American Intellectual History

H. G. Wells was one of the most influential writers of the first half of the twentieth century. Most famous today as a founder of modern science fiction, he was once known throughout the world as a visionary social and political thinker. Questions of global order were central to his work. From the opening decade of the century until the close of the Second World War, he campaigned tirelessly for the creation of a world state, characterised by universal peace and justice. Yet scholarship on Wells has paid insufficient attention to the complex and conflicted nature of Wells’s early views about how to build a world state, and in particular the tensions between his advocacy of a New Republic, formed by the unification of the English-speaking peoples, and his support for liberal imperialism. In this essay I analyse the development of this key theme in Wells’s political thinking. I demonstrate how his views on race, empire, and Anglo-American union shifted over time, show how his political arguments connected to his underlying views about social explanation and language, and highlight how his interpretation of the United States had a profound influence on his ideas about world order.

This article analyses the historical conditions for, and implications of, the attitudes and conduct of a number of prominent or influential public intellectuals in the United States during the Great War. It argues that many intellectuals, particularly those who supported American entry to the war, shared a general lack of concern with the realities of full-scale warfare. Their response to the war had little to do with the war itself – its political and economic causes, brutal and industrial character, and human and material costs. Rather, their positions were often based on their views of culture and philosophy, or on their visions of the post-war world. As a result, relatively few of these intellectuals fully considered the political, social, and economic context in which the catastrophe occurred. The war, to many of them, was primarily a clash of civilizations, a battle of good versus evil, civilized democracy versus barbaric savagery, progress versus backwardness, culture versus kultur. The article describes several manifestations of American intellectual approaches to the war, discusses the correlation between intellectual and general public attitudes, and concludes with some implications for thinking about the relationship between intellectuals and war in more recent American history.

During the final quarter of the twentieth century, the democratic peace thesis - the idea that democracies do not fight one another - moved to the centre of scholarly and political debate throughout the Western world. Much of this work traces its origins to the European Enlightenment, and especially on Immanuel Kant. However, this historical narrative misses much of the subsequent discourse about democracy and war. In this essay I focus on some prominent, though now largely forgotten, strands of political thinking in the United States and Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In particular, I dissect fin de siècle debates about democracy, empire, race, and interstate conflict. Section I delineates four popular visions of peace that circulated during the nineteenth century: structural-liberal, radical-liberal, socialist, and republican. Section II introduces what I call the ‘democratic war thesis’ and the ‘democratic empire thesis.’ The former identified the linkages between democratic political structures and inter-state conflict, the latter suggested that vast empires could co-operatively govern the world and abolish war.  Section III anatomises the racial peace thesis, which was propounded by a range of prominent figures,  including Andrew Carnegie, Cecil Rhodes and H. G. Wells. They argued, from different points on the political spectrum, that the 'Anglo-Saxon race' held the key to perpetual peace.

Thomas Jefferson's conviction that the health of the nation's democracy would depend on the existence of an informed citizenry has been a cornerstone of our political culture since the inception of the American republic. Even today's debates over education reform and the need to be competitive in a technologically advanced, global economy are rooted in the idea that the education of rising generations is crucial to the nation's future. In this book, Richard Brown traces the development of the ideal of an informed citizenry in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries and assesses its continuing influence and changing meaning. Although the concept had some antecedents in Europe, the full articulation of the ideal relationship between citizenship and knowledge came during the era of the American Revolution. The founding fathers believed that the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of the press, religion, speech, and assembly would foster an informed citizenry. According to Brown, many of the fundamental institutions of American democracy and society, including political parties, public education, the media, and even the postal system, have enjoyed wide government support precisely because they have been identified as vital for the creation and maintenance of an informed populace.

http://www.uncpress.unc.edu/browse/book_detail?title_id=40

Studies of the history of the human sciences during the cold war era have proliferated over the past decade -in the JHBS and elsewhere. This special issue focuses on the connections between the behavioral sciences and the culture and politics of the cold war in the United States. In the recent literature, there is a tendency to identify the cold war human sciences with two main paradigms: that of psychocultural analysis, on the one hand, and of the systems sciences, on the other. The essays in the special issue both extend our understanding of each of these interpretive frameworks, and help us to grasp their interconnection.

