This study of American intellectual histories sketches their development from colonial chronicles to today's professional scholarship. It concentrates upon the writings of a dozen or more major historians between the late 1800's and the middle 1900's who have contributed to the study of the history of ideas in America, including Moses Coit Tyler, Edward Eggleston, Charles Beard, Carl Becker, Vernon Farrington, Merle Curti, Perry Miller, and Ralph Gabriel. The various histories are analyzed partly from the perspective of (...) a developing scholarly discipline and partly from the perspective of the "climate of opinion" in which the histories were written. The methods employed by the historians in studying ideas, as well as the substantive interpretations expressed in the histories, are analyzed in relation to the "world-views" or "ideological positions" of the historians themselves. Originally published in 1966. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

The essays in this book demonstrate the breadth and vitality of American intellectual history. Their core theme is the diversity of both American intellectual life and of the frameworks that we must use to make sense of that diversity. The Worlds of American Intellectual History has at its heart studies of American thinkers. Yet it follows these thinkers and their ideas as they have crossed national, institutional, and intellectual boundaries. The (...) volume explores ways in which American ideas have circulated in different cultures. It also examines the multiple sites--from social movements, museums, and courtrooms to popular and scholarly books and periodicals--in which people have articulated and deployed ideas within and beyond the borders of the United States. At these cultural frontiers, the authors demonstrate, multiple interactions have occurred - some friendly and mutually enriching, others laden with tension, misunderstandings, and conflict. The same holds for other kinds of borders, such as those within and between scholarly disciplines, or between American history and the histories of other cultures.The richness of contemporary American intellectual history springs from the variety of worlds with which it must engage. Intellectual historians have always relished being able to move back and forth between close readings of particular texts and efforts to make sense of broader cultural dispositions. That range is on display in this volume, which includes essays by scholars as fully at home in the disciplines of philosophy, literature, economics, sociology, political science, education, science, religion, and law as they are in history. It includes essays by prominent historians of European thought, attuned to the transatlantic conversations in which Europeans and Americans have been engaged since the seventeenth century, and American historians whose work has carried them not only to different regions in North America but across the North Atlantic to Europe, across the South Atlantic to Africa, and across the Pacific to South Asia. (shrink)

