David Steigerwald Ohio State University

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“Intellectual History for What?” U.S. Intellectual History Conference 2010 David Steigerwald Ohio State University I have to confess at the outset that I’m not altogether comfortable speaking to this group about the purposes of intellectual history today. There are people here from whom I’ve learned so much, and many more from whom I am learning so much, for me to presume that I have any useful insight. I speak especially with our younger colleagues in mind. You don’t need me to answer the question “Intellectual history for what?” The answer is really in your hands, not mine. Besides, many people familiar with my work think of me as a generalist. Or perhaps some think of me, as did someone I was introduced to last year who sniffed, diffidently, “Oh, you’re that Sixties guy.” As though I were the only person who writes on the Sixties. At least that’s a somewhat less caustic assessment than what I heard from a senior colleague who chided me not so long ago for my “ill-focused research agenda.” Fair enough, I guess. I do have a general, maybe even strange, track record of writing—Wilsonianism, consumerism, the culture concept, the urban crisis, and yes, the Sixties, and most recently the UAW and automation. I was trained as an intellectual historian, however, and it is my method, I even say my avocation. I am interested in the broad ebb and flow of ideas, and most particularly in how and why certain ideas gain currency in particular times and places. No matter what particular topic I’m digging around in, I’m first and most keenly interested in what ideas underlay claims to power, to prestige and status, and how people explain themselves to themselves. There is a close relationship between my “ill-focused research agenda” and intellectual history as a method of inquiry, as a way of getting at the past and posing good questions. It seems to me that ours is the most expansive of all fields within the discipline of history. Ideas have been everywhere, at all times, and everyone has them. They are universal. At a time when every field is scrambling to become international and cosmopolitan in the broadest sense, intellectual historians can be satisfied that their field has always been thus—at least in theory and potential. We should be inveterate—indeed shameless—trespassers, and that is one of our foremost virtues, ill-focused research agendas notwithstanding. For this reason, I would like to see a field full of people with widely varying interests, one that sets few if any boundaries. If you are interested in any given thinker or body of knowledge simply because they attract you, you should indulge yourself. I can recall Eugene Genovese telling students that it was more or less useless to waste time studying a body of thought that was unconnected to the flow of power, that a 14th-century Adam Smith was no Adam Smith. As an

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aspiring polemicist, I initially took his point and agreed with him. Now, however, I’m inclined to think that we should be more generous to one another. More than that, though: In a public atmosphere that is arguably more fiercely antiintellectual than any of us can remember—and we’re historians; our memories are long—reflecting on a body of thought simply for the sake of doing so has value. It has merit. To take serious ideas seriously is not an act of subversion or resistance. It is, however, inherently dignified. It has integrity. For my part, though, I have to admit that I was attracted to intellectual history partly for its polemical value. My introduction to Gramsci as an undergraduate introduced me to the broad possibilities that rested in the study of ideas. He legitimated intellectual history to me. This was in the early 1980s, and Gramsci was all in fashion. And while lots of people took lots of different things from Gramsci—including the subjectivist delusion that radicalism began and ended in “culture”—there were three things that reading him impressed on me: first, that ideas mattered, that power relations were expressed, if often only imprecisely, in widely-held convictions; second, that the study of ideas did not necessarily entail a preoccupation with “intellectuals” or formal philosophy, that my neighbor’s bizarre infatuation with Amway’s propaganda was as telling as the cultish popularity of Milton Friedman; and, finally, that an inquiry into the history of ideas was no abstract endeavor but could be turned to hard questioning about the manipulation of power in any given time or place, and by extension, could encourage hard questions about the relationship between prevailing public ideas and the wielding of power in our own time. Gramsci gave me leave to indulge both a passion for the play of ideas across time and an obligation to come to critical terms with the way the contemporary world works. The lure of intellectual history as a method of inquiry is its capacity—a unique capacity, I believe, if not in kind then in degree—to think through the ideological constructs that bedevil the world we live in now, to speak truth to power, to invoke the cliché. Another way of saying this is that intellectual history is a way of living up to the obligations of that type we call “the public intellectual.” Here is another seductive ingredient to the field: by doing intellectual history, it is possible to contribute to intellectual history. Admittedly I don’t think we’re so unique in this: economic historians can surely do economics and contribute to contemporary debates, as can diplomatic historians and historians of race, just to check off a few of our companion fields. Still, I do think that there is a peculiar opportunity, if not obligation, for us as historians to engage our subject matter with the same intensity of purpose that our subjects pursued theirs. In this way, intellectual history joins the subjective and objective more decisively than other methods. The opportunity both to write intellectual history and to contribute to public discourse as public intellectuals hangs heavy about us in ways that I don’t see in other fields, whose practitioners are often too easily self-satisfied. Precisely because we take ideas seriously, we are more abruptly faced with our fecklessness

