“Intellectual History for What?

”
U.S. Intellectual History Conference 2010

David Steigerwald
Ohio State University

I have to confess at the outset that I’m not altogether comfortable speaking to this
group about the purposes of intellectual history today. There are people here
from whom I’ve learned so much, and many more from whom I am learning so
much, for me to presume that I have any useful insight. I speak especially with
our younger colleagues in mind. You don’t need me to answer the question
“Intellectual 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. Or

perhaps some think of me, as did someone I was introduced to last year who
sniffed, diffidently, “Oh, you’re that Sixties guy.” As though I were the only
person who writes on the Sixties. At least that’s a somewhat less caustic
assessment than what I heard from a senior colleague who chided me not so long
ago for my “ill-focused research agenda.”

Fair enough, I guess. I do have a general, maybe even strange, track record of
writing—Wilsonianism, consumerism, the culture concept, the urban crisis, and
yes, the Sixties, and most recently the UAW and automation. I was trained as an
intellectual historian, however, and it is my method, I even say my avocation. I
am interested in the broad ebb and flow of ideas, and most particularly in how
and why certain ideas gain currency in particular times and places. No matter
what particular topic I’m digging around in, I’m first and most keenly interested
in what ideas underlay claims to power, to prestige and status, and how people
explain themselves to themselves.

There is a close relationship between my “ill-focused research agenda” and

intellectual history as a method of inquiry, as a way of getting at the past and
posing good questions. It seems to me that ours is the most expansive of all fields
within the discipline of history. Ideas have been everywhere, at all times, and
everyone has them. They are universal. At a time when every field is scrambling
to become international and cosmopolitan in the broadest sense, intellectual
historians can be satisfied that their field has always been thus—at least in theory
and potential. We should be inveterate—indeed shameless—trespassers, 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 varying
interests, one that sets few if any boundaries. If you are interested in any given
thinker or body of knowledge simply because they attract you, you should indulge
yourself. I can recall Eugene Genovese telling students that it was more or less
useless to waste time studying a body of thought that was unconnected to the
flow of power, that a 14th-century Adam Smith was no Adam Smith. As an

Copyright David Steigerwald 1

aspiring polemicist, I initially took his point and agreed with him. Now, however,
I’m inclined to think that we should be more generous to one another. More than
that, though: In a public atmosphere that is arguably more fiercely anti-
intellectual than any of us can remember—and we’re historians; our memories
are long—reflecting 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 or
resistance. It is, however, inherently dignified. It has integrity.

For my part, though, I have to admit that I was attracted to intellectual history
partly for its polemical value. My introduction to Gramsci as an undergraduate
introduced me to the broad possibilities that rested in the study of ideas. He
legitimated intellectual history to me. This was in the early 1980s, and Gramsci
was all in fashion. And while lots of people took lots of different things from
Gramsci—including the subjectivist delusion that radicalism began and ended in
“culture”—there were three things that reading him impressed on me: first, that
ideas mattered, that power relations were expressed, if often only imprecisely, in
widely-held convictions; second, that the study of ideas did not necessarily entail
a preoccupation with “intellectuals” or formal philosophy, that my neighbor’s
bizarre infatuation with Amway’s propaganda was as telling as the cultish
popularity of Milton Friedman; and, finally, that an inquiry into the history of
ideas was no abstract endeavor but could be turned to hard questioning about the
manipulation of power in any given time or place, and by extension, could
encourage hard questions about the relationship between prevailing public ideas
and the wielding of power in our own time. Gramsci gave me leave to indulge
both a passion for the play of ideas across time and an obligation to come to
critical terms with the way the contemporary world works.

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

capacity, I believe, if not in kind then in degree—to think through the ideological
constructs that bedevil the world we live in now, to speak truth to power, to
invoke the cliché. Another way of saying this is that intellectual history is a way
of living up to the obligations of that type we call “the public intellectual.” Here is
another seductive ingredient to the field: by doing intellectual history, it is
possible to contribute to intellectual history. Admittedly I don’t think we’re so
unique in this: economic historians can surely do economics and contribute to
contemporary debates, as can diplomatic historians and historians of race, just to
check off a few of our companion fields. Still, I do think that there is a peculiar
opportunity, if not obligation, for us as historians to engage our subject matter
with the same intensity of purpose that our subjects pursued theirs. In this way,
intellectual history joins the subjective and objective more decisively than other
methods.

The opportunity both to write intellectual history and to contribute to public

discourse as public intellectuals hangs heavy about us in ways that I don’t see in
other fields, whose practitioners are often too easily self-satisfied. Precisely
because we take ideas seriously, we are more abruptly faced with our fecklessness

Copyright David Steigerwald 2

in a society that does not. In a moment when self-critical thought is as rare as
human decency, we are at a real disadvantage.

