its CEO a very young man who spoke at the GOP's National Convention and is funded by the sorts of people who have long struggled to make laissez faire capitalism the only  accepted public discourse.  I employ both satire and serious analysis to respond to this "neo McCarthyite"  list.  It will s

The study of the way US administrations form and present to the public their visions of foreign lands helps addressing both the general theme of the relations between ideology and foreign policy, and the more specific themes of the relations between mental maps and foreign policy, and na-tional identity and foreign policy. Based on Kennedy's public speeches as well as on declassified documents from his administration, this essay will analyze Kennedy’s image of Europe.

This article examines the U.S. Supreme Court's lesser-known educative role as an egalitarian institution within a broader deliberative democratic process. Scholars have argued that the Court's long asserted power of judicial review, especially in the equal protection and civil rights context, has been an overreach of the judicial branch's constitutional authority and responsibilities. Normative and empirical critiques have been centered on the aims of judicial review, and the challenges it poses in American political life. A core issue surrounding these critiques is that Justices are appointed not elected, and thus undermine the principle of majority rule in the U.S. constitutional democratic order. Although these critiques are legitimate in terms of claims about unelected Supreme Court Justices' seemingly discretionary powers over elected legislative bodies, and the uncertain policy implications of judicial pronouncements on the broader society, there is, nevertheless, a positive application of judicial review as a tool Justices use as part of their educative role overcoming the so-called "counter-majoritarian difficulty." Through a close reading of oral arguments in Brown vs. Board of Education (1954) and San Antonio vs. Rodriguez (1973)-two landmark cases invoking the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment to the federal Constitution-the article shows how appointed Justices adjudicate individual cases on appeal and attempt to educate (through an argumentative, reason-based and question-centered process) citizen-litigants and their legal representatives about the importance of equality, fairness and ethical responsibility even prior to rendering final decisions on policy controversies that have broader national social, political and economic implications.

The theme of market-dominant minorities underlies Amy Chua’s latest book, Political Tribes, which examines domestic identity politics and the effects of foreign identity politics on U.S. foreign policy. Chua’s focus on tribalism, that instinctual tendency of humans to associate around shared norms, values, histories, customs, and traditions, holds together what feels like two different arguments: the one about culture at home and the other about foreign policy. The problem with Chua's perspective is that anti-tribalism is tribal, i.e., a view embraced by certain elite groups in America without regard to the perspective of many ordinary Americans. Political Tribes suggests, therefore, that Chua is part of the problem: her type of tribalism is acceptable, others are not. A more convincing plea would acknowledge that the breezy cosmopolitanism Chua prefers is not accessible to all, and offer a more nuanced depiction of “Americanness” and its multiplicities.

This is a chapter from a book I'm writing about Malcolm X.  I cover his militant period as the leading minister of the Nation of Islam (under Elijah Muhammad) as well as the dramatic changes following his last visit to Mecca in 1964.  He was a complex man whose life deserves further study, so long as we do not over-simplify him or try to make him into an image that is more our creation than it is him.

The sub-title "Journey to Brotherhood" reflects the theme of seeing his life as a journey.  The first chapter "Disagreeing with Malcolm" indicates this work is something more than eulogy or hagiography.   

Whether you are pro- or anti-Malcolm, you might give one of the chapters a try.

The theme for the chapter posted here is that bi-racial unity in American history reflects another side of the nation's history, one that the Nation of Islam denied was even possible in their furious assault upon all white people as racists and devils. 

It may seem far afield from Malcolm's life but it is a necessary chapter on the nature of the Underground Railroad, one of the brightest shining examples of bi-racial cooperation in American history.  Every author has to start somewhere.
-Prof. Rosenberg
U.S. History, Ph.D.

