New Books in Intellectual History

Udi GreenbergView on AmazonAmerican policymakers and scholars alike have looked to the rapid transformation of Germany, specifically West Germany, from a defeated Nazi state into a thriving democracy as one of the most successful postwar reconstructions of the twentieth century. Scholars have variously credited an influential U.S. occupation or Germans' own revulsion at their Nazi past as the cause of the success. Udi Greenberg, Assistant Professor of History at Dartmouth College, pushes scholars to rethink these common explanations for the transformation in his new book The Weimar Century: German Émigrés and the Ideological Foundation of the Cold War (Princeton University Press, 2015),  Greenberg shows how a small group of German émigrés, who came of age during Germany's Weimar Republic, provided the intellectual leadership for West Germany's postwar reconstruction as a democratic republic. The book focuses on five individuals, Protestant political thinker Carl J. Friedrich, Socialist theoretician Ernst Fraenkel, Catholic journalist Waldemar Gurian, liberal lawyer Karl Loewenstein, and international relations expert Hans Morgenthau. Each of these émigrés became important leaders in the intellectual transformation of Germany and were key figures in facilitating a collaboration between American occupiers and Germany citizens. Beyond their role in the democratization of West Germany, Greenberg also shows that these émigrés were key architects of the Cold War order. These émigrés saw democracy and anti-communism as closely linked, an interpretation they brought not only to the reconstruction of Germany, but also to Cold War projects across the globe. These men became key players in U.S. Cold War policymaking in Korea, Latin America, and beyond. In doing so, they gained influential roles in at the center of American power and helped shape the early Cold War for better and worse.

Orit HalpernView on AmazonThe second half of the twentieth century saw a radical transformation in approaches to recording and displaying information. Orit Halpern's new book traces the emergence of the "communicative objectivity" that resulted from this shift and produced new forms of observation, rationality, and economy. Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945 (Duke University Press, 2014) beautifully accomplishes this by creating a dialogue between fields that don't often speak to one another in our scholarship: the history of science and knowledge, and the study of design, planning, and aesthetics. The result is a fascinating history of the construction of vision and cognition after WWII that looks carefully at the impact of early cybernetics on American design, urban planning, psychology, political science, management, and governmentality. Along the way, readers are treated to explorations of the "smart city" of Songdo Korea, the 1964-65 World's Fair, labs at MIT, tricks played on porpoises, images of Marilyn Monroe, experiments on frog eyes, gardens designed by Isamu Noguchi, and much more. It's a deeply thoughtful, wonderfully trans-disciplinary book that's also a lot of fun to read.

Kimberly A. HamlinView on Amazon[Cross-posted from New Books in Gender Studies] Kimberly A. Hamlin is an associate professor in American Studies and history at Miami University in Oxford Ohio. Her book from Eve to Evolution: Darwin, Science and Women's Rights in Gilded Age in America  (University of Chicago Press, 2014), provides a history of how a group of women's rights advocates turned to Charles Darwin's evolutionary theory to answer the eternal "woman question." Hamlin's fascinating intellectual history uncovers how the new evolutionary science provided multiple arguments by which to advance the cause of women's rights in the home and society.  Many scholars are familiar with the Enlightenment, religious, and socialist origins of feminist thought. Hamlin suggests another significant strand of thought offered by the science of human origins. She argues that Darwinism, often with unorthodox interpretations, was effective in overturning a central ideological obstacle to women's equality–the biblical story of Eve. Charles Darwin's theory, against his own conservative views, turned upside down traditional ideas about women. Freethinkers, socialist, sexologist seized on evolutionary science to build arguments against recalcitrant traditional views. They asserted that their contemporary culture was a construct of erroneous ideas calling for change, in order to live in accordance to the evolutionary laws of nature. As "reform Darwinists," Hamlin's subjects stood against social Darwinism, religious teaching, and custom. Yet, evolutionary science under male control was deployed to reassert women's subordination. Sex difference as interpreted by many male scientists pointed to female intellectual inferiority. Women, mostly outside the science establishment, called on the evidence of "woman's experience" against claims of scientific men.  Hamlin offers a lucid narrative of how a group of women intervened in a period between the demise of Eve, as the metanarrative for the meaning of womanhood, and the masculinist consolidation of evolutionary science.