Debates about post-Westphalian forms of citizenship play a central role in contemporary political thought. I analyse a significant precursor to these debates, exploring fin de siècle conceptions of racial and imperial political membership. My argument has two main parts. First, I delineate different models of imperial citizenship: imperial-statist, institutional-imperial, racial-imperial, and isopolitan. Second, I dissect the notion of ‘isopolitan’ (or common) citizenship. Isopolity is a practice, derived from the ancient Greeks, in which independent states reciprocally grant citizenship rights to the members of other independent states, thus creating a loose form of political union. It was adapted at the turn of the twentieth century to theorise future Anglo-American relations. I examine the arguments of some prominent isopolitans, focusing on the constitutional theorist A. V. Dicey. ‘Anglo’ isopolitans challenged the isomorphic relationship between the territorial state, sovereignty and political membership. They did so through constructing a global white supremacist political vision.

La participation du Canada à l’intervention militaire contre le groupe armé état islamique illustre la netteté du choix qui s’offre aux canadiens en matière de politique étrangère. D’un côté, l’internationalisme libéral, qui domine la culture stratégique canadienne depuis la Seconde Guerre mondiale, est porté par Thomas Mulcair et Justin Trudeau. En face d’eux, Stephen Harper se fait le héraut d’une nouvelle conception du Canada et de son rôle dans le monde : le néoconservatisme. Or, les termes de ce choix ne sont pas également connus : si l’internationalisme fait l’objet d’analyses systématiques depuis longtemps, le néoconservatisme demeure mal compris du fait de sa nouveauté relative. Certes, depuis quelques années, des analystes de politique étrangère canadienne cherchent à expliquer les discours et les actions de Stephen Harper par l’étude de son idéologie néoconservatrice (Boerger 2007 ; Boily 2007, 2009 ; Massie et Roussel 2013 ; Dorion-Soulié et Roussel 2014 ; Lagassé, Massie et Roussel 2014). Ces travaux prennent tous comme point de départ le constat d’une rupture (Morin et Roussel 2014) : depuis l’arrivée de Harper au pouvoir, on assiste à l’émergence d’une nouvelle culture stratégique issue d’une idéologie néoconservatrice. Mais, jusqu’à présent, le terme lui-même  n’a pas été conceptualisé de manière satisfaisante, et trop peu de travaux ont cherché à vérifier l’hypothèse de la rupture néoconservatrice. Ce numéro spécial propose de remédier à ces deux insuffisances de la littérature.

Histories of analytic philosophy in the United States have typically focused on the reception of logical positivism, and especially on responses to the work of the Vienna Circle. Such accounts often call attention to the purportedly positivist-inspired marginalization of normative concerns in American philosophy: according to this story, the overweening positivist concern for logic and physics as paradigms of knowledge displaced questions of value and social relations. This article argues that the reception framework encourages us to mistake the real sources of the analytic revolution in post-war philosophy. These are to be found in debates about intentional action and practical reasoning – debates in which ‘normative’ questions of value and social action were in fact central. Discussion of these topics took place within a transatlantic community of Wittgensteinians, ordinary languages philosophers, logical empiricists, and decision theorists. These different strands of ‘analytical’ thinking were bound together into a new philosophical mainstream not by a positivist alliance with logic and physics, but by the rapid development of the mathematical and behavioural sciences during the Second World War and its immediate aftermath. An illustrative application of this new framework for interpreting the analytic revolution is found in the early career and writings of Donald Davidson.

Belgian-American critic Paul de Man’s postwar relationship to his wartime past has been fiercely debated since the 1987 discovery of almost 200 pro-German articles that he wrote in his youth during the Nazi occupation of his native Belgium. What were the reasons for his postwar silence over this and how did this relationship shape his deconstructionist writings? Here, it is argued that after his 1948 emigration to America, de Man, with single-minded, almost obsessional, determination pursued an authenticating project, the goal of which was to become an author who never (again) committed the mistakes of his youth. To realize his goal, de Man underwent a decades-long spiritual conversion that can be viewed as embodying the tension between two models of conversion in Western culture: metanoia – the transformation of one’s way of thinking and being – and epistrophē – the return to the source of one’s way of thinking and being. While de Man’s conversion at first entailed the straightforward renunciation of and silence about his wartime life, his repudiation eventually fashioned an opposition between his present and past. This opposition remained ‘undeconstructed’ – his collaborationist identity became an unrepresented presence, ‘a stowaway’ that endured and in great part defined him. Evidence of the tension between de Man’s opposed aims – his divided conversion – is perhaps most legible in his postwar writings.