This article examines Richard Nixon’s role in the international effort to curb the spread of nuclear bombs during his tenure of the U.S. presidency between 1969 and 1974. The goal is to demonstrate that Nixon sabotaged the effectiveness of Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) which he ratified on November 24, 1969, and that his scepticism of the goal of the NPT paved the way for Israel’s refusal to sign the NPT and its acquisition of nuclear weapons. Although Israel had launched the nuclear weapons program in 1958, ten years before Nixon took the Oval office in 1968. It employs, with a qualitative research model, three independent variables requiring clear analytic, and updated approaches to explain how Nixon triggered Israel’s acquisition of nuclear weapons. This analysis draws on a number of sources from books, academic journals, memoranda, and published reports to evaluate my study’s overall validity and reliability critically.  Based on the evidences of my correlation claims, I hypothesize that Nixon’s condemnation of the NPT, arms transfer deal with Israel, and his cynicism towards curtailing the spread of nuclear weapons across the globe led to Israel’s possession of nuclear weapons. This paper recommends further research project on the argument whether, or not being a non-signatory to NPT or any nuclear Treaties enables non-nuclear states to launch nuclear weapons program and accomplish their mission of nuclear weapons capability.

Before the CIA was formed, U.S. intelligence overseas (spying) was accomplished by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Shortly after the end of WWII, Hal Leith - a member of the five-man OSS team - parachuted into Soviet-controlled Manchuria to rescue prisoners of war from a Japanese POW camp and to spy on the Russians. This is Hal Leith's story and his recollections of that dangerous mission.

Patrick Henry’s declaration that he knew of no other guide than the “lamp of experience” has long supported the perspective that the American Revolution derived much of its moral and intellectual force from history. Inspired less by a desire to inaugurate a new era than by a desire to reclaim a lost birthright, it becomes on this view a revolution in the original sense, a return to an original point of departure, and consequently, a conservative one. In this paper I argue that far from being confident of their place in history, the American revolutionaries were dubious of the illumination it offered. Instead of taking their bearings from it, they were convinced that their experiment’s future could be secured not by embracing the past, but only by rejecting it.

Jefferson’s pronouncement that the Revolution opened a “new chapter” in human history is an emblematic but by no means exclusive expression of this attitude. Similar sentiments abound in revolutionary writings. None captures this spirit more than The Federalist, a work suffused by a profound skepticism about the guidance offered by any but the Americans’ own experience. Publius denies the examples of history in order to vindicate the new Constitution from claims that the ruptures it has effected from past experience are likely to doom it, and by extension, the nation. The Americans have not ignored history, Publius replies; they have surpassed it. They should be proud to have been unafraid to heed no example but their own. Indeed, therein lies the greatness of the American achievement.

No “flight from modernity,” as one scholar labeled it, the Revolution was forged in its embrace. It exemplifies the historical philosopher Reinhart Koselleck’s theory that modernity (Neuezeit) emerged in the eighteenth century precisely when expectations of the future were distanced from all previous experience. The American Revolution, far from being beholden to the past, was fully modern. Modern because its makers “like[d] the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.”

Historians have long understood that the notion of "the cold war" is richly metaphorical, if not paradoxical. The conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union was a war that fell ambiguously short of war, an armed truce that produced considerable bloodshed. Yet scholars in the rapidly expanding field of Cold War studies have seldom paused to consider the conceptual and chronological foundations of the idea of the Cold War itself. This stands in contrast to the study of other historical epochs that are governed by grand but ambivalent rubrics: the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, or the Industrial Revolution. In Uncertain Empire, a group of leading scholars takes up the challenge of making sense of the idea of the Cold War and its application to the writing of American history. They interrogate the concept from a wide range of disciplinary vantage points; the scope of these different positions illustrates the diversity of methods and approaches in contemporary Cold War studies. Among the disciplines on which the book draws are diplomatic history, the history of science, literary criticism, cultural history, and the history of religion.

Animating the volume as a whole is a question about the extent to which the Cold War was an American invention. Essays look at the Cold War as in need of a rigorous re-centering, after a decade in which historians have introduced expansive global and transnational perspectives on the conflict; as a uniquely American ideological project designed to legitimize the pursuit of an ambitious geopolitical agenda; as a geopolitical and transnational phenomenon; and other approaches. Uncertain Empire brings these debates into focus, and offers students of the Cold War a new framework for considering recent developments in the scholarship.