View on Amazon[Cross-posted from New Books in Buddhist Studies] In India in the Chinese Imagination: Myth, Religion, and Thought (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), eleven scholars (including editors John Kieschnick and Meir Shahar) examine the Chinese reception of Indian ideas and myth, and address Chinese attempts to recreate India within the central kingdom.  Beginning with Victor Mair's argument that it was Buddhist theories about reality that allowed fiction to flourish in China, and ending with Stephen R. Bokenkamp's study of celestial scripts that Daoists created in response to the appearance of Sanskrit and the Devanāgarī script in China, the volume focuses primarily on the fourth to tenth centuries but addresses dynamics that were at play both before and after this six-century period. While many previous studies that address the impact of India on China do so by focusing on the Chinese transformation of Buddhism and on the degree to which Chinese Buddhism retained this or that Indian feature, this volume differs in that it looks at the influence of Indian thought (particularly religious thought and myths) beyond the confines of Buddhism proper.  Meir Shahar and Bernard Faure's respective contributions are good examples of this, as they demonstrate that some of the Indian deities and demons who came to China with Tantric Buddhism exchanged their Buddhist robes for Daoist ones, or escaped into the wider world of Chinese religious thought and practice.  Another central theme of the book is the way in which Chinese turned to Indian models for religious and political ends, or, in other cases, attempted to recreate India within China.  Shi Zhiru, for example, explains how a tenth-century king of Wuyue sought to manufacture and distribute 84,000 stūpas, a clear emulation of the great Indian king Aśoka. In addition to the aforementioned scholars, the volume contains chapters by Yamabe Nobuyoshi, Ye Derong, the late John R. McRae, Robert H. Sharf, and Christine Mollier.  This book will be of particular interest to those wanting to learn more about Indian myth in East Asia, the Chinese reception of Indian ideas and symbols, the interaction between Daoism and Buddhism, the adapting of Buddhist monasticism to Chinese familial organization, Bodhidharma, the influence of Buddhism on Chinese literature, and the Chinese response to Buddhist doctrinal dilemmas.

Matthew StanleyView on Amazon[Cross-posted from New Books in Science, Technology, and Society] "Show me how it doos." Such were the words of a young James Clerk "Dafty" Maxwell (1831-79), an inquisitive child prone to punning who grew into a renowned physicist known for his work on electromagnetism. After learning to juggle and conducting experiments on falling cats, Maxwell went on to have an intense conversion experience that brought him to evangelicalism. The young T.H. Huxley (1825-95), on the other hand, busied himself at "delivering sermons from tree stumps" as a young boy, before joining the navy, studying jellyfish, eventually launching an assault against the Anglican Church and gaining world renown as the biologist who was "Darwin's Bulldog." Matthew Stanley's wonderful new book introduces us to Maxwell and Huxley as they embodied theistic and naturalistic science, respectively, in Victorian Britain. Moving well beyond the widespread assumption that modern science and religion are and always have been fundamentally antithetical to one another, Huxley's Church & Maxwell's Demon: From Theistic Science to Naturalistic Science (University of Chicago Press, 2014) offers a history of scientific naturalism that illustrates the deep and fundamental commonalities between positions on the proper practice of science that began to diverge relatively late and in very particular historical circumstances. Beginning at a point when Maxwell's theistic science was the "standard" and Huxley was the "challenger," and ending at the point when Huxley "won," Stanley goes on to guide readers through some of the major topics of debate that characterized Victorian science (including the nature of miracles and of consciousness, the limits of science, the origin of the universe, the question of intellectual freedom, the morality of education, the possibility of free will) to show the gradual divergence of perspectives that were always rooted in concerns about scientific practice, and to consider the ramifications of this history for how we understand and conduct debates over Intelligent Design and related issues today.

