David Steigerwald Ohio State University

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

David SteigerwaldOhio State University

I have to confess at the outset that Im not altogether comfortable speaking to thisgroup about the purposes of intellectual history today. There are people herefrom whom Ive learned so much, and many more from whom I am learning somuch, for me to presume that I have any useful insight. I speak especially withour younger colleagues in mind. You dont need me to answer the questionIntellectual 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. Orperhaps some think of me, as did someone I was introduced to last year whosniffed, diffidently, Oh, youre that Sixties guy. As though I were the onlyperson who writes on the Sixties. At least thats a somewhat less causticassessment than what I heard from a senior colleague who chided me not so longago for my ill-focused research agenda.

Fair enough, I guess. I do have a general, maybe even strange, track record ofwritingWilsonianism, consumerism, the culture concept, the urban crisis, andyes, the Sixties, and most recently the UAW and automation. I was trained as anintellectual historian, however, and it is my method, I even say my avocation. Iam interested in the broad ebb and flow of ideas, and most particularly in howand why certain ideas gain currency in particular times and places. No matterwhat particular topic Im digging around in, Im first and most keenly interested

in what ideas underlay claims to power, to prestige and status, and how peopleexplain themselves to themselves.

There is a close relationship between my ill-focused research agenda andintellectual history as a method of inquiry, as a way of getting at the past andposing good questions. It seems to me that ours is the most expansive of all fieldswithin the discipline of history. Ideas have been everywhere, at all times, andeveryone has them. They are universal. At a time when every field is scramblingto become international and cosmopolitan in the broadest sense, intellectualhistorians can be satisfied that their field has always been thusat least in theoryand potential. We should be inveterateindeed shamelesstrespassers, 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 varyinginterests, one that sets few if any boundaries. If you are interested in any giventhinker or body of knowledge simply because they attract you, you should indulgeyourself. I can recall Eugene Genovese telling students that it was more or lessuseless to waste time studying a body of thought that was unconnected to theflow 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,Im inclined to think that we should be more generous to one another. More thanthat, though: In a public atmosphere that is arguably more fiercely anti-intellectual than any of us can rememberand were historians; our memoriesare longreflecting 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 orresistance. It is, however, inherently dignified. It has integrity.

For my part, though, I have to admit that I was attracted to intellectual historypartly for its polemical value. My introduction to Gramsci as an undergraduateintroduced me to the broad possibilities that rested in the study of ideas. Helegitimated intellectual history to me. This was in the early 1980s, and Gramsciwas all in fashion. And while lots of people took lots of different things fromGramsciincluding the subjectivist delusion that radicalism began and ended inculturethere were three things that reading him impressed on me: first, thatideas mattered, that power relations were expressed, if often only imprecisely, inwidely-held convictions; second, that the study of ideas did not necessarily entaila preoccupation with intellectuals or formal philosophy, that my neighborsbizarre infatuation with Amways propaganda was as telling as the cultishpopularity of Milton Friedman; and, finally, that an inquiry into the history ofideas was no abstract endeavor but could be turned to hard questioning about themanipulation of power in any given time or place, and by extension, couldencourage hard questions about the relationship between prevailing public ideasand the wielding of power in our own time. Gramsci gave me leave to indulgeboth a passion for the play of ideas across time and an obligation to come tocritical terms with the way the contemporary world works.

The lure of intellectual history as a method of inquiry is its capacitya unique

capacity, I believe, if not in kind then in degreeto think through the ideologicalconstructs that bedevil the world we live in now, to speak truth to power, toinvoke the clich. Another way of saying this is that intellectual history is a wayof living up to the obligations of that type we call the public intellectual. Here isanother seductive ingredient to the field: by doing intellectual history, it ispossible to contribute to intellectual history. Admittedly I dont think were sounique in this: economic historians can surely do economics and contribute tocontemporary debates, as can diplomatic historians and historians of race, just tocheck off a few of our companion fields. Still, I do think that there is a peculiaropportunity, if not obligation, for us as historians to engage our subject matterwith the same intensity of purpose that our subjects pursued theirs. In this way,

intellectual history joins the subjective and objective more decisively than othermethods.

The opportunity both to write intellectual history and to contribute to publicdiscourse as public intellectuals hangs heavy about us in ways that I dont see inother fields, whose practitioners are often too easily self-satisfied. Preciselybecause 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 ashuman decency, we are at a real disadvantage.

Where intellectual history stands in an intensely anti-intellectual age, a timewhen 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 self-criticism, which comes from studying the movement of ideas and the people whoconvey them, sets us off against our fellow citizens, too many of whom seem tothink that Glen Beck is an intellectual. This disconnection between what we doand public discourse provides the background, in my view, against which the fieldhas undergone a much-noted decline over the last twenty years or more. Many ofus look back to the time when Richard Hofstadter won Pulitzers for books thateviscerated the know-nothings; many of us are even more familiar with the timewhen Christopher Lasch rebuked the know-somethings, and earned wideattention, if not praise, for doing so.

