Richard Cándida Smith responds to Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen’s The Ideas That Made America: A Brief History.
The Dynamo
The opening chapter of Henry Adams’s history of the United States confidently examines the country’s economic and demographic conditions at the election of Thomas Jefferson as president. Turning in the next chapter to the state of cultural and intellectual life in the early republic, Adams warns that “only with diffidence could the best-informed Americans venture … to generalize on the subject of their own national habits of life and thought.”[1] He bemoans the excess of attention given to New England letters, of little inherent interest because, with a few notable exceptions (he cites Jonathan Edwards), for Adams the writings of US pastors and professors were “mostly dull, and wanting literary merit.”
More genuine originality of thought, he argues, was to be found among inventors such as Robert Fulton, financial and commercial innovators such as Albert Gallatin, or the political theorists who led the revolution and founded the republic, such as Jefferson, Madison, and Adams’s own great-grandfather, John Adams. The publications of such practical men, written for a public that had to be convinced rather than instructed, were much shorter and more lively. Their arguments had, in Henry Adams’s evaluation, resulted in new machines, political structures, and ways of conducting business that, over the nine decades separating Jefferson’s election and the publication of Adams’s history, transformed the most basic conditions of everyday life. The obscurantist tendency marking commentary on cultural and intellectual life in the United States, Adams observed, reflected the longstanding hostility most traditional scholars felt for what the eminent Boston pastor and geographer Jedediah Morse in 1803 called, “the insidious encroachments of innovation … that evil and beguiling spirit which is now stalking to and fro through the earth.”[2] By contrast, and to Adams’s point, Morse’s own son, Samuel, famous inventor of the single-wire telegraph, had different ideas and would become an important symbol of innovation as the “engine of progress.”
Despite Adams’s claims that early American cultural and intellectual history cannot be adequately represented by conventional means, he filled four long chapters with his observations on the life of the mind in the United States at the beginning of the nineteenth century. He emphasized the multiplicity of perspectives to be found, though it should be noted that his conception of “multiplicity” was clearly limited and highly selective, even by the standards of his own time. Women appear sparingly. Native American and African American ideas are entirely absent, despite Adams presenting slavery and westward expansion as two of the most important challenges the new nation had to address. Nonetheless, Adams’s argument was that by 1800, multiplicity, understood as reflecting the diverse and competing practical purposes of the nation’s citizenry, proved to be the most dynamic aspect of modern thought, making irrelevant but never repudiating the country’s traditional Christian conception of a unified chain of being. Most troubling of all, after the revolution, every group that could organize itself produced its own body of authority. Adams took for granted that this multiplicity would expand infinitely, a theme he explored in more detail in his later book, The Education of Henry Adams.
Adams’s concept of the “dynamo” expressed a heuristic framework for modeling historical phenomena that he had derived from the laws of thermodynamics. In all phenomena, an originary unified state gives way to a state of entropy. An assumption that natural and social phenomena follow distinct but corresponding paths resurrected ideas of totality in an acceptably modern form. Adams clearly yearned for antique, spiritual conceptions of unity—he contrasted the dynamo to the “Virgin” of eleventh- and twelfth-century Christianity—rather than one grounded in the random motions of atoms and molecules in a state of pressure. He accepted that what he desired exists only in the essentially aesthetic mental constructions humans develop to veil the chaos of natural creation with illusions of origin, direction, and meaning. The resolution effect inherent to his heuristic framework helped transform an idiosyncratic secondary figure in nineteenth-century US intellectual life into a central icon of twentieth-century US intellectual history, ready-to-hand for discussing the contradictory experiences of modernity.
All fields struggle with how to reduce a complex body of scholarship into a comprehensible story that starts somewhere and arrives….
The difficulties Adams invoked before summarizing US thought and culture are inherent to a field whose remit is to study the representations of the world that a society makes. Any imaginable contemporary introduction to US intellectual history, whether a book, a film/television program, or a survey course, must pass over most of what has been or is currently discussed in the field. No overview can capture the range of topics and interpretations presented at annual meetings of the Society for US Intellectual History and the African American Intellectual History Society, published in journals such as Modern Intellectual History and the Journal of the History of Ideas, or discussed at length at the S-USIH and AAIHS blogs. New work in gender, African American history, Native American history, the environment, the history of markets, and the multiple reshapings of capitalism have reworked core topics in US intellectual history. The field is alive because it keeps outgrowing older conclusions that proved to be less settled than they might have seemed fifty years ago. There are simply many more names, books, events, movements, and arguments in discussion than any author or instructor could include in any overview of thought and society in the United States.
