New Books in Intellectual History

[Cross-posted from New Books in American Studies] How could members of a movement committed to cosmopolitanism accommodate nationalism? How could men and women committed to non-resistance reconcile themselves to politics when the authority of even democratic polities depended ultimately upon the threat of force? How could activists committed to equality — the essence of democracy — deny that the democratic process produced policies that were manifestly unjust? Those are some of the main questions that animate W. Caleb McDaniel's important book The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery: Garrisonian Abolitionists and Transatlantic Reform (Louisiana State University Press, 2013). The most deeply research study of the transatlantic networks of the radical antislavery movement to date, it raises questions about the tensions between cosmopolitanism and nationalism, peace and violence, and means and ends that continue to bedevil those struggling to achieve social justice.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Political Science] Robert Horwitz is the author of America’s Right: Anti-Establishment Conservatism from Goldwater to the Tea Party (Polity, 2013). Horwitz is professor in the Department of Communications at the University of California San Diego. Over the last few months, we’ve heard from several authors discuss their books about neoliberalism and the Tea Party. Horwitz seeks to pull these movements together. He highlights the long history of paranoia in politics and the ways it influences the Tea Party today. He describes the ideological underpinnings of anti-establishment conservatism but also the institutions, people, and mechanisms through which the beliefs were spread. You can read a chapter here.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Science, Technology, and Society] In The Gaia Hypothesis: Science on a Pagan Planet (University of Chicago Press, 2013), Michael Ruse offers a fascinating history of the Gaia Hypothesis in the context of the transformations of professional and public engagements with science and technology in the 1960s. Based on an archive that spans texts, oral histories, and interviews with some of its major figures, The Gaia Hypothesis charts the development of the idea of the earth as a self-regulating organism. Ruse explores the development of the idea by Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock, and analyzes the nature and bases of the reactions to Margulis and Lovelock’s ideas from within different scientific and public communities. All of this is contextualized in a deep history of the different world concepts and philosophies of nature that informed the heated debate over Gaia, considering the idea of the earth as organism and nature as a self-regulating system in a range of texts that include Plato’s Timaeus, the work of German idealists, and the anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner, among many others. (The attentive reader will also note a surprising connection between Gaia and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies.) The book is full of empathetic, insightful, and often very funny portraits of Margulis, Lovelock, and a community of other figures associated with Gaia and its histories. It is also a wonderfully lively and readable narrative. Enjoy!

Michael J. Kramer, author of The Republic of Rock: Music and Citizenship in the Sixties Counterculture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), spoke with Ray Haberski about the way rock music became a venue, a medium, and a culture through which diverse groups of people—from the hippies in Berkeley, California to American troops in Saigon, Vietnam—thought about and attempted to create new meanings of citizenship. Kramer discusses such interesting terms as “Hip Capitalism,” “Hip Militarism,” and transnationalism within the expansive contexts of Cold War America and the counterculture.  The book offers a model of how to consider culture through the lived experiences of those who produced it and came to embody it.

Drew Maciag, author of Edmund Burke in America: The Contested Career of the Father of Modern Conservatism (Cornell University Press, 2013) spoke with Ray Haberski about the intellectual challenges Burke raised in a time of democratic revolutions and the legacy he left for thinkers who attempted to leverage tradition in the face of political change.  Maciag’s book is well-written and smartly conceived.  His subject spans the entire history of the United States, from the Revolution to the present day, and introduces readers to American thinkers who continue deserve our attention.  He also does an expert job addressing the conflict between liberalism and conservatism by demonstrating the roles historical contingency and personality play in shaping these complicated terms.  Maciag’s book serves a diverse community of readers, from academics looking for smart arguments about political theory to general readers who are interested in origins and development of the poles of American politics.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Language] Pretty much everyone who's done a linguistics course has come across the name of Ferdinand de Saussure – a name that's attached to such fundamentals as the distinction between synchrony and diachrony, and the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign. Yet when it comes to the man behind the ideas, most people know much less. Who was this man – this aristocrat with a Calvinist upbringing who shook the foundations of the linguistic establishment, and whose influence was felt more strongly after his death than it ever was in life? When John Joseph started looking into these questions, he found only scattered information. As a result, he ended up having to write the book that he himself had wanted to read. The result, Saussure (OUP, 2012), is a detailed but nevertheless readable account of the life and works of one of the most respected figures in the history of linguistics. In this interview we discuss some of the questions that arise in connection with Saussure: his major intellectual influences, his remarkable lack of publications during his adult life, the originality (and historical antecedents) of some of his central ideas, and "Calvinist linguistics".

