American Intellectual History

Liberalism is a term employed in a dizzying variety of ways across the humanities and social sciences. This essay seeks to reframe how the liberal tradition is understood. I start by delineating different types of response – prescriptive, comprehensive, explanatory – that are frequently conflated in answering the question “what is liberalism?” I then discuss assorted methodological strategies employed in the existing literature: after rejecting “stipulative” and “canonical” approaches, I outline a contextualist alternative. On this (comprehensive) account, liberalism is best characterised as the sum of the arguments that have been classified as liberal, and recognised as such by other self-proclaimed liberals, over time. In the remainder of the article I present an historical analysis of shifts in the meaning of liberalism in Anglo-American political thought between 1850 and 1950, focusing in particular on how John Locke came to be seen as a liberal. I also explore the emergence of the category of "liberal democracy". I argue that the scope of the liberal tradition was massively expanded during the middle decades of the twentieth century, such that it came to be seen by many as the constitutive ideology of the West. This capacious (and deeply confusing) understanding of liberalism was produced by a conjunction of the ideological wars fought against “totalitarianism” and assorted developments in the social sciences. Today we both inherit and inhabit it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

W. V. Quine is widely regarded as one of the most important and influential philosophers of the twentieth century. Quine wrote and lectured on logic, philosophy of language, and epistemology throughout his long career, and was one of the American figures who did most to establish the analytic tradition of philosophy in the United States. Until recently, the historical development of both Quine's philosophy and the analytic tradition of which it is a part remained unexamined by historians and philosophers alike. In the last decade or so, however, analytic philosophers have begun to assess the history of their enterprise, and Quine's place within it. Building on this welcome development with the tools of intellectual history, this essay examines Quine's philosophical apprenticeship in the late 1920s and 1930s.

The basic tenets of Quine's mature thought set in early in his studies. Most notably, he displayed in his student writings a commitment to science as the primary theory of the world within which philosophical inquiry should take place. Yet he found the uncertain direction of interwar American philosophy uncongenial to his views. During a year of postdoctoral research in Europe, Quine encountered the work of analytic philosophers and logicians such as Rudolf Carnap and Alfred Tarski. Their scientific program for philosophy captivated Quine, who returned to Harvard a champion of their work. For the rest of the 1930s, Quine was an indefatigable advocate of the analytic tradition; he brought news of European logic and scientific philosophy to American universities. His purpose in doing so was to move American philosophy towards science and away from what he saw as its metaphysical entanglements. The reception and transformation of analytic philosophy in the United States is shown to have involved a complex dynamic between foreign and domestic conceptions of philosophy.

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.

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.

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)

Even as most scholars acknowledge that biblical law cannot be equated with legislation in the modern sense, there are many ways in which modern—and hence, anachronistic—notions about law continue to permeate discussions of biblical law. It is difficult to clear away intuitive assumptions without an alternate set of coordinates to assess the issue at hand in a new and different way. To move beyond a view of biblical law as legislation we need to identify a well-grounded empirical model that answers the fundamental questions: What is law? How is law determined? What is the role of sanctioned texts in determining that law? This study seeks to re-appropriate the common-law tradition of jurisprudence as a heuristic aid for the study of biblical law. This approach went largely out of favor in the mid-nineteenth century and we have lost touch with its basic assumptions. Re-engaging the common-law tradition will enable us to re-examine basic questions raised by the critical study of biblical law: What are the mechanisms that governed the evolution of law in ancient Israel?  Finally, how did the evolution of legal theory in the nineteenth century influence the study of biblical law?

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.

This essay explores a form of reflexivity peculiar to the postwar social sciences. The mobilization of science in the United States during World War II released across the social sciences a wave of new research tools: mathematical models and calculation techniques ranging from game theory to cybernetics. As this profusion of analytical technologies gathered pace in the early years of the Cold War, practitioners of economics and cognate disciplines began to register what I term tool shock. Foundational debates about the epistemological properties and scientific legitimacy of the new tools were conducted in various fields. Focusing on economics and sociology, and in particular on economic theory and social theory, I track these debates across the immediate postwar years. I show that the intensity and location of tool shock varied noticeably in these two disciplines. Such differences, I argue, can be explained by the extent to which the postwar techniques were built into the pedagogical and research practices of the two fields in question.

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.