All fields struggle with how to reduce a complex body of scholarship into a comprehensible story that starts somewhere and arrives, after so many class sessions or so many chapters, at a definable, summarizable destination. The challenge is particularly difficult with intellectual history, the story of what people knew, or thought they knew, with particular concern for how ideas shape what people in the society did. Ideas are flexible mental “objects,” operating in social life through many, overlapping and, typically, inconsistent if not contradictory representations. A successful representation opens up new ways of seeing and doing. It replaces older representations, which become antiquated. New ideas facilitate the pursuit of new goals, but their success also means that some aspects of the world in which humans operate will be seen less clearly than before. Any usable representation of a complex reality must ignore potentially important elements within that reality.[3] One of the ways of getting around that problem has been the division of knowledge work into distinct fields, each developing its own systems of representation freed from the polymath’s obligation to grasp totality.
The Bridge
For example, take the bridge. In some circumstances, it is primarily an engineering problem involving materials, strength, flexibility, and the principles of statics. In other situations, the same bridge is analyzed as a vital component of an area’s economic infrastructure and hence an entry point for understanding a community’s political life. A bridge is also an aesthetic object whose design expresses the ambitions and values of its sponsors in their broader effort to reshape the built environment to express their ideas of a well-governed polity. Any given aspect of human life involves an intersection of a broad number of quasi-autonomous disciplines, each of which is likely to focus on a relatively narrow range of ideas. All the perspectives brought to bear to represent any given reality are heuristic, adopted because useful for the particular purposes of those involved. Something holistically present to all members of a society has been turned into a variety of distinct overlapping objects, each corresponding to the goals those involved have formed. Intellectual life, if taken as the theory and practice of the arts, humanities, and sciences all together, thus has the challenge of developing adequate representations of competing interpretations (and interests) that humans bring to a multiplicity of sites and situations.
If the “ideas” associated with bridges are complex, how much more indeterminate must be ideas of intangible concepts such as “democracy,” “capitalism,” “modernity,” “antimodernism,” “gender,” “race,” “ethnicity,” “sexuality,” “intelligence,” “the environment,” “consumerism,” “science,” “knowledge”—all basic, indeed fundamental topics that any introduction to US intellectual history will reference. Anyone working in the field develops working definitions of the various concepts that are most relevant to the specific historical questions they have chosen to examine. Working definitions are descriptive tools for managing indeterminate categories in the course of developing explanatory hypotheses, which, given the inherently partial and fragmentary nature of historical evidence, necessarily operate more as tentative propositions.
Working definitions and narratives are particularly useful heuristics whenever precision, accuracy, and completeness are unfeasible. The inability to view the past directly and the fragmentary and partial nature of surviving traces are inescapable conditions shaping all historical representations. The art of history writing rests on the selection of a few key pieces of evidence that are capable of standing in for a much larger field of action, most of which must be surmised through the use of heuristic methods. Henry Adams borrowed the then relatively new concept of entropy to shape his argument that ideals of unity were succumbing to the realities of multiplicity. In physics, entropy is an important element in a theoretical model, whose cogency is affirmed by its predictive value. Observations made in an early heuristic phase yield a conception whose validity precedes the data from which the theory was derived. In Adams’s hand, entropy is a poetic image, whose value is the degree to which a reader sees a complex historical reality in a new and meaningful way that is consistent with the sources Adams used.
In the introduction to The Ideas That Made America, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen describes a very different image that allows her to condense an amorphous topic into a coherent 200-page book that, she explains in the introduction, “tells the story of developments in American intellectual life as a history of ‘crossings’ in all of their varieties—between one cultural setting and another, text and context, secular analysis and sacred belief, and formal argument and emotional affirmation.” Unexpected “conversations,” in movement across national, temporal, and cultural “borders,” illustrate the multiplicity of interests, perspectives, beliefs, and social position that, forced to interact, must continually rework, often repurpose, the various representations the varied historical actors involved have used to make sense of a world that, for better or worse, they must share.[4]
The propositions Ratner-Rosenhagen presents fit the material in the book, but they are in no way definitive descriptions of what US intellectual history must be. All historians working in the field have analogous, but seldom identical, working assumptions. In my intellectual history courses, I gave my students a related but different image to help them follow the various topics that lay ahead. I described the course as tracing a series of intense epistemological battles, usually lasting generations, over what constitutes a reliable foundation for truth. Opposing positions on “how we know” have significant consequences for corresponding ontological and deontological conceptions. I found an epistemological frame a useful starting point because it foregrounded the formal aspects of ideas as semi-autonomous factors at work in a community, while simultaneously signaling the potential for violence in many intellectual disagreements, as well as the often-disastrous consequences for many of those who became objects of knowledge in need of “objective” and “verifiable” representations. This, if you will, provided the necessary heuristic “bridge” into my narrative of US intellectual history.