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in a society that does not. In a moment when self-critical thought is as rare as human decency, we are at a real disadvantage. Where intellectual history stands in an intensely anti-intellectual age, a time when what constitutes a public intellectual is murky at best, may be the central problem of our field presently. Our love of serious ideas and our instinct for selfcriticism, which comes from studying the movement of ideas and the people who convey them, sets us off against our fellow citizens, too many of whom seem to think that Glen Beck is an intellectual. This disconnection between what we do and public discourse provides the background, in my view, against which the field has undergone a much-noted decline over the last twenty years or more. Many of us look back to the time when Richard Hofstadter won Pulitzers for books that eviscerated the know-nothings; many of us are even more familiar with the time when Christopher Lasch rebuked the know-somethings, and earned wide attention, if not praise, for doing so. I do not think that it is a coincidence that the voice of public intellectuals has diminished and that the field of intellectual history has declined at essentially the same time. The question is how the two are connected. As we try to grapple with our evident inability to engage the reading public in ways that influence public discourse, we are sometimes given to a certain amount of collective selfflagellation, as in, for example, the sharp exchange between Russell Jacoby and David Hollinger over Jacoby’s The Last Intellectuals. To our younger colleagues, this confrontation might seem like ancient history, now twenty years or so gone. You may be wise to be impatient. But to me it’s very fresh. Jacoby’s argument was aggressive and pointed: American intellectuals had surrendered the important influence they had enjoyed on public debate at mid-century by taking up comfortable positions in academia; academia, in turn, pressed them into assorted lines of conformist specialties and rewarded them for churning out jargon-ridden blather that got them tenure at the cost of any serious public influence. Prof. Hollinger responded vigorously. “It is a flippant book,” he wrote, hostile to a great deal of intellectual effort that had been rendered in all good faith and dismissive, accordingly, of any number of serious thinkers who also happen to hold academic positions at prestigious institutions. My gut tells me I’m with Jacoby, that our immersion in academia has gradually drawn us away from our obligations as public intellectuals as we chase tenure and academic fashion in pursuit of security. My instinct is to think that Hollinger too easily glossed over the pressures that academia imposes on us. I’ve always been uneasy with one of his main lines of criticism, in which he suggested that academia is large enough to be considered a broad community, a public all its own. Thus, he wrote, where academics reach across disciplinary lines, as Richard Rorty, Stanley Fish, Paul Kennedy, Robert Bellah and others have done, they in effect do the work of public intellectuals. “Wide currency within academia does not meet the more universal, transacademic standard” of the mid-century giants, Hollinger argued, “but it can go some distance toward it in an era marked by a large academic community.” Nor was academic expertise something to dismiss

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lightly, he added, because it is often brought to bear in critical ways to temper and test audacious general claims. It is as though he were defending a selfenclosed, self-correcting intellectual world because that is where the real thinking is being done. But that seems to me to skirt Jacoby’s basic thrust: that intellectuals were increasingly talking mostly to themselves. If my gut takes me one way, my head takes me the other, because a strong part of me agrees with Hollinger’s critique. The central problem with Jacoby’s book, as Hollinger rightly maintained, was his claim that the university was to blame for the evaporation of the public intellectual. Surely, academic expertise, always hard-won and never anything to dismiss, is no automatic disqualification from the ranks of public intellectuals. Look at some of the wisest people engaged in public debate these days—Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz from economics; James Hansen and Lonny Thompson from climate science, come quickly to mind—and the value of that expertise is obvious, their impact on public discourse invaluable, if unfortunately indecisive. It is not just an ideal, moreover, to say that the university as an institution remains a place where free-thinking is possible, a place where we can stand apart from the public in order to get the distance necessary to take its proper measure. And this makes the university fundamentally different from—and fundamentally superior to—the agendadriven think tanks that have consumed far too much official public attention over the last decades. But disinterested criticism is not the same as disengaged criticism, and if we don’t speak beyond our own circles, then our defense of the integrity of ideas won’t mean much. As I said, to some extent I think we’re too hard on ourselves when we bemoan the related disappearance of public intellectuals and the decline of the field of intellectual history. The very coincidence of these two things suggests to me that academia is not primarily to blame for either. Particularly those of us who work in 20th-century US are often tempted to measure our own situation against those mid-century giants—Mumford, Niebuhr, Arendt, Macdonald, Daniel Bell, Jane Jacobs—when it probably was the conditions under which they wrote that made them so influential; that is to say, mid-century America’s receptivity to broad ideas may have been peculiar. Our moment is very different. Clearly, rampant anti-intellectualism is a problem. I want to suggest, however, that this is not the most important obstacle to the venturing of broad ideas. We have had other periods of national stupidity before, and we’ve manage to get through them, though maybe the dominance of rightwing media does make the present idiocy more serious. But I want to point to two other things. Ideas have become means to manipulate for narrow ends. They are either ruthlessly put forward in the service of the continued accumulation of wealth and power for those who have both; or as narrow, functional things whose purpose is to inform a specific debate, a particular policy, a given agenda. The present debate over the state of the economy is a case in point. Even the Krugmans and the Stiglitzes focus their attention on how much stimulus we need, or how much financial regulation, while their American

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Enterprise Institute or Heritage Foundation adversaries counter with their freemarket promises of endless growth. Who is advancing broad claims about what an economic system in a democracy ought to be like? Who is crafting visions of the good society? How do we know what the common good is if we have no ideas about what the good society ought to look like? This is a tough environment for those of us who want to write about and defend broad, humanistic ideas. But that’s the environment we face—it’s our reality. We probably will not see in our lifetimes the likes of a Lasch or a Hofstadter, or a Mills or a Mumford or an Arendt. That is not necessarily our fault. It would be our fault, however, if we shy away from our double burden, which is stand as scholar who defend the integrity of ideas, while we stand as citizens who venture broad critiques that provide some glimpse of what a decent, democratic society should look like. .

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