The essays in this book are concerned with the intellectual development of the Spanish Empire in America from 1492 until Independence in the 1820s. The first section deals with the creation of a powerful language of natural law in the 16th and 17th centuries. The second explores the ways in which this was used to account for, and to deprecate, the cultures of the Native Americas. The final section traces the emergence of Enlightenment modes of approaching the subject of (...) âe~Othersâe(tm), both in Europe and the New World, and charts the emergence of a separate cultural identity among the creole population of the Americas. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 489 right; and it will be of interest to students of modern aesthetics. But compared with Rudolf Makkreel's ground-breaking study, Dilthey, Philosopher of the Human Studies (Princeton, 1975), it is handicapped by an exasperating vagueness. This is mainly because Heinen does not go more deeply into Dilthey's profuse aesthetic writings from a historical perspective and on the basis of a commitment to an appropriate methodology. What we (...) get, instead, is a rather one-sided reflection on several important aspects of Dilthey's aesthetic writings. ROLF-DIETERHERRMANN University of Tennessee Young John Dewey: An Essay in American Intellectual History. By Nell Coughlan. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1975. Pp. xii + 187) The author's aim in this carefully researched volume is to examine the early development of Dewey's character, primarily as it is expressed in the changes in his philosophical development from the time he was a student at the University of Vermont until he left the University of Michigan to go to Chicago in 1894. The account is at its best in relating the common problems shared by Dewey, his teachers George Sylvester Morris and G. Stanley Hall and his younger colleague George Herbert Mead. All were conscientious men, concerned to develop an account of the world and of society that does not fall back on religion as a crutch, that could give some accounting of or even take advantage of new developments in empirical psychology yet still provide a role for the philosopher as a moral leader. Where in the America of the 1870s and 1880s could such a person turn? Aside from Harvard and Johns Hopkins, there was no place for the independent, secular philosopher in American colleges and universities. The safe clergyman was typically given employment; the free thinking agnostic was considered dangerous. Further, there was the problem of intellectual isolation. Coughlan brilliantly contrasts the tight knit intellectual community of Victorian England with the struggles of individual American thinkers, scattered around the United States, to find like-minded intellectual companionship. Morris tried to resolve these problems by embracing the idealism of T. H. Green and hoping for a full-time chair at Hopkins. Hall, who eventually got the chair, went into empirical psychology. His choice was safe and intellectually respectable but ignored moral matters. Mead and a young friend named Henry Castle went through a long struggle to develop a satisfactory world view. Castle never achieved success and died in a shipwreck at age 32. Mead's correspondence with Castle reveals that he endured a number of acute personal crises before becoming Dewey's colleague at Michigan and discovering the latter's newly developing "organic circuit" theory with all its implications for the development of social psychology. Dewey was the most successful of the lot. It would be easy to construe a scenario wherein the young Dewey became skeptical about Green's idealism and underwent an acute personal crisis at the prospect of a world no longer glued together by the universal mind. This apparently never happened. By his own account, Dewey's "drift" from idealism took fifteen years, 1and I suspect that this gradual disengagement served as an effective buffer against the shock of having to develop an experimental naturalism all of a sudden. At any rate, Coughlan gives the most thorough account available of the evolution of Dewey's thought during the Michigan years. Coughlan is on solid ground so long as he treats Dewey as a person who shared common intellectual problems with like-minded colleagues and teachers. But how can one reconstruct his personal life? The difficulties are real. Dewey's published writings of the period reveal little John Dewey, "From Absolutism to Experimentalism," in John Dewey on Experience, Nature, and Freedom, ed. Richard J. Bernstein (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1960), p. 12. 490 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY of his personality. Indeed, one is moved to ask whether his personality was almost entirely submerged in his work. Colleagues, friends and students are no longer available to tell their story. There is little in the way of revealing personal correspondence that is available. Dewey was not inclined to reminisce.2 About all we have from him... (shrink)

Offering a new intellectual history of ideas about reforming capitalism from within, this book traces the emergence of different value systems in the American context, offering a fresh perspective on debates about capitalism in the late 19th century and 20th century.

Written in the American tradition, American Modern: The Path Not Taken describes how four major American thinkers practiced philosophy non-reductively by incorporating the arts and other human activities. Tejera provides a detailed analysis of Peirce, Dewey, Santayana, and Buchler, showing that the importance they placed on the human can cure what is missing in recent philosophy. American Modern will interest philosophers, historians of philosophy, and scholars of American intellectual history.

Islamic Intellectual History in the Seventeenth Century: Scholarly Currents in the Ottoman Empire and the Maghreb. By Khaled el-Rouayheb. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. xvi + 399. $99.99, £64.99.

The article traces the development of Hungarian intellectual history of the early modern period from the emergence of the national romantic constructions of literary history to the recent turn towards contextualist and conceptual history. One of its main findings is the ideological importance of this period for the formation of the national canon, as it became a central point of reference for the emerging local methodological tradition of intellectual history, even if it was often (...) compartamentalized under other categories. From this perspective, the article puts particular emphasis on ideological constructions seeking to define the nation and depict the emergence of modern national identity. This finding also offers a vantage point for analyzing the interplay between literary history and the socio-culturally focused approaches, which can be considered the main framework for the developments of the last two decades, when these local historiographical traditions entered into an interesting dialogue with the Western European and American schools of intellectual history. Along these lines, while pointing out the discursive continuities with the previous paradigms, which are shaping even the contemporary historiographical production, the article also ponders the ways in which the inherited (post-)romantic constructions can be successfully challenged. (shrink)