Given that heuristics are necessary for historians to communicate the conclusions they have formed with each other, as well as with students in the classes they offer or, for that matter, with the general public in the introductory-level books they publish, the guiding images and the material selected are likely to be as different as the individuals involved. The value of heuristic models is formal and communicative. The primary responsibility of anyone teaching a class or writing a text is to share informed judgment. Instructors and authors present an overarching interpretation of topics they have spent most of their professional careers studying, supported with evidence selected for relevance to the arguments they, as scholars and analytic thinkers, feel the greatest urgency to share.
At the introductory level, they have succeeded if they can impart a key for approaching a field whose content far exceeds what can be said in any course or book. Any key is partial, so will need to be augmented with the keys others have used, which happens in the course of a student or reader exploring topics of interest further and encountering work that other scholars have produced. There is, however, always the danger that an argument convinces because it confirms preferences. Instead of better comprehending the aliveness at work in each moment, the student or the reader receives the comfort of a representation that feels likely primarily because the message is likable.
The Horizon
Reinhart Koselleck noted that the transmission of knowledge from teachers to students is central to renewing the traditions at play within a society so that they remain meaningful for the next generation, meaning generally objects of continuing discussion and debate.[5] An important corollary to his observation is that traditions are never reproduced exactly. To remain a living tradition, older ideas must always be reinterpreted to take into account new developments, many or most of which were absolutely unimaginable to those in the past. At the same time, as “conversations,” “crossings,” “debates,” and “battles” take place, new connotations rework the vocabulary available for various types of conceptual discussion. The meaning of words in everyday usage can shift radically, often in very short periods of time, without the distinctions being clearly acknowledged.[6] Each generation reshapes the traditions it inherits to fit its own ambitions, many of which, of course, are completely antithetical not only to each other but to previous consensuses congealing into a tradition.
As a result, the distinctive task of intellectual history has been to identify the traps filling the terminology available in any given society. In his investigations of historical methods, Koselleck observed that the most common words available to describe everyday matters are so saturated with competing assumptions, reflecting both practical and ideological investments, that they have lost their descriptive utility.[7] Koselleck argued that terms used in the past are seldom adequate descriptions, but their place within larger narratives reveals what he called a “horizon of expectation,” within which the interplay of hopes and fears shaped preparations for action.[8] As a “horizon,” the reality of a term is experienced as a set of expectations for action in the present, and thus might be considered as equivalent to routines, protocols, or, possibly, habits. A horizon of expectation is about current social relationships and how to manage them, how to insist that they are, or should be, predictable in specific, desired forms, how to make preferences mandatory. It motivates a repertoire of responses to the ups and downs of living and working with others. A horizon of expectation shapes assumptions about what others will do, while suggesting a range of situation-specific reactions to perform in return, whose performance will strengthen control, but also, in many cases, resistance.
Conditioned self-existence (particularly revealed through the senses) coexists with its opposite: universality, not as existence-for-self, but instead existence for consciousness of identity and connection, an existence for others found by means of self-realization and made visible to oneself and one’s companions through the logic of a narrative, the purpose of which is to propose the categories necessary for identification of one’s location in the world. For the storyteller, and for those who listen with appreciation, the essential content of perception becomes, as Hegel framed it in The Phenomenology of the Mind, “undifferentiated and indeterminate universality.”[9] This result can be pleasurable, providing the winners an enjoyment of their status that can be rehearsed, revised, and repeated. Since unification is an act of consciousness, the reality must exist in the relations of consciousness refined into desirable forms. Consciousness replaces immediate nature, direct knowing of wants and objects that satisfy those wants, with a crafted second nature, which more closely corresponds to the notions of objects viewed through the infinite and plastic nature of thought. Random events that could appear as mere caprice transform into examples of moral imperatives becoming present and showing the way to a proper, socially determined, occasionally even desirable, form of self-realization grounded in collective affirmation.
Intellectual history remains one of the best approaches to perceiving past horizons of expectation.
Intellectual history remains one of the best approaches to perceiving past horizons of expectation. It helps us reconstruct worldviews vying in political and social contests at a level that is more than ideological rehearsal. A worldview inherent to a horizon of expectations is the most stable element in a given historical situation because it provides keywords, protocols, and routines to which busy people can turn when uncertain about what to do next. The “horizon of expectation” makes visible tacit assumptions and ambitions motivating policies. The contests that fuel historical change underscore that multiplicity of worldviews and of horizons of expectation is more common than consensus. This is one of the many reasons why the effort to define the “American mind,” or even the “New England mind,” proved to be a dead end.
US intellectual history has entered a stage where the wealth of information is so extensive that imagining a list of canonical texts or canonical figures, however flexible or modular, serves no practical purpose beyond a putative common core curriculum, which may in practice interfere with incorporating what a growing body of new research has revealed into how US intellectual history is taught or shared with the general public. There will likely be repeated efforts to restore the center as well as to imagine alternative centers. Every center suggests a coherence that is tempting to scholars and students alike because it can be rehearsed, revised, and repeated. But only because a coherent narrative and stable working definitions require defining whatever remains anomalous to the main storyline as “deviant,” “idiosyncratic,” “marginal,” “parochial, “provincial,” and so on.