Sean FornerView on Amazon[Cross-posted from New Books in History] The Federal Republic of Germany is often held up today as one of the world's great democracies, where the commitment to such ideals as transparency, careful deliberation, social and political equality, a vibrant public sphere, and perhaps most important–political participation–defines the country's self-image. It was not ever so. In 1945, Germany lay in ruins, literally, not to mention ethically and existentially. And much of its population, in that moment, given the chance, would very likely have chosen to return the Nazis to power. Sean Forner is Associate Professor of History at Michigan State University. His book, German Intellectuals and the Challenge of Democratic Renewal: Culture and Politics after 1945 (Cambridge University Press, 2014), deals with that moment in Germany just after the Second World War, when a network of individuals he calls engaged democrats emerged. These individuals occupied a range of political positions, but all shared a dream of a Germany that would be both committed to democracy, and beholden neither to West nor East. That part of their project–creating a Germany between the incipient polarities of the Cold War–was not to be, but the engaged democrats of the immediate post-1945 era are nonetheless a highly significant part of the transformation that arguably helped to create–or lay the foundations for–the Germany of today.

Erik C. BanksView on Amazon[Cross-posted from New Books in Philosophy] The Austrian physicist Ernst Mach, the American psychologist William James, and the British philosopher Bertrand Russell shared an interest in explaining the mind in naturalistic terms – unified with the rest of nature, not metaphysically distinct as Descartes argued. In The Realistic Empiricism of Mach, James, and Russell: Neutral Monism Reconceived (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Erik C. Banks delves into the movement that these three figures launched, for the first time showing how they provide a unified, if incomplete, theory of the mind. Realistic empiricism combines a direct realist view about knowledge with neutral monism – the idea that the basic events that make up the world are neither mental nor physical and can be manifested as either. Banks also advances the position as a non-panpsychist contender in contemporary philosophy of mind, and outlines the underlying mathematical framework for the basic events.

Matthew A. SuttonView on Amazon Matthew Avery Sutton is the author of three books:  Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America (2007), Jerry Falwell and the Rise of the Religious Right: A Brief History with Documents (2012), and, most recently, American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism (Harvard University Press, 2014), which is the subject of this interview with Raymond Haberski for New Books in Intellectual History. Sutton makes a provocative argument in the introduction of this book that captures a few of his central arguments: "Their business was that of instant redemption, of immediate transformation," Sutton says of a group of radical evangelicals who would become known as fundamentalists. "Fundamentalists created a different kind of morally infused American politics, on that challenged the long democratic tradition of pragmatic governance by compromise and consensus. Theirs was a politics of apocalypse." From the late nineteenth century to the present, Protestants who have read the signs of the times as ominous warnings of both the decline of the world around them and the impending return of Jesus to lead the faithful to a new future have shaped American thought and politics through their fundamentalism and, later, as evangelicals. Far from feeling paralyzed by apocalyptic visions, evangelicals have turned their interpretation of the end times into generational calls to action. Sutton's book joins a distinguished historiographical tradition and an exciting new wave of younger scholars writing and re-interpreting America's history of evangelical Protestantism. His book stands as one of the first synthetic treatments of the intellectual, political, and social histories of this significant subject.

Todd H. WeirView on Amazon[Cross-posted from New Books in History]  If you look up the word "secular" in just about about any English-language dictionary, you'll find that the word denotes, among other things, something that is not religious. This "not-religious-ness" would seem to be the modern essence of the word. If a government is secular, it can't be religious. If a court is secular, it can't be religious. If a party is secular, it can't be religious. But, as Todd H. Weir points out in his fascinating book Secularism and Religion in Nineteenth-Century Germany: The Rise of the Fourth Confession (Cambridge University Press, 2014), the origins of what we might call "secularism"–the faith with no faith–were profoundly religious. To understand how this could be so, Weir takes us back to an age and place–the nineteenth-century German Lands–in which belonging to a church was a matter of state. The question then and there wasn't whether you were going to adhere to a faith, but which one. Yet, in the wake of the Enlightenment, there were those who did not want to belong to one of the "established" (as in "establishment clause") religions. They–"dissenters"–were seeking their own path to God and they petitioned the state to allow them to do so. Sometimes the lords of the land (and often heads of the church) granted this wish; sometimes they didn't. Sometimes they did, reversed themselves, and then reversed themselves again. Given the novelty of "free religion" and "free thinking," it was hard to know what to do. In any case, the back and forth between officials and religious dissenters opened a space–narrow at first and then gradually widening–in which the faithful could be not only different but, well, not very faithful at all. Listen in.