"Thought-provoking . An impressively wide-ranging and exceptionally coherent collection that simultaneously clarifies, problematizes, and advances our understanding of the United States and the Cold War." --Hugh Wilford, Journal of American History"

This dissertation examines normative and descriptive constructions of thinking in cold war America. It highlights how democratic thinking, academic thinking, and human thinking were interconnected. Social critics believed that American democracy depended on open-mined, flexible, autonomous, and creative thinking. In contrast, they held that the opposite characteristics—closed minded, narrow, rigid, and conformist thinking—typified authoritarian or prejudiced people. Citizens equipped with the right set of mental characteristics could also solve a set of problems that social critics identified in modern America. Where mass society endangered American individualism and threatened to alienate Americans both from one another and from the government, people possessing sufficient autonomy and creativity could ameliorate these problems and help America retain its democratic and individualistic nature.
The mental characteristics that made good citizens also made good intellectuals: both exhibited open-minded, flexible, and pluralist thinking. This preference for flexible cognitive traits appeared in methodological struggles across the social sciences from sociology to psychology and anthropology. It also led to disdain for disciplinary focus and widespread enthusiasm for interdisciplinary methods as social scientists found interdisciplinary study to be inherently valuable.
Intellectuals’ opinions about how they or their colleagues thought were thoroughly intertwined with their opinions about both human nature and democratic character. As a consequence, nominally objective scientific descriptions of normal human nature both informed and borrowed from normative visions of democratic character and exemplary academic thought. The emergence of the field of cognitive psychology was conducted in the most political of ways, involving the academic politics of right-thinking. Cognitivists and their behavioristic opponents struggled to capture the high-ground of true scientific thinking. Here the struggle was about which group of psychologists were better thinkers. Additionally, cognitive psychology’s very specific vision of human nature was a product of an academic community that often elided differences between right thinking and normal thinking. Cognitivists argued that humans are flexible and autonomous by comparing them implicitly to individualistic, democratic Americans and explicitly to flexible, creative scientists. As a consequence, the exemplary member of the academic community and the ideal American citizen became the universal model of human nature.

The NEA funding battle of the 1990s erupted at the nexus of two arenas: politics and art. But for evangelical conservatives this volcano had been seething for quite some time. In his work, theologian Francis Schaeffer taught American evangelicals that one could trace the story of Western thought through its collected creative production (art and entertainment); his narrative culminated with a culture in steep decline - moral, political, and aesthetic. Schaeffer encouraged evangelicals to turn the story around by making aesthetically excellent art that embodied goodness, to not flee but engage with mainstream culture through a "distinctly Christian" lens. Yet bizarrely, Schaeffer's followers largely responded in the next few decades by decrying nearly all pop culture and contemporary art, and creating a distinctly Christian subculture that mirrored mainstream culture but existed only within the church walls—precisely the opposite of his call to engagement.

This paper argues that the strange contradictory result of Schaeffer's call is directly related to the link between art and politics in popular American evangelicalism, propped up as it is by the prominence of the religious right. It will first outline Schaeffer's views, then explore his audience's subculture-creation and explain how this is congruent with their political activism. If a culture "in decline" (one that diverges from traditional values) is most clearly seen in its immoral art, then creating replacement moral art is a political act. Fighting for God’s truth is tied up with fighting for conservative political ideals, and war requires bunkers—as does its cultural products.

Peter Drucker (1909–2005) is celebrated as perhaps the greatest management guru, and one of the greatest futurists, of the twentieth century, but he has rarely been taken seriously as an intellectual. Raised in Vienna among a cohort of émigré academics that included Schumpeter, Hayek, and von Mises, among others, Drucker was both deeply learned and incredibly prolific. This essay seeks to rehabilitate Drucker as a humanistic social thinker, reinterpreting his earliest writings in German, his two major treatises on totalitarianism and the crisis of capitalism published after he emigrated to the US, his debate with Polanyi and engagement with Kierkegaard, and his early postwar writings on management theory and the knowledge society. It identifies in Drucker's Protestant faith a deep and abiding set of intellectual, ethical, and spiritual commitments helping him to navigate a path out of Nazi Germany and assume a position of enormous influence in American business life.