The Unexpected
In his study of the early republic, Henry Adams acknowledged that Revolutionary War and independence had opened up space for marginal groups to pursue their interests. The old New England, of which Adams was a notable if prickly and challenging heir, lacked the energy to sustain its authority. Adams did not celebrate multiplicity, but looking back at the first century of the republic, he found that multiplicity continually prevailed over the authority of tradition because all alternatives required repressing the nation’s most likely sources for innovation and renewal. He concluded that by the end of James Madison’s second term, “uniformity,” a bare minimum that traditionalists and modernizers could agree upon, became a working substitute for genuine unity.[10] The idea is similar to Francis Lieber’s and Alexis de Tocqueville’s well-known commentaries in the 1830s and 1840s on the stabilizing role of “conformity” in a society based on individual rather than family or corporate status.
Adams’s most recent biographer, David S. Brown, traces his subject’s anti-modernism, but he also delves into Adams’s contributions to post-Civil War social reform movements and his continuing efforts to reshape modernity in an alternative direction. In this account, in abandoning the Republican party for the reform wing of the Democratic party, Adams hoped to reconcile the strengths inherent to multiplicity with the stability that comes when the best educated, usually those well-grounded in valued traditions, can guide inescapable change. Adams the reformer had many more frustrations than successes, but his ideas influenced many of his fellow elites who were better prepared for the practicalities of leadership, among them Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, who Adams took under his wing a few years before he died when they moved to Washington so Franklin could serve in Woodrow Wilson’s administration.[11]
That an icon of anti-modernism, filled with Anglo-Saxonist presumptions about the dangerous cosmopolitanism of Jews and the inferiority of most immigrants and emancipated slaves because their origins lacked traditions of democratic governance and self-reliance, could also be part of the New Deal’s genealogy suggests the multiplicity at work inside many, perhaps most, historical figures of note.[12] Rather than limiting investigation and commentary to reiteration of well-known verities that have never been as self-evident as claimed, the current effort to expand the boundaries of US intellectual history, fragile as it is and under fierce attack, will have, regardless of the outcome of the current moment, demonstrated—Adams might have noted “once again”—the surprising perspectives that come from thinking capaciously about intellectual life.
About the Author
Richard Cándida Smith is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of California, Berkeley. He has published seven books and over fifty essays in publications from the United States, Brazil, Mexico, Spain, France, the Netherlands, and Britain. His work has explored arts and literary networks, movements, and institutions in the United States, with an emphasis on international connections and exchange. He sits on the board of directors of Voices of Contemporary Art as well as several editorial boards and committees. He has been helping organize US participation in the Transatlantic Cultures: Cultural Histories of the Atlantic World 18th-21st Centuries, an international project under the direction of historians from France and Brazil bringing together scholars from every part of the world. He is a contributor to Painted Poetry & Painterly Poetics, an Ekphrastic Notion, an interdisciplinary, international project based in the Netherlands exploring the poetics of text and image.
Notes
[1] Henry Adams, History of the United States of America during the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson (1889-1891; reprint, New York: Library of America, 1986), 31.
[2] Adams, 32.
[3] Consider how, when germ theory replaced the four humours in the nineteenth century, interest declined in the role of the environment in health outcomes. See Linda Nash’s Inescapable Ecologies: A History of Environment, Disease, and Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), for a discussion of the disastrous effects this change in medical paradigms had on both environmental practices and public health in California’s agricultural and mining communities.
[4] Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, The Ideas That Made America: A Brief History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 3-4, quote on 3.
[5] Reinhart Koselleck, “Historia Magistra Vitae: The Dissolution of the Topos into the Perspective of a Modernized Historical Process,” in Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 26-42.
[6] Quentin Skinner’s influential two-volume The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge University Press, 1978) is a classic study of how political languages shifted in the early modern period.
[7] Koselleck, “The Historical-Political Semantics of Asymmetric Counterconcepts,” in Koselleck, Futures Past, 155-191.
[8] Koselleck, “‘Space of Experience’ and ‘Horizon of Expectation,’” in Koselleck, Futures Past, 255-275.
[9] Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Phenomenology of the Mind, Section II, trans. J. B. Baillie (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1967), 176.
[10] Henry Adams, History of the United States of America during the Administrations of James Madison (New York: Library of America, 1986), 1447.
[11] See David S. Brown, The Last American Aristocrat: The Brilliant Life and Improbable Education of Henry Adams (New York: Scribner, 2020), in particular, 105-106, 310-319.
[12] Brown, The Last American Aristocrat, 2, 278.