This essay investigates the origins and assesses the advantages and disadvantages of the new field known as Wissensgeschichte from the perspective of an American intellectual historian. It argues that while some historians of science may be ready to embrace a new identity as historians of knowledge, this terminology remains baggy and invites facile applications of Foucauldian theory. The essay concludes with the hope that the history of knowledge approach may instead open up new avenues for conversation and (...) collaboration between historians of science and garden variety historians. (shrink)

The still astonishing expansion of the American university since World War II has transformed the nation's intellectual and cultural life in myriad ways. Most intellectual historians familiar with this period would agree, I suppose, that among the conspicuous changes is the sheer increase in the size and diversity of intellectual and cultural activity taking place on campuses across the country. After all, we know that colleges and universities that employ us also provide full- and part-time academic (...) appointments to novelists, poets, playwrights, filmmakers, choreographers, composers, classical and jazz musicians, painters, photographers, and sculptors, even though most of them probably began their careers with little or no desire to join us in the halls of academe. This now widespread employment practice has decentralized the nation's literary and artistic talent. It also has made for a manifold increase in degree-granting programs in writing and the creative arts. One example will suffice here. When World War II ended, there were a small handful of university-based creative-writing programs. Over the course of the next thirty years, the number increased to fifty-two. By 1985, there were some 150 graduate degree programs offering an MA, MFA, or PhD. As of 2004, there were more than 350 creative-writing programs in the United States, all staffed by practicing writers and poets, many of whom now also hold advanced degrees in creative writing. (shrink)

In Riches and Poverty, Donald Winch explores the implications of a fundamental and influential idea in political economy. Adam Smith's science of the legislator provided a key to studying the rich and poor in commercial societies, transformed an ancient debate on luxury and inequality, and furnished a basis for assessing the American and French revolutions. Against this background, Britain embarked on its career as the first manufacturing nation, and Malthus made his first contributions to a debate which concluded with (...) the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834. Malthus provoked fierce opposition from the Lake poets, opening an intellectual rift that persisted throughout the nineteenth century and continues to influence our perceptions of cultural history. Donald Winch has written a compelling and consistently-argued narrative of these developments, which emphasises throughout the moral and political bearings of economic ideas. (shrink)