Where intellectual history stands in an intensely anti-intellectual age, a time

when 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 who
convey them, sets us off against our fellow citizens, too many of whom seem to
think that Glen Beck is an intellectual. This disconnection between what we do
and public discourse provides the background, in my view, against which the field
has undergone a much-noted decline over the last twenty years or more. Many of
us look back to the time when Richard Hofstadter won Pulitzers for books that
eviscerated the know-nothings; many of us are even more familiar with the time
when Christopher Lasch rebuked the know-somethings, and earned wide
attention, if not praise, for doing so.

I do not think that it is a coincidence that the voice of public intellectuals has
diminished and that the field of intellectual history has declined at essentially the
same time. The question is how the two are connected. As we try to grapple with
our evident inability to engage the reading public in ways that influence public
discourse, we are sometimes given to a certain amount of collective self-
flagellation, as in, for example, the sharp exchange between Russell Jacoby and
David Hollinger over Jacoby’s 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 it’s very fresh. Jacoby’s argument
was aggressive and pointed: American intellectuals had surrendered the
important influence they had enjoyed on public debate at mid-century by taking
up comfortable positions in academia; academia, in turn, pressed them into
assorted lines of conformist specialties and rewarded them for churning out
jargon-ridden blather that got them tenure at the cost of any serious public
influence. 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 good
faith and dismissive, accordingly, of any number of serious thinkers who also
happen to hold academic positions at prestigious institutions.

My gut tells me I’m with Jacoby, that our immersion in academia has gradually
drawn us away from our obligations as public intellectuals as we chase tenure and
academic fashion in pursuit of security. My instinct is to think that Hollinger too
easily glossed over the pressures that academia imposes on us. I’ve always been
uneasy with one of his main lines of criticism, in which he suggested that
academia is large enough to be considered a broad community, a public all its
own. Thus, he wrote, where academics reach across disciplinary lines, as Richard
Rorty, Stanley Fish, Paul Kennedy, Robert Bellah and others have done, they in
effect do the work of public intellectuals. “Wide currency within academia does
not 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 a
large academic community.” Nor was academic expertise something to dismiss

Copyright David Steigerwald 3

lightly, he added, because it is often brought to bear in critical ways to temper
and test audacious general claims. It is as though he were defending a self-
enclosed, self-correcting intellectual world because that is where the real thinking
is being done. But that seems to me to skirt Jacoby’s basic thrust: that
intellectuals were increasingly talking mostly to themselves.

If my gut takes me one way, my head takes me the other, because a strong part of
me agrees with Hollinger’s critique. The central problem with Jacoby’s book, as
Hollinger rightly maintained, was his claim that the university was to blame for
the evaporation of the public intellectual. Surely, academic expertise, always
hard-won and never anything to dismiss, is no automatic disqualification from
the ranks of public intellectuals. Look at some of the wisest people engaged in
public debate these days—Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz from economics;
James Hansen and Lonny Thompson from climate science, come quickly to
mind—and the value of that expertise is obvious, their impact on public discourse
invaluable, if unfortunately indecisive. It is not just an ideal, moreover, to say
that the university as an institution remains a place where free-thinking is
possible, a place where we can stand apart from the public in order to get the
distance necessary to take its proper measure. And this makes the university
fundamentally different from—and fundamentally superior to—the agenda-
driven think tanks that have consumed far too much official public attention over
the last decades. But disinterested criticism is not the same as disengaged
criticism, and if we don’t speak beyond our own circles, then our defense of the
integrity of ideas won’t mean much.

As I said, to some extent I think we’re too hard on ourselves when we bemoan the
related disappearance of public intellectuals and the decline of the field of
intellectual 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 work
in 20th-century US are often tempted to measure our own situation against those
mid-century giants—Mumford, Niebuhr, Arendt, Macdonald, Daniel Bell, Jane
Jacobs—when it probably was the conditions under which they wrote that made
them so influential; that is to say, mid-century America’s receptivity to broad
ideas 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 the
venturing of broad ideas. We have had other periods of national stupidity before,
and we’ve 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 to
two other things. Ideas have become means to manipulate for narrow ends.
They are either ruthlessly put forward in the service of the continued
accumulation 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 in
point. Even the Krugmans and the Stiglitzes focus their attention on how much
stimulus we need, or how much financial regulation, while their American

Copyright David Steigerwald 4

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

This is a tough environment for those of us who want to write about and defend
broad, humanistic ideas. But that’s the environment we face—it’s our reality. We
probably will not see in our lifetimes the likes of a Lasch or a Hofstadter, or a
Mills or a Mumford or an Arendt. That is not necessarily our fault. It would be
our fault, however, if we shy away from our double burden, which is stand as
scholar who defend the integrity of ideas, while we stand as citizens who venture
broad critiques that provide some glimpse of what a decent, democratic society
should look like.
.

Copyright David Steigerwald 5