The authors investigated secondary conditions in people with developmental disabilities in terms of (a) the average number of conditions experienced and overall health and independence, (b) their degree and nature, and (c) gender differences. Information was obtained by a questionnaire completed by the caregivers for 659 people with developmental disabilities. Participants experienced an average of 11.3 secondary conditions. Secondary conditions causing significant limitations were reading difficulties, communication, physical fitness-conditioning, personal hygiene-appearance, weight, dental and oral hygiene, and memory problems. Some gender differences emerged in overall health scores and limitations due to secondary conditions. PMID: 21291309 [PubMed -indexed for MEDLINE] 2. Augment Altern Commun. 2010 Dec;26(4):230-41.

This essay argues that post-analytic philosophy finds its origins not only in an invented tradition-that of 'analytic philosophy'-but also in an invented dilemma: namely, the response to the allegedly overweening dominance of 'positivism' in American philosophy. I begin by surveying the problems with the folk wisdom about positivism and analytic philosophy. This pervasive narrative locates the emergence of post-analytic philosophy after a period of hegemony for logical positivism and cognate philosophical subfields. Taking seriously evidence indicating a distinct overlap in the construction of the analytic and post-analytic traditions, I return to the founding moment of American analytic philosophy in the years immediately following World War II. What we see, I suggest, is not a reaction against a clearly defined and powerful logical positivist mainstream, but the careful, piecewise co-ordination of what would become characteristic 'analytic' modes of argument, problematics, and tool kits. Willard Van Orman Quine played a central role in this process, and for this reason I focus on the circumstances in which his field-defining 1951 article, 'Two Dogmas of Empiricism' was written and received. I conclude with the claim that both analytic and post-analytic philosophers relied on a peculiar image of the failure of logical positivism, and of the opportunities that failure presented.

Relations (DSR), recounted the three scenes in some detail. 1 Each sheep was slaughtered close to the family dwelling by a team of two persons, who completed their task in less than one hour. Similar containers were used to catch the blood after the throat was slit, and in each case, cords were used to tie the animals down and, later, to hang the carcass. In all three instances, the viscera were carefully treated: the bladder and gall bladder were thrown away, while the stomach and intestines were cleaned and saved for food.

L’article a pour sujet la personnalité extraordinaire du kabbaliste le Rabbin Levi Isaac Krakovsky (1891–1966), un des étudiants oubliés du Rabbin Yehuda Leib Ashlag (1885–1955). Krakovsky diffusait l’enseignement de son maître en Amérique en anglais, écrivait des douzaines de livres et essayait d’établir des yeshivot de Kabbalistes. Contrairement à son maître, il présentait un enseignement exotérique et une vision de diffusion de la Kabbale dans le monde entier. Son influence était minime, mais un de ses élèves était Shraga Philip Berg qui continuait son chemin et le complétait de plusieurs points de vue. L’article se base sur de riches matières archivales, parmi lesquelles de longues essays de l’auteur en manuscrit qui sont décrits ici pour la premiere fois. D’une telle façon, nous décrivons le dévelopment de la Kabbale en Amérique du début du vingtième siècle jusqu’ aujourd’hui.

Historians of pragmatism have long overlooked Kenneth Burke and Richard McKeon.This has not been without good reason. At first glance, the two read more like critics than adherents of the tradition. Yet placing Burke and McKeon’s writings from the 1920s to the late 1950s in the context of their development reveals a shared project aimed at reforming pragmatism. While pragmatists such as John Dewey and Sidney Hook alleged a conceptual fidelity between the scientific method and democratic processes such as public debate, Burke and McKeon questioned this link. Metaphors drawn from science, they believed, blinded pragmatists to the nature of communication.Due to this oversight, pragmatists ignored the ideological ambiguity that surrounded terms like “science” and “democracy” during the mid-twentieth century. Burke and McKeon sought to fix this omission. Pragmatists, they argued, needed to trade the language of science for a terminology drawn from a source more attuned to the power of communication: the arts. By advancing this case, Burke and McKeon crafted an aesthetic form of pragmatism—a variant of the philosophy that, ultimately, contemporaries would barely recognize as such.