An anthology of 19th century philosophical writings, along with historical essays, demonstrating the influence of Hegelian thought on American intellectual life, from the St. Louis movement to the Concord School in the 1880s, and the importance of German-oriented culture in nineteenth century America.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Arthur O. Lovejoy and the Challenge of Intellectual HistoryJohn Patrick DigginsMen and ideas advance by parricide, by which the children kill, if not their fathers, at least the beliefs of their fathers, and arrive at new beliefs.Sir Isaiah Berlin1I was supposed to wind up the study of mine, and become the Lovejoy of my generation—that's the silly talk of scholarly people.Saul Bellow2To become "the Lovejoy," with the implication (...) that each generation could only have one, was the ambition of Moses Herzog in Saul Bellow's novel, written a few years after he had won the Nobel Award for literature. Herzog presents the life of a professor who has as many sexual escapades and as much personal angst as he has scholarly interests, too unfocused to be another Lovejoy. Bellow's novel is full of letters to Nietzsche, Heidegger, and other modernist minds who brought Western intellectual life to a standstill, posing a lasting question mark about the possibilities of knowledge. Bellow taught in the program of the Committee on Social Thought at [End Page 181] the University of Chicago. His colleague and close friend Allan Bloom also taught in that program. But when Bloom wrote the best seller, The Closing of the American Mind, he cited Nietzsche and Heidegger as part of the "German disease" that did so much to subvert academic thought, supposedly turning students into zombies, walking air heads responding only to vacuous visual stimuli and mind-numbing music, with Rock n' Roll blasting through a Walkman and having the effect of a "masturbational fantasy."3While Bellow's epistolary novel interrogated modernist thinkers, Bloom's popular tract of the times cited many classical thinkers as a countervoice to the modernists—Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, Augustine, Aquinas, Dante, Hobbes, Kant, Lessing, Schiller, Locke, and Rousseau. Such minds also figured prominently in the works of Arthur O. Lovejoy. But the recitation of such names leaves the impression that Lovejoy concerned himself only with the main currents of European intellectual history. On the contrary, two of his most important and often neglected books are The Thirteen Pragmatisms and Reflections on Human Nature.4 There one finds profound meditations on two vital episodes in the history of ideas in America: the Enlightenment and the philosophy of pragmatism. Perry Miller, arguably America's greatest intellectual historian, skipped over the Enlightenment as he proceeded to study the Puritans and then the transcendentalists, and he never seemed to have much interest in the pragmatists.5 But what Lovejoy had to write on the Enlightenment and pragmatism is richly ironic.The pragmatists claimed to have liberated modern thought from the easy assumptions of the "Age of Reason," and today's poststructuralists charge that eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinkers deceived themselves in looking to the advent of knowledge as an answer to the presence of power. Lovejoy's books offer a different take entirely, making us aware that it is the modernist thinkers who may be deceiving themselves with the dubious promises of pragmatism and the arrogant conceits of poststructuralism and deconstruction, whose proponents claim to be the first "masters [End Page 182] of suspicion." In many of Lovejoy's works, nothing is resolved and everything is left suspended in a state of honest suspicion.Lovejoy was comfortable with contradiction, and hence more in tune with Augustine, who looked to the depths of human consciousness for spiritual knowledge, than with Aquinas, who believed evidence for God and human freedom could be found in reason alone. Nowhere is Lovejoy's affinity for the emotions of consciousness better seen than in his several essays on romanticism, both English, French, German, and even its origins in Chinese aesthetics and Confucian ethics. It was not reason and the notion of order and regulation that appealed to Lovejoy but the spontaneous promptings of nature springing forth without reflection or design. He delighted in quoting Voltaire against classicists and scholastics. "Worship God and practice justice—this is the sole religion of the Chinese literati.... O Thomas Aquinas, Scotus, Bonaventure, Francis, Dominic, Luther, Calvin, canons of Westminister, have you anything better? For four thousand years this religion, so simple and so noble, has endured in... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Beyond Revisionism:The Bicentennial of Independence, the Early Republican Experience, and Intellectual History in Latin AmericaElías José PaltiLatin America's Revolution of Independence was an event of world-historical importance. Citizens of different regions simultaneously created new nation states and established republican systems of government. This occurred at a time when the very meaning of the notions of "nation" and "republic" remained ill-defined. In such a context, a number of (...) debates naturally emerged regarding the tenets of modern politics, and the kind of dilemmas and problems contained therein.Yet the assessment of the historical relevance of these disputes has been precluded by the teleological assumptions which have informed traditional approaches in the history of ideas. These assumptions have led historians to interpret these disputes as mere expressions of local prejudices that prevented the correct understanding of the true meaning of the modern liberal concept of representative democracy. According to this traditional view, the concerns of Latin American commentators were seen as "deviations" from the rational path of conceptual development and understanding. It was necessary to undermine this traditional teleological prejudice before the debates around these notions produced in Latin America in the nineteenth century could reveal their historical significance and become matters for systematic analysis. The rise of a "new intellectual history," insofar as it has [End Page 593] questioned the assumed rationality and logical consistency of the putative models and disclosed the contingent nature of their foundations, has opened the door to an entirely new universe of problems and issues for scholarly research in the field of Latin American politico-intellectual history.The great wave of new studies on the crisis of the Spanish and Portuguese empires and the emergence of new national states, triggered by the approach of the Bicentennial of Independence, has been greatly influenced by this new set of questions.1 Historians from different countries in Latin America have revisited that fundamental event, and have sought to revise established perspectives in the field. This has made room for the development of a self-defined "revisionist" position. However, what is to be revised has not always been clear.The revisionists seek to dislocate an epic narrative of independence as the epiphany of long-lasting struggles of oppressed nations to recover their rights to self-determination.2 They argue that the teleological, nationalistic biases of traditional approaches led their authors to see as already present at the point of departure an entity (the nation) which actually could be perceived only at the point of arrival. If understood in this way, however, the revisionists' contributions are hardly innovative. In the decade of the 1960s, a series of studies, propelled by the spread in Latin America of Marxist thought and social history, as well as by the increasing presence of American and European historians in the field, had already destabilized Manichean emplotments of the Revolution of Independence as a struggle between liberty and oppression.3 These studies introduced a number of nuances that questioned the objective basis of the states that emerged from the rupture of colonial ties. Instead, they demonstrated that the new states were the result of the contingent process of formation rather than its premise. [End Page 594] Yet it is not here that the profound transformation of the discipline has occurred. Revisionists do concentrate their criticism on the contents of nationalistic narratives, but leave untouched the theoretical premises on which these narratives rest. They fail to penetrate and undermine the sets of antinomies on which those teleological perspectives are grounded: enlightenment / romanticism; rationalism / nationalism; "liberty of the Modern" / "liberty of Ancient;" modernity / tradition; individualism / organicism, etc. In the following pages I will trace the origins of revisionism in Latin American, its contributions to the field of politico-intellectual history, and the kind of problems that it raises in turn.The Tradition of History of "Ideas" in Latin AmericaMany scholars consider Charles Hale to be the key figure in the emergence of the revisionist critique. As Fernando Escalante Gonzalbo remarks, for the case of Mexico (which has served as the exemplary case for the entire region): "Up to the moment Charles Hale came to intervene, we could recount to ourselves a delicious... (shrink)