My aim in this essay is to throw into relief Leo Strauss's impact on American intellectual culture by comparing his career in the United States with that of another famous émigré, the German philosopher Rudolf Carnap. Respectively a defender of ancient political wisdom and a proponent of logical empiricism, these two figures do not share much intellectual ground. But this sharp contrast, I shall argue, makes the comparison all the more worthwhile. It highlights the unpredictable reception of their distinctive projects in the United States. This unpredictability is more than a matter of bare contingency. There is of course no general formula for predicting the fortunes of concepts or texts that, germinated in one culture, are released into another. But in the case of a "transfer" of ideas involving the forced emigration of the intellectuals who bear those ideas, the complexities of reception and influence are intensified in certain determinate ways. From an ideological point of view, the most striking aspect of the phenomenon of intellectual migration is the variety of ways in which the émigré scholar may imagine their relationship to a host society. There is a spectrum of possible attitudes to take toward the experience of exile in a foreign culture, from the invocation of absolute irreconcilability to a conviction in the possibility-and perhaps even the reality-of common discourse and acculturation. The divergent ideological frameworks deployed by émigré intellectuals in the midst of a new environment mediate the reception of their work by the host society. Thus the sheer fact of physical emigration adds a new dimension to the already complex historical process of cultural exchange.

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.

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.

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.

Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.d-nb.de abrufbar.

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.

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.

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.

[Co-Translation] 世界史上的太平洋时代, Studies of Maritime History 海洋史研究 9 (2016): 3-31 [with a new postscript]  (with Chen Guanhua). [Pekka Korhonen, “The Pacific Age in World History,” Journal of World History 7.1 (1996): 41-70.]

The idea of the world's economic, political, and cultural center moving from Europe to the Pacific region is already more than 100 years old. The term Pacific Age was coined in Japan in 1892, and around the turn of the century the idea was discussed in the United States and Australia. During the 1920s it became a catchword among Pacific liberal intellectuals, but the gloom of the 1930s ended the vision. In 1967 the idea reappeared in connection with the emerging Pacific integration process, and rapid economic development in East Asia has kept the optimistic vision alive since then.
本文作者贝卡・科尔霍宁（Pekka Korhonen）系芬兰于韦斯屈莱大学（University of Jyväskylä）社会科学哲学研究所世界政治学教授，日本东京大学、早稻田大学、京都大学和香港岭南大学、中国人民大学访问学者。译者陈冠华系香港理工大学中国文化学系博士、陈博翼系美国圣路易斯华盛顿大学（Washington University in St. Louis）历史系博士候选人、浙江师范大学环东海与边疆研究院特聘研究员、《清史研究国际通讯》海外编委。本文系浙江师范大学环东海与边疆研究院“16-19世纪东南海域与社会经济研究”课题研究成果。
原文刊于Journal of World History 7. 1 (1996), pp.41-70。译者按：本文最早翻译于2006年，当时美国夏威夷大学本特利（Jerry H. Bentley）教授慷慨授权刊出一批《世界历史学刊》论文，中山大学历史系徐坚教授着意将其引进国内，其后因故未出版，本文亦无从校订问世。2014年我们重拾旧译之际，正值北京举办APEC峰会，中方在会上首次倡导成立亚太自由贸易区，共建亚太伙伴关系。此文虽属旧作，但在梳理近百年来东、西方人士对亚太地区政治、军事、经济关系之构设的思想史、观念史上，仍具重要的学术参考价值和现实指导意义。原文作者贝卡・科尔霍宁先生获知中译文行将出版，应邀专门为此撰写了致中国读者的后记以补充其对亚太事务的最新见解。最后，衷心感谢《世界历史学刊》主编拉扎罗（Fabio López Lázaro）教授重新慷慨授予版权，及该刊助理编辑塔赫科（Brandon Tachco）先生、克丽芙（Rebecca Clifford）女士的热情协助。

This is a review of Daniel Greene's book "The Jewish Origins of Cultural Pluralism: The Menorah Association and American Diversity" (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2011). The review was printed in the Journal of Jewish Identities, Vol. 7, No. 2 (July 2014), pp. 88-90.

It is well known that throughout U.S. history, members of the Religious
Society of Friends, or Quakers, have often engaged in political discourse
and policy debate over war, antislavery, and human rights, yet there has
been little scholarship on Quakers and presidential leadership. H. Larry
Ingle’s new book, Nixon’s First Cover-Up: The Religious Life of a
Quaker President, provides an intriguing account through impeccable
research and even better writing of one of the most enigmatic and
controversial presidents in U.S. history—Richard M. Nixon—and his
underlying Quaker faith. Ingle draws on and challenges Nixon biographers,
who, he argues, misunderstood the impact of religion in Nixon’s
decision-making process, by reinterpreting Nixon’s own published works
and personal and political correspondences. Ingle uniquely focuses on
Nixon’s often ignored, or just completely forgotten, “Quaker heritage,”
which arguably informed his personal character, leadership style, and
broader political life.

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 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.