Casey Nelson Blake Columbia University

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Copyright Casey Nelson Blake 2010 1

Intellectual History for What?U.S. Intellectual History Conference 2010

Casey Nelson BlakeColumbia University

Daniel Bell famously wrote in 1960 "The differences between the intellectual andthe scholar, without being invidious, are important to understand. The scholarhas a bounded field of knowledge, a tradition, and seeks to find his place in it,adding to the accumulated, tested knowledge of the past as to a mosaic. Thescholar, qua scholar, is less involved with his self. The intellectual begins withhis experience, his individual perceptions of the world, his privileges anddeprivations, and judges the world by these sensibilities."

What is striking to me about the presentations we have just heard is how theirauthors write as scholars andintellectuals. They have reflected on the traditionsthat inform their work as historians, and on the institutions that have shapedthose traditionsgraduate school, institutions of higher education moregenerally, and journals of opinions. And whether implicitly or explicitly, theyhave spoken of the personal reasons that have led them to do the work they do.The latter is quite unusual in a conference of this kind and is an approach that Idlike to see be a more prominent feature of discussions of our field, particularly ifwe take seriously our responsibility to students. That is not to say we have heardpersonal revelations or declarations that identity determines intellectual orpolitical commitments. Instead, several of our panelists have reflectedthoughtfully on what might be called the subjective necessity of intellectualhistory. George Cotkin reminds us that the Vita is about la vida, or life. Those of

us who admire his work know that all his inquiries are inspired by WilliamJamess question, What makes a life significant. Rochelle Gurstein describesher choice of graduate study with the late Christopher Lasch as an effort tounderstand how we have come to inhabit what we normally think of as our ownprivate thoughts, feelings, perceptions, taste, sensibility. The practice ofintellectual history allowed her to understand the centuries-long processes thatshaped the inner life while also freeing her from the confines of [her] ownsubjectivity and the provinciality of our own historical moment.

These reflections have taken me back to my own experiences as a graduatestudent at Rochester in the late seventies and early eighties, which I recognize

were hardly typical of those enrolled in other programs then or since.Rochesters program was not only non-professional but decidedlyanti-professional, both in its emphasis on training across the boundaries of field anddiscipline and in the urgency with which many of us approached the study ofideas as related in some way to pressing public concerns. Perhaps others wereconcerned about finding a methodology that could stand up to the challenge ofthe new social history or elevating the visibility of intellectual history inprofessional organizations and journals. Those preoccupations prompted some


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stimulating discussions, as we were reminded in last years plenary on theWingspan Conference; but I fear an exclusive focus on methodologicalbreakthroughs may obscure the memory of other impulses that were deeply feltat the same timeand that I dare say are still deeply felt by young people whoenter this decidedly unfashionable field today.

As presumptuous as it may sound, it was profoundly important to many atRochester to figure out where we stood in relation to social theorists, culturalcritics, and philosophers who brought historical learning to bear oncontemporary debates. To discover where we stood on Adorno, RaymondWilliams, the Marcuse-Brown debate about Marx and Freud, on Arendt,MacIntyre and the revival of the civic-humanist tradition was in some respects todiscover where we stood with ourselves. Similar motivations were at work aswe plowed through the great tradition of American historians who dared to thinkbigthe Beards, Hofstadter, Perry Miller, William Appleman Williams--all ofwhom we read as both scholars and intellectuals (in Bells typology). To put itanother way, we studied intellectual history because we wanted some guidanceabout the conduct of public and private life. Rochester was not the only place forthis approach to historical inquiry: similar ambitions inspired many AmericanStudies grad students and junior faculty at Yale at roughly the same timeand nodoubt at other programs as well.

I raise these issues not to play a trump card of some kind, or suggest that such adistinctly anti-professional approach yielded greater scholarship than thatgenerated in other venues. Rather, I mention them because I believe they haverelevance to our work as teachers, particularly as teachers of undergraduates. Ifcalls for public intellectuals are to mean more than applauding publicity-seeking intellectuals, then I believe we need to reflect more on the teaching we

doperhaps our most important venue for addressing a public of non-specialistsand the on institutional settings in which we do it.

There are of course many ways to teach the history of ideas and culture: asideologies; as formal systems of thought enabled by specific institutions; as thequestions generated by communities of inquiry; as civic discourse and publicrhetoric; and much else besides. In my own case, I have found thatundergraduates respond most powerfully to an approach that explores how ideasare generated by the lived experiences of people we call intellectuals as well asthose we dont. I try to approach lived experience asfeltexperience andreflected-on experience and give particular attention to the biographies of

younger thinkers who struggled to find their way in societies rarely organized fortheir convenience. In large part I am responding to what I perceive is ourcultures failure to give young people examples of how to grow up and leadsatisfying lives. I am hardly going to stand up as an example of how to do that,and I dont claim that figures like William James, Jane Addams, or JamesBaldwin give students road maps for life. There are temples of worship andtwelve-step programs for that. But I believe that what Christopher Lasch called aconversational approach to the past, a dialogical process of discovery and self-


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discovery, is one of the greatest gifts we intellectual historians can offer thethousands of generalists who pass through our classrooms each year.