Sociology once debated ‘the social’ and did so with a public readership. Even as late as the Second World War, sociologists commanded a wide public on questions about the nature of society, altruism and the direction of social evolution. As a result of several waves of professionalization, however, these issues have vanished from academic sociology and from the public writings of sociologists. From the 1960s onwards sociologists instead wrote for the public by supporting social movements. Discussion within sociology became constrained (...) both by ‘professional’ expectations and political taboos. Yet the original motivating concerns of sociology and its public, such as the compatibility of socialism and Darwinism, the nature of society, and the process of social evolution, did not cease to be of public interest. With sociologists showing little interest in satisfying the demand, it was met by non-sociologists, with the result that sociology lost both its intellectual public, as distinct from affinity groups, and its claim on these topics. (shrink)

The Canonization of Islamic Law: A Social and Intellectual History. By Ahmed El Shamsy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Pp. ix + 253. $90.

Around Abhinavagupta: Aspects of the Intellectual History of Kashmir from the Ninth to the Eleventh Century. Edited by Eli Franco and Isabelle Ratié. Leipziger Studien zu Kultur und Geschichte Süd- und Zentralasiens, vol. 6. Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2016. Pp. xx + 682. €89.90.

Although the treatment of history in late nineteenth-century American legal scholarship remains largely unexplored, two recent areas of research have discussed this subject tangentially. Historiographical critiques of the emphasis on doctrine by American legal historians typically maintain that late nineteenth-century legal scholars viewed history as disclosing an inevitable evolutionary progression from primitive to civilized forms. This "whiggish" approach, the critiques add, ignored the context and function of past law while apologetically justifying conservative existing law as autonomous (...) scientific truth. Without addressing the historiographical critiques, scholarship about late nineteenth-century legal thinkers has touched on their historical research and assumptions, mostly in passing as part of inquiries about other subjects. Designed primarily to convey how both areas of research have contributed to the historiography of late nineteenth-century American legal history, this article concludes by drawing on my own extensive reading of the original sources. Sometimes in support but often in refutation of the existing secondary literature, my findings reveal that the late nineteenth-century scholars formed a distinctive and sophisticated American school of historical jurisprudence that merits further study. Often warning against the very faults ascribed to them by dismissive subsequent scholars, many viewed legal evolution as a contingent response to social change and urged substantial reform of existing law. The American school of historical jurisprudence, moreover, provides an important intellectual context for new insights into two giants of American legal thought, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. and Roscoe Pound. (shrink)