[Cross-posted from New Books in Political Science] Daniel Stedman Jones is the author of Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics (Princeton University Press, 2012). The book tells a portion of the intellectual history of neoliberalism through a focus on the period of the 1950s through the 1980s. Stedman Jones tracks the development of a set of ideas by Karl Popper, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and later Milton Friedman, George Stigler, and James Buchanan, first in Europe and then in the United States. This intellectual movement soon becomes a transatlantic political movement, as the leaders of the neoliberal agenda sought to influence policy makers in the UK and US. Policy making in the late 1970s and early 1980s, particularly deregulation and other market-based reforms, reflected the success of the “masters of the universe” to move beyond the academy. The book ends with a reflection on the legacy of neoliberalism in current times. Scholars in political science, public policy, history, and economics would all benefit from the story Stedman Jones tells about the relationship between the history of ideas, politics, and policy. The book was short-listed for the Royal Historical Society, Gladstone Prize.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Philosophy] Contemporary philosophers still wrestle mightily with Plato’s Republic. A common reading has it that in the Republic, Plato’s character Socrates defends a conception of justice according to which reason should rule the soul and philosophers should rule the city.  On all accounts, the Republic is centrally concerned with the question of what philosophers are and how they come to be.  A standard reading contends that the multiple discussions in the Republic of the nature of the philosopher all aim to depict the very same kind of creature. In her new book, Philosophers in the Republic: Plato’s Two Paradigms (Cornell University Press, 2012), Roslyn Weiss challenges this view.  She argues that the Republic depicts at least two distinct kinds of philosopher.  She then employs this analysis in discussing several puzzles that emerge from the text concerning, for example, the absence of the virtue of piety in the Republic, and the curious similarities between Socrates’s conception of justice and moderation.  The result is a fascinating examination of the Republic that has much to offer both to Plato scholars and more casual readers.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Language] The only disappointment with A History of Psycholinguistics: The Pre-Chomskyan Era (Oxford UP, 2012) is that, as the subtitle says, the story it tells stops at the cognitive revolution, before Pim Levelt is himself a major player in psycholinguistics. He says that telling the story of the last few decades is a task for someone else. The task he's taken on here is to describe the progress made in the psychology of language between its actual foundation – around 1800 – and the point at which it's widely and erroneously believed to have been founded – around 1951. The story that the book tells is remarkable in many ways: not only for its vast breadth and depth of scholarship, but also for the number of misconceptions that it corrects. Levelt uncovers how many modern theories in psycholinguistics are in fact independent rediscoveries of proposals made in the 19th century, and charts the significant positive contributions made to the science by figures who are often overlooked or even derided now (we discuss a couple of such cases in this interview). He vividly depicts how the rapid march of progress was catastrophically disrupted in the early 20th century, by a combination of political strife and scientific wrong turns, before being restored in the 1950s. In this interview we talk about some of the recurring themes of the book – forgetting and rediscovery, the remarkably prescient nature of much 19th century theoretical and experimental work, and the collective misunderstanding of the history of the discipline. And we touch upon the intentional misunderstandings that allowed research in psycholinguistics to be exploited for financial gain or more sinister purposes.

