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FORUM: THE PRESENT AND FUTURE OF AMERICAN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY INTRODUCTION

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 March 2012

THOMAS BENDER
THOMAS BENDER*
Affiliation:
Department of History, New York Universitythomas.bender@nyu.edu
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Extract

The following essays present six distinct but broadly compatible narratives of scholarship in United States intellectual history over the past half-century: postwar dominance, a season of despair, and then the field's rise, transformation, and expansion. The essays are a feast of erudition; any reader will come away from them with a list of “must-read” books. But there is much more here. These are rigorous and sophisticated explorations—at once historical and prescriptive—of a flourishing field. The writers span different generations, with authors representative of older, middling, and younger scholars. These appraisals are various yet they are unambiguously within the mainstream, tracking the current understandings of the somewhat fuzzy boundaries of the field. While additional writers might have further enriched the coverage, these writers together offer a fair representation of current practice in the field.

Type
Forum: The Present and Future of American Intellectual History
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 9 , Issue 1 , April 2012 , pp. 149 - 156
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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References

1 A selection of the papers presented were published in Higham, John and Conkin, Paul K., New Directions in American Intellectual History (Baltimore, 1979)Google Scholar. That conference was recently commemorated with a plenary panel of alumni at the US Intellectual History Conference of 2009, held at the Graduate Center of the University of the City of New York.

2 See Kuklick, Bruce, “Myth and Symbol in American Studies,” American Quarterly 24 (1972), 435–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 For an early response by an intellectual historian see Laurence Veysey, “Intellectual History and the New Social History,” in Higham and Conkin, New Directions in American Intellectual History, 3–26.

4 The old behaviorist mode is exemplified by Thernstrom, Stephan, The Other Bostonians: Poverty and Progress in the American Metropolis, 1880–1970 (Cambridge, MA, 1973)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; a very early example of the newer trend is Lemisch, Jesse, “The American Revolution from the Bottom Up,” in Bernstein, Barton J., ed., Towards a New Past: Dissenting Essays in American History (New York, 1969), 3–45Google Scholar, who gave voice to nonelite figures and pointed social history in a direction that twenty years later would become sociocultural history, tending to focus on identity and private agency, thus weakening the political focus central to Lemisch's work.

5 See Thomas Bender, “The Culture of Intellectual Life: The City and the Professions,” in Higham and Conkin, New Directions in American Intellectual History, 181–95.

6 David A. Hollinger, “Historians and the Discourse of Intellectuals,” in Higham and Conkin, New Directions in American Intellectual History, 42–43.

7 To take myself as an example, the shift is evident in two books: Toward an Urban Vision: Ideas and Institutions in Nineteenth Century America (1975) was in the American-mind mode, while New York Intellect: A History of Intellectual Life in New York City, 1750 to the Beginnings of Our Own Time (1987) was far more ambitious but much more specific and contained.

8 Among those leading historians who expressed their debt to Niebuhr were Perry Miller, C. Vann Woodward, Henry May, and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. A classic example of bringing this outlook to historical interpretation is Schlesinger, Arthur M. Jr., “The Causes of the Civil War: A Note on Historical Sentimentalism,” Partisan Review 16 (1949), 469–81Google Scholar.

9 See Benjamin, Walter, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Zohn, Harry (London, 1983)Google Scholar; idem, The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedeman, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, 1999); Berman, Marshall, All that Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York, 1982)Google Scholar, and Gallagher, Catherine, The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction, 1832–1867 (Chicago, 1985)Google Scholar.

10 Bouwsma, William, “From the History of Ideas to History of Meaning,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 12 (1981), 279–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Geertz, Clifford, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973), 5Google Scholar.

11 Hollinger, “Historians and the Discourse of Intellectuals,” 43

12 Rorty has articulated many versions of this, but I have in mind his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, 1979).

13 Dewey, John, The Public and Its Problems (New York, 1927)Google Scholar.

14 Latour, Bruno, “Why Has Critique Run Out? From Matter of Fact to Matter of Concern,” Critical Inquiry 30 (2004), 225–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also idem, “From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik, or How to Make Things Public,” in Latour, Bruno and Weibel, Peter, eds. Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (Cambridge, 2005), 41Google Scholar.

15 See Nagel, Thomas, The View from Nowhere (New York, 1986)Google Scholar.

16 James, William, Pragmatism, ed. Kuklick, Bruce (Indianapolis, 1981), 31Google Scholar.

17 For a bit more elaboration see Bender, Thomas, The Unfinished City: New York and the Metropolitan Idea (New York, 2002), chap. 4Google Scholar.

18 For a rich account of her self-transformation and her impact on the city's literary culture see Capper, Charles, Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic: The Public Years (New York, 2007), chaps. 6–7Google Scholar.

19 Kloppenberg, James T., “Deconstruction and Hermeneutic Strategies for Intellectual History: The Recent Work of Dominick LaCapra and David Hollinger,” Intellectual History Newsletter 9 (1987), 3–22Google Scholar. See also idem, “Objectivity and Historicism: A Century of American Historical Writing,” American Historical Review 94 (1989), 1011–30.