Is there such a thing as Canadian neoconservatism ? Even though many analysts in Canadian foreign policy use this term to describe the Harper government and the « Calgary School », they fail to concep-tualize precisely the political object in question. Some go as far as saying that this ideology was imported from the United States. This paper’s goal is, first, to show the « recognition » that American neoconservatives give to their Canadian counterparts and vice versa, thus illustrating the ideolog-ical proximity between these two neoconservatisms. However, the second portion of the article consists in proposing a generic definition of neoconservatism, to show that if it is warranted to speak of a Canadian neoconservatism to describe the Harper government and the « Calgary School », it is not a sign of American influence. Rather, Canadian neoconservatism has its own particularities and traditions.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Richard Rorty advocated that his confréres kick the ‘philosophy habit’—that is, adopt a post-positivist, post-metaphysical style of interpretation. Philosophers largely ignored Rorty’s clarion call. Unburdened by the kind of Selbstverständnis of scholarly mission held by most analytics, members of departments of literature instead became the most important advocates for reading literature philosophically during the last two decades of the twentieth century. Though the academic Left, especially practitioners of ‘theory’, largely celebrated and encouraged this development, Rorty, in the late 1990s, came to view it as harmfully elevating ‘cultural politics’ above ‘real politics’, which would ultimately lead to the abandonment of civic responsibilities. While heavy-handed and partial, Rorty’s critique of the uses of philosophy by literary critics was not only perceptive, but can be helpful for understanding how the contemporary academic Left might move forward as well.

This paper sets out an ambitious critique of contemporary political scientists, political historians and others concerned with the history of democracy. It argues that overwhelmingly the history of democracy relies on an overtly Eurocentric narrative that emphasizes the keystone moments of Western civilization. According to this narrative, democracy has a clear trajectory that can be traced from ancient experiments with participatory government in Greece and to a lesser extent in Rome, through the development of the British parliament, the American Declaration of Independence and the French Revolution, and then finally onto the triumphant march of the liberal model of democracy across the globe over the last 200 years, particularly under Western tutelage. Histories of democracy that focus exclusively on these events not only privilege Europe and its successful colonies, but also miss the broader human story of the struggle for and achievement of democracy.

This presents us with a distinct challenge. For those whose heritage does not include a direct link to Greek assemblies, the American Congress or the French Revolution, the 'standard history of democracy' provides a distant and exclusive narrative, which limits one's ability to embrace democracy. This paper concludes by noting that, as democracy spreads out across the world today, political scientists not only need to break down the intellectual orthodoxy that democracy has exclusively Western roots, but also to embrace a more global view of democracy as a political practise that has been present at various times and in sometimes unfamiliar ways in the complex histories and rich cultural traditions of most of the people of the earth.

This chapter discusses the political thinking of the influential late nineteenth-century historian E. A. Freeman. It focuses on his critique of the British empire, before turning to his preferred alternative racialised vision of world order. This was centred on an elaborate account of the historical evolution and glorious destiny of the "Aryan" race, and it was embodied in his demand for a future alliance - even joint citizenship - between Britain and the United States. I also discuss how his popular account of "comparative politics" helped to shape the emerging discipline of political science in the United States, chiefly through its influence on Herbert Baxter Adams at Johns Hopkins.

A slightly revised version will be republished in Duncan Bell, Remaking the World: Essays on Liberalism and Empire (Princeton UP, 2016)

Starting from the presupposition that art and art criticism in the United
States of America are closely linked and that the very meanings and
receptions of art works have been reflected by various writings in the field of art criticism, this first part of a comprehensive study on the topic
attempts, on the one hand, to divide the historical evolution of American
fine arts and art criticism into several distinct periods, and on the other, to evaluate the major directions of art criticism by considering its historical periods as being markedly ideological or cultural, as the case may be. Thus, considering the approximately 150 years of historical
accomplishments of art criticism in the United States, I will argue that the starting point of American art criticism is visibly cultural, while the next two periods are characterized by ideological art criticism, noting that the ideological orientation differs in the two time frames. The fourth moment in the evolution of art criticism marks the revival of the cultural, so that, within the fifth, the postmodern art criticism could no longer grasp a clear distinction between the cultural and the ideological. The present article will focus on the first two important orientations in art criticism in the United States, 1865-1900 and 1908-1940, respectively; a future study will consider the remaining three periods, following this historicist approach of art criticism in the United States.