This kind of work is more easily done in certain contexts and at certain timesthan others, and the presentations by Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, Wilfred McClay,

and David Steigerwald bring home powerfully the institutional and ideologicalchallenges we face today. An unholy alliance of pseudo-populists, marketfundamentalists, and neo-liberals racing to the top of test scores has launched asavage war against learning. In response, many within the university are circlingthe wagons around practices that should have been rethought years ago. I wouldlike to conclude by saying a few words about the research university as achallengeperhaps the greatest challengeto those who believe in intellectualhistory as a resource for reflection on the conduct of life. As we know, theresearch universities that emerged in the United States in the late nineteenthcentury represented a powerful rebuke to the classical curriculum of the liberalarts college, which took as its mission the character-formation of young peopleand the training of a leadership elite in the civic arts. Those goals did not entirelydisappear in the research university, but they were increasingly relegated to theleast-valued sectors of the institutionusually to core curriculum and humanitiesprograms freighted with the tasks of teaching writing and creating a sense ofcommunity among freshmen finding their way in large institutions. These wereand remain labor-intensive programs that demand a lot from faculty, andteaching of this kind is often viewed as service supposedly unrelated toscholarship (a huge error in the case of intellectual historians, in my opinion).And of course such teaching results in few material or professional rewards. Thismay explain why even the most vaunted core-curriculum programssuch as theone at Columbiadepend on the labors of graduate students, adjuncts, andjunior faculty who are required to do a tour of duty in the Core before tenure.

Training in the civic arts has become the domain of debating clubs and otherextracurricular activities that many students pursue with one eye on their lawschool applications. Meanwhile, the marginalization of morality within theAmerican universityas Julie Ruben calls ithas culminated in moralinstruction by residential life administrators, who sponsor workshops in sexualconduct and multicultural sensitivity during freshman orientation (workshopsthat are promptly forgotten once classes begin). Without a common commitmentto character formation and civic educationwithout a common commitment toanythingits no wonder that the university is often such a fractured andfractious place

To say that intellectual historians have never felt entirely comfortable in thisinstitutional setting is an understatement. The disciplinary status of history hasalways been a bit fuzzyis it a social science or part of the humanities, or both?but the homelessness of intellectual historians in research universities has beeneven more acute. We may do better in liberal arts colleges, religious institutions,great-books schools like St. Johns, progressive colleges that still try to practice apragmatist pedagogy, or in schools like Cal Poly that have a policy of benignneglect when it comes to the humanities. Many of us who work in universities


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have more in common with faculty in other fields than we do with our fellowhistorians. I have had some of my most rewarding experiences in the classroomteaching with colleagues in American literature. In teaching graduate students, Ihave often found that those whose undergraduate studies were in subjects otherthan history are the ones best prepared to write about the history of ideas and

intellectuals. But its in the undergraduate classroom where I am most aware ofthe disconnect between what the matters to the research university and whatmatters so deeply to my students and to me.

Today the research university is in deep trouble, for reasons that are so familiar Idont need to rehearse them here. It worries me that our field has contributed solittle to public debates about higher education. Scholars in literature, moralphilosophy, and religion have intervened more forcefully, and more effectively,than we have. Meanwhile, a good many blogs operating on the margins of theacademy, or well beyond its orbit, are rising to a challenge that most intellectualhistorians have yet to acknowledge. The editors of one such blog, The NewInquiry, write:

The growing supply of career academics has floodedthe university job market, and 21st centurytechnologies have thrown traditional media intocrisis. Although the future of higher education andprint remains obscure, these cultural sea changeshave yielded one definite side effect: an abundance ofyoung writers and thinkers resolved to pursue a publicintellectual life for its own sakea pursuit orderedand enabled by Internet technology.

The people writing in such venues are searching for alternative ways of living alife committed to ideas, even as the economic infrastructure for such a lifecrumbles beneath them. They are also, Im delighted to see, seeking out writingsthat almost disappeared from humanities curricula during the last two or threedecades. Those drawn to Addams, Croly, Bourne, Trilling, Ellison, or Sontagdont want to complicate the narrative; they want to enter the moral narrativeof their own country and master it. Nor do they seem to spend much timefretting about methodology: method-ism is in many respects what the researchuniversity does best, and its pulse is fading as fast as that of the university itself.Something is happening here, and we dont know what it is, but any honest

person knows what it isnt: the Berkeley of 1960, the Columbia of 1950, theMadison of 1920, and the Ann Arbor of 1900 are not coming back. Given thatreality, I have to ask if the research university really is the best place to addressthe question of intellectual history for what?

Casey Nelson Blake Columbia University

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