Edward Ross DickinsonView on AmazonIn this interview with historian Edward Ross Dickinson we talk about sex. Well, actually we talk about the talk about sex. Since Michel Foucault's epochal work History of Sexuality (1976) how moderns talked about sex has been a central concern of cultural and intellectual historians. Foucault linked a number of nineteenth-century phenomena, such as the growth of sexology as a discipline and the pathologization of homosexuality, to the formation of new sexual subjectivities and the emergence of biopolitical strategies of population management. Taking a cue from Foucault, some historians of modern Germany have interpreted the talk about sex and reproduction in the Kaiserreich as the foundational stage of a discourse about eugenics that would ultimately contribute to National Socialism and its racial state. In his book Sex, Freedom and Power in Imperial Germany 1880-1914 (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Dickinson challenges this view. He likens German sex talk to a barroom brawl that started at one table and spread across a crowded room. Sex was as a field of contestation, involving Christian moralists, sex reformers and sexologists, each tied to social and political interests. In this interview, we discuss the different anthropologies that undergirded the respective positions. Christian (and some Jewish) morality activists argued that sex had to be overcome through the moral virtue, while sex reformers and sexologists understood sex in a monist vein, as a natural drive and the engine of creative production and human biological and social evolution.

William J. TurkelView on Amazon[Cross-posted from New Books in Science, Technology, and Society] "In a sense, all life consists of the colonization of an electric world. But to see that, we have to go back to the very beginning." William J. Turkel's new book traces the emergence and inhabiting of an electric world through the span of human history and beyond. Embracing a "big history" approach to the archive, Spark from the Deep: How Shocking Experiments with Strongly Electric Fish Powered Scientific Discovery (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013) is a story of the human understanding and use of electricity through the study of strongly-electric catfish, rays, and eels. It's a history of intimacy between life and the electric, humans and instruments, life and death, from the earliest history of human interaction with strongly electric fish through the modern world. Turkel collects a fascinating set of sources and stories on therapeutic, experimental, and conceptual encounters with fish as apparatus, and readers will find wonderful engagements with the work of Darwin, Volta, Galvani, von Humboldt, Faraday, Du Bois-Reymond, and many more writers and thinkers. Spark from the Deep is also the result of a very inventive and thoughtful approach to digital history, and we talk about Turkel's research methodology and engagement with digital tools and sources in the course of the interview. As a result, this will be of interest to listeners who seek stories of the electric, as well as listeners interested more broadly in the craft of history. Enjoy! You can find Turkel's introduction to doing research with digital sources on his website.

Steven ConnView on Amazon[Cross-posted from New Books in Urban Studies] Americans have a paradoxical relationship with cities, Steven Conn argues in his new book, Americans Against the City: Anti-Urbanism in the Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press, 2014).  Nearly three-quarters of the population lives near an urban center, the result of a centuries-old, global trend that reflects not just industrialization but the role cities have played as engines of economic, social, cultural, intellectual, and political life. Yet two-thirds of this "metropolitan" demographic–half the nation–chooses to reside in the suburbs, and over the years a remarkably consistent and low number of people have said they would prefer to live in a city. This may just reflect circumstance, the outcome of policies that, historians know, were not smartly, and often undemocratically, imposed. But as Morton White recounted decades ago, the intellectuals of the past have been just as anti-urban as politicians. Despite the outsized importance of the seaboard port-cities to the War for Independence, the founders left a Constitution that divided power geographically, not numerically, ensuring that cities would be forever underrepresented. Jefferson expressed the feeling of many early republicans that we could only maintain our virtue and freedom by remaining a nation of small yeoman, even while doubling the country's size and guaranteeing its commercial development. Henry David Thoreau, writing in a more democratic age, told readers to go to "the woods" to find individuality–from a cabin one mile outside Concord. This anti-urban tradition was briefly interrupted in the late 1800's, when, as Conn writes, for the first time the problems of the city became the problems of the nation. Many Progressives advocated European-style planning to meet the challenges for which cities were infrastructurally unprepared and often governmentally powerless to resolve. But as Conn writes, many thinkers also continued to see the city itself as the problem, and saw the solution as decentralization: dispersing population and industry. During the interwar period, the car, and electricity, stepped in to meet their needs, and when the Great Depression hit, FDR and the New Dealers fell back on this generation of thought, coming forward with a battery of programs that would unravel the city–and the famous coalition he built. Indeed, while the anti-urban tradition has often been the vehicle for an illiberal free-market political agenda, Conn shows that it has covered the ideological spectrum. The postwar Right in the Sunbelt helped speed the decline of the industrial belt in the North by advertising its bourgeoning megalopolises as the antithesis of the urban: free of high-rises, zoning, civil rights protestors, unions, and government in general, even while it relied on billions in federal tax dollars, saw high rates in crime, and increasingly had to reverse itself and create basic municipal services. But the anti-urban sentiment cut across the aisle, from the enthusiasm of postwar liberals for "urban renewal" and highways to the hippies' revival of the back-to-the-land fantasy and the flowering of 1990's communitarianism. The nation's anti-urban policies remain, as does the bipartisan impulse, which makes this book's subject as relevant as ever. Perhaps, as Conn says, in this era of hip gentrification, when the children of the suburbs are returning to cities, the "new urbanists" will break internationally odd pattern. But they will have to grapple with the multidimensional legacy of the nation's anti-urban past. And Conn's intellectual and cultural history, the first of its kind, will be the place to start.