Abstract: Originating in the theoretical and aesthetical controversies whipped up by the overall iconoclastic rejections of traditional aesthetic canons in avant-garde art, the very question concerning the refinement of cognitive adventures and the plural meanings of aesthetic experiences has continuously fuelled the American ruminations on visual arts. Due to the impactful role of technology in the artistic realm and the outburst and dissemination of visual arts around the midcentury (e.g., the overarching impact of Hollywood industry and the boldness of abstract expressionism), American professionalized aesthetics has started to mirror the more and more complex artistic occurrences and their plethora of meanings. Broadly inspired by an opuscule of Ludwig Wittgenstein, the first conceptual investigations of the arts in the United States have been incited by the interrogation of the cognitive status of aesthetics (i.e., the autonomy of artistic idioms and/or the essentialism/ anti-essentialism debate regarding the languages of the arts). By and large, the role of cognition about the visual arts has gradually expanded to include the critique of art philosophies and traditional aesthetics, the questioning of aesthetic categories and predicates, the rejection of formalism and essentialist definitions, the reexamination of intentionality and perception, the subject - object dichotomy, etc. Moreover, cognitivism about the arts has fundamentally reconsidered its very instruments: description, interpretation, meaning and representation. The present paper attempts to unveil the most recent dimensions of cognitivism about the visual arts, especially focusing on its instantiations in contemporary American aesthetics.

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The well-known and undeniably formative relationship between John Smibert, colonial America's first academically trained portrait painter, and George Berkeley, the eminent immaterialist philosopher of empiricism, has long puzzled scholars. Whereas most research has attempted to define their association by focusing on Smibert's celebrated painting The Bermuda Group, this article argues that two highly enigmatic and potentially satirical paintings by Smibert-portraits long ago entitled Self-portrait, no. 1 and Self-portrait, no. 2-better clarify the intellectual relationship between the two men. Comparing these two paintings reveals that many of their otherwise conventional elements are deliberately opposed-from their sitters' attire and gestures to their virtual spaces and formats. These oppositions are interpreted here as Smibert's artistic engagement with the conflict between his training in the painterly depiction of the third dimension and Berkeley's theory of visual perception.

The dissertation examines the meaning of the public or common good considered as an end or purpose of government in the public debate over the adoption of the U.S. Constitution. Federalists and Anti-Federalists assert that the purpose of government is to both promote the public good and protect individual rights. What did they mean by the “public good” and related phrases? An extended commentary and textual analysis of the published writings of five Federalists (John Dickinson, Oliver Ellsworth, Noah Webster, Tench Coxe, and James Wilson) and five Anti-Federalists (Agrippa, Centinel, Federal Farmer, Impartial Examiner,and Brutus), the dissertation examines the way in which the notion of the public good played a significant part within the larger themes of federalism, representation, liberty versus licentiousness, and union during the ratification period.

Neither side’s understanding of the protection of individual rights as the purpose of government completely forecloses the notion of the promotion of the public good. The uniquely federal nature of the Constitution obscures the deeper understanding of the public good of Anti-Federalists and Federalists alike, but both sides—especially the Federalists—provide plenty of evidence. The Anti-Federalist view of representation emphasizes that the public good must be truly public without making clear how the public good differs from majority will; the Federalists emphasize the public good must be truly good, the product of sound deliberation. The Federalist argument includes the explicit claim that liberty is not license, but tied to a common notion of virtue, or what is truly good for all. The Federalists argue that there is a public good for all the states combined and thus the federal government must have supreme power over matters relating to commerce—and commerce is spoken of as intrinsically connected to morality and virtue—for the sake of this national public good. Although the Federalist notion of the public good is severely limited in scope, remaining in some way open as to the final purpose of human beings or the ultimate questions about what is truly good, it is nonetheless much more than the notion of an interdependent collection of private goods.