I do not think that it is a coincidence that the voice of public intellectuals hasdiminished and that the field of intellectual history has declined at essentially thesame time. The question is how the two are connected. As we try to grapple withour evident inability to engage the reading public in ways that influence publicdiscourse, we are sometimes given to a certain amount of collective self-flagellation, as in, for example, the sharp exchange between Russell Jacoby andDavid Hollinger over Jacobys 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 its very fresh. Jacobys argumentwas aggressive and pointed: American intellectuals had surrendered theimportant influence they had enjoyed on public debate at mid-century by takingup comfortable positions in academia; academia, in turn, pressed them into

assorted lines of conformist specialties and rewarded them for churning outjargon-ridden blather that got them tenure at the cost of any serious publicinfluence. 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 goodfaith and dismissive, accordingly, of any number of serious thinkers who alsohappen to hold academic positions at prestigious institutions.

My gut tells me Im with Jacoby, that our immersion in academia has graduallydrawn us away from our obligations as public intellectuals as we chase tenure andacademic fashion in pursuit of security. My instinct is to think that Hollinger tooeasily glossed over the pressures that academia imposes on us. Ive always been

uneasy with one of his main lines of criticism, in which he suggested thatacademia is large enough to be considered a broad community, a public all itsown. Thus, he wrote, where academics reach across disciplinary lines, as RichardRorty, Stanley Fish, Paul Kennedy, Robert Bellah and others have done, they ineffect do the work of public intellectuals. Wide currency within academia doesnot 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 alarge 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 temperand test audacious general claims. It is as though he were defending a self-enclosed, self-correcting intellectual world because that is where the real thinkingis being done. But that seems to me to skirt Jacobys basic thrust: thatintellectuals were increasingly talking mostly to themselves.

If my gut takes me one way, my head takes me the other, because a strong part ofme agrees with Hollingers critique. The central problem with Jacobys book, asHollinger rightly maintained, was his claim that the university was to blame forthe evaporation of the public intellectual. Surely, academic expertise, alwayshard-won and never anything to dismiss, is no automatic disqualification fromthe ranks of public intellectuals. Look at some of the wisest people engaged inpublic debate these daysPaul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz from economics;James Hansen and Lonny Thompson from climate science, come quickly tomindand the value of that expertise is obvious, their impact on public discourseinvaluable, if unfortunately indecisive. It is not just an ideal, moreover, to saythat the university as an institution remains a place where free-thinking ispossible, a place where we can stand apart from the public in order to get thedistance necessary to take its proper measure. And this makes the universityfundamentally different fromand fundamentally superior tothe agenda-driven think tanks that have consumed far too much official public attention overthe last decades. But disinterested criticism is not the same as disengagedcriticism, and if we dont speak beyond our own circles, then our defense of theintegrity of ideas wont mean much.

As I said, to some extent I think were too hard on ourselves when we bemoan therelated disappearance of public intellectuals and the decline of the field ofintellectual 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 workin 20th-century US are often tempted to measure our own situation against thosemid-century giantsMumford, Niebuhr, Arendt, Macdonald, Daniel Bell, JaneJacobswhen it probably was the conditions under which they wrote that madethem so influential; that is to say, mid-century Americas receptivity to broadideas 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 theventuring of broad ideas. We have had other periods of national stupidity before,and weve manage to get through them, though maybe the dominance of right-

wing media does make the present idiocy more serious. But I want to point totwo other things. Ideas have become means to manipulate for narrow ends.They are either ruthlessly put forward in the service of the continuedaccumulation 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 inpoint. Even the Krugmans and the Stiglitzes focus their attention on how muchstimulus we need, or how much financial regulation, while their American


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Enterprise Institute or Heritage Foundation adversaries counter with their free-market promises of endless growth. Who is advancing broad claims about whatan economic system in a democracy ought to be like? Who is crafting visions ofthe good society? How do we know what the common good is if we have no ideasabout what the good society ought to look like?

This is a tough environment for those of us who want to write about and defendbroad, humanistic ideas. But thats the environment we faceits our reality. Weprobably will not see in our lifetimes the likes of a Lasch or a Hofstadter, or aMills or a Mumford or an Arendt. That is not necessarily our fault. It would beour fault, however, if we shy away from our double burden, which is stand asscholar who defend the integrity of ideas, while we stand as citizens who venturebroad critiques that provide some glimpse of what a decent, democratic societyshould look like..

David Steigerwald Ohio State University

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