Mike O'ConnorView on Amazon[Cross-posted from New Books in Political Science] Mike O'Connor is the author of A Commercial Republic: America's Enduring Debate over Democratic Capitalism (University Press of Kansas 2014). He has also published articles in Contemporary Pragmatism and The Sixties. O'Connor teaches at Georgia State University in Atlanta, and holds a Ph.D. in American studies from the University of Texas at Austin. He was one of the original bloggers at the U.S. Intellectual History website, and served as a founding officer of the Society for U.S. Intellectual History. O'Connor offers an intellectual history of the relationship between government and business in the US. Starting at the very earliest days of the republic and travelling up to the contemporary time period, the book offers rich details and interesting findings about the nature of government. I was most interested in the exploration of the opposition to taxes. The book is a nice complement to previous podcasts from Daniel Stedman-Jones in May 2013.

John TreschView on AmazonAfter the Second World War, the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukacs described National Socialism as a triumph of irrationalism and a "destruction of reason." It has since become commonplace to interpret modern European intellectual history as a prolonged struggle between the Enlightenment and Romanticism. The Enlightenment is generally valorized as identical with rationality, mechanism, cosmopolitanism, liberalism, progress, optimism, and secularism, while Romanticism is often connected to holism, irrationality, conservatism, nationalism, myth, pessimism and, eventually, fascism. John Tresch (University of Pennsylvania) questions these dichotomies in his new book The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon (University of Chicago Press, 2012). In our interview we discuss what made steam engines Romantic, which technical illusions awaited early nineteenth-century Parisian theatergoers and how Saint-Simonians could envisage future society as a Romantic machine.

Ajay K. MehrotraView on AmazonPrior to the passage of the Sixteenth Amendment, the United States did not have a national system of taxation–it had a regional system, a system linked to political parties, and a system that, in many instances, preserved and protected trade.  In his superbly written and thoughtful book Making the Modern American Fiscal State (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Ajay K. Mehrotra argues that "the rise of direct and graduated taxation in the early twentieth century signaled the start of a more complex and sophisticated system of fiscal governance." Indeed, the introduction of a federal income did not merely create a completely new and soon dominate stream of revenue for the federal government, but created new institutions for the collection, accounting and distribution of revenue, and, most importantly, changed the way Americans viewed and related to each other. Drawing fascinating portraits of economists and legal scholars and pulling together intellectual threads from economics, institutional and political histories, Mehrotra has produced a work at the leading edge of new U.S. intellectual history. Ajay K. Mehrotra is Associate Dean for Research, Professor of Law, and Louis F. Niezer Faculty Fellow Adjunct Professor of History at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. He is the co-editor (with Isaac William Martin and Monica Prasad) of The New Fiscal Sociology: Taxation in Comparative and Historical Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009). His writings have also appeared in student-edited law reviews and interdisciplinary journals including Law & Social Inquiry, Law & History Review, and Law & Society Review. His scholarship and teaching have been supported by grants and fellowships from the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council.