[Cross-posted from New Books in History] I have a friend who, as a young child, happened to meet Herbert Marcuse, by that time a rock-star intellectual and darling of the American student movement. Upon seeing the man, he exclaimed “Marcuse! Marcuse! You have such a beautiful head!” I don’t know how beautiful Herbert Marcuse’s head was, but I do know a lot of other interesting things about him and his Frankfurt School buddies now that I’ve read Thomas Wheatland’s wonderful The Frankfurt School in Exile (University of Minnesota Press, 2009). The story Tom tells casts the Frankfurt School in a new (and more correct) light. For one thing, Horkheimer, Adorno, and the rest really were hard-core empirical social scientists in the beginning, not “Critical Theorists” as we understand the term. They counted, measured, conducted surveys and did everything a positivist sociologist or economist would do. But, of course, that was not how they became idols of the New Left and the founders of “Critical Theory.” (Now that I think about it, almost no one ever achieves fame by doing empirical social science. See “Malcolm Gladwell” for more.) No, they–or rather Fromm, Marcuse and Habermas–got famous by telling young Americans that they were “repressed,” “alienated,” and “downtrodden” at exactly the moment they wanted to hear it, that is, the 1960s. You see, the “old” Marxism was dead; this was the “new and improved” version. In other words, they were in the right Critical-Theoretical place and at the right Critical-Theoretical time. And, as Tom points out, they were bewildered and even a bit disturbed by their fame. Despite what my friend said, Marcuse did not get a big head. Rather the opposite. He, much to his credit, told the students he didn’t want to be their guru, that he didn’t believe in gurus. But they didn’t care–they made him one anyway. Students love gurus. I loved Tom Wheatland’s book, and I encourage you to read it. Please become a fan of “New Books in History” on Facebook if you haven’t already.

[Cross-posted from New Books in History] When I was an undergraduate, I took a class called “The Enlightenment” in which we read all the thinkers of, well, “The Enlightenment.” I came to understand that they were the “good guys” of Western history, at least for most folks. We also read, as a kind of coda, a bit about the “Counter-Enlightenment,” of which you may never have heard. The writers of the Counter-Enlightenment were, I learned, the “bad guys” of Western history, for they (apparently) didn’t like reason, truth, progress and all that. First among the black-hats was Joseph de Maistre. He believed the French Revolution was “satanic,” as were the ideas behind it. Or so I thought until I read Carolina Armenteros‘ excellent book The French Idea of History: Joseph de Maistre and his Heirs, 1794-1854 (Cornell University Press, 2011). Turns out de Maistre was a good deal more subtle and thoughtful than the “received view” of him suggests, and Carolina does a marvelous job of making plain how and why. In this interview, Carolina explains not only the complexity of his thought, but also that he wasn’t really French, let alone a black-hat wearing reactionary.

[Cross-posted from New Books in Psychoanalysis] Perhaps most of us interested in psychoanalysis in the United States have the idea that, in 1909, when Freud lectured at Clark University, his first and only visit to this country, the profession was launched. That Freud was perhaps an afterthought to a larger celebration at the school may stun us, but truth be told that appears to be the case. In  After Freud Left: A Century of Psychoanalysis in America (University of Chicago Press, 2012)–part of what John Burnham calls “The New Freud Studies”–we encounter scholars looking closely at the way in which American culture interfaced with psychoanalytic thinking. During the mid-twentieth century, for myriad reasons, (the Cold War among them), psychoanalysis was a force to be reckoned with in the States. The book, which includes essays by historians of medicine and of culture, among them Elizabeth Lunbeck, George Makari, Louis Menand, and Dorothy Ross, tells a tale of how psychoanalysis resonated with some of the major thinkers of the time–including Lionel Trilling, Herbert Marcuse, and Norman O. Brown to name but a few. Given the contemporary context, aka today, in which psychoanalysis is not currying much favor as a mode of treatment or as a system of ideas, looking at the profession in its hey day will give one cause to pause. These historians argue that cultural shifts, among them the advent of psychopharmeceuticals coupled with new ideas about the self that do not consider the unconscious, have placed psychoanalysis on the sidelines. Dr. Burnham was a pleasure to interview and, as an historian, has been studying all things psychoanalytic since the 1950s. What we love to consider is that he has seen, in his lifetime, many of the changes that the book he has edited chronicles. That he has been writing about psychoanalysis, beginning with the completion of his doctorate in 1958 on the early origins of this profession, only makes this interview more compelling. Something prompted him to take notice then and it is an abiding interest that he has cultivated ever since. We were so pleased to have him with us as a result. In assembling an illustrious group of historians to write about this topic, Dr. Burnham has done a terrific service to a profession that might well want to reflect on its origins.