The study presents the Russian historical-philosophical process in the context of the discovery of a new object, themes, personae, set of reactions and formation of a product for the intellectual community. The author's reliance on philosophical empirical material and appropriate hermeneutics in its processing allows the author to highlight those factors that influenced individual and collective reception. The author sees as a convenient case study the “discovery” by the Russian philosophical community of the early 20th century of both (...) class='Hi'>American philosophy in general and C.S. Peirce in particular. Since the beginning of the 19th century, Russian thinkers have turned their attention to American philosophy in all the diversity of its manifestations. Russian intellectuals paid special attention to American pragmatism and everything associated with it. In Russia, in addition to translations, numerous reviews of foreign publications on this topic are appearing. Of particular interest to us in the Russian “collective reflection” of American ideas is the system of preferences for ideas, texts, events, and names. The point is that what might have been a priority for a European thinker, for a Russian one turned out to be on the “periphery” of his consciousness, as well as vice versa. While James appeared among the priority figures for Russian thinkers, Peirce was in his “shadow”. Using rich empirical material, the author shows all the stages of Peirce’s image formation in the Russian intellectual community. The research shows that “image” of Peirce, which represents not so much the thinker himself, but characterizes the intellectual community that turned to him. The results of the study may be useful both for contemporary foreign and Russian interpreters of Peirce and for historians of philosophy who are rethinking the past and forming in the present new objects of reception and reflection. (shrink)

In a little over two hundred years, American legal thought moved from premodernism through modernism and into postmodernism. This book charts that intellectual voyage, stressing both the historical contexts in which ideas unfolded and the inherent force of the ideas themselves.Author Stephen M. Feldman first defines "premodernism," "modernism," and "postmodernism," then explains the development of American legal thought through these three intellectual periods. His narrative revolves around two broad, interrelated themes: jurisprudential foundations and the notion of (...) progress. He points out that much of American legal thought has grappled with the problem of identifying the foundations of the American judicial system and judicial decision making. The various ideas of jurisprudential foundations, moreover, are closely tied to shifting notions of progress-the definition of the term, assumptions about the possibility of progress, and hopes about how law might contribute to it.This book's broad historical sweep and its clear explanations of the competing theoretical positions of current legal scholarship make it indispensable to students and scholars of jurisprudence and American legal history. (shrink)

America’s Philosopher tells the story of English writer John Locke’s (1632–1704) American reception, from his time till ours. The ‘intellectual life’ of the volume’s sub-title is understood broadly...

In January 1969, just before his inauguration as president, Richard M. Nixon attended a concert in his honor at Constitution Hall. The program consisted entirely of works by American composers, including Howard Hanson, then the director of the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester. Hanson's choral work “Song of Democracy,” a setting of two excerpts from poems by Walt Whitman, was the last number of the evening. Here isNew York Timesmusic critic Harold Schonberg's commentary on the (...) event, which featured the National Symphony Orchestra and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir:“Song of Democracy” is not a very original or strong piece, but it makes a big brave sound in its concluding measures, and the well-trained Mormon Tabernacle Choir had a lusty time with it... Mr. Nixon listened intently, but grinned his way between numbers. At the end of the Hanson work, he was determined to be the first to applaud. He brought his fist down in a great downbeat, anticipating the conductor's by a good half measure.Afterwards, Schonberg reported, Nixon left the presidential box to congratulate Hanson personally. (shrink)

Carrying on the Tradition: A Social and Intellectual History of Hadith Transmission across a Thousand Years. By Garrett Davidson. Islamic History and Civilization, vol. 160. Leiden: Brill, 2020. Pp